Month: February 2015

ISIL aka Daesh

Currently ISIL, in the Caliphate illegally and heinously established in Iraq, is killing proportionately  many times more Muslims than Christians.  The offshoot of ISIL in Libya is more likely to be settling old political scores and grinding the faces of secular Muslim countries, since in the Caliphate the ISIL goons are extorting a tax rather than beheading Christians – for the most part.  Christians living in slavery in the Caliphate is cool; suffering Muslim apostates to live is not.  I note with interest that Egypt, never exactly Mr. Upstanding in protecting minority Copt rights, responded with airstrikes.

Given that ISIL’s end game is to be the prime mover in the bringing forward of Judgement Day, in glorious battle with the forces of Rome on the plains of Iraq, I hope the secular Muslim countries and NATO strap their collective wills together and squash these lunatics, with a nice leisurely war crimes trial for the survivors afterwards.
Also, and not to put to fine a point on it, without air support ISIL cannot long prosper.  Best case scenario the Saudis roll their eyes, take out the Caliph using local intelligence, and go back to messing with oil prices in hopes of removing enough production from the global market to stabilize their market share.  The Wahhabis and the propaganda arm of Al-Qaida hate ISIL, one for being branded apostate and one for being told they’re not being diligent enough in meeting their political ends (no Caliph, no territory, no ground troops, no hall pass with Allah).
Without multi-state sponsored military intervention, it’s likely to play out as:
ISIL expands territory and operations much farther and faster than anybody wants or will give them credit for.
Inability to provide the necessities of life due to mismanagement, sanctions and constant warfare will anger the local populations so that ISIL spends as much time, blood and treasure putting down rebellions as expanding the Caliphate (which it feels obliged by Allah to do).
Various ethnic and religious groups fight into this mess (with much handwringing and vapidity on the part of the Western military and press) and a longish multiparty 5-10 year civil war ensues.  Sometime in there the Caliph goes to heaven in wee little bits.
ISIL wannabes in the West keep shooting up synagogues and malls, triggering revenge killings of Sikhs minding their own business pumping gas or shopping at Walmart, arsons at mosques and calls to ‘ship the bastards all home’ – which pains me, since I really like most the Ahmadis and Ismailis I’ve met, even if they are the worst apostates EVAR.
An uneasy peace mostly due to exhaustion, climate change (water is a huge issue for the region) and wackiness in the oil market ensues after the civil war.
A new Qurayshi Caliph is secretly unveiled to the faithful, and publicly revealed some months or years later.
Rinse, repeat.
Yeah, I’m a cynic.

anecdotal trigger

Ah, me.  The decluttering group I belong to on facebook posted the 40 bags in 40 days challenge.  That made me think.

Time was, I lived in Amedeo Garden Court (5 different apartments over almost ten years) in Toronto.  When I was living in the northwesternmost building, my downstairs neighbour, who was our childcare provider at the time, reported a most amazing story.

It started with a dispute between the landlord and her across the hall neighbour. Other tenants reported that this woman, a slender, sad looking person in her 40s, had an apartment that was full of garbage (when the door was open, you could see a human wide path through a debris field of pizza boxes and trash).  It smelled, it was attracting pests.  The landlord lowered the boom and told the woman to clean or move.

She hired two little Portuguese guys (in those days in Toronto every cleaner was Portuguese – I bet that racial balance has shifted dramatically) to clean. I’m sure their hearts sank when they saw the scale of it.

Well, in one day they hauled out forty large trash bags, forty empty 40oz liquor bottles, and disturbed a veritable army of mice and cockroaches.  You couldn’t get close to the garbage bin; it was surrounded by the most noisome collection of trashbags shy of a garbage strike. The woman came home from work (and we’re talking about a hot day and no air conditioning) and berated them for ‘not finishing’!

My downstairs neighbour’s husband spoke Portuguese, and he said he heard combinations of curse words he’d never heard before, as he eavesdropped from across the hall.  They demanded their money, told her in English that they’d see her in hell before they came back and did a stitch more of work for her… and then the troubles began.

We took five mice out of the apartment over the next week (I caught two with my bare hands, we trapped one, and Bounce got two), and I’ve never, ever seen that many cockroaches outside of films from the tropics. It was months before we got the influx of roaches down to a dull roar.  Hoarding isn’t about moral panic, it’s a health hazard. Also, alcoholism.  My neighbour was amazed this woman would arise from her trashpile everyday and go to work.  I bet her clothing stank, even when it had been laundered.  You can be really really sick and hold down a job.

