forward
» Wednesday, October 26, 2005

This is a low point.

Weblog, I had almost forgotten your existence. Over the last two weeks you were becoming a thing recognized but not fully grasped, like a familiar tree whose name you do not know. Therefore (trust me here) it behooves me (from O.E. behofian "to have need of") to gather myself on what I look forward to.

1. Nanowrimo (November 1-30). I've signed up for good old National Novel Writing Month this year, and I've been overtaken by this strange enthusiasm for the project. Normally I wouldn't go near that kind of thing - who wants to type out 1500 words a day for an entire month on top of the rest of your life? - but for some reason it finally seems correct. In past years I've been disgusted by the notion of seeing what comes out of my mind when I'm forced to blather, but this time I'm genuinely curious as to what my brain will make my thoughts look like on paper. I've even got the title picked out: Death in Brownsville. I've never been to Brownsville, but I read an article about migrant workers there once. So I feel well prepared.


2. Safe neutering of your pet (October 31). I never thought I'd look forward to having an animal's testicles removed, but I now recognize it as a common experience among pet owners. Our cat gets more rambuctious every day, morphing in an eyeblink from a sleepy pet to a little fur-clad bullet with testicles. Like the ring of Sauron, those testicles are the source and engine of all that cat's evil. Once we take them and cast them into the fires of Mount Doom I know we'll all feel a lot better. As long as Gollum doesn't get ahold of those things. The wearer of the Black Furry Testicles is endowed with super speed and the ability to knock things from high ledges.


3. Costa Rica. It seems strange that I once wrote a guide to Costa Rica, not knowing that my parents would go all Costa Rica-happy and invite us down there for Christmas vacation, but in retrospect I suppose it was for-too-ee-tus. For to eat us? No, fortituous. Or perhaps I'm being dealt an obscure punishment for writing such a pack of lies about a country with no standing army, where a full 25% of the land is a wildlife preserve. This will be my first real vacation in years. And for those of you who know me, may I say that travelling for work and spending my nights in hotel rooms with a cameraman does not constitute a vacation.

Labels: metablog

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comedy of the commons
» Thursday, October 20, 2005

According to a Globe and Mail story (click on Der Title above), US tourism is at an all-time low in Canada, a result of high gas prices, a strong CanaDollar and long lines at the border as the dinosaurs of Homeland Security curl up and rot in their customs booths. The online version doesn't mention it, but the paper article points out that Windsor, Ontario is suffering from the loss of American tourists.

Oh no. Downtown Windsor faces the prospect of becoming a seedy, ugly bytown populated with strip clubs and cigar stores, where crackwhores knock on minivan windows in broad daylight, where suburbanites and senior citizens shun the downtown in mingled disgust and fear, where the lead-poisoned employees of motor plants shuffle down the streets and unleash skyward pleas to an absent god, where even an evening at the movies is ruined by packs of drooling chuckleheads who laugh like methed-up hyenas when David Carradine calls Uma Thurman a cunt, where the most notable building is a casino that looks like a brushed-aluminum soft ice cream cone, where -

Ah. No, that was Windsor when I went there last summer. I'd hate to see it in a slump.

Labels: scorn

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phoque cancer
» Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Marking fall

Yesterday marked the first day that I could see my breath before me as I walked to work. The air smelled of cold damp and the sharp tang of dead leaves. It was a great morning. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the Fuck Cancer t-shirt.

The difficulty of the Fuck Cancer T-shirt

At lunchtime yesterday I went to Fratelli's Café, a noon-hour restaurant that belonged to a family named Fratelli about fifteen years ago. Since then it's been owned by (among others) a Korean couple who served sushi along with Italian sandwiches and espresso, a born-again biker who loved to extoll the virtues of virtuous living while entertaining me with tales of organized crime in the Maritimes, and most recently, a lumbering hollow-eyed guy with long blonde hair who looks like he took a hit of speed in 1974 and hasn't slept since. He employs little skater girls in touques and baggy cargo pants. They slouch around the counter, shuffle over to the tables, saunter back, slump over the espresso machine, and generally contrive to look as bored as possible. I suspect they're a major draw for the IT lunchtime crowd, a herd of slightly puffy guys in their twenties and thirties, khaki pants and checked shirts turned out, keycards swinging from their lanyards, a Blackberry holstered at the belt. How many times per day in cities across North America is this scene repeated? The numbers from Seattle alone must be staggering.

