It's been a while since I wrote here and now that I am once again in limbo (did you know limbo was in nova scotia?) I thought I'd share with you some of the posts I wrote along this little journey of mine that I never published. They're slightly sporadic.
Written Jan. 9, 2007
Today I drifted off into a daydream.
As I boarded a little ship, I couldn’t help but look up at the huge liners on either side. I had once mopped their decks but was now settling to mop the decks of a much tinier ship. As I walked across the deck I saw the captain, content to paint the ship bright blue. He was using painting knives and hadn’t realized or maybe hadn’t cared that every once in a while his knife would nick the boat and let in a stream of the sea. The rest of the crew were sitting on buckets, and once in a while, when the captain and his first mates turned their heads, the crew would grab a bucket of water and fling it over the side.
“Don’t worry,” one said. “They’ll get bored and find something else to paint, and then we can fix the nicks.”
But the captain and his mates kept on painting. And the crew kept working, with buckets slung over their shoulders.
I walked around the little ship, nicks everywhere.
“Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be 32 lifeboats?” I asked. How can we set sail with only 28 lifeboats? And just as I said it, four lifeboats fell to the water and shattered, leaving us with only 24 lifeboats.
“Isn’t someone supposed to be building more lifeboats?”
“Don’t worry,” one of the crew said, trying hard to believe his own words.
Frustrated, I got into one of the lifeboats, lied down and fell asleep.
I dreamed that I woke and stepped again onto the little ship, this time the water was up to my ankles and rising quickly to my knees. I started toward a lifeboat, but there were none left. They all were scattered in pieces, floating along the top of the sea. The streams from the nicks were now fountains from gaping holes. I looked up at the giant liners on either side. The captains had gathered and were looking over the edge, watching the little ship sink.
“Wouldn’t want her on my ship,” one said. “That whole crew is going down with that ship,” said another.
I looked at my knees, now under water, and sank.
Then I awoke, in the lifeboat, got up and took a walk around the deck. How foolish I had been only a few moments before. The nicks were there, true, and the boat mainly blue, but the crew were patching the holes and painting over them with an array of beautiful colours. The crew were still working with buckets over their shoulders, but they were working with wood and hammers and nails, building this little ship from nothing. Over the edge of the ship I saw the lifeboats, scattered into pieces, but three people in lifejackets were nailing them back together. It would take a long time, but we’d have our lifeboats.
I looked up at the captains looking down from their liners, and I reminisced for a moment about the days I mopped their decks, then I looked at the loyal, devoted effort being put forth by this inspired crew. And with that I held open my hands to accept a mop. Instead, a crew member handed me a saw and a hammer.
One day, I thought, perhaps I’ll want to once again crew those liners. But today, I’m going to help build this little ship and watch it sail.
With that I awoke, and got back to work.
Written: Saturday, Jan. 13, 2007
I get sad whenever I see children. Not children, more toddlers. Kids still innocent enough that they’re still in awe of everything they see. A little kid in the mall yesterday had just finished his meal and was so excited to get back into his car-shaped stroller. I’ve never seen a kid so happy as when his dad lifted him up and stuck him in. He was probably still too young to talk. I thought about that kid, just kids in general really, and about how that’s the last stage of innocence. It’s the last time he’ll ever be that happy, that free of burden, of responsibility or contradiction. Soon his parents would impress upon him a religion, and he’d become Christian. Or Catholic. Or Jewish. Or Muslim. Whatever his parents felt necessary to dig into his skin, like had been dug into theirs. Soon, he’d get nicked with whatever hatred was passed down by his parents, or his culture, or his country’s history.
We all think we’re born with a clean slate and it’s only our own actions that create the baggage we take through life. That’s not true. Before the age of five, these babes get the old suitcase passed down through the family tree and they get dressed in all the traditions, the customs, the religion and any conflict that goes along with it. No one will argue that customs and traditions are what make life interesting and let us know where we came from. But how can you stop the cycle of hate, the lack of understanding between two groups of people, when we keep impressing it upon our children. The five-year-old carrying a rifle doesn’t know how the war started, he doesn’t know why he hates the people similar to him on the other side of a man-made line. All he knows is that he does. Because his parents do.
