OK…so what is really going on?  All of a sudden, we are getting sabre-rattling from Canada, the paragons of peace, the nancy-boys of North America?  Canada talks tough with Russia?  Give me a break!

I have no idea what this is all about but one thing is for sure, it is NOT about the Ukrainian people.  We don’t care that much about our OWN people 95% of the time – so we are going to punch Russians in the face for doing what not only comes naturally but also may be somewhat justified?  Makes no sense.

Who is writing the script for this dark sit-com?

Look: Russia leased land in Ukraine.  Like Britain did 115 years ago with Hong Kong.  Russia has half it’s navy in Crimea.  It has nuclear weapons there and over 60% of the population there are Russian.  Putin has to go there.  He has to secure his forces.  He has no choice.  In fact, I would prefer Putin to have the nuclear weapons over newly energized Ukrainian rebels.  As bad as Putin is, he hasn’t used any nuclear weapons yet.

And, from what I hear from real Ukrainians, the current team of parliamentarian pirates are not 100% supported even amongst those not Russian.  Clearly this is a divided country in so many ways.  Give ’em time.  Let them sort it out.

But Canada has somehow suddenly found it’s voice on this?  Let me put it bluntly: we do not have a voice in this.

For Canada to posture on this current issue is like France posturing on Quebec.  “Shut up, already!”

So, what is the real issue?  Well, methinks that the Ukraine ‘splitting off’ from Russia serves the west in some way.  So, they are meddling to make matters worse.  Offering up billion dollar loans to Ukrainian Vlad-come-latelies and attending memorials – what nonsense.  What hypocritical and dangerous nonsense!

Don’t get me wrong, Putin has a long track record of Stalin-eque rule and is clearly not a nice guy.  But, given that he has no choice in Crimea because he leases an apartment and a big marina there, why make this an issue?  Why make this an issue for Canada?

And, from my point of view, Canada lives in a glass house.  Canada does not take care of our own people.  See aboriginal issues.  See the environment.  Canada does not even take care of it’s own veterans.  Canada sells out it’s resources to China.  Canada cuts back on services to it’s own people and cheats everyone.  But we are going to war to back up our Ukranian brothers over an issue that is just a week or so old?

Somebody should arrest John Baird and put a muzzle on Stephen Harper.  For their own good. They are way out of their league in this street fight.

There is only one plausible explanation I can see for this: the arctic.

Canada and Russia claim overlapping parts of the arctic.  We are already taking little ‘runs’  at each other by overflying our air territories and them doing the same.  And that will have to be sorted out if either government begins the planned rape of the resources there (oil).  So, by Canada and the US showing up like Batman and Robin over Ukraine, a clear message regarding territorial disputes in the arctic is being sent.  We will subsequently diminish our rhetoric over Ukraine (because we don’t care about it, really) but we will then double our flyovers in the arctic and add the presence of our American neighbours.

The message: Canada and the US stand as one.  Stay out of the arctic and we’ll stay out of Ukraine.

But I have no idea what I am talking about.  Maybe we should just trust Harper on this…waddya think?

As you know, Sal and I are trying to write a book about something off-the-grid.  Since I am the more prolific writer and inclined to colourful expressions (i.e. lies, hyperbole and fabrication) and Sal is more about facts, order, sense and sensibilities, I produced the raw material and she is in the process of refining it.  The idea is to reduce the last few years of blather to a story of sorts.

When we started, we didn’t know what the story was going to be and, to be honest, we are still not sure.  Old Couple Retires?  Change of Life?  Adventure Living on a Budget?  Going Feral (but with a computer and other mod cons)?

Of only one thing I am quite sure: Sally is a butcher!  Whole anecdotes are sent to the morgue.  Story threads are sutured up.  Themes dismembered.  Categories of interest deemed uninteresting are sent to the psychiatric ward for further analysis.  And every rant has been expunged!  I feel like the World’s Biggest Loser, except not in weight loss but in words.

If she could do this for me in the weight loss category I would be anorexic and almost beyond recovery.

“Sal, you are cutting all the meat off the bones!  A book is more than a list of accurately compiled and researched facts, it is a human, personal-interest story.”