I generally show up at the tail end of the IT rush, when everyone is filtering out and the café enters the start of the long lazy afternoon, the slow stretch from one to four. After one o' clock the customers tend to be people who, like me, have waited out the rush, with its rustle of golf shirts and clack of heels, people who prefer to eat in relative quiet (this usually ends when the owner comes out of the kitchen and says "Anyone here like Led Zeppelin?" and then cranks up the stereo for a few minutes). People who need a brief break from the people who show up at noon. The skater girls sweep the floor and most of them leave. A couple hang around at a table or lean against the concrete planters in the courtyard and smoke. Somewhere in the midst of this slow time yesterday a boy walked in wearing a Fuck Cancer t-shirt.

Aw, Phoque

I call it a Fuck Cancer t-shirt - as opposed "a t-shirt that says Fuck Cancer on it" - because teenage boys never do anything original, and this one was probably the first of the many that I will see over the next few years. Despite the contrivance and crassness, the smarmy calibration between the offensive and laudatory, I still wanted one for myself. I wanted to get up and run down the halls of hospitals and retirement complexes, bursting into the oncology ward with a raised fist, screaming "Fuck Cancer! Fuck it man!" and then running out again. The wearing of the shirt reminded me of the time that our grade 4 class found out that the French word for seal was "phoque". Much running around at recess and irritating of teachers followed.

I wondered what I'd do if I were the person behind the counter when Mr. Fuck Cancer came in and asked for an Italian soda. My likely reaction would be to ignore the shirt politely and make him his blueberry bullfrog or whatever they're calling sodas nowadays. Then I'd stand around and realize that I'd missed my moment - the responsible moment in which I say, Turn that t-shirt inside out and you've got a deal, young man. Undoubtedly that would be the guy's cue to tell me that I was being a fascist, and can't I read? Don't I see that fucking cancer is a good thing? Why would I want to silence such a positive message? Would I rather that he came in with a t-shirt that said Down With Health and Positive Feelings In This World? Which is what the wearers of Fuck Cancer t-shirts and kids running around a playground screaming "Phoque! That means seal in French" are always waiting for. I recall a few kids crying out "What did I do? I wasn't swearing! I said 'seal' in French!" as stone-faced teachers harvested them from the playground.

phoque cancer

What exactly does it mean to fuck cancer? We all know what it means when someone screams out "Fuck You!" or dismisses someone out of hand with a fuck-him-he's-not-worth-it kind of gesture, but to fuck cancer suggests a sustained determination to ignore the disease, to carry on regardless. Fuck Cancer is not an exhortation to allocate more funds for its treatment or bend resources to the task of eradicating it. It's a dismissal of cancer altogether, which is even less productive than running around hospital corridors and screaming at old people. In which case I would have to play the stone-faced teacher to the phoque cancer kid in the Fuck Cancer shirt, and kick him out to the street.

Labels: autobio

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television
» Monday, October 17, 2005

I produce a television show. But I don't consider it proper television, ie. a program that I'd sit down and watch. So by that solipsistic standard, what is television? Let's do this by process of elimination:

CSI's All Over. The CSI franchise is not television. It is a medieval morality play armed with forensic technology, in which a crooked and corrupt humanity perverts the Lord's work while a team of Inquisitors moves among them with implements of divination, tracing out the unholy shape of murder. By the time the hour is up, every suspect, every witness has been called before the inquisition, wherein their souls are pinned and pneumisected for the satisfaction of the high priest. It is a telling feature of the CSIs that even witnesses have sins to hide or rationalize. No one is innocent. We rarely witness the actual moment of arrest of the guilty, since their guilt has been decreed by these explicators of invisible evidence.

Laws & Orders. As Talmud is to Torah, so are the Law & Order shows to CSI. Whereas CSI is concerned with uncovering the unregenerate nature of humankind, Laws & Orders provide the exegesis on the process of punishment. The pupils and the teachers come and go, but the fallibility of language and custom in the face of evil must always be dealt with. Watch for this knuckly premise in an upcoming episode: Can the government devise a law so perfect that it cannot be broken? It'll guest star David Caruso, won't it?