Back to the kid in the stroller. Once he’s got his religion and his loves and his hatreds, that’s when the impressions from his parents end, and the damage done to a little child is taken over by the rest of the world. Shooed into a sweat shop, a sex trade, a drug gang, a socially unacceptable school group, a
Catholic conscience. Then there’s the realization of the damage done to others. Of global warming, of dead fish, of rape, senseless murder and pistol whipping. Of torture camps, of castration, of permanently vacationing multibillionaire CEOs and their three-job, no benefits working counterparts. And then he’d feel the sense of hopeless, that no matter how wrong he can see the world is, there is little he can do. And that hatred can’t be stopped, because it’s always recycled through babes just like himself.
I remember a young math genius who committed suicide. I remember the comment someone said when we found out the cause of death. He said that the kid was a genius, with a loving family and a pretty girlfriend, but, hah, that wasn’t enough. There was a million things that could have happened to that kid that he felt he just couldn’t live with. We’ll never know. Or maybe - like many geniuses who ended their own life, like Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Wolfe, Elliot Smith - maybe, he just saw the world a little too clearly. When I lay out the world page I see daily the horrors happening in our world. I see the vivid pictures no newspaper would ever run. Sometimes I think if were a little smarter, and could completely understand the gravity of what I witness second-hand everyday, that maybe the burden would be too much for me as well. I keep thinking I’m not getting enough sleep, cause I’m always tired. But I don’t think I’m tired. I just think I’m weary. Toddlers never look tired.
And toddlers shouldn’t always be happily stupid. That’s why they grow up. But how I feel sad for that little toddler knowing what the world is about to impress upon him.
Written Jan. 23, an unpublished fluff column
This is usually the time of year when I become an ever-sleeping hermit. Instead, as the clock beside my bed beaming 2:38 a.m. reminds me, sleep is something I’ve had little of since I moved to the Valley nearly two months ago.
The first month and a half I figure I can blame on the air mattress that added ten years easy to the age of my spine. But now that I’ve dropped a quarter-month’s income on a good mattress, my back is slowly regaining its posture yet I’m still missing my crucial zzz’s.
In the wee hours of the night, shopping lists, decisions, did I pay off my Visa? Ethical dilemmas, random regrets, did I lock the car? I should really help Africa . . . These thoughts and more are constantly humming through my brain.
Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and mathematician, once wrote: “It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately all times.”
But since I have no hope of cultivating my mind, all I have to do is fool it into thinking it’s organized.
I was good at this when I was little. If I couldn’t sleep I would just flip around and sleep with my head at the foot of the bed. This sudden change was too much for my little kid brain to handle and would immediately admit defeat and shut down. For big anxiety attacks - like waiting-for-Christmas-morning attacks - I would sleep on the floor. That is until my little sister barged in at 5 a.m. (who this year, now 16, she still woke me up by steam-rollering me).
But as I got older, so did my mind, and we’ve been at odds during stressful spats ever since. I tried prescriptions. I drank a glass of wine. I drank two glasses of wine. My housemate is brewing a batch of red wine in a Home Depot pale in our dining room, and right now, at 2:54 a.m., I’ll be honest, I’m tempted.
Last night, while tossing, I tried to trick mind like I did as a kid. I decided I just needed to feel nestled.
So I threw on the quilt my mother made me, and grabbed the stuffed green lizard on my bookshelf, known as Mr. Jefferson, and got nestled.
I’d like to say Mr. Jefferson was a childhood stuffed animal, but really he was a recent purchase, one of those random, ridiculous buys - like scented moisturizer or goldfish - that serve little purpose other than to trick our minds into thinking we’re calm. Incidentally, I picked up Mr. Jefferson the day I took this job.
But alas, a little while later and still very much awake, I kicked off the blanket and well, Mr. Jefferson was hogging my space.
Maybe at this age there is no shortcut. To sleep or to suppressing stress. The only real way to get a cultivated mind is to actually organize it. Or start eliminating the day-to-day needless stresses in our lives.
Written Jan. 30, 2007
Today I slipped into a daydream. More like the memory of a daydream.
