good bye, Hudson's Bay

In 1670, by a Royal Charter, the British government granted the Hudson's Bay Company all lands that drained into Henry Hudson's bay, which was a crazy amount of land, it may as well have been all of Northwestern Canada. Actually, no one even knew how much land it was, the whole business of circumscribing the land according to drainage was likley a lark, none of those lands were surveyed. I suppose some limit had to be established.

In the two hundred years that followed, the Hudson's Bay Company raped the people and the land in the service of their skinning business. It was a messy affair, once the skins were taken the bodies of the animals were left to rot out there in the prairies and swamps of northern Canada.

So they did this for 200 years and made a lot of money. But as the resources depleted and the upper crust of London and beyond had tired of wearing beaver, the Company wanted out. It was good timing too, as Canada had just come into confederation in 1867 and were in need of land, so the new dominion offered the Hudson's Bay company 300,000 pounds for their land. The Company was glad to take the money.

In just over two hundred years the Company pillaged and profitted off of land that was never theirs (it didn't even belong to the British in the first place, other people were living there), and, then, when explotiation lost its interests, they turned around and sold it away for more money.

Just today on the news I heard that the Hudson's Bay Company was bought out by some foreign investor for 800 million dollars. And some Canadians actually lament the loss -- it's amazing to me as the whole institution was clearly a sham.

Now, unfortunately, there is nothing unique about this scenario, it was replicated in countless and even more violent ways all over the world, this is but another sad example of the world system.

Anyway, I wanted to speak of this for other reasons than dull historical trivia; this scenario seems to me a plain example of the absurdity of owned property, and the human claim of ownership, or even stewardship, over the land. It amazes me how any person or institution (I am not a communist) can become convinced that the land is legitimately theirs. Fine you buy the land, call it your own, that's the way it works, but that cannot take away from the fact the the entire logic is corrupt. And it is.

... Yeah, so you say, well, this is a colonial problem, it was different in Europe, Greece, India, not a chance, you can't ever take it back far enough, how far do you want to go? To the dawn of humanity, okay, even if I'd grant you such a dawn, who did those first human beings have to kill and drive off the land to start this sickness we lovingly call humanity.

... Yeah, well, humanity is, there must be a way to work it out, okay, then, can you not deceive me?

the possibility

Regardless of the degree of misery I feel in the morning, whether it be due to insomnia or a recent drowning in beer, I know that I will fall in love at least once during the course of a day.

It actually amazes me that I can feel any such thing, but I do, I've fallen in love with more than a thousand girls and counting.

This used to creep me out, not because the thoughts were lecherous, I mean, I'm not dangerous or anything, but because it's too easy to fall in love this way, what's the point if it's as easy as going down to the store for a pack of cigarettes?

Anyway, as I had said, this used to creep me out, but it's doing so less now, and I think it's because I had named the feeling all wrong. What I've been mistaking for love is some kind of hope, a hope that helps keep me going, it makes some of this misery tolerable. But do not be confused, this is not because I believe that at some indeterminate future point find I will find someone around the corner waiting patiently for me, this is irrelevant and a lie. This hope is the simple potential that human beings have to be beautiful.

Through all the stories of murdered babies and raped women, or pictures of decaying bodies lined up in a row, this hope, however misguided it may be, is a sense that we are somehow not all doomed.

And, that this only happens with women, despite what you may think, is not suggestive of something sexual. It happens because I project my own misery, violence and egoism onto my own gender, and in doing so, have somehow allowed myself to create an opposing gender in which I can easily house all of those things I am not.

That the gender is created here cannot be understated, for I know, as a fact, that women can be as vain, egotisitical, harmful and duplicitous as any man.

what the fuck do you do man?

Tonight wasn't all that bad out there, I got a fair share of green lights and the stench of the crowds had vanished.

Not like the other day though, when I was hitting all the red lights and found myself held down in the corner of a bus by a cloud of perfume, hairspay and raw human pungency. All the while lugging dented cans of beer that had wiggled lose of their plastic holders, recently mangled by the city street. And, in one of the worst parts of town too, they're savages down there, they'll pick you clean if you don't keep moving.

