Giant wave

Last weekend, I was making my merry way up the path of peaceful contentment when a huge wave of ennui rolled in. Knocked me into a ditch. Took me three days to crawl out.

The soundtrack to “Three Days in a Ditch” was Stars. I saw them on Friday with Broken Social Scene at the Marquee. Both bands were fabulous, but Stars just about made me weep, they were that good. It’s not that their music is depressing – in fact, it’s quite uplifting. But that was the problem. I went home with a full heart and still no one to give it to. The next day had the gall to come up sunny. I spent the day wandering around the house trying to distract myself with a dust rag. Humming. “Live through this and you won’t look back.”

Consequently, I was very happy with Sunday's blizzard. I hid in my pyjamas all day. Grown ups don’t cry because there’s no one to love them. No, no. I made osso bucco, for one, and pounded the dining room with fat, alien chord clusters. Hoping I won't hear the next wave when it comes crashing in.

Comment away!

I've fixed it so anyone can comment - you just have to post as "Anonymous" but you can leave your name in the body of your comment - if you want me to know it's you. Carry on!

"What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

In full reliance on the laws of physics as I understand them (and let’s be clear, my understanding is 99.5% empirical with a dim 0.5% grasp on the facts), I decided to answer this question in the form of a pie. Not pi. Just pie.

People who know me (assuming there are such people) can tell you that I got me some bona fide kitchen game. I can cook. I would say that I am a freestyle cooking specialist. On any unpromising-looking Tuesday night, I’ll chip something out of the freezer, dumpster-dive into the crisper, rattle about in the cupboards, wing it all together and hey presto, there will be something hot and yummy, if maybe a little unorthodox, slung on your plate by dinnertime. That’s my gift.

Well, truly, my gift may be pattern recognition. I just recently worked this out. I was thinking about myself (as I often lovingly and lengthily do) and trying to identify the points of intersection in all my interests and skills. What’s the connection between composing pop songs, cooking, and solving logic problems? How about between playing billiards, playing Scrabble and finding things other people have lost? The pattern that emerged was patterns. I’m good at pattern recognition.

Pattern recognition is essential to good cooking, too, in case you were wondering where the hell I’m going with this. Cooking is about combining patterns of flavours, textures, and colours using various techniques and methods. It’s weaving, but with food. Because I have good pattern recognition skills in the kitchen, I know that when I have a dish that’s built on a Holy Trinity of ginger, garlic and coriander, it will not work to throw vanilla into the mix.

Come to think of it, being good at pattern recognition is really just a fancy way of saying that I’m not complete crap at paying attention to life experience. I only need to throw away one batch of ginger-, garlic-, coriander- and vanilla-fried chicken. I know how to spell “obsessiveness”, even though the on-board spell checker continually attempts to foist something weird on me. I can find things my friend Tim has lost in about 38 seconds because I know Tim in a way he doesn’t know himself. When I look at a room with Tim in it, he’s in it, whereas in his own view of the scene, I’m in it. We have different patterns in mind, and different blind spots, too.

But what about the freaking pie? I hear you clamour. Okay. The question was “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Well, I believe that all of the foregoing is true – all the stuff about pattern recognition and vanilla-fried chicken and why Tim can’t ever find his cell phone without me – but I can’t prove it. And good lord, what a time waster that would be, if I tried. Really, you might as well ask “What DON’T you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

What I believe is true, even though I can’t prove it, is that faith is as necessary as breath. Faith is Imagination’s dumpier sister. Faith is the one who knits the mittens, pays the oil bill on time, and dresses properly in foul weather. Faith doesn’t worry about stepping off the porch only to be hit by a bus (though Imagination wastes all sorts of time on it). Faith bakes all the pies.

So, asked to produce something I believe is true but cannot prove, I went with faith and baked a pie. My pie will not be too sweet. It may be a little tangy, even, and here a smidge of vanilla is not out of place. I baked my pie in a hot oven until the crust got properly crusty, then I set it on a ledge, out of reach of the cats and other naysayers, where even now it is cooling, waiting for whoever wants a slice. It will be delicious, for it is a pie made out of garden-fresh, handpicked amor vincit omnia.

Food for thought

My friend Ken sent me this delicious link:
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html
Do go and have a look before you read the next post.

My name in lights 

Breathing, what's that like?

My reptile brain let this out the other morning: “Dear God, I have to stop smoking.” Was it a prayer? It could have been. It was out loud and everything.

I’ve been smoking for a long time. For the past long while, my lungs have been hurting. (It’s completely terrible to see this in writing - that my lungs hurt – even though I’ve been saying it in my head for some time now.) So it’s been on my mind a dozen times a day that I need to stop. I’ve been pretending that I’m working on a plan to quit. I'm not. Or rather, my unspoken plan has been to wait until something came along that absolutely made me have to stop. Like lung cancer, for god’s sake.

So when my reptile brain bellowed this out on Monday morning, when it yelled it on high, I thought it might be a prayer, so I backed it right up with another prayer, this time from my regular brain: “Please, you’ve got to do something!”