I walked down the wharf towards my little ship, optimistic for the changes we were going to make and trying to forget the ugly poster I last saw pinned to side. When I got to the spot the little ship was docked there was a crowd blocking it. I squeezed and awkwardly pushed my way to the front of the crowd and looked down onto the sea. The little ship was gone. A couple of the crew and I got down on our knees, grabbed the edge of the dock and peered over the side. Through our own wavering reflections we could see the little ship resting on the bottom of the seabed, wrapped in seaweed. The little ship had sank. Still on my knees I looked up at our captain, our decent, nice captain. He couldn’t bare to look me in the face, just peered down at the wood beneath his feet as he told us he had pulled the plug. I looked back down at the little ship. It wasn’t even finished. Three months was not enough time to finish a ship. We were finally wearing off the blue paint, fixing the nicks; finally had enough lifeboats on board. The ship was finally going to sail. If we’d only had a little more time, our little ship would have been something enviably even among the bigger ships, I thought with tears forming in my eyes. It’s gonna be okay, said my crew chief. You’ll be okay. My fellow crewmate said she always felt it was too good to be true. And she was right. It was a whirlwind romance that we’ll never forget but had to end. The following week I still walked down the wharf, sat at the edge of the dock and dangled my feet in the water above the little ship. Periodically another crewmate would come by and do the same; there were always feet dangling in the water. Maybe we were in denial, thinking, hoping that little ship would somehow float back to the surface. It had carried so many people, so many stories, in its short life. I sat there awhile today, procrastinating, knowing I’d have to slip back into the cold water and tread for a while, again. I leaned back and placed my hands on the deck behind me, tilting my head toward the sky, there I saw the captains on their giant ships. They were once again peering over the edge down at us as we sat and dangled. I expected the look of I Told You So, or I expected them not to be looking at all. But instead they peered down at us and tilted their caps, as if to say You Tried. And that’s something to be proud of. And it was a beautiful little ship.
Written Jan. 9, 2007
Today I drifted off into a daydream.
As I boarded a little ship, I couldn’t help but look up at the huge liners on either side. I had once mopped their decks but was now settling to mop the decks of a much tinier ship. As I walked across the deck I saw the captain, content to paint the ship bright blue. He was using painting knives and hadn’t realized or maybe hadn’t cared that every once in a while his knife would nick the boat and let in a stream of the sea. The rest of the crew were sitting on buckets, and once in a while, when the captain and his first mates turned their heads, the crew would grab a bucket of water and fling it over the side.
“Don’t worry,” one said. “They’ll get bored and find something else to paint, and then we can fix the nicks.”
But the captain and his mates kept on painting. And the crew kept working, with buckets slung over their shoulders.
I walked around the little ship, nicks everywhere.
“Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be 32 lifeboats?” I asked. How can we set sail with only 28 lifeboats? And just as I said it, four lifeboats fell to the water and shattered, leaving us with only 24 lifeboats.
“Isn’t someone supposed to be building more lifeboats?”
“Don’t worry,” one of the crew said, trying hard to believe his own words.
Frustrated, I got into one of the lifeboats, lied down and fell asleep.
I dreamed that I woke and stepped again onto the little ship, this time the water was up to my ankles and rising quickly to my knees. I started toward a lifeboat, but there were none left. They all were scattered in pieces, floating along the top of the sea. The streams from the nicks were now fountains from gaping holes. I looked up at the giant liners on either side. The captains had gathered and were looking over the edge, watching the little ship sink.
“Wouldn’t want her on my ship,” one said. “That whole crew is going down with that ship,” said another.
I looked at my knees, now under water, and sank.
Then I awoke, in the lifeboat, got up and took a walk around the deck. How foolish I had been only a few moments before. The nicks were there, true, and the boat mainly blue, but the crew were patching the holes and painting over them with an array of beautiful colours. The crew were still working with buckets over their shoulders, but they were working with wood and hammers and nails, building this little ship from nothing. Over the edge of the ship I saw the lifeboats, scattered into pieces, but three people in lifejackets were nailing them back together. It would take a long time, but we’d have our lifeboats.
I looked up at the captains looking down from their liners, and I reminisced for a moment about the days I mopped their decks, then I looked at the loyal, devoted effort being put forth by this inspired crew. And with that I held open my hands to accept a mop. Instead, a crew member handed me a saw and a hammer.
One day, I thought, perhaps I’ll want to once again crew those liners. But today, I’m going to help build this little ship and watch it sail.
With that I awoke, and got back to work.