I had to get off the cart early the smell and the heat of the thing had me physically sick. But standing out there in the death of autmun, under the oppressive skies in this god forsaken country, filled me with only a different order of despair. Strolling slowly to the place I was, if only briefly, glad I had arrived.

Inside she's asking me questions about New Soctland. Typically, I find it tiresome to answer questions about my life, especially when they seem the product of boredom, that is, I think people for the most part don't really give a shit about anybody else, and if they inquire it's because they cannot think of anything else to say, don't like the silence, or just can't stand not knowing, not having control. And, more often than not these questions are a way in to talk about themselves anyway, people just can't get out of their own heads.

I particularly abhor questions about vocation, this is, in my opinion, one of the least interesting topics for conversation - nobody cares, people are disingenuously curious, and much of this talk seems only to be characterized by random self affirming ejaculations.... just the other month some joker asked me at a party, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I wanted to cut his tongue out, if for no other reason than in order to prevent some future individual from having to suffer such nonsense.

While I often meet such questions about vocation with lies and evasiveness, I was surprised to find myself lying about NS. What's the matter with me? And, these weren't methodical lies, I wasn't trying to put on airs. They were silly lies, for instance, I misrepresented the population, I rearranged the geographical location of towns, I exaggerated historical events, and tinkered with distances. It was all very strange, it all seemed to be happening with no intention on my part, all this was happening as if I were a wallflower looking in on this conversation that was happening between myself and somebody else.

As I had said, when I find that strangers are being invasive, cruel, deliberately insincere or pushy I've no problem with employing a range of evasive tactics. But my bullshit was certainly uncalled for in this situation, she was a kind human-being and perhaps even genuinely interested. Good grief.

nothing left to do, II

In an earlier posting I had written that I didn't understand how it is that people get to be deserving of anything, any one thing. And I had said, I think, that not only do I not feel as if I'm not particularly deserving of anything, I don't know what makes anybody else deserving of what they have. In fact, most of the reasons I can come up with are quite corrupt.

While I agree that life is suffering I don't think that this means life should be lived as grimly as possible. Physical suffering, in particular, I think, should be minimized at all costs. So, I'd like to modify my initial comments on deserving and say that I do understand that people are not deserving of physical suffering. And, why not? 'cause I said so, and I hold compassion as a virtue on good merits.

But this does not make the day to day bold faced individualism any easier to deal with. In fact it's this individualism that obviates compassion. Now, I am not saying that I have a unique handle on compassion, as I too have acted on my own desire for self-gratification on many occasions, occasions that I know were quite harmful to other human beings. And, it's precisely this egoism that kills compassion, and it's precisely this egoism that is both emphasized and encouraged in some of the environments in which I find myself, from time to time.

That's what I don't understand about this deserve, the conviction that an individual potentially deserves all things, and I'm not overstating the nature of the affair here... you can be anything you want, if you didn't know. This is bullshit. Though we're all taught this --- If you work hard enough you can get whatever you want, and if you don't get what you want maybe you didn't work hard enough, or you're missing something, something that you might well deserve, but don't yet have, so go on ahead and fill yourself up with psychotherapy, skin lotion, a social network, or the latest poetry. And, if this doesn't work, "Goddamnit I deserve more than this, surely I deserve more than this," the gravity of the situation is only compunded, gotta try something else --- People are perpetually unfulfilled, and fulfillment was an illusion anyway, it's all very sad.

And, again I am not exempt from this, but my lord it's a pain to push it, but it is pushed, driven around and around again. I think that this is part of the reason why I had always found history intersting as a curiosity but not particularly instructive. Actually, it's on this point that I think many of those folks in the east were on to something, as for them it seems that anything worth learning looks looks pretty much the same regardless of time, place or cast of characters. The epics are as good history as the best historiography on the Crimean War.

Anyway, continuing with my self-indulgence, when I'm told not to worry and that things will all come out in the wash as I duly deserve, I try, or want, to say, "look I've little expectation for return on this investment, and anyway, the resolution does not concern me, and that's okay."