“No, it isn’t.  It’s not all about you, you know?  Or me. Ya gotta get over yourself.  And you gotta stop writing about me!  Now what was the average weight of an adult raven again?  And do we have the latest schedule of the barge?”

“Why?”

“Because you refer to the ravens in the same blog as the barge and people need to know the facts from the footnotes.”

“Footnotes?”

“Yeah, you know….like where your sources of information came from…that kind of thing?”

“I made ’em up!”

“See!  Now there’s the problem in a nutshell.  You can’t just make stuff up.” 

“But, of course I can!  I was there.  It happened to me.  There were no teams of scientists watching and measuring.  I fell into the sea, got cold and climbed out.  What kind of fact-checking do people need for that?!”

“No, silly.  I mean when you refer to a tree that you chopped down.  You don’t mention the name of the tree or, if you do, you don’t mention the Latin name or whether it is on the endangered list or what kind of forest it comes from.  People need that.”

“They do if they are silvaculture students but not if they are simply readers!”

“See!  That’s why you need me.  You don’t know squat about readers.  I know about readers.  I’m in a book club.  You are not.  Keep that fact in mind when you think to criticize, big boy!  So keep writing.  I intend to throw away a whole lot of what you write, so I need lots!  And, if you don’t mind, I have a list of things I need you to research.  We need more facts on stuff like gensets, tools and all the flora and fauna in our area.  Oh yeah, and do try to be funny, won’t you?  This is supposed to be a light take on living-off-the-grid and well, sometimes you are kinda boring.”    

T’is the 27th.  Last post was the 22nd.  Five days!  I think that is the longest drought of my nasty, brutish and short writing career. What the hell?

Part of the reason, of course, is what I have been saying lately…….there is little of interest for me in the city.  Even though living down here is easy, convenient and quite tasty when you find a few good local restaurants, it is basically unstimulating.  Worse, I spend no time building and hours at a time in the seated position.  TVs and computers are eating at my life.

“Dave, what the hell is wrong with you?  Turn ’em off!” 

Yeah.  Like that works!

Anyway….five days of city living is almost enough to give me fodder for one day of writing.  So, here it is: I met a Ukranian guy.  Expressed my sympathy for the trials and tribs his country was going through.  He shrugged.  I then expressed a bit of support for the pretty, braided Yulia Tymoshenko who had been incarcerated for the past four years.  She, it seems, was the rightful leader-of-choice of the people.  He shrugged.

“What?  You don’t like pretty girls?”

“Oh, I like pretty girls but she bad like others.  Just pretty.  Still bad.  They all bad.  Each one just take money from peoples and give to friends and selves.  They all bad.  Even her.  She not bad like others bad but still bad.” 

“Oh…………”

“You think Canada different?  It no different!  Government take money from peoples give money to friends.  You not see?”

“Oh, I see.  I see.  Don’t get me started.  We could be here all day speaking with heavy Eastern European accents, nyet?”

“What you say?”

“I say I share your cynical point of view but, given half a hour’s conversation, I will also share your accent and weird sentence structure.  I pick up speech patterns like a sponge.  Next thing you know, I am drinking Vodka (which I pronounced Wodka – it was already happening!) and sending out for perogy delivery!  I’ll leave drunk, full and with your accent.  Where’d you come from, anyway?”

“Coquitlam.”

I also met Frank Wang.  Nice guy.  Also poor English.  Chinese herbalist.  A friend of mine was wanting some horrible Asian tea-medicine that acts like a tonic and I was in the neighbourhood so I went to pick it up for him.  Because of his enthusiastic endorsement of Frank, I stayed for an assessment of my own self (our guest suite does not have a mirror, you see).  Frank asked me some questions only half of which I understood and looked at my eyes and throat and then prescribed me some herbs, too.  $78.00 later I walked out of the little shop of horrible herbs with a large grocery bag of frog tongues, newt eyes and things necessary to make a tea of double, double toil and trouble.  There were a few mushrooms in there too, I think.

Frank looked at me and asked, “You watch TV?” 

“Now don’t start with me, Frank……”

“Where you live?”

“On a remote island up the coast.  Off the grid.”

“Wha’…? You mean condo?”