Written: Saturday, Jan. 13, 2007
I get sad whenever I see children. Not children, more toddlers. Kids still innocent enough that they’re still in awe of everything they see. A little kid in the mall yesterday had just finished his meal and was so excited to get back into his car-shaped stroller. I’ve never seen a kid so happy as when his dad lifted him up and stuck him in. He was probably still too young to talk. I thought about that kid, just kids in general really, and about how that’s the last stage of innocence. It’s the last time he’ll ever be that happy, that free of burden, of responsibility or contradiction. Soon his parents would impress upon him a religion, and he’d become Christian. Or Catholic. Or Jewish. Or Muslim. Whatever his parents felt necessary to dig into his skin, like had been dug into theirs. Soon, he’d get nicked with whatever hatred was passed down by his parents, or his culture, or his country’s history.
We all think we’re born with a clean slate and it’s only our own actions that create the baggage we take through life. That’s not true. Before the age of five, these babes get the old suitcase passed down through the family tree and they get dressed in all the traditions, the customs, the religion and any conflict that goes along with it. No one will argue that customs and traditions are what make life interesting and let us know where we came from. But how can you stop the cycle of hate, the lack of understanding between two groups of people, when we keep impressing it upon our children. The five-year-old carrying a rifle doesn’t know how the war started, he doesn’t know why he hates the people similar to him on the other side of a man-made line. All he knows is that he does. Because his parents do.
Back to the kid in the stroller. Once he’s got his religion and his loves and his hatreds, that’s when the impressions from his parents end, and the damage done to a little child is taken over by the rest of the world. Shooed into a sweat shop, a sex trade, a drug gang, a socially unacceptable school group, a
Catholic conscience. Then there’s the realization of the damage done to others. Of global warming, of dead fish, of rape, senseless murder and pistol whipping. Of torture camps, of castration, of permanently vacationing multibillionaire CEOs and their three-job, no benefits working counterparts. And then he’d feel the sense of hopeless, that no matter how wrong he can see the world is, there is little he can do. And that hatred can’t be stopped, because it’s always recycled through babes just like himself.
I remember a young math genius who committed suicide. I remember the comment someone said when we found out the cause of death. He said that the kid was a genius, with a loving family and a pretty girlfriend, but, hah, that wasn’t enough. There was a million things that could have happened to that kid that he felt he just couldn’t live with. We’ll never know. Or maybe - like many geniuses who ended their own life, like Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Wolfe, Elliot Smith - maybe, he just saw the world a little too clearly. When I lay out the world page I see daily the horrors happening in our world. I see the vivid pictures no newspaper would ever run. Sometimes I think if were a little smarter, and could completely understand the gravity of what I witness second-hand everyday, that maybe the burden would be too much for me as well. I keep thinking I’m not getting enough sleep, cause I’m always tired. But I don’t think I’m tired. I just think I’m weary. Toddlers never look tired.
And toddlers shouldn’t always be happily stupid. That’s why they grow up. But how I feel sad for that little toddler knowing what the world is about to impress upon him.
Written Jan. 23, an unpublished fluff column
This is usually the time of year when I become an ever-sleeping hermit. Instead, as the clock beside my bed beaming 2:38 a.m. reminds me, sleep is something I’ve had little of since I moved to the Valley nearly two months ago.
The first month and a half I figure I can blame on the air mattress that added ten years easy to the age of my spine. But now that I’ve dropped a quarter-month’s income on a good mattress, my back is slowly regaining its posture yet I’m still missing my crucial zzz’s.
In the wee hours of the night, shopping lists, decisions, did I pay off my Visa? Ethical dilemmas, random regrets, did I lock the car? I should really help Africa . . . These thoughts and more are constantly humming through my brain.
Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and mathematician, once wrote: “It is amazing how much both happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately all times.”
But since I have no hope of cultivating my mind, all I have to do is fool it into thinking it’s organized.
I was good at this when I was little. If I couldn’t sleep I would just flip around and sleep with my head at the foot of the bed. This sudden change was too much for my little kid brain to handle and would immediately admit defeat and shut down. For big anxiety attacks - like waiting-for-Christmas-morning attacks - I would sleep on the floor. That is until my little sister barged in at 5 a.m. (who this year, now 16, she still woke me up by steam-rollering me).