Any Sitcom You Can Think Of. When I watch a sitcom, I envision a flight on a jet plane that circles and returns its passengers to the point of origin. Everybody hits the tarmac, takes a stretch and then - hey, wait a minute. If you bought a ticket from Cedar Falls to Albuquerque and ended up in Cedar Falls, you'd be rightly peeved. But we all watch sitcoms without a word of complaint. When I was a child I used to wonder why sitcom characters bitched for 25 minutes and then concluded that they were happy all along. Schnieder wants a better job? He gets one and decides that he likes his old one better. Monroe wants to get laid? He tries unsuccessfully and concludes that he's better off a virgin. Even as a child I realized something was off here.

Ghost Whisperer. An uncomfortable blend of sentimental spirituality and Jennifer Love Hewitt's over-perky boobs pointing at everything. Does anyone remember when she played a plain-Jane character on Party of Five? Did she show up at a wrap party in a low-cut shirt and give the producer a host of really unseemly ideas? Or did Hewitt perceive on her own the revenue possibilities of her cleavage?

Lost. That's not a TV show. That's a kind of pulp serial music video. We're all waiting for the secret decoder ring.

Soap operas. Well they're certainly not operas. There's maybe some background music in the nightclubs, plus that sexy saxophonist always pops up for the bedroom stuff. And with the exception of the occasional shower scene, I've never seen any soap. At best soap is implied in the extreme cleanliness of the cast. Maybe they should be called cold cream operas.

Based on the couple of episodes I've seen, Veronica Mars appears to be television, but I always forget airtimes.

Mulholland Drive could have been television, but ABC didn't appreciate a pilot featuring a filth-encrusted hobo who controlled the characters' destinies from the alley behind a Winky's. Or maybe they didn't like the albino cowboy. Hard to say. So David Lynch did what he probably wanted to do with the show all along, which was to tuck the narrative into a dream, throw in some lesbian sex, add a floor show, and cap the whole thing off with an inverted backward-running story of jealousy, broken dreams and suicide. No y banda.

The Wire, Deadwood, The Sopranos, The L Word are all really fantastic television, more or less devoid of pacifying sermons. They run on cable networks, though, and for these shows you must pay money. You get what you pay for, which is why network television is free. Although in most instances what you get is less again.

Labels: scorn

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the creepy bargain
» Saturday, October 15, 2005

Intermission. A hemi-demi lit theatre. Audience members shuffling in, shuffling out, bunching together here, wandering loosely there. Schmutzie and Palinode are already seated. Schmutzie leans over and gives Palinode's ear a kiss.

Palinode: Now my ear's wet.

Schmutzie: That's too bad.

P: Do you have a sponge tongue or something?

S: Something more absorbent?

P: Yeah, that way you could kiss my ear then bring out the sponge tongue.

S: An interchangeable tongue? That's really gross.

P: But necessary.

S: It's like that fish they found with the parasite tongue.

P: That'd be so cool to bring a fish home with another fish* inside it posing as its tongue.

S: What? That'd be digusting.

P: It would be a bargain. Two fishes for the price of one.

S: No. Not a bargain. It would just be creepy.

P: A creepy bargain.

S: No.

P: Sure. It would be like getting some pork chops with a severed hand in the package. A creepy bargain.

S: It wouldn't be like that at all.

P: Yes it would.

S: You can't just make up a good thing and a bad thing, put them together, and then say "Oooh, that's a creepy bargain". That doesn't work.

P: Works fine. As long as you're not paying for both.

S: I could say "a box of chocolates with a spleen at the bottom" but that doesn't make it a bargain of any kind. It doesn't work.

P: Somebody would be looking for their spleen, it's true. But that's a free spleen for you.

S: It doesn't work!

P: I wouldn't pay for a spleen on its own, but if you throw one in for free, I'm there.

*The creature that devours a fish's tongue and then attaches itself to the tongue's stub is not a fish but a kind of bug. I didn't know this at the time of the conversation. Mea maxima culpa.

Labels: conversations

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a winner and all that
» Friday, October 14, 2005

In my last entry I proposed a contest to guess my first name from a list of my Googled needs. Ye are smart folk, and two of youse answered correctly (I'm experimenting here with some archaic second person plural pronouns, pay no mind). Since I had two correct answers, both win a prize in the mail, just as I had promised.