“Oh.  No.  I live in a house.  Good Feng Shui.”

“Wha’ you say?”

“Never mind.  I live in a house.”

“Eat fast food?”

“No.  Once every two months.  No more.  Always good food.  Never processed.”

“OK.  No more pizza for you, OK?  Not good.  No more burgers, OK?  Not good.  You eat spicy food?”

“Well….yeah…kinda…..you know……I like Chinese food and…..”

“Ha ha.  Chinese food not spicy!  Ha ha, you make joke with Frank!”

“OK, well then there’s Indian food.  I like Indian food.  Probably once or twice a month.  And I make sushi now and then.”

“Ha ha!  You funny guy!  Sushi good.  Sushi no spicy.  Ha ha.  But only yellow curry for you, OK?  Yellow curry good.  Green curry bad.  OK?” 

I was going to discuss Wasabi with him but decided not to.  If Feng Shui didn’t bring us closer, nothing would.

City living, eh?  Just one giant international melting pot of herbs, spices and broken English.

I have recently learned that children’s car seats can get stale dated.  Seems they have a best-before date and, if used for too long, go ‘bad’.  Your kid’s head will crack like an egg in a 5 mph accident!  Who knew?

I have also learned that some Canadians have benefitted from an economic stimulus program that never even existed! (That is not easy and you have to admire their pluck in getting there and still having enough energy for being filmed for already-purchased-for the-Olympics television ads).  And I have learned that dirty dish cloths left unwashed can carry germs that will make you sick.  Maybe crack your kid’s head even? Fabric items such as plush toys can also kill you and your loved ones if you are not careful.

But most of all I have learned that our fellow Canadians love one another so much that we will all get behind our hockey players even if they take on the world!

These lessons cost the government millions to teach.  That is why they have cut back on real educational funding for schools, you see…more kids watch TV than listen to teachers…makes sense in a cynical, selfish, political-brainwashing kind of way.

I have also learned that Enbridge Northern Gateway is protecting our environment from threat – Enbridge is not threatening our environment like it might seem.  They love the salmon.  They love the whales.  And they are doing their level best to protect it all from the bad guys.  God bless ’em.  They have even hired a local ‘mom’  and ‘grandmother’ as project manager.

Who are the bad guys, again?

Propaganda is a powerful tool and our government is not letting this Olympic opportunity pass them by.  They are bombarding us with messages.  Every million dollar ad telling us about dirty washcloths and stale car seats is paid for by your tax dollars.  Every boosterism hockey ad is paid for by your tax dollars.  You are paying to be lied to.  You are paying to be conned. You are paying to be convinced that ‘they’ are looking after you.

They are not.  They are doing the opposite.  They are stealing from you and your children and your children’s children.  They are liars.

And we don’t even think about it.  “Ho hum, just another stupid ad about dirty dishcloths…telling us what everybody knows…or telling us blatant lies…all done with a backdrop of real Canadian scenery and wildlife…so what else is new?” 

Here’s something new: We are also being told to curb our wanton use of antibiotics.  We are being told that over use of such drugs causes problems and those problems are our fault!  Fact: antibiotics are prescribed by doctors, sold by pharmacies and they really do go stale.  In other words: the consumers being lectured to by the ads are NOT the problem.

Their propaganda is not a real solution for the problem but it helps deflect the blame from government and the medical industry.

More and more we are seeing advertising campaigns selling ideology rather than product.  We see political points of view rather than bargain discounts.  We see environmental platitudes and outright lies stated by corporate polluters and backed by government complicity.  Even the media and broadcasting – the medium by which this duplicity is delivered – is guilty of NOT telling the truth.

It is not just a case of the absence of truth – it is a purposeful, managed and carefully packaged lie.  L-I-E.

The BIG LIE is all of it, this giant cover-all veil of lies, statistics, half-truths, propaganda, spin and deceit that pervades almost every newspaper article, every piece of legislation, every ad on TV and especially the infotainment that passes for news.  We have, as a nation, become so complacent or so stupid that the BIG LIE is no longer even half-hidden or subtle.  It is blatant.  It is ‘in your face’.  It is embarrassing, insulting and completely out of control.

