Month: November 2009

Update

My meeting with Serge the composer went great but he wants me to refine what the hell it is I really want to accomplish while he’s teaching me music, so I am going to think about that and get back to him.  We both like Hans Zimmer and James Horner, no surprise.  He was amazingly generous and collaborative in the hour and a half I spent with him, and he taught me two important things about scoring for films which I had not really understood before.

Serge is on the 144 bus line, which also goes to SFU, and then I had lunch at the old office and said hi to folks.  Then I went to Surrey and got stood up by my date.  I didn’t mind, I had wireless and drank a latte.  And some guy chatted me up on the way out, can you believe it?  Anyway, I hope dude is okay, and that it was just a communication snag… there’s no sense complaining about somebody’s behaviour until you have an explanation, and for all I know his neighbour’s dogs savaged him.

Speaking of which, I was walking back to the house (my bike has two flat tires) with $50 of meat yesterday and I ran into a loose pitbull.  Man, for one brief second I was terrified, and then I realized from the animal’s body language that it had no intention of coming near me whether I had ten pounds of pork chops, stew beef and bratwurst on me, or not.

All of my bus connections today were zippity.  Very nice.

Jeff reminded me that I was supposed to get the cats dry food today, and I forgot.

Busy day

Today I am going to go and see a music teacher who lives close by to see if I can take lessons; then I’m going up to my old workplace for lunch; then I’m going to Surrey for a while, and then I should be home for supper.  This is the most I’ve been on transit since the fireworks last summer.

Last night Tom and Peggy and Paul and Keith came over for broiled pork chop, cauliflower and home made cheese sauce, salad, cole slaw, corn and garlic bread.  Dessert was fresh fruit and pecan torte. It was all nommers.  Then we sang and played for a while.

I light a candle for everybody killed and injured at Fort Hood yesterday.   I am sure there will be an uptick in attacks on furrin brown people as a consequence.  I light a candle for the man who thought he could made a contribution to world peace by slaughtering his fellow soldiers.  It’s just so grisly, and so wrong.

My favourite poem about death, by the great atheist Lucretius

On the Nature of Things…

No single thing abides; but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings-the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.

Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.

You too, oh earth-your empires, lands, and seas –
Least with your stars, of all the galaxies,
Globed from the drift like these, like these you too
Shalt go. You are going, hour by hour, like these.

Nothing abides. The seas in delicate haze
Go off; those mooned sands forsake their place;
And where they are, shall other seas in turn
Mow with their scythes of whiteness other bays.

The seeds that once were we take flight and fly,
Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky,
Not lost but disunited. Life lives on.
It is the lives, the lives, the lives, that die.

They go beyond recapture and recall,
Lost in the all-indissoluble All:-
Gone like the rainbow from the fountain’s foam,
Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall.

Flakes of the water, on the waters cease!
Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these.
Atoms to atoms-weariness to rest –
Ashes to ashes-hopes and fears to peace!

O Science, lift aloud your voice that stills
The pulse of fear, and through the conscience thrills –
Thrills through the conscience with the news of peace –
How beautiful your feet are on the hills!

This is the poem that my church’s Care and Concern Committee sent to me after my grandmother died a few years back.  A beautiful sentiment…..

Brief interlude of sludge, with a echidna-heavy pause.

I haven’t been very productive in the last couple of days, but I am not particularly worried about it.  I’m getting back on the horse, so to speak.  I’ve noticed that after a ‘high’ – like the trip, which was remarkable in many ways – there is a ‘low’.  I feel sludgy, contemplative, grumpy and immobilized.  That part doesn’t last either.  It’s all a question of balance.

And you can laugh at me, but my mOm still loves me.

Every time I see an Echidna, I think of Gerald Durrell.  He’s one of my all time favorite writers – he crafts a sentence so very well, and his descriptions are pithy and memorable.

This morning I’m going to treat like a work morning.  I’m going to get up and make Jeff brekkie, then I am going to sit at the kitchen table and make a paper list, and then I’m going to do it.  It’s all boring domestic stuff, and when it’s done, I suspect I’ll get back on task.

Last night I made a phone call that I’ve been dreading for two weeks now.  To preserve the dignity and privacy of those involved (and also to prevent myself from looking a right asshole, always a difficult task) I can’t really talk about it.  With that behind me I can start feeling a little perkier again.

But I would like to thank Deb and Tammy for helping me get to the point I could actually make that call.  Without friends, we’re wild animals in a lonely and challenging place.  And thanks, Jeff.