1st prize goes to Jason, an Episcopalian priest currently working on his Ph.D in Episcopaleontology at Cambridge. At first I thought of disqualifying him on the grounds that he may have simply asked the Lord, who knows my name. Invoking the omniscient conduit is cheating! Then I remembered that God doesn't speak to Episcopalians anymore. So. Since Jason lives in the UK, I'm going to send him by mail the Treasures of the New World. A galleon loaded down with tobacco, coffee beans, maize, potato root, tomatoes, and a curious hemp distillate taken for pleasure around these parts. Jason, I've press-ganged an entire crew, and your galleon will be arriving in Liverpool in six weeks' time. If you don't want the bother of a galleon - and a trip to Liverpool - send me your mailing address at palinode at gmail dot com. And I should say: the reference to the saint was not too obtuse. If you'd guessed wrong then it definitely would have been obtuse.

2nd prize goes to The Absurdist, who, despite his sobriquet, answered my question in as straightforward a manner as possible. He wrote "Your name is Aidan". Not very absurd. Especially since that's my name. For something absurd, Absurdist, check out Miss A's comment here. Nonetheless, you win a prize by mail. What's the prize? Hmmm. Since I detected a religious colouring to your weblog, I think I'll send you The Pleasures of a Godless Life. Sleeping in on Sundays, Betting on Dogfights, Fornicating with All Kinds of Everything Including Keira Knightley. That should be enough to shake your faith up a little.

*Note: all prizes will actually be collages of photos from old magazines. No refunds.

Labels: useless

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all my terrible aching needs
» Sunday, October 09, 2005

Schmutzie borrowed this from Sweetney, and now I hoist this over my shoulders and toss it into the waste pit of my weblog. The game is simple: Google "[your name] needs" and skim the best of the results. I didn't use the name Palinode (since a palinode needs nothing but its subject material, and even that it abandons). Instead I used my real name, which I've used on this site once or twice but don't feel like abusing with overuse. Suffice it to say that my name, which was extremely unusual when I was born in the early seventies, has now become a favourite of new parents for both boys and girls. It's also showing up on soap operas, Sex & The City and one of the CSIs, so my Googled needs tend to the melodramatic and pediatric. Without searching my site or cheating by Googling portions of these phrases, see if you can guess my name. Winner receives something. I don't know what yet, but I'll send it to you by mail! That's always a slice of fresh-cut fun.

Palinode needs to be with Kendall
Palinode needs a decent storyline
Palinode needs serious convincing - he's been burned
Palinode needs a friend right now
Maria thinks seeing her face right now is the last thing Palinode needs
Palinode needs to be put in a hospital and kept there while new medications are tried
Palinode needs some basic geography help
Palinode needs me to be there
Palinode needs to see a doctor
Palinode needs a clue
Palinode needs to be calmed down enough to be put into his crib w/o screaming his head off the second we put him down.
Palinode needs something more exciting to do
Palinode needs some better choices than who've they've been throwing him with.
Palinode needs Simone. Or Kendall. Or me.
Palinode needs to catch Mel Baxter and to do so he needs to camp out at the resort.
Palinode needs an enema. Palinode needs an enema. Palinode needs an enema. [this one worries me a little]
Palinode needs Lara to help him remember his music
Palinode needs that encouragement in his life
Palinode needs someone wild and fun
Palinode needs a strong character to play against him
Palinode needs the respirator to help out his lungs
Palinode needs to steer clear of the local gang of thugs led by Johnno
Palinode needs a way to help them
Palinode needs only a major to finish
Palinode needs sesame street chicken
Palinode needs his mama around
Palinode needs treatment for his neurological problems
Palinode needs two takes to find his happy face
Palinode needs to spend some time on the floor too
Palinode needs a chaperone
Palinode needs me to scare away monsters in his closet and under his bed.
Palinode needs a little brother or sister
Palinode needs your help to make the Rooftop Playground a reality
Palinode needs to have me up and about
Palinode needs cereal
Palinode needs a puppy!
Palinode needs a serious dose of chocolate and a long-ass bath
Palinode needs to learn how to go out and socialise without my help
Palinode needs serious convincing - He's been burned
Palinode needs the computer for the International work
Palinode needs a playmate
Palinode needs to keep pursuing Kendall
Palinode needs one, tool that is
Palinode needs to be surrounded by people who are going to be a constant in his life
Palinode needs me to balance him still
Palinode needs a break
Palinode needs help
Palinode needs to let lying dogs sleep
Palinode needs to stop with all that linguistics and language crap
Palinode needs a lot of names, doesn't he?
Palinode needs his diaper changed
Palinode needs to be fed every three hours
Palinode needs to get a haircut and a real job
Palinode needs to tidy it up
Palinode needs me
Palinode needs Mia - but not like that
Palinode needs a woman
Palinode needs a middle name
Palinode needs one of those
Palinode needs 47 cards
Palinode needs to do something
HOLY CRAP Palinode needs to learn now to drive
Palinode needs You
Palinode needs a new blankie
Palinode needs more tummy time
Palinode needs that kind of medical attention
Palinode needs to find a Roger Moore chat room now

There you go. I'm a barrel of needs. Give me my 47 cards and my tummy time or I'll take a shiv to you.