And it has an increasingly American style to it.  And you know where that leads?  Blind patriotism, ugly nationalism and complete and utter ignorance of the rest of the world.  It also leads to supplication, subservience and forced compliance when deemed necessary by government (Homeland Security).  We will become a nation of hockey goons just as the US has become a nation of tail-gate football fans.  And anyone questioning that will become a danger to national interests or a person of interest to the police.

Warning! Whatever you do, don’t get too caught up in the boosterism that is the Olympics.  All it really is NOW is nationalism writ large.  And nationalism is just BIG party politics at work.

Having said that, Gilmore Junio exemplified real sportsmanship by giving up his Olympic opportunity to a better skater and one of Canada’s ski coaches, Justin Wadsworth helped a Russian competitor whose ski had broken.  THAT is the Canada I would like to see promoted. 

I confess to a weakness for attractive women.  I am a visual animal, after all and I figure “God gave ’em curves and gave me eyes.  It must be my job to check ’em out!” 

‘Course, things change with age.  I admit that, too.  I have actually passed beautiful women in the street and NOT looked!  What is up with that?  I have even passed beautiful women in the street and NOT even seen them!  Like my eyes were failing or something!

That is so weird.

But the other day it became more clear to me.  I saw.  I looked.  I stared.  And I was seduced.  I was completely enthralled.  My friend Steve had given me the keys to the Kubota mini-excavator and it is just gorgeous!  I call her Kubby.

OK, I know what is being mumbled out there…”How dare he compare an excavator to a woman!  The bastard!”  And I know that pursuing that comparison will only get me deeper in trouble with the women.  Like digging yourself out of a hole……..not unlike using an excavator to get you out of a hole….

Never mind.

The point: I may have moved on from primal reflex staring at beautiful women (may have) because age alters all things hormonal.  But nature also abhors a vacuum and what little testosterone I have left is being directed towards cute little excavators.  OMG!  What fun!  (Do not let the serious look on my face fool you.  I was grinning on the inside!)

Two magic joysticks control the little beasty.  One is the ‘steering wheel’  and the other is the bucket/fork-lift control.  You can set your speed and just leave it or you can set your ‘default’ speed and employ an accelerator pedal to over-ride that speed whenever you feel confident enough in what you are doing.  The perfect recipe for a disaster!  OMG!  What fun!

I spent the first hour or so just slowly ambling about and tearing up the yard.  I moved a few empty pallets and stacked them and then moved them again and stacked them again.  It was great!

Then I decided to make it a menage a trois and I invited Sal to the party.  I gave her twenty seconds of instruction, made sure there was plenty of room around her and set her free!  She danced that machine like she was born to it.  Placing pallets like doilies at a dining room table.  She had a touch with the controls not unlike a surgeon.  She was brill!

I gushed.  “Wow!  Sal!  You were awesome.  Right from the start – just moving stuff like it was an extension of yourself (actually, she was moving stuff better than if it was an extension of just herself.  On her own, she can get a bit klutzy – see previous post about quilting and blood).  I’m impressed!” 

“I don’t get what all the fuss is about.  It’s not hard.  Piece o’ cake.  I’m bored of this.  I’m going in.”  Then she looked at me like I was raving about playing with Lego or something and dismissed herself.  Natural born heavy equipment operator.

I looked at her with new eyes as she sashayed those cute little equipment operator hips back to the house.  Oooh….temptress-in-a-hardhat………thy name is Sally!

A few years back, we were in Thailand.  Sal fainted (40 degrees C) and slumped like a swooning Southern Belle to the floor of the lobby of our hotel.  Before she had even hit the prone position there were thee female staff members attending to her every want (which wasn’t much as she was unconscious – but it is the thought that counts).  I rushed across the lobby to attend but the lovely little Thai women were doing a fine job so I turned to call an ambulance. “Ambulance on it’s way, sir.”  Staff had already handled that, too.

Five minutes later we were expertly whisked off in an immaculate ambulance and greeted at the door of the hospital by the senior gastroenterologist.  No forms.  No waits.  No bureaucracy.  Just immediate service.  Sal was poked, prodded, de-blooded by a few cc’s and scanned and rayed where appropriate.  Total elapsed time: half an hour.  As they trundled her upstairs to what was a better room than provided by our hotel, I filled out some paperwork.  Maybe five minutes.

