Gratuitous

Yesterday, as I signed into Yahoo! for my e-mail, I noticed this tagline in the "News" column: "JonBenet Suspect Tried To Remove Facial Hair." I realized then that, beyond the neverending blizzard of headlines and tabloid covers, I had yet to read one single article or op-ed piece on this murder/media frenzy, and that now was definitely not the time to alter that record.

Addressing The Black Puppies

Churchill's “black dogs of despair” introduced themselves to me this summer, albeit as puppies. I'm not exactly debilitated by their little shadows, but you can see I'm not quite “inspired”, either. So I'm cautiously taking a page from Searchie's terrible and beautiful imperative, in the hope that my muse and my unbidden canine companions can work something out.

To be honest, it's really been a very pleasant summer for us. We witnessed the most spectacular thunderstorm just days before our vacation. Then we climbed into the car and skipped town just as the worst heat wave in decades settled in. We took the North Superior route through Ontario to Manitoba, driving through the southern mass of the Canadian Shield. All those rocks and trees that inspired The Group of Seven provoke similar reveries in me. I've lost track of how many times I've taken this path by car, bus or train. The mode of travel doesn't matter: so long as the seat I'm in is comfy, the austere beauty of it all clears my head and prompts me toward loftier thoughts.


It's a long drive for two little girls, though, particularly when you have to exercise some discretion about which beaches are best for cooling their feet and legs: the first time we stopped at Wawa for a cool-off break, we emerged from the bracing cold water of Lake Erie and witnessed a brilliant rash take hold of our skin. Apparently the water is still recovering from the decomissioned scintering plant.

We decided our best course of action was to drive one long, killer day from Toronto to Thunder Bay, and make the second day easier on the system. Midway through day two, my wife proposed we find a beach and take a break. I knew just the place: West Hawk Lake

West Hawk was formed from meteor impact. The lake is located in the apron-fringe of the Shield, and is very deep and cold. Some mining and logging has been done around West Hawk, but the lake proper is a delicious resort for people of any class. When I was a kid, my family vacationed there in tents or trailers, and there were usually one or two parishioners in either of my father's congregations who owned swanky cottages overlooking the lake.

We pulled off the highway, and parked next to the long, sandy beach. I made a point of buying the girls ice cream at the lake's convenience store – a place where I purchased my most memorable comics when I was a kid. Then we dressed down, and descended to the beach.

Right off the hop, something seemed amiss. While our daughters played, I went through my internal checklist: sun and sand, and plenty of cool, fresh water to frolic in (check); an abundance of young, athletic flesh, lightly oiled and not-so-primly ribboned with nylon spandex (check); my beautiful wife, happy and similarly clothed (check); my gradually improving mood, moving steadily toward unmistakable friskiness (...um, bad news, boss....).

I stood and glowered at the crowd around me. For the first time in my life I was conscious of a clear, dividing line at work: at one end of the spectrum were the tanned and muscular, unselfconscious in both poise and motion; at the other end, clothed in a billowing pair of trunks, skin pasty-white and offset by dark thatches of bodyhair, awkwardly aware of this mortal coil (and the fact that he could stand to drop a few pounds prior to his shedding it altogether) was ... me.

Feh – the vagaries of the bourgeois, mid-life male in North America. The blue-collar Joes I associate with in town don't worry about body-image; neither, I suspect, do the very rich. What about Europeans? Do they give a toss about the fading physique? The answer is important to me, because (yet another bourgeois affectation) I've generally strained to put on the European mindset, which I would loosely define as: embracing adulthood is infinitely preferable to holding onto one's youth.

But I had once been young on this very beach, and I knew exactly where the current crop of yoots were coming from. I was no longer there, and this garnered a sensibility that reached deeper than “Good grief – I'm putting on a spread, and I've eaten too much ice cream to care!” I'm talking about that one stuck note on the circus pipe organ: the Big D Minor. Certainly, Death is no stranger to me. But this one-way argument I've had with Death is changing. I've had family and acquaintances die, representatives from of every stage of life. The ones who died young were invariably aberrations: accidents, stupidity, despair or just plain freakish turns in health. A person can witness this and remain in vibrant denial about the imminent presence of Death.

Not so, the 40s. I caught up with a childhood friend in Winnipeg, and we went through the ritual list of people we knew. The roll-call has its usual traumas, divorce and remarriage being a fairly common element. But death is getting more frequent mention. I was told of a mate from university – recently remarried, recently a father of two – newly diagnosed with cancer and given one month to live. I thought of how I'd spotted him at the Folk Festival last year, with his two golden-haired sprats keeping him tethered to the children's tent. It had been so good to see him get a second crack at happiness, but, Jesus – now this?!