Labels: useless

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let freedom reign within twelve months
» Saturday, October 08, 2005

I had a dream a few nights past that I was thirty five years old. That's all I remember. I was thirty-five in my dream. Since I turned thirty-four recently, why would my brain go to the trouble of pretending that I'm one year older? If I were awake and caught my brain dressing up as a marginally older version of myself, I'd rebuke it for its obvious lack of ambition. Then I'd take over, give myself a chunky metal body with pincers for hands (important, those pincers), lasers for teeth (for that bright smile of death), and age myself two hundred years. Or whenever the aliens finally roll in to steal our planet's natural resources. Point is, I'd be able to defend the planet with my fearsome pincers and laser teeth, sending all off-planet marauders back to skulk in the bowels of their lunar fastness.

As it is, my brain exercises its shallow imaginings when I'm asleep and defenseless, forcing me to experience the unexciting spectacle of myself one year from now. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll have a dream of asking for porridge at an IHOP or wandering the aisles of a Payless factory outlet.

Labels: useless

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industrious wednesday answer to idle tuesday question
» Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Yesterday (or yeasterdye, as they say in New Zealandese) I asked my readers what they would buy from me, if I were to offer it for sale on my site.

Blackbird said that she would buy all the tea in China from me, so I checked my kitchen cupboards. I have 48 individual sachets of Red Rose Tea in their original gauze mesh, plus I have 5 grams of Japanese Sencha green tea, and a box of Camel Brand pellet-like gunpowder green tea, which I imagine could be loaded into a shotgun for all those home-invasion moments. These items are too precious to me for retailing.

My vast tea estates have been seized by regional armed governments and now they produce opium, or so I hear. This is a better drug than tea. Point of trivia: Schmutzie once took a green tea bath and emerged no greener than before. So all those stories you hear are bull.

Guanilo offered to purchase: "that bitchin' diving apparatus" on the right-hand side of the screen (click to reach my profile); potato chips; or a bagel. I love options. I understand that a diversified economy is a strong economy, and I'm a tower of fiduciary strength (ein Festeberg ist unser Palinode).

That bitching diving gear that you want so badly, Guanilo, is not meant for submarine ventures. Slide that one on and you'll never survive a tour of the reefs. It's a Draeger apparatus, a breathing device worn by intrepid Draegermen as they stalk the dark disastrous corridors of mine accidents for trapped miners. Draegermen are known for their courage, as exemplified by the 1937 film Draegerman Courage. Before I enter into a contract to sell you this device, Guanilo, I must know: are you prepared for the awesome responbility that comes with this device? Because you'll be a subterranean superhero.

Potato chips I can work with. There's even a chance for profit on both ends: if you keep the empty bag, you can sell it to Saviabella, who's in the market for a robot vagina. Ms. Bella: please note that all robot vaginas are sold "as-is" and do not come with a warranty of any kind. Do not attempt to reverse engineer, disassemble or make copies of the robot vagina without expression transmitted permission of the robot. In the event of accident, injury or death in the course of use of said vagina, dealer shall be indemnified and held harmless and not forced to watch Double Jeopardy starring Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones, nor any of its DVD extras, featurettes, commentaries or interactive menus, nor any celebrity interviews, 'making-of' minidocs, nor any photo galleries or trailers, teasers, wallpapers or screensavers.

As for a bagel, I don't think I can help you there. My bagels have certain ideas about being reduced to their exchange value.

Anonymous, the rules for Underwater Hun are not for sale. They are free to anyone who sends me an SASE, unless they have long red hair, in which case they must shave their beard.

Labels: useless

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idle tuesday question
» Tuesday, October 04, 2005

I keep getting spam asking me questions like "Having Trouble Attracting Customers to your Website?"

I want to tell the spammers that my site's not selling anything. What would you people buy from me?

Labels: metablog

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for me, the tmi entry
» Monday, October 03, 2005

Oh very well.