From fainting to luxurious floor five complete with several full-time-attendance nurses (really cute ones.  High heels, little caps and broad smiles….I almost checked in myself!) maybe took us one hour.  Probably less.

The hospital was immaculately clean.  The service stupendous.  The treatment effective and quick and the experience of being ‘looked after properly’ was way beyond our expectations.  They even gave Sal a room with a small kitchenette and a spare bed for me should I wish to sleep over.

We left the next day.  Sal was fine.  They charged me the equivalent of not-quite $300.00 everything included.

Yesterday around 2:00 pm Sal cut her finger.  It was deep.  She wanted stitches.  She went to Richmond General.  I was in the Valley looking at equipment and so I came as soon as I could – about an hour and a half later.  Sal greeted me at the door, “You do not want to go in there!  They said that I would have to wait another 3.5 hours and it is a horror show in there.  People throwing up and bleeding and still not getting looked at.  The disease and crowding alone is enough to make healthy people sick and, knowing you, you will go nuts.  Don’t go in.” 

“So, do I go or do I stay?  And what about your finger?”

“I don’t want to stay either.  I have been waiting in the rain outside for most of the time.  Can’t go in there!  Let’s go to that grocery store where there is a walk-in clinic.  I know we drive for another hour but I am three hours more here at the very least .” 

So we went to North Van.  Walk-in closed.  So we found another.  Small store front.  No chairs.  Couldn’t get in.  Packed.  Maybe twelve people spilling out the door.  Lots of hacking and wheezing.  They wouldn’t ‘do’  stitches anyway.  Not cost effective.  Prescription writing is more profitable, you see.  So, we left.  Went to another.  Sal was the 2nd one in when they opened at 5:30.  By 5:45 the place was teeming.  We got home just after 7:00.

Our politicians tell us we have the best health care system in the world.  It is a lie.  Our Health Care professionals warn us that 3rd world health care systems are expensive and dangerous.  But I’ve been to a lot of them (from Thailand to Mexico, from El Salvador to Guatemala and some of the Caribbean Islands) and that is a lie, too.  Third world is better.

Had we been home, I would have sutured Sal’s finger myself.  If she balked (she might) we would have gone into Campbell River and it would have been 1000% better.  Our Emergency doctors in CR are ex-South Africans and they KNOW sutures as well as anyone.

My point: This is not the best health care system in the world.  Worse, the professionals are NOT professional or, at the very least, they are not as caring, effective, fast and courteous as the Thais, the Mexicans or even The Bahamians.  When you see a dozen people on the North Shore standing cramped and injured in a store-front clinic, there is no doubt about it.  And should you, God help you, find yourself in an Emergency ward in a big urban hospital you can be assured that you are bathing in germs and one of the most popular is the drug resistant kind.  You may walk out with your finger stitched but you’ll be sporting a disease that will never go away.

You think we are off the grid now?  Wait until I put together a bigger and more comprehensive first aid kit that rivals that of a walk-in clinic in Thailand!

Let the appendectomies begin!  

Meaning: we are well on the downhill side of our time in the city by February 14.  Meaning: we can start looking forward to going home, Spring and having fun!

But we’ll be without Meg.  That will be weird.  Fid is finding the whole thing confusing.  On walks, he sometimes tends to hold back and look over his shoulder wondering where she is.  We just wait until he ‘gets it’ again and we then trundle off.  Weird.

We are still pretty active down here, tho.  Visiting, shopping, writing up documents, having meetings, learning to zen-drive again (being somewhat unconscious while driving so as to NOT be driven mad by the delays and overall waste of time that city transit is).  It is all good.  Kinda.  In a Borg-ville kinda way.

As they say, resistance is futile.  We are undergoing assimilation.

But they won’t get us.  We can see the light.  We will escape.  Freedom is just another word for getting out of the city and we are already eyeing the chains that currently bind us.  We’ll be OK.

Not so some of my friends.  Some are as good as anchored forever.