I went home to breakfast and by 10 am, I was puffing away.

On Tuesday night I lit yet another cigarette and had two puffs. I felt sick, conscious of my lungs hurting, so I stubbed it out. Then on utter impulse I grabbed the pack of smokes off the counter and threw it in the garbage.

So here’s the thing: the next morning I woke up about to get sick. I didn’t go to work. I became increasingly toxic throughout the day. By bedtime I was hacking and shivering. I’ve been sick for 3 days now, with a fever that comes and goes, and a stuffy head, and god knows what coming out of my lungs. I’m living in my pajamas, I got my period, I’m crampy and coughy. I feel like shit on a stick.

But I haven’t smoked, I don’t want to smoke, and I’m pretty sure I’m not going want to again, after this. I know it’s only a chest cold, but if a weeny little chest cold is going to turn me into this feeble, dripping crank, what the hell am I doing, holding out for lung cancer?

I think the rule is, if you say it out loud, if you write it out loud, it’s a prayer. It's just that if you're a non-believer, you have to take care of it yourself. I'm putting the kettle on now.

The last laugh

I heard something on the radio today that I think requires a global alert: We are about to run out of helium.

No kidding. Apparently, helium is only available as a by-product of the natural decay of certain radioactive elements (like uranium) that collect in underground caverns. It can't be produced in a lab somewhere; it's got to be dredged up and it qualifies as a non-renewable resource.

Essential medical gear like MRIs can't function without liquid helium. And here we are blowing it (as it were) on balloons for 5-year-olds' birthday parties, or sucking it back for the sake of so many Minnie Mouse impersonations.

Ban the balloons! Besides which, sea turtles find them hard to digest, and if you can just for a moment pretend you're a sea turtle, imagine how much it would suck to make it to a hundred years in the deep green sea, fending off fishing trawlers and sea lions and god knows what other predators, only to choke to death on the ragged remnant of a fucking Spongebob balloon.

Yeah, that's right: the party's over.

Hack, spew

When I created my account for this site, I was not very imaginative about usernames and passwords and such. I am okay about saying this, as with the feebleness of my imagination when it came down to securing the old perimeter. Because, frankly: what damage could some poor little hacker buddy do? "I know, I'll write something inane, mwahaha!"

Well, top this:

I've recently discovered that if, as the mood takes me, I just let go random bursts of speech, my reptile brain apparently has things to say. One day as I trundled around the hill, it barked out, "That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard!" I had to stop walking and think about it. I couldn't remember what I was thinking about before my reptile brain decided to take a run at me. But - because I've since started paying a little more attention to my reptile brain - I can guess it was something way self-absorbed. Like "How come they never call?" or "I'll probably be dead soon." Now my reptile brain pretty reliably jumps in with stuff like "I just need to get laid, for chrissakes".

If, right in the middle of a complex reptilian expostulation, a car slows down as it rolls past me on the hill, I pretend I am talking to my dog.

The only constant

Change, it's been said, is the only constant. What tripe. What about faulty stage monitors?

On Thursday last I played some music, in public, with my friend Alyson MacLeod. It was the first time in 2 years for me, the first in 7 or 8 for her. We used to be rock stars. Now we're just, I don't know, rocks. Sedentary, sedimentary, putting the "ass" back in jurassic.

Monitors aside, it was good. We learned how to mic a cello. We made people listen. How wonderful to have come back to music, loving it as much as ever, but leaving behind the giving of a fuck whether it's cool with the kids - or anyone else for that matter.

I used to think it was ego, but now I suspect that making music, as an act of creation, is an essential act of id. The id wants food, the child cries. The id wants music, the fingers play. The id doesn't care about anyone's needs but its own.

I devolve, happily, every day.

A detail

Does dark matter?

According to current thinking in cosmological physics, over 90% of the universe is comprised of matter and energy we can't see and can barely detect - so-called "dark matter" and "dark energy". Of the stuff we can see, most of it's us.

This would certainly explain the urge to blog. Blogging creates detectable matter out of the great void - matter that, if not called into existence by legions of self-absorbed wordbirds such as myself, would just be lurking around out there, bending radio waves at inconvenient moments, drilling along through the crust of the Earth like it ain't no thang, and fucking up other people's equations (which is just rude).

I can't help wondering, being that all matter and energy (which are the same thing) in the universe is constant, and being that it's possible (in the sense of not being proven impossible) that dark matter could somehow convert to plain old matter, whether by creating this blog site I may have inadvertently deprived of his great moment some poor Antarctic research physicist who's been hanging out in a stuffy, creaking quonset hut in dirty sweatpants for six years, diligently calculating the precise arrival time of the next beloved neutrino, which, instead of diving into the polar crust for a nanosecond's flick at the machinery of detection, found itself keelhauled by my ISP and frogmarched along to this page to become an infinitesimally small, but crucial part of the digital expression of the number 9.

(That was one sentence. I should be spanked.)

I would apologize to Research Dude, but I'm mad with power - the power to create being from nothingness.