I may have forty bags  to declutter and take out (actually, I doubt it), but I think apart from spiders and silverfish it’s all good, and it won’t smell.  After all these years, I don’t keep food in my room….

Sore

I was in pain for most of yesterday and I had a brief and unsatisfactory night of it.  The CPAP came off quite early as I recollect.  Every time I roll over in bed I can hear the damned pelvic bones go crunch, crunch.  It doesn’t hurt – strangely, but by jingo it’s weird and freaky.

Unfortunately my plans to go to Victoria are being impacted by how hard it is to walk.  Just before bed last night I imagined the walk (now about half a k longer at the Victoria end and already unconscionably long at the Vancouver end) at the ferry terminal and I actually cried.  I don’t think I can do it.

So I think what I will do is try to locate a brace (it’s actually a maternity girdle, if you can believe it) or jerry-rig something at this end and see if it helps and THEN go.

Hurts to stand, hurts to sit, hurts to walk.  Off to youtube for physio exercises for my problem, as it occurs there should be help there.  Huzzah, there are!  God bless the midwives.

Church plus coffee

I have to pick up milk, cream and cheese for church today, but that’s just across the street. I have to be dressed and out the door by 9:45 – I’ve already got my outfit laid out and clean so that’s one fewer decision to make.  CPAP for maybe four hours last night.  I had a panic attack when I put the mask on at first.  After a while I calmed down and put it on.  I remembered to put the eye goop in.  The omega-3 appears to be helping with the dry eye, enough to be noticeable but not a whole lot.

Everybody have a good day! I have other plans.

 

The Golden Seam

At 2:51 today, this appeared.

It is an everyday magic
And yet you’re in my every dream
Very little of the tragic
With you life’s a golden seam
Mining jewels of contentment
And adoration most divine
Living in a loving present
Home and family are kind

Into our perfect home of respite
Perhaps a snake, perhaps a fire
The scalding words, the lip bit
But it can’t make our love expire

Promise me and I will swear to you
By all that’s beautiful and free
I will always love and care for you
As I hope you will love and care for me.

A Valentine for Vancouver

CPAP for about 4 hours.  Wonderful, textured, entertaining dreams. I feel more energetic.

I may go to Mike Beach today if the weather improves as much as it’s supposed to.

Alex and Katie were here yesterday for laundry, recording lullabies and scanning family photos.

Why me? Why Vancouver?

For almost ten years, my ex’s request to be transferred to Vancouver by his employer sat in some HR equivalent of development hell.  Nothing happened, and given the desirability of the posting and Paul’s place in the line, nothing was expected to.  Then, three weeks after our family followed his employment from Montréal to Toronto, he got word to report for work in Vancouver in 72 hours’ time.  Yeah. We did two interprovincial moves in five weeks.

And he smiled.  He’d applied for three weeks of vacation at exactly the same time, and couldn’t be forced to start work until it was finished. Thus began our family’s transition.

We put everything we owned in a truck trailer — including the vintage motorcycle and sidecar that Paul later sold so we could buy a house – and sent it on its way. We grabbed the kids and the cat and flew to Victoria and dropped the kids off with the grandparents, and then we spent two weeks lining up a car, a place to live and schooling and drivers licences,

We laboured in that little golden slot of weather that we get sometimes in late October, when the days are deliciously crisp and cool, the air smells wonderful, and the sun on the mountains makes you think you’re living in a fantasy novel.

We wondered why there was a bird we could only hear at intersections.  We said Gag-lard-ee and Anna-kiss and locals choked on polite laughter. We found a house (after consulting an earthquake map for the safest locales) and got the kids settled, and began a love affair with Vancouver that continues to this day.

I can’t speak for the rest of my family, since time has kept us in the same city but no longer under one roof, but the shape and texture and beauty of the city has come to mean home as no other place ever has.  Memories bubble up.