He's still an aberration, but in some unfortunately unremarkable ways: he's male, and his odds are worse than most. It's different for women. Two summers ago, a neighbor was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has two young children, and a shell-shocked husband. They seem to have come through it – watching her with her family is a near-delirious treat. But we returned from vacation to see two other women pushing strollers and wearing do-rags over their shiny heads, while another passed away quite suddenly. It's just so fucking wrong.

Just before I left, my friend gave me two CDs: Johnny Cash's posthumous album, and Bruce Cockburn's latest, Life Short, Call Now, both of which remain in heavy rotation. I thanked him, then quipped, “I guess they were sold out of Oh My God: I'm Gonna DIE!!”

What has been sinking in, however, is this: the spectre of my own death pales next to the possibility of enduring the deaths of those I love. Unthinkable. You do what you can to avoid this fate, but in the end it's just not up to you.

You can't prep yourself for any of it – it's said that worry does nothing to rob tomorrow of its sorrows, but does a great job of robbing today of its strength. Or, in the words of this book, Ya Can't Let Cancer Ruin Your Day. The title alone pretty much delivers the full emotional package of these terribly limited lives of ours.

The present, and my present company, are all I have. It is a gift. It is enough.

Whither Gaming?

I play a one-note trumpet when it comes to video games, but since no-one's listening, I'll put it to my lips yet again. I love playing video games, especially "shooters". I enjoy the sense of discovery that comes with rounding a corner, and the thrill of teasing out reaction patterns. But I believe the gaming industry reached critical mass with Half-Life and The Sims. The real-dollar decline in gaming began with Halo and the XBox required to play it. With The Godfather and Sony's Playstation 3 it's sinking fast, and I don't think it's likely to recover anytime soon.

If you look at the game templates coming out for XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3, you'll find little of substance to differentiate them from Berzerk, the quarter-gobbling monster of the 80s. The Berzerk template was two-dimensional; you steered a stick-man through corridors and shot robots before they shot you. Someone -- probably not the programmer -- made an awful lot of money with that game (garnering a small fortune from yours truly, for starters). It worked, in other words, so that's the template -- second-person shooter -- the game industry has run with.

Flash forward 26 years. The new "bots" are more sophisticated in their behavior, and the overall playing landscape is more or less three-dimensional. But that's it. Same basic template. The end.

There are a few other templates, to be sure -- the virtual pilot, team sports, hand-to-hand fighting, etc. -- but they've all been around for 25 years or longer. We are talking about an industry that has delivered increasingly more spectacular bells and whistles, while keeping the baseline product unchanged for over a quarter century. The automobile industry might be able to coast on its laurels for that length of time, but anyone trying to pull the same stunt with computers is begging for a spectacular fall.

If you eavesdrop on industry conversations, you'll overhear a fair bit of chatter over how to make games that appeal to women. This is a good start, but the pitches are telling: a popular scenario with the suits is a Tomb Raider-type game with a Brad Pitt look-alike.

Wrong, all wrong.

If you want to know what the most addictive video game for women is, I'll tell you for free: Tetris. I don't know a single woman with the capacity to resist. I've played Tetris; I've enjoyed Tetris; I've even been a Tetris freak. But women put me to shame. They'll play it for hours. Then, when they finally pull themselves away, they'll stare at you with an unusual intensity. You might flatter yourself into thinking it's your Axe bodyspray, but the fact is they're staring at the gaps between your ears and your shirt collar and deciding what algorhithmic shape best fits that space.

I have got absolutely no theory as to why Tetris is so huge with women; I'm just here to pound the pulpit and say, if a programmer or developer is truly interested in keeping the gaming industry an economic engine that fires on all cylinders, they'll leave the shooter freaks to figure it out for themselves, and concentrate on producing the next Tetris.

And good luck to 'em.

Presidential Reading

When I heard the President was reading Camus, I hoped against hope that he'd picked up The Rebel, or was at least giving consideration to the philosopher's short and provocative essay, The Unbeliever. Alas, Mr. Bush's choice was predictable: The Stranger. I have to confess that although I am an unabashed admirer of Camus's writing, the general public consumption of this short novel has always made me a little batty. I really wish it was read with greater care -- adolescent males, in particular, seem to take all the wrong messages from it.

Link from Maud Newton.