Fifteen years ago
- I was nineteen years old. I had left the Maritimes one year before and was still coming up with all sorts of pretentious adjectives for the prairies.
- I had flunked grade 12 (whoo-hoo!) and so had just finished my extra year in high school. I made it through with decent marks, partly because the relentless disorientation of adolescence had calmed a bit, and I was able to show up every day and sit in class. It was still very difficult to do, but I managed.
- After I moved to the prairie city, one year beforehand, I'd started to lose interest in dating - or did dating lose interest in me? I went out with a few girls but it felt a bit mechanical. By October of 1989 it had been close to a year since my last girlfriend.
- I was skinny. I think I was thirty-forty pounds under my current weight, and currently I'm pretty slim. I was skinny because I smoked too much and frequently forgot to eat. I slept little, which is pretty much how it's been since I was a very small child. I do not remember ever being hungry during my late teens, but I recall feeling constantly overheated, as if I were running a low-grade fever.
- On the day before my 19th birthday I visited a place called the Big Muddy, a coulee-ridden swatch of patchy grassland just north of the US border. You could stand right at the border fence and look south into the US. The land was equally bare but tinged with red towards the southern horizon. It was the beginning of the badlands. I had never seen America before.
- I had thick curly hair, which at that point had not begun to thin. I smelled of leather and American cigarettes.

Ten years ago
- If you've a mind for arithmetic, you'll figure out that I was twenty-four at this point. I was living a bigger city at this point, having left university midway through an English degree. Up until two years before, I had never lived on my own, never payed a bill, never gone grocery shopping for myself, never run out of cash midway through the week. I was managing a used bookstore and making enough money for an apartment, tobacco and sufficient food to maintain my weight (although my weight dipped to under 100 pounds not long after I first moved there in mid '93. I was horrified to see such a number on the scale and began to force myself to eat regularly. I still felt overheated most of the time, but at least I filled out).
- In the summer of 1995 my dry streak with dating ended with a bang. I had a fling with an girl who was unnervingly similar to my first great highschool love. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was not so much a relationship as it was an exorcism.
- I had just left one roommate and moved in with a friend of mine named Tony, whom I can only describe as a cross between Lenny Bruce and a Prussian general. I'm not certain how our personalities meshed, but somehow they did.
- On my 24th birthday a friend painted the Zig-Zag man on a t-shirt for me, partly because I smoked Drum all the time, and partly because I looked like the Zig-Zag man whenever I grew a beard.
- In September I moved back to the prairie city that where I lived at nineteen and live now. I went back to university and met a girl named Friday whom I dated for three years. I learned the fine art of campus drinking.

Five years ago
- What was I, twenty-nine? By this time my hair was no longer thick, and I was keeping my head shaved. I had begun to look like all those other guys out there with shaved heads, hoop earrings and little tufts of hair beneath their lip. Mind you, I made it look good.
- I wasn't married by then, but I was only months away from getting engaged, on an absolutely ice-cold winter's night, to Schmutzie. We were doing a kind of yo-yo dating, taking buses on weekends between each other's cities. I did not know at the time that I was going to marry her, but she had figured out that she was going to marry me, so it worked out nicely.
- Autumn of 2000 was the last time I got ID'd for anything. The Schmutz and I walked into a casino lounge and were promptly asked for ID by a guy in a black suit who was almost certainly five years younger than either of us. I could've out-experienced that bastard any day of the week, but we were so flattered at being ID'd that we just walked out and wandered around for the rest of the night. There's a strong possibility that we saw The Way of the Gun that same weekend. Remember that slow motion car chase scene? That was awesome.
- By this time I had started working in the telefilm-o-vision industry, doing research and writing treatments for a small company that made historical documentaries on the Holocaust. Those were cheery times.

