Midnight Jolt Run

Somewhere between realizing that the Power Rangers aren’t real, and seeing your parents or guardians as fallible human beings instead of invincible protectors or tyrannical monsters, you begin to realize that there are problems in the world that do not centre around your ability to have ice-cream for dinner or a receiving a skinned knee.  In fact, as your mind opens up to accept more and more of the horrors around you, I’d dare think that you form a strong consensus in your mind that GI Joe was lying when he said that knowing was half the battle, and that red-and-blue lasers were the other part of the equation.

It isn’t long before you realize that no matter how many bake sales you run, hugs you give and Band-Aids you hand out to people that you can never do enough.  There are always more problems.  Worse is when you start to see the really terrible ones advertised on TV like some kind of rolling guilt trip to haunt your impressionable young mind.  Giving begins as a fun thing you do at holidays or for birthdays, and is transformed into something that seems absolutely vital for the continued survival of the human race.  Maybe it is.  Maybe it isn’t.  But it sure does feel like it when you see kwashiorkor-bellied children suffering bare-footed in the dirt of some God-forsaken shithole in Africa.

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I have felt sadness before.  Loathing and anger are no strangers to my emotional pallet, and I can tell you of bitter swallows of both heartbreak and unrequited desire.  Ahh yes, yet they were always the kind of drink that scalded the throat, lightened the wallet and will…and ultimately taught me a lesson, desired or not.  But this…this is a watered down pint of spirits.  This strange, weak emotive mead is brewed not of the deepest sorrow, nor the sharp tang of regret.  It is stale, and it is hateful and I know it will not allow me to drink deeply of it so I may lose it in a hangover the next day.  I drink of piss-warm egotism, and yet I can’t bring myself to walk over to the toilet and deposit the liquid where it rightfully belongs.

My earliest memories are a jumble of three images.  One was me, crying in my crib, angry at an imposed curfew but otherwise, just darkness, and a semi-out of body experience where I imagine seeing myself, howling into the night, raging against sleep, and eventually…succumbing.

The second earliest memory is of a car crash.  Truck crash, specifically.  I remember in great detail and environmental awareness of the moments beginning with me looking out a window in the Ford pickup being driven by my mother down the highway, and then crawling around on the upside-down-overturned truck cabin roof, avoiding the pebble-like broken safety glass that was everywhere, and crawling out onto the highway to the waiting arms of my mother who had, until that moment, assumed I had been crushed under the truck or thrown free of the wreck into a fence somewhere.

The third is much more green.  Running back and forth around the back yard of my grandparent’s lawn in Fort St. John at the age of…well, I was at the oldest four years olf.  I remember the feeling of the sloped lawn under my feet as I ran from the house to the small drainage ditch that broke the lawn up into a hill and an island when it rained.  I remember the smell of peas and ruhbarb and the taste of fresh carrots straight from the earth and the plesant cold sting of icey cold water right from the garden hose.  I remember countless times over countless years of that same backyard, and the layout of the home attached to it.  My Grandparents home.  With a simple one-story design, with a caveronous, adventure-sparking cellar underneith known only as the “Mole Hole” in which treasures like pickled carrots and mushroom soup lay dormant and pensive upon a noble and brave soul’s journey down the home-made rickety steps.

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There is something terribly exciting about choice, reaction and consequence. In our society, freedom and choice go nearly hand in hand, rolled together in a little sushi roll that promises again and again that it is worth fighting for, worth dying for, and worth having no matter how bitter the taste or allergic the reactions that follow consumption of said maki. We value this perfect simple idea of freedom so deeply that we make it the unsung (and not so unsung) hero, prize and virtue of countless tales, songs, hymns and legends. Maybe it is because we believe we grew from a time that didn’t have choice… (You have to get up and hunt or you’ll starve. You’ll have to find a mate or you’ll die alone. You’ll have to follow what your elders taught you or be stoned or burnt to death) that we forget that this freedom has been around a lot longer than our silly notions of the world have been cast in the die of our so called collective common sense.

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[read part 1 here]

My Daddy once told me that you should never rely on the works and acts of a pair of hands that isn’t still around to own up for them.

I believe this intrinsically, as do many poor hobos like me who have spent the night in a pre-dug camp and ended up getting crushed by rock when the half-assed supports failed.  Even worse is some of the corporations who sling out small fortunes in an effort to professionalize this rock-hopping business.  They’ll cut corners, ignore warning signs and pull out their teams before they can see the results of their poor planning.   The nastier characters, and I do know a few, will set boobytraps that they forget about when leaving, or purposely leave just for a dark chuckle.   Fine by me, I say.  Just more reason to dig your own holes and set your own tent.

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She bundles up in the cute stuff
Armoured in nylons and grey fluff
And an outer balloon jacket far too flat
To hold even a warm breath for more than a dozen heartbeats

Out into the cold she awakes
The one day a year she forsakes
The weather channel a dozen times
And her sudden accidental bravery makes me smile a dozen more
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Reading through Facebook updates is like trick-or-treating.  You walk up to the browser, ring the doorbell / favourite / bookmark, and hope that the first and last thing you see isn’t an axe flying toward your head or your girlfriend breaking up with you by announcing to the world you are a terrible lover and your butt smells like rotten cheese.  Thankfully, due to years of police and citizen patrols the axe thing happens pretty rarely.  The ass-cheese thing depends on you, but we can hope it is also a rare occurrence.

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It’s an art, ya’see.

All in the wrists in those last few seconds.

When I tell the youngsters that you have about a minute to prepare once you see the train comin, they act like a minute is a lifetime, forgetting that those sixty little seconds melt away pretty fast in the cold black of space.

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There is a strange pleasure I have in watching my son become a person.  Its hard to describe, really.  We’re brought up with the idea that children are people too.  That there is a kind of instant nobility and sentience to Humanity.  The truth, however, is that we grow into it.  We grow into our Intelligence, our Will and our Belief.  It doesn’t just happen all at once, and that alone is the reasoning behind several hundred pages of Catholic Dogma describing what happens to Little Suzy Six-Month-Old when her mother suffers a terminal bout of Post Partem and kills them both by running the Honda too long in the garage.

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There is a Bhuddhist monk in China who made it a regular habit to pray more than three thousand times a day in his earlier, youthful years.  Now, as he reaches seven decades upon this planet, he finds himself having to scale back his devotion to a mere one thousand on average.  Upon the hardwood floor of the temple, his footprints are literally etched into the wood, creating something akin to what children do when the city or your parents pour new cement near your house.

Outside of breathing, blinking and walking, I would be surprised to learn I do anything with this much regularity.  There are no books on Prunes for the Soul.  No Fibre rich diets for the Imagination.  No Boot Camp for the Brain.  I’m one of those types of people that wears my spirituality, creativity and ego on large, comfy baggy shirts that can hide the few pounds you put on while indulging at Marble Slab.  Trying to compress any of that into what equates to a metronome is alien to me.   Read the rest of this entry »