The turbaned Sikhs teasing the waitress to bring them chopsticks in the Chinese restaurant, “What are we, uncivilized?” The silent explosion of flowering shrubs each spring, the lilacs, the rhodos and the cherries. The way people leave their Diwali lights up until Christmas. The Babel of accents and voices on the transit; the kindnesses I have experienced on the two occasions I’ve had car trouble and strangers appeared out of nowhere with cell phones. The ‘four o’clock stripe’ at sunset in the winter, just about the only time you can reliably see the sun. The hundreds of kilometres of lovely places to walk and ride; the hills that nearly gut you in the summer and cause articulated buses to splay out like drunks in the winter.

Watching my son do Winter Karate Training on Jericho Beach, marching in his gi into the water; paddling among the herons on the Pitt River, and then nearly dying of the effort required to get back to the dock when the tide was making.  Sunsets and sunrises of transfixing beauty.  Dealing with raccoons, skunks, coyotes, deer and bears, and once, the authorities had to tranquilize a cougar, mere blocks from the house.  Running into herons in every part of the city.  Once I startled one as I came around a corner on my bicycle and nearly fell off as a six food wingspan abruptly flung wide in front of me. The stairs at Wreck Beach and the 60’s vibe that greets you at the bottom.  Sadness at the ancient trees wrecked by a storm in Stanley Park; joy to see the statue of Lord Stanley the first time and read the beautiful words inscribed on it.  Asking Headwater to come play on the back deck for my brother’s birthday, and what an amazing concert that was.

There are things I’ve learned to dislike about Vancouver, but complaints are cheap.  I’ve learned to love my splendid city, to want to know more about her and the people who were here before the settlers came.  It was a happy accident that brought me here, and I’ll be staying here as long as I can.  Vancouver has given me a church community I cherish, co-workers whom I now consider my closest friends, and music and love and really phenomenal craft beer in abundance.

It seems strange to have been born on one coast only to find my heart’s home on the other, but Vancouver is a place that has taught me to respect the playful grip coincidence has on any human life.

wa-ho

OMFGBWAHAHA.  NOT SAFE FOR WORK.  The noise this thing makes is a complete relief for grief and woe. TLDR: I wouldn’t want a device that sounds like a cross between a prop plane and a sewing machine anywhere near mah nethers.

I musta burnt 500 calories last night with the tossing and turning.  I wore the CPAP for 4 long and tedious hours and finally gave up, got up, peed, took another painkiller (I was in AGONY after the walk, and it hurt to roll over but I had to to get my back to hurt in different ways).  Got up at 9 and had to deal with the tedium of rumbly tummy after my sushi lunch yesterday. Crossing that restaurant off my list.

Katie and Alex are coming to record some songs, they should be here imminently.

 

The second worst thing about being a white liberal is that there are fewer and fewer people I can openly mock and pick on. The worst thing is knowing that there should not be ANYBODY in that category. If I really cared, I’d mend and not mock. I think that having hundreds of millions of people to hate, fear, mock, jeer and write bigoted laws for is part of the special appeal of social conservatism.

Walkita walkita

Walked 2.5 k today; went to the dentist office to pay Katie’s overdue bill from December (which I had already agreed to do, I finally got around to it) and then walked over to the imaging place to get film of my pubic symphysis, and then went to the bookstore and got really sad because I shouldn’t buy any books, and so I didn’t, But I Really Wanted Roxane Gay’s book goldurnit, and then crossed the street and had sushi for lunch, and then went to the library and picked up a couple of books.  I took the bus back and now I am, candidly, pretty crippled up.  Peggy said yesterday well if what you say is true it’ll hurt when I push here and WAAAAAAA HO! I yipped most doggedly and had to be scraped off the ceiling.

So yeah, it’s a problem.  Maybe something will show on the xray.

Theology Pub

…was wonderful.  Lots of different points of view.  Found out that there’s a conspiracy theorist not exactly libertarian coming to Beacon!  Ten guesses what his performative gender is, first nine don’t count.  He told me that Putin is the greatest statesman on the planet right now. I told him he was a fucking KGB bagman to start off with and one of the worst oligarchs the world has ever seen and he told me that that didn’t stop him from being a great leader.  All I could think of was Dr. Filk blowing a raspberry of window-rattling proportions, cause that shit will NOT fly.  As a chaser I watched one of Slavoj Zizek’s latest videos.  I did not laugh aloud because he makes you mad, happy, crazy, thoughtful and fucked up in rapid succession.  He is my favourite public philosopher of all time, even if he is a Marxist.