One year ago
- Colour me thirty-three. I had been married three years at this point and living in a cramped apartment with Schmutzie and some finches. With the exception of the apartment, I'm a happy man.
- If it's early October, then I was in the passenger seat of a Saab 95 going north through France on my way to Karlsruhe in southern Germany. I had just spent a week in the Netherlands and a week in the south of France, interviewing survivors and family about the North Sea Flood and the Malpasset Dam Collapse. I knew when we left Fréjus and St-Raphael that I would miss those places for a long long time. And I do.
- I was two days away from buying a nice second hand SLR camera in Karlsruhe. I spent the next four weeks mostly taking photos of Smart Cars. I came home from the Europe on Halloween. I'd been paying so little attention to the goings on in the outside world that the costumes worn by airport staff in Calgary completely flummoxed me.
- It's hard to sum up or make sense of my life one year ago because details are so fresh in my mind. The autumn of 2004 marked the beginning of a change in my life, from traveling field producer to stationary show producer. The long periods away from home combined with weeks of inactivity were difficult to deal with - I ended up restless but tired, sitting at home but wanting to go out, wanting to pack my days with something purposeful but too disconnected to do it. Mostly I wanted to do something that would impress The Schmutz, but I didn't know what. I only knew that I couldn't continue on this way.
- In November of the year the road trips started to dry up (production slows down from November-January) and I started filling in as a producer on the show. It was largely a make-work project, but I turned out to be good at it.

Yesterday
- Christ, yesterday was Sunday. It seem unfair to have to talk about Sundays. I went for brunch with some friends (not least among them Politiko and Tahini Monkey) and walked around a little bit with The Schmutz. In the afternoon I read How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World and Elaine Scarry's lecture On Beauty and Being Just. Schmutzie appeared to spend the entire day doing laundry. I made Moroccan carrots and black beans and rice for supper. We watched an episode of The Family Guy as we ate. Later on The Schmutz went to bed early, falling asleep on the couch with her faux-converse on and her cheek smushed up against my shoulder. I was restless and watched an episode of Firefly. That calmed me down some.
- This weekend I watched Serenity, A History of Violence and Land of the Dead. Is it wrong that I found them all to be very similar films?
- I got some feedback on a short story I'd been working on from The Schmutz. She liked it.
- We're now living in a much bigger and better place, in an old brownstone with high ceilings, unpainted baseboards and transom windows above the doors (the brass latch informs us that the patent dates to April 1899). We took an undersized sick black cat home from the Humane Society just a month ago and named him Oskar.
- I picked Oskar because I got a vibe from him that I thought of as 'levelheaded'. The vibe was actually 'sick and malnourished'. Obviously my catdar needs some work.
- I've been producing the show officially for six months now, and I've weathered a pretty stressful transition. This life, it's a good one.

Five Songs I Know All the Words To:
- "Holiday in Cambodia" by Dead Kennedys
- "Casimir Pulaski Day" by Sufjan Stevens
- "Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie
- "Redemption Song" by Bob Marley
- "Both Hands" by Ani Difranco

Five Snacks I Eat:
- Smoked oysters with white cheddar on crackers
- avocado on toast
- salsa and chips
- almonds
- rapple chaps, no dap

Five Things I Would Do with $100,000,000.00:
- build a golem that actually works
- accentuate the positive by buying lots of stuff
- pay off the debts of family and friends and make them feel really bad about it
- with the increased leisure time, stalk Alan Greenspan
- buy a stable of fine Arabian horses and dip them in gold

Five Places I Would Run Away To:
- Costa Rica
- Big Sur
- St. John's
- south of France
- Schmutzie's choice, but it better be warm and near the sea

Five Things I Would Never Wear:
- the acid wash ensemble
- the fuscia tank top
- the baggy zebra-stripe pants
- the "Don't Argue with Your Wife, Dicker" baseball cap I saw one day in a discount department store window
- the activewear

Five Favourite Television Shows:
- them Whedon shows
- Deadwood, motherfucker. Godamnit!
- The Wire
- that shiny new Battlestar Galactica
- Lawst

Five Great Joys:
- It's hard to pump the snark out of this category, but I'm trying. First great joy is finding a book you've forgotten you were dying to read.
- Second great joy is the autumn afternoon with no wind and bright-leaved trees.
- Third great joy is spending lazy afternoons with The Schmutz.
- Fourth great joy is a well-turned phrase.
- Fifth great joy is effortless, free-flowing conversation, jumping back and forth from subject to subject, sawing away at the limb of afternoon until it breaks.

Five Favourite Toys:
- not a toy guy, but I liked the Death Star model when I was a kid.

Five current Reads:
- HA! by Gordon Sheppared
- The Iron Council by China Méaville
- How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World by Francis Wheen
- On Beauty And Being Just by Elaine Scarry
- Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship and the Innocence of Youth by Marjorie Heins

Five People I'm Tagging
- Uh-uh. Tagging is the pox of blogs.

Labels: autobio

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