One Book

One book that changed my life: Back when I worked at the bookstore, my co-worker and I would roll our eyes whenever we overheard someone say, "This book changed my life!" It's always amused me to hear this claim made about novels, particularly. There may well be novels that can change a person's point of view, or inspire them toward action – Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is often cited as the classic example – but I'm more inclined to think of novels as keeping me company (pleasant or otherwise) than shaking me up and turning me around. Were I to name such a novel, it would probably be Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, for its abundance of genuinely subversive mischief. But I think I'll eschew the fictional route for something more tangible, a self-help title that has indeed helped me help myself and deserves credit for a demonstrable change in the way I think and act: The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner.

One book I've read more than once: Ooooh, I love to re-read! But I'd say the book I've re-read most is Moon Palace, by Paul Auster.

One book I'd want on a desert island: probably something with a title like How To Get Off Your Freakin' Island And Back To Civilization.

One book that made me laugh: Oh, man ... anything by David Sedaris. I'll go with Dress Your Family In Corduroy And Denim.

One book that made me cry: hard to know where to start with this one. I've already mentioned Peter DeVries' Blood Of The Lamb, so I'll go with Peace Like A River by Leif Enger.

One book I wish had never been written: Easy: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- a book born from bloodshed, that has inspired bloodshed, and continues to inspire it still. Its only worthwhile byproduct is Will Eisner's final book, The Plot, which I highly recommend.

One book I wish had been written: this one.

One book I'm currently reading: Where God Was Born by Bruce Feiler.

One book I've been meaning to read: A Dance To The Music Of Time by Anthony Powell certainly qualifies, but to be honest, I'm having real trouble finishing Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle – not because it's boring, but because I keep getting distracted by other, shorter works.

One person I tag: YOU!!

Home

Infinity always gives me vertigo
And fills me up with grace -- Bruce Cockburn, Mystery.



A windshield shot of the plains of southwestern Manitoba, taken en route to Northern Alberta. And, yes, they are anything but infinite -- they simply allow for that illusion, and the blessing that Cockburn alludes to. Still and all, I'm glad to be back home.

Catching Up

I'm back, but not yet fit to post. Instead, I'm catching up on me cobbers.

Cowtown Patty considers how the cut of the hat determines the cut of the cowpunch, here. I've always wanted to wear a cowboy hat (from time to time, I still pull on the boots -- a throwback to my motorcycle days), but there isn't a single one that doesn't make me look like a horse's ass.

Andrew, the Aging Punk Wannabe has got me whistling Cheap Trick, thanks to his list of Thirteen Great Opening Lines From Rock, Pop & Country.

Scott has officially posted more pictures of his dog than I have of my kids (but then, he's never been one for self-restraint)!

Darko provides a much-needed Explanation Of The Philosophy Of Fjaka. Potential bumper-sticker: Fjaka - Now, More Than Ever.

Gideon calls this his "second-favourite movie dance routine". If his favourite is from Saturday Night Fever, I don't wanna hear of it.

I've been reading Seb Hunter's Hell Bent For Leather: Confessions Of A Heavy Metal Addict and thinking, "It's good, but it's not quite The Cheese Chronicles" (the gold standard of rock n' roll narratives, IMHO). Now Preacher Dan informs me that Tommy Womack has resumed his on-line ranting. Here's Tommy, in the throes of a condition I recognize all too well: the Ecumenical Hangover.

And finally, just about everyone on my list of cobbers has been hit with the "One Book" meme (if you aren't among them, you may now consider yourself tagged). I'll get to posting mine, but I thought Terry Teachout had an interesting variation: which authors dominate your bookshelves? The qualification is five books by or about, and here are my dominators:

Martin Amis
Aristotle
Paul Auster
Julian Barnes
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Frederich Buechner
Albert Camus
Leonard Cohen
Douglas Coupland
Robertson Davies
Don DeLillo
Annie Dillard
E.L. Doctorow
John Gardner
God (heh, heh)
Jim Harrison
Robert E. Howard
Philip Kerr
Soren Kierkegaard
Madeleine L'Engle
C.S. Lewis
Cormac McCarthy
Friedrich Nietzsche
Kem Nunn
Plato
Thomas Pynchon
Mordecai Richler
Carol Shields
Neal Stephenson
Nathaniel West
Rudy Wiebe
Philip Yancey

Another possible variation I might get to: which artists dominate your CD collection?

Thanks to my readers for all the pleasant wishes (silent or otherwise), and my apologies to every Winnipeg friend I neglected (for all my time away, it was a very limited visit -- argh).