My stammering out of some version of the above is typically followed by two sorts of responses,

"I'm sorry you sound depressed, that must suck" or, "I find the representation of despair interesting."

---
In writing all of this, or any other item for that matter, I do not wish to imply that I've some sort of unique insight over the masses (because, simply, there is nothing unique here, or clear even) or that my life is defined by an endless string of such encounters as described above and elsewhere. Very thankfully, in other places, I'm able to find things quite sane.

.... someone's listenting to Neil Young right now, and I hate to say it, as I do like Neil Young, but I want to tell them to turn it down. These characters who just moved in beneath me, if they're not fucking to the CBC news in what must be a painful attempt cover to up their confused groans they're listening to Neil Young, Eddie Veder or Rod Stewart (this is all oddly true).... And, I apologize for informing you of this, this is pain I should have held onto.

the floodway

My posts have been quite self-deprecating lately. For a reprieve I want to talk about the floodway. As a recent immigrant to this city I was initially quite captivated by the floodway.

In 1873 when Alexander MacKenzie was the premier of Canada, he commisioned a railway that was to travel through the recently established province of Manitoba. The chief obstacle in this plan was the crossing of the Red River. Two sites were proposed for the crossing, one at Selkirk and the other at Winnipeg. The site at Selkirk was favoured by the chief engineer, Sir Sanford Flemming, because it was on higher ground and on a straighter line between Portage La Prairie and the western end of Lake Superior, Winnipeg was situated on a flood plain and a spur would have been needed to drive the trains through that city.

However, in 1881, through some dubious political interference on the part of the businessmen of Winnipeg, the recently re-elected, John A. MacDonald, the drunken visionary of confederation fame, urged the Canadian Pacific to build their track through the city of Winnipeg.

Since then, as old Sanford had predicted, the rail line and the city have been the yearly victims of disasterous floods, especially in the south where the river track bottlenecks and hangs up the ice floes.

To alleviate the water troubles, after a particularly disasterous flood in 1950, the province of Manitoba conceived the idea of digging a ditch around the city, and in 1968, and the ditch, the floodway, was put into operation. Since '68, the floodway has, so I've been told, 'saved' the city of Winnipeg more than a dozen times.

It's a funny ditch out there in the middle of the prairie, though I don't know how long it is, I'd guess that it must be thirty miles, it runs the length of the city. In any case, you can drive your car out to it, pull off on the side of the road and watch the water flow. Or, you can drive your truck right into it like the farmers do, you can see them driving around the city with their muddy trucks.

"Hey, you've been out to the floodway."

"Yup."

Here's a sketch of the floodway, unfortunately the pictures on the web all seem to be associated with engineering details, like the depth of the gates. I wish I had a real time picture, perhaps I should take one.

the interloper

I am an ugly, dimwitted, grimy and smelly human being. While this has most likely always been the case (especially when I was really young) I used to be able to hide it behind my youth, to a degree anyway. Now I'm being called on it quite frequently.

There's this park down the street right along the Assiniboine River that I used to like to walk to, I'd just hang out by the riverside and spend some time staring at it all. Though I won't kid you the Assinniboine is not a very pretty river to look at, it's grimy, slow rolling and littered with trees from the autumn floods, in fact, the river is a natural drainage ditch that carries the red sludge of the prairies and everything else it might pick up along the way out to Hudson's Bay.... aren't all rivers such ditches? maybe, I don't know that much about geography, or geology, though I do know that some rivers are more beautiful than others. For instance, I think the St. John River is a beautiful river.

Anyway, this story is not about riprarian environments. -- I wrote that sentence specifically because I wanted to use the word 'riprarian' -- This is about my inabilty to view this particular river anymore. River parks are, as you know, filled with very specific groupings of people, some of the more predominant groupings include: lone women and men with animals, couples, families with children, and runners. Now, as you can see, there is no grouping for dimwitted and grimy 30 year old men. In fact, if they were able, I'd bet all those groups would get together and erect a sign at the park gates explicitily disallowing entry to characters displaying such a disposition.

