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Here it is, a fine specimen of North American burger creation, commercially grilled and made to consumer level perfection, a Red Robin's Bacon Cheeseburger with the accompanying 'bottomless' fries. Many would decry the choice of this burger as the last burger of the summer, but when you own no grill of your own, and have already enjoyed a plethora of excellent burgers ranging from Harvey's to backyard BBQ, then it is more symbolic rather than having its own meaning. For every summer I have returned to Vancouver has slowly evolved into an annual ritual of the "burger summer". This summer, I definitely had my fill of the cow meat, but the arc of my wedding has made this last burger particularly reflective.Like many, I have come to believe that the greatest challenge of being 30-something is to know that you won't be on top for very long. The luxury of youth, that power to disregard all the safety features, the power to make either real and profound changes or minuscule, meaningless fluff , that power disappears. When you are 30-something, every decision has profound consequence, usually not immediately but certainly the sharks come for their share eventually. The habits we possess or that possess us will be the same habits we hold until death. These will not change easily or without great labour or cost, for our bodies will not suffer it, our friends will not suffer it and death is not to be trifled with.But what of risk and the palpitations of the heart, the rush and promise of glory and love? That I am alive, comfortable and 30-something means those are questions I am not qualified to ask. This love for burgers only has meaning if it has a beginning, a rise and naturally, a conclusion. While I do not believe it will be the last burger I will ever consume, I do believe it will be the last burger eaten with the sort of call it what you may, reckless abandon/rampant modern over-consumption/just plain youthful gluttony. The next burger to hit these lips will come with it the sort of thoughts that I once thought were unnecessary: "Is this really worth what I'm paying for it?" or "How will I be paying for this later?" And so while I will eat them again, it will not be the same.Finally, I believe this may be my last post for awhile. I hear that currently, upon re-entry onto the other side of the Great Firewall of China, I will lose direct access to facebook, twitter, blogger, flickr, picasa and many other sites. My limited knowledge and patience for proxies means that the broadcasts may dim. Still, my thoughts will brew and for those who wait, they will be worth sinking your teeth into.
I tire of each spark that comes, each time dimmer than the one before, teasing me like an awkward teenage smile all full of teeth and chrome. It hurts to recognize and put to words the massive failure that I’ve only come to realize at this moment. This is the itch of an in-grown hair, worse than cancer, worse than any hidden fault because it looks at you plainly, honestly and with the greatest transparence. It hurts like that because you think you could get it, that you had the power to do so, but you bleed and you scratch because you are powerless.
There is nothing here but a recognition that forces have intently succeeded in creating fear in my heart, the sort of fear so that I have willingly placed that stone in my throat to choke upon. In these years and in this time, the loudest bullies have again achieved their purpose.
Even now they know that I am trying once more, that for the next passages, I will grow tired, falter and be satisfied with the manifestation, only so that I will wake in the morning and destroy these words.
Had my mother and father known what a waste of time I have become, I’m sure they would have cashed the checks long ago for blue chips or lycopene-producing tomato plants or conflict-free diamonds or pharmaceutical companies that kill people. The fact that they didn’t is neither mystifying nor mysterious. I simply can never truly understand what they struggled so hard for because there is nothing in my universe to compare it against.
In the vacuumed gentle spaces lit by aged fluorescent lights, we mumble on about sympathy and empathy, but my generation has never had to actually feel what those that came before us have had to feel, and the generation rising up after me gushingly nods in the reassurance of a comprehension provided by yet another first-person shooter filled with Nazis and jackboots. To suggest that the human condition is relative to the challenges of the moment is to insult the people who consequence of true conflict.
Only the upturned root of youth must feel this urge. And even then they lack that urgency, that gripping sense of palpitatious pursuit that is streaked upon the golden glimmering edges of dragonfly wings, twitching their last twitches in the fades of a setting autumn sun. In the modern panic, caged by my thoughts, caged by my clothes, trapped in brown stained dirty windows and locked down by the mucus-filled crap in my lungs; at least in another time I'm shown that people would at least have neckties to loosen, a gesture no longer even having meaning beyond the metrosexual billboards that surround me. I'm absolutely terrified, reaching, grasping, pawing for an exit, trying so hard to smile through it all. I need to throw out all of the brittle plastics. I want to run to the curbside and bring it all back inside. I try to play all of my MP3's at once. I want to format my senses. I'm my own psychic and voyeur. I see nothing.