As readers know, I have a friend with a terminal disease.  Like Lou Gherig’s, it is a wasting away-thing.  And it has had it’s way with him for over five years.  It is beyond comprehension how horrible this thing is.  He is, as they say, courageously battling it but….in such cases courage doesn’t really count.  The disease always wins.  So, it is hard.  Very hard.  Being anchored doesn’t begin to describe this kind of thing.

Other friends are doing fine but, of course, having to face their challenges from just getting older to dealing with illness and frailty as well.  Some are just having to work longer than they wanted and still others are feeling the demands of still-dependent children or even more dependent elderly parents.  No question – life is a challenge and some of those challenges are pretty hard.

And make no mistake – it is all age related.  The challenges being encountered are not new.  People throughout time have had to face them.  This world has a myriad of obstacles to overcome but there is not one where time or aging or untimeliness is not a factor.  Time, it seems, affects everything.

We, of course, are not without some challenges.  No one gets a free ride.  But, in all honesty, it seems like we are having a pretty good time of things and we are extremely grateful for what we have.  We are very, very fortunate.

Think: little piglets at a buffet. 

Having said all that, we are even more happy when we are home and I don’t think that is because most people are happier at home.  I think it is that and a bit more.  The bit more is that our home is so wonderfully enriched by nature and all that it includes.  Yes, that lifestyle involves more physical work and some logistical difficulties but, when you can still navigate those waters, such effort makes everything better.  You know?

And, of course, time will eventually affect our ability to navigate.  We know that.  But, until then, we are happy and going to remain so.  Squeal…………

The countdown from Valentine’s day continues……………

Megan died yesterday.  Or, more accurately put, we had to put her down.  Reason: catastrophic liver failure.  We lost a very, very good friend February 7th.  She’ll be missed. A lot.

A very sweet, faithful, loving and gentle dog who adored Sal.  And accepted me for who I was.  They don’t come much better.

But Meg was pretty old.  It was inevitable.  We kinda knew it was coming.  But well, you know…..?  It was still hard. Still is, actually.

The circle of life is sometimes not all that it is cracked up to be.  Right now it feels like a deflated balloon. But we’ll cope.

Of course, my primary coping mechanism these days, as you know, is to blame the city.  “Her liver worked just fine on the island!”  We’ll get through this by condemning urban living. It is a useful palliative.

Transference – a sign of good mental health.

A lot transpires during a time like the one we had yesterday.  One tends to focus on (perhaps) not always the right things.  The vet didn’t seem all that great.  The clinic was too warm.  Cars are not good vehicles for transferring corpses.  Traffic can get in the way.  The woman at the pet crematorium was irritating.  And unnervingly weird.

But I have also learned that my first emotional response to anything I don’t like is anger.  First, I get mad.  Then I get angry.  Like it was the pet cemetery woman’s fault.  And I know that about myself.  I know it is just me.  So, I do not punch her in the face.  But I think about it.

So did Sal.

Who would have thought that such a job could be so potentially dangerous?

Anyway………………..Meg is gone.  Just me, Sal and Fiddich now.  We’ll be fine.

!#!%$&! city! 

So, I go to have lunch downtown with a friend today.  2 hours.  $15.00 for parking.  That makes me laugh out loud.  My lunch was $12.00!

I attempted to park at another lot the other day but it required me to ‘swipe my phone’ to pay.  At that point, I did not have a smartphone with which to swipe and, even tho I am sure there was an option to pay with a credit card (but NOT money!) I was deterred.  So, I left.

I went to a third lot on another day and tried to buy 3 hours of parking (that robot took cash) but it would only give up 2.5 hours.  I tried phoning the company to pay for another 30 minutes.  Phone tree only.  No joy.  So, I went to the manager of the big box store I was parking under and he said, “We have nothing to do with the parking. I  can’t do a thing.  No one can.  If you call them, you get a phone tree.  We have given up!”       

This is a funny way to run a big box store….don’t you think? 

At the time, of course, it was frustrating and such events make me feel as if I am stupid (and usually I am.  I find out the solution to the above mentioned problems a few days later sharing the incidents with friends).  Living a mini Rip van Winkle experience is a major adjustment best digested with a large does of humour.  And so I try.