Here's proof, I'm in the park caught halfway between some daydream and wondering at the rust on the river, when some family with a couple of kids, not quite school age, walks by. And, as they do, one of the children captures me in her stare and in passing tries to hand me some stone that she was carrying, when her mother caught eye of this she screamed, "don't go near that man!" and, then, yanking her by the arm, continued to letcure her on the evils of single men in parks.

Now, disciplinary methods aside, I do think the lesson here is a good one, you don't want your kids talking to strangers, weirdos or not, anymore than most strangers probably want children talking to them.

Nevertheless, this incident has further affirmed my status as an unwanted visitor. And this episode was not the only one of its kind, not only have I experienced incidents of the same genre before, I've documented cases of incidents in other genres that carry the same unwanted theme: I've on occassion been accosted for smoking, leered at by couple's whose privacy I was evidently invading (despite the fact that they're in a meadow surrounded by twelve other people), hit by bicycles (I had forgot to include bicyclers as a legitimate park group), and hollared at by runners for being 'in the way.' Some of the above events are not so much unique to parks, but are an unfortunate hazard associated with my daily existence and as such I've learned to tolerate them.

The pervert label, however, I take much more seriously, to maintain what little dignity I have, or whatever it is that somehow manages to hold together the scraps of my life, I've got to restrict these park visits.

nothing left to do

I've been told both very crudely and sincerely that it's a sin not to feel special or deserving of anything. Well, the "special" here is a (poorly) literary liberty, but I swear I hear it just the same.

This advice weighs heavily on me, as I'm not sure I've ever felt I've deserved much of anything in my life. In fact, I feel as if I've already much more than I deserve anyway. So much so that I'm waiting for this to finally catch up to me, to be exposed as the fraud I really am. And, someday this will catch up to me.

"Hey, buddy, we've figured you out, your charlatan ways aren't gonna fly here anymore, it's best you pack up and head on out of town."

I'm actually honestly amazed that this has not happened yet. Meanwhile I keep waiting, and in all likelihood will die waiting, unless of course, the sham comes crashing down beforehand. And, if so, I think this would be the miracle.

the moth

One of the few things I've learned in my 29 years of existence is that people, in general, do not like me, actually, in fairness, their dislike is rarely that active, it's more that they would simply rather not have anything to do with me. This probably explains why I have few aquaintances and even fewer friends. In the end I guess this is best for everybody involved.

I don't think this is some attenuated depression used to affirm an already loose sense of self. First, it's simply a cold brute fact. Second, I don't think about the situation in that way, I've some time ago learned to appreciate its absurdity, and anyway, the only thing that makes me happy is when I hear that my sister and mother are happy, which most times has very little to do with the goings on in my life.

... Two weeks ago during the break in what for me is a very long and trying class, I silently mentioned to the self-professed anarchist sitting beside me that there has been a giant moth stuck to the ceiling of the classroom for at least a month.

I made the comment because I really thought the moth looked bizzare, and kinda funny, hanging up there, I mean it's not quite a bat, but it's a really big moth.

Anyway, so I said that thing about the moth, and she looked at me like I was a giant ignormaus, "a moth up there, huh?" she said, half smirking. "Oh, look at that, there is." While I found her response amusing, she was not at all laughing, neither at the moth nor, especially, her own remark, which in her view was adequately dismissive, perhaps even slightly proud.

Today, a week after my moth comment, it's break time again, and she says to all the doughnut eating, krueller peeling, finger licking characters ('cause that's what they do), "hey, there's a moth that's been stuck to the ceiling since the first day of class." And everyone is immediately entrhalled.

"Oh, look at that, I never noticed him before,"

"That's a big moth,"

"Oh, he's hibernating,"

"Ha, ha, ha, ha..."

This dead moth is now the darling of the class.

The moth went from a burdensome observation - a product of one person's perceived insanity (or normalcy) - to the most intriguing item of breaktime conversation yet.