But as I got older, so did my mind, and we’ve been at odds during stressful spats ever since. I tried prescriptions. I drank a glass of wine. I drank two glasses of wine. My housemate is brewing a batch of red wine in a Home Depot pale in our dining room, and right now, at 2:54 a.m., I’ll be honest, I’m tempted.
Last night, while tossing, I tried to trick mind like I did as a kid. I decided I just needed to feel nestled.
So I threw on the quilt my mother made me, and grabbed the stuffed green lizard on my bookshelf, known as Mr. Jefferson, and got nestled.
I’d like to say Mr. Jefferson was a childhood stuffed animal, but really he was a recent purchase, one of those random, ridiculous buys - like scented moisturizer or goldfish - that serve little purpose other than to trick our minds into thinking we’re calm. Incidentally, I picked up Mr. Jefferson the day I took this job.
But alas, a little while later and still very much awake, I kicked off the blanket and well, Mr. Jefferson was hogging my space.
Maybe at this age there is no shortcut. To sleep or to suppressing stress. The only real way to get a cultivated mind is to actually organize it. Or start eliminating the day-to-day needless stresses in our lives.
Written Jan. 30, 2007
Today I slipped into a daydream. More like the memory of a daydream.
I walked down the wharf towards my little ship, optimistic for the changes we were going to make and trying to forget the ugly poster I last saw pinned to side. When I got to the spot the little ship was docked there was a crowd blocking it. I squeezed and awkwardly pushed my way to the front of the crowd and looked down onto the sea. The little ship was gone. A couple of the crew and I got down on our knees, grabbed the edge of the dock and peered over the side. Through our own wavering reflections we could see the little ship resting on the bottom of the seabed, wrapped in seaweed. The little ship had sank. Still on my knees I looked up at our captain, our decent, nice captain. He couldn’t bare to look me in the face, just peered down at the wood beneath his feet as he told us he had pulled the plug. I looked back down at the little ship. It wasn’t even finished. Three months was not enough time to finish a ship. We were finally wearing off the blue paint, fixing the nicks; finally had enough lifeboats on board. The ship was finally going to sail. If we’d only had a little more time, our little ship would have been something enviably even among the bigger ships, I thought with tears forming in my eyes. It’s gonna be okay, said my crew chief. You’ll be okay. My fellow crewmate said she always felt it was too good to be true. And she was right. It was a whirlwind romance that we’ll never forget but had to end. The following week I still walked down the wharf, sat at the edge of the dock and dangled my feet in the water above the little ship. Periodically another crewmate would come by and do the same; there were always feet dangling in the water. Maybe we were in denial, thinking, hoping that little ship would somehow float back to the surface. It had carried so many people, so many stories, in its short life. I sat there awhile today, procrastinating, knowing I’d have to slip back into the cold water and tread for a while, again. I leaned back and placed my hands on the deck behind me, tilting my head toward the sky, there I saw the captains on their giant ships. They were once again peering over the edge down at us as we sat and dangled. I expected the look of I Told You So, or I expected them not to be looking at all. But instead they peered down at us and tilted their caps, as if to say You Tried. And that’s something to be proud of. And it was a beautiful little ship.
posted by Am at 5:54 PM
3 Comments:
wow.
I echo Matt's sentiments. But I am troubled by the piece on toddlers and the idea that we are only happy when we are 'innocent.' This suggests that the main purpose of adulthood is trying to limit unhappiness as much as possible, since once we know 'the truth,' happiness becomes an impossibility. In a godless era, the fact that the world is complicated and challenging and dramatic must be a source of joy and optimism. We may fail in our attempts to change this purgatory (and in some places, this hell) into heaven, but at least the possibility is in our hands, and not in the hands of some faceless, random deity.
It's not that you're only happy when you're a toddler, it's more that it's the last time you get to be so naiive, completely closed off from influence, responsibility and the horrors that people do to each other. There's a great Walt Whitman quote that goes:
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self-contain'd
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owing things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."
But people created the earth in its current state and do the horrible things to each other and I agree that to live like animals (or toddlers)and ignore this is to be irresponsible and take the challenge and meaning out of life.
But I also think there's a certain joy in living like this that you lose once you get older, because although you can be just as happy and most likely a lot happier, once you join the rest of us you can never be that happily stupid again.
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