But I am not alone in scrambling up this steep learning curve.  I share my stories with waitresses, clerks, elevator-riders and even pan-handlers and, to a person they say, “Geez, me too.  I came from Kelowna three years ago and when I go back, I am just so happy to use a quarter in the meter and have no other problems.”

To the panhandler I say: “Sorry, dude.  No spare change. Get a card reader!  Can I swipe you with my phone?” 

Technology is OK.  I guess.  I don’t really have a problem with it other than the problems I personally have with it.  But I can eventually learn how to use it and I will.  It will be fine.  But, one has to ask if it isn’t a smidge out of control?  When hip young waiters and waitresses downtown are scratching their heads over their smartphones, you have to wonder ‘who has mastered these damn things!’   When paying customers can’t pay without a smartphone, something is wrong.  And I can’t even begin to describe what kind of mental illnesses smartphones and phone trees are causing.

Steve Jobs died young.  Coincidence?     

It is a brave new world that requires more than courage.  There is the prerequisite of NEWSPEAK (English mixed with techno-babble and e-jargon), an electronic bracelet like the ankle bracelet that convicts wear (we call them smartphones and they track you just as well as the ankle types) and a form of subservience to disembodied voices and unpublished rules of social order that is not only enslaving and brainwashing, it is involuntary.  Don’t do it…you perish.

Welcome to Borgville.  You will be assimilated.  Resistance is futile.

Over the last ten years the most common question posed by friends in the city was, “So, exactly what do you do all day up there in the middle of nowhere?”  The implication in the tone and the question itself was that we were living in some kind of stimulus wasteland, a boring backwater of staring at trees and hammering nails.  Where was the interest, they wondered?

‘Surely, you must be bored out of our gourd?’

My answer to that was pretty direct.  I wrote a blog almost every day about what was happening.  And there was always something happening.  The days I missed writing were usually because the day was so full, there was not even time in it for writing it up.  Life there was never boring.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Life was (and likely still is) always interesting, challenging, entertaining and fascinating.  Beautiful, natural and magic is a bonus.

You might have noticed that my writing output down here has tapered off somewhat.  And what I am writing about has a negative tone.  Yesterday, I wrote almost 500 words about the ironic isolation of the rich residing in the über expensive neighbourhood we are visiting.  Despite the lavish surroundings, community is nowhere to be seen in this neighbourhood.  More to the point: people are hardly seen.  Luxury cars are the substitute.  This is a stimulus wasteland.

I didn’t post that blog.  Too negative.  Sal didn’t approve.  And, honestly, I don’t dislike the people in our neighbourhood.    I don’t know them.  Nor will I ever get to know them.  I will not bump into them.  I will not exchange pleasantries.  No one will ever stop and chat.  We are all invisible to each other.

Nor do I dislike a little luxury now and then.  There is nothing wrong with a granite counter-top or a big screen TV.  And I confess willingly to drooling over some of the new cars.  But I don’t need them.  And they are NOT interesting.  Once the granite countertop is in place, it is a counter-top.  A simple hard surface.  It is NOT a raven.  It is not an Orca.  It isn’t even comparable to a visit from a squirrel.  It is just a counter-top in a kitchen upon which one makes a sandwich.  Plywood will do that.  Sadly, the same can be said for the TV.  I don’t care how big the screen, the content is drivel.  Watching it is a waste of time.

But, let’s face it, materialism is kinda fun.  For a day, anyway.  OK, in the case of fancy cars, maybe a week.  Two at the tops.  After that, it all fades into the background.  To get that same kind of first-time, new-car-smell ‘kick’ we have to buy something new again.  And soon.  And then we need another  shopping ‘fix’ soon after that one when the thrill wears off.

I have met people down here who think shopping is their job!

You wonder what we do all day up there in the forest?  Well, first off, the Orcas and the ravens are the gifts that keep on giving.  So is the giant canvas on which nature is painted.

The real question is: what do urban people do all day?

And, yes, I know the hypocrisy of what I am saying.  I lived down here (when I didn’t know better) and I am currently living here and, yes, I am shopping.  But instead of that disqualifying my comments I think it partly validates them.  I can see the difference now. It is so obvious once you get out.