Now, that I noticed the moth was a sheer accident, and this is not important whatsover to the story, anybody could have noticed the moth. Nor is this some comment on my power of observation, it's a fucking moth. In fact, I want to distance myself as far as possible from this narrative.

All of this nonesense is less as an example of my own personally perceived human indifference, and more an example of the drudgery of daily conversation, which is not my drudgery alone. It seems that it's most times bogus whether anybody's listening or not.

a goat picture

Here' s a picture of my sister feeding a goat in King's county, Nova Scotia.

Goats

I spent at least half an hour tonight telling a girl why it is that I like goats. A topic that she did not inquire about. Little wonder she said it was time to go. Good god man - if I you have to say it all, don't start there.

St. Paul under the northern lights

Ah, Lou you're a great man.

Me and another girl have been working for a year on this instruction manual for a distance education course, it's a terribly boring task, which is why we had to ask for an extension on the deadline, which is also why we he had to meet with the guy that's overseeing the construction of it all. Somehow this guy finds all of this stuff very exciting, he says to us, "What you want to do is think about making 'the manual' fun and engaging, try incorporating some of these exercises..."

"How about giving some lectures on tape, you know, so you can really explain all of the finer points, talk right at them."

"Or, how about reading some scripture on tape, you know, give them a real sense of the oral quality of this inspirational material"

"What about crossword puzzles,"

(I wonder what sort of clues he was thinking of...."raiser of Lazarus," "reader of the writing on the wall," "dreamer of butterflies and men," "Charioteer, of South Asian fame," "killer of all first born children (Egyptian)"...)

"Oh," and this one brought a spark to his eye, "you should think about dressing up in costume and acting out some really key scenes in religious history."

Despite the absurdity of his suggestions, I got into his excitement.

The girl I was working with maybe less so, though her responses were great, which I think only added to the absurdity... "hmmm, I'll keep that in mind." This humoured him just enough to keep going. It was a very amusing hour.

skeletons all look alike

Despite all my effort, this world refuses to let me leave it alone.

This morning my doorbell rang at 10:30, I ignored it, went back to sleep with a head still half full of rum. It rang again an hour later, this time I got up (with a head no less full) to see what the noise was all about, it was the dude who lives down hall, he comes by once a week asking for cigarettes, I always oblige him, and this morning was no exception.

I easily went back to sleep. I've never had a problem with this guy, his requests always seem to be clothed in embarrassment, which is something I can understand.

An hour later I'm woken again, but by someone beating on my door this time. To stop the noise I get up and go through the routine again, but this time there's this kid standing out there, maybe five years old, all dirty, staring at me... before I've the time to process the scene, a girl swings around the corner, and half yelling blurts out, "Where's Wendy at?"

"I don't know who Wendy is."

"She ain't here then."

"No, she's not here"

"Do you know where she went?"

"She's never been here, in fact, in all my life I've never known a woman by the name of Wendy"

"All right then," she says very suspiciously, and reluctantly leaves.

I turned on the Blue Jays game.

... Just the other week at about midnight I answered another ringing doorbell. Behind the door this time was a girl in her pyjamas looking very upset. I barely get the chance to say hello before she's asking me about my loud electric guitar playing.

"I'm having a very hard time sleeping with you playing your guitar like that," she says.

"I'm sorry that you can't sleep, but I don't own an electric guitar, you must be looking for somebody else."

"Well, it's awfully loud, I wish you'd keep it down." she clearly did not hear a word I had just said.

"Look, I'm not being prick, I'm not playing a guitar, and I've not been listening to music either, the noise that you're hearing must be coming from elsewhere."

"Really, well, it's awfully loud" And as she's saying this her eyes are scanning my apartment for the guitar she knows is there.

How can I make this any clearer for her, I'm thinking, "Well," I say, "look, you can come in if you want, there's no guitar here"

And, she does, it's amazing, the whole time I was talking to her she was utterly convinced that I was boldfaced liar. So she walks in peeks around, "hmmm., I wonder where the noise is coming from then" and coldly apologizes as she leaves.

And the strange thing about all that had just happened was that I couldn't shake the feeling that she still in some way blamed me for her discomfort.