I bought beer last night.  First time in a while, but I had to have it, and it turns out it was super yummy.

clownbeer

In too deep?

Last night I dreamed I was following a human-body style alien around asking it if we could at least have a wee peek at some technology to which the response is “You humans cannot understand it” to which my response was “No, we’d be making improvements once we knew how it worked.” Alien stomped off. I should probably lighten up on the Stargate franchise rewatch.

Off to the doctor to deal with the shooting pains in my groin. **** me, if somebody had told me you can get arthritis or sports injuries in the joint of your pubic bone I would have said YUK but I really wouldn’t have expected to get it.  Now I’m thinking that when I skidded and fell in the shop almost two years ago, that’s when the initial injury happened.  I’m remembering how much the walk to and from work – the last time I worked – was killing me. Oh well it’s for the doc to say.  It doesn’t hurt all the time but when it does, I stop in my tracks like a lightstruck deer and promptly start limping on both feet while whimpering.  I have to be really careful how far I walk with Paul now, and I’m DONE when I get back.  Also, I’m finding shopping, with it’s combo of slow walking and hauling and then driving a stick vehicle and getting in and out of a tiny car (which I love, but man), more and more difficult.

CPAP okay.  Probably about four hours. I do wake more rested.

 

No writing yesterday but I worked on songs.  Welp, only half an hour to make it to the appointment, BYE.

Working on songs

I have found (I think) most of the songs I printed out before my hard drive died, and am now going to put them in alpha order and scan the ones I don’t have digitally.

Sisyphus is done, and I also turned it into an MP3 and shipped it to mOm. As a song it’s quite fast; as a repurposed, slowed down, dropped more than an octave piece of soundtrack it’s actually very cool.

I need to do a lot more dejunking. I finally freed up the guest room, which was a staging area for clean clothes, and I hung everything, which would help if I didn’t keep stuffing my room with things that don’t belong in the rest of the house but have no appropriate storage.  In the end, apart from kitchen and bathroom stuff, I hope to be able to get everything into one room; that’s the desired end state as it’s obvious I won’t be living in this house for the rest of my life although far from obvious when I’ll move.

Tomorrow night it’s Theology Pub!  I will be taking a friend to supper and then hanging out afterwards; I wouldn’t miss it as it is at the Heritage Grill and their back room is a treat.

Cpap last night.  No writing.  My mood is very dark and angry, which is great when you’re writing dark and angry scenes, and not so good when you’re trying to do the sf equivalent of the St. Crispin’s Day speech.  I keep losing the thread after a few paras.  Cazart.

Keith came by yesterday but I was still feeling very wobbly so I didn’t hang out with him much.  I ate the burger he brought me though!

Well, I suppose it’s time to shower and ingest vitamins and painkillers, drink some coffee and suchlike.

Katie is coming over on Friday to do some recording.  Blink!  She wants to do an album of songs for Alex for when she’s not around.  I personally think it will make him cry harder, once he figures out not to believe the lie that she’s there and singing, but what the heck. I’ll try anything that doesn’t involve running.  When I was rolling over in bed last night my pelvic joints made so much noise you could probably hear them across the room.

Blergh

Church was quite unhappy making.  I got rumbly tummy from a deli tray, the speaker didn’t bother rehearsing or speaking clearly, all the songs were single stanzas so it’s like stand up sit down fight fight fight.

Then I come home.

There’s nothing left but the work.  It’s a good thing there is so much of it.

I couldn’t bear the cpap last night, I’m breaking out all along where the mask sits.  I’ll put it on tonight… I should probably check the water level.

Four hundred words yesterday.  It’s better, but it’s still no screaming hell.

 

 

Many songs

So I have written down four additional songs, and I’m working on a blues tune called Don’t you Weep, which is a pisser because no matter how I try I cannot figure out how to render it; it’s played in E but that results in so many accidentals that the mss looks like birds crapped on it.  However, on playback it is sounding really good, and I’m having very little trouble with the tempo.  I now have to readjust everything because I forgot a verse but fortuitously I remembered the last time I had a song this difficult and I’m not putting in the lyrics until the very end, because if you cut and paste in Finale AFTER you’ve put in lyrics they follow around the pasted part and you have to completely redo everything because the lyrics and notes are tied together.  This results in very bad swearz.

I thought I heard Jeff up too and there’s a light under his door.  We’re not sleeping good.  Tonight and last night I used the Cpap for at least four hours.  I like it and then bam I can’t stand having something on my face and literally sit bolt upright and claw it off.  Blergh.

Katie and I went for a shop yesterday – she needed to do a HUGE shop to get as much food into the house after the rent got paid, and I needed a medium sized one.  And, I put gas in the car for what is probably the second time since I sold Ziva.  Anyway I left a bag of groceries at her place and Dax delivered it, which is good since I get crabby without cream for my coffee.  I bought Alex a teething blanky – he’s a chewy little boy.

There continues to be a wave front of disturbances in the Force regarding childrearing techniques.  Jesus fucking Christ people, Katie was raised in the benign neglect corner of the attachment parenting spectrum.  It goes like this: If the parents love each other and the children, feed -starting with breastfeeding- and clothe and house and vaccinate the children, align the children within their families with those who are most like them and like them most, and refuse to injure them with genital mutilation, hey, job done.  We didn’t allow babies to ‘cry it out’ because that means ‘HEY KID YOU CAN BE BLOWING A FUSE AND IN PAIN AND NOBODY GIVES A SHIT’ which means ‘WHY DON’T YOU GROW UP TO BE AN ADULT WHO NEVER COMPLAINS ABOUT WORK CONDITIONS OR HORRIBLE RELATIONSHIPS.’  And you may anyway, but that’s not the way we planned it.

Now Katie is trying to draw a line in the sand with incommonlaws about this, and I burst into tears while driving hearing about it because of my benign neglect attachment style and all of my Dredded Feelz.  Alex is an infant child; if he’s so active he leaves bruises on his caregivers that’s just the way he is; I had no idea my grandchild was going to be a little hairless mountain gorilla, but since he is in most respects normal I’m not worried about it.  I don’t worry because he doesn’t want to cuddle with me now; he will when he’s two, or ten, or NEVER and it’s for me to give him what he needs now and not get all judgy on his mom about how she’s not letting him cry it out.  He doesn’t like to be still.  If I hold him I stand and either walk or rock, and the second he gets yippy I hand him back.  It’s not a point of pride to me to get him to BEND TO MY FUCKING WILL; it’s a point of pride to expect his mother to know what the hell she is doing with her own gorram kid. Thus endeth the rant.

Now I am going to finish my coffee (paradoxically, it will help me go back to sleep) and play another Bejewelled game (I have now opened all the games and am waiting to collect about four more badges) and maybe even finish that damn song, and maybe even try to put the mask back on.  Sigh.

Today’s sermon is about disability.  I am not missing this.  I’m doing coffee next week, I just checked the list. Thank god it’s a google shared document now, siphoning my way through emails sucks.

 

The sickening feeling

It turns out that I did NOT move all my previously rendered-in-Songwriter songs over to google drive.  There are a whole bunch missing.  Part of me is really sad; another part is “Now I’ll do them properly” since there were a LOT of things I did not understand about music notation then which I do now.

CPAP wasn’t on for very long at all.  Eyes were not too dry this morning.  I am beginning to understand why many people lose weight when they go on the CPAP.

So I did some writing yesterday, but it was completely flabby, so I am going to prune my verbs and adverbs and see if I can’t do a stirring  -over the top folks! speech.

Whole wheat chocolate chip pancakes for brekky.

Once upon a time there was a woman whose oldest daughter lied and cheated and stole. They were estranged for a decade. The woman lost touch with her grandchild.

The oldest daughter started contacting her.  You can see this coming, and even so, you can’t look away.  She wanted a rapprochement.

No, not really.  She wanted her mother to move across six states, bankrupt herself paying off daughter’s utility bills, put her name on the apartment they all moved into, and then fend for herself when daughter abruptly moved out and married her current boyfriend.  No word of thanks, no invite to the wedding.  Not even a goodbye.  All the woman’s friends said it would happen.  She cheerfully acknowledged it. And she left behind three other grandchildren and her church home for this ninety and nine procedure.

So, under the fundraising title “There’s no fool like the queen of the fools” she’s asking for 2000 bucks to go the fuck home, and although I’ve turned down every one of these appeals for months now I gave her twenty dollars.  And if you really know me, you’ll know why.