But truly, in the end we cannot win. For he has always been there, sitting in the middle of the room, calmly, patiently, without flinching or breaking any sweat even if he could. When our steps were lighter, we leaped across his lap, bumped into him, cried and laughed in our ignorance, screaming out songs of joy and pain. In moments, every slowly, we became aware of his presence amongst us, and yet he was still merely an outline or a shadow that we blocked out with whatever we had in our hands, whether it was a book, the weekend newspaper or a fabulous set of warm tits gently swinging in front of us. All the time however, he has gradually come into sharper focus: each time our bodies failed, each time our bruises became more noticeable or took longer to heal, each time our eyes had trouble focusing on anything else, he became clearer. And then there is the moment we realize that he has the greatest patience, greater than any saint, greater than the sun waiting to one day embrace the earth. In our wild revulsion we gather our fears, eat our children and lash out like small dogs; we bark and yip with false confidence, backtracking fearfully when we see that he is unmoved, as still as the day he got there, which seems to be forever because our faltering memories don’t recall when that day was. Some grow tired of waiting while others watch with trepidation as every last excuse for greeting him slips away. And then he rises, so quickly and suddenly, with a smooth grace of movements that we swear we have seen before; and before we even have time to think about being scared, he’s up and has left the room. And so have we.
Returning to those long turned-over journalistic roots of my high school days, I recently had the privilege of talking to a colleague, Holly McRann, on the subject of the birth defect of her left hand.
While she confessed to being a little nervous at having to think about what to say, I never told her how nervous I was in interviewing her. With such a sensitive topic, I knew that I had to be well prepared. On the day of the interview, I was skittish and the armpits were humidifying my shirt. Despite the initial jitters, I found my voice and she found hers. Holly spoke with her down-to-earth plain speak and quirky sense of humour. I listened and then I wrote.
Thanks must go out once again to Holly McRann for helping me to get such a high from this stuff; as usual, the 'what-ifs' about my life and career kick in but I know that it's much more fun as a hobby than as a job. Check out amateur journalism at its finest here.
A colleague of mine died yesterday morning, at work, about 200 meters from me, most likely at the moment he fainted and his body struck the cold, hard, granite landing of that corner stairwell. I was not there. I did not see him. I was not there when my friends and co-workers rushed to his side, attempted CPR and escorted him to the hospital.
He was not a close friend of mine, and though our community here is relatively small and the lines between the fraternal and the collegial are blurred, the moments of deep connection did not occur. It is that way sometimes, and I could never pretend that it was any other. I feel privileged to have had those chances of friendly banter and the good cheer of a joke in the hallways.
It is also no lie that we share that common bond of all humanity, the one we are so often reminded of and the one that we so often forget. Those who come into this world, will at one point leave it. And knowing that, we must not be callous or indifferent, but strive to live to the fullest extent that our powers allow. Like so many before him, he has reminded us once again that we must, no matter how difficult, cherish each second of unhindered breath, each victory against the inevitable. We must not restrain our love for our friends, and we must forgive our enemies. For when that day comes, it will likely not be of our choosing. Our debts must be repaid because we will leave our friends and loved ones bereft of something greater than the material. Rest in peace, my friend.
Long discussed and proposed at various times among my photographic friends, a website dedicated to our amateur photography and professional geekiness is now up in a very infant state: http://sites.google.com/site/thefotogeeks/
I had originally thought about going it alone by extending photography into this blog, but when I realized that it was JUST TOO BIG, then it bled over onto another site.
Gradually throughout the day of creating this thing, I realized then that whatever feeble attempts I have ever made towards artistic/creative photography would never have been possible with the feedback, support and gentle cajoling of the likes of Blake, Kevin and Paul.
Like many side projects, this one will probably suffer as life decides to bombard my time, my work and my play. Still, I'm willing to give it a go if they are.
I really should stop mocking adults who enjoy Disney cartoons. If smoking and drinking are legal (and marijuana and heroin are almost legal), then who's to say that it's wrong to be hooked on cans of syrupy, song-filled side characters with foreign accents and overly handsome, baritone heroes? Romance is equal in its cost and potential for destruction when compared to any other drug. I'm just a little miffed that nobody bothered to give me the straight dope.
Cigarettes were once billed as being healthy. Any current film that takes up the banner in the war on tobacco will have a black and white clip from the 1950s showing a white-coated actor playing a doctor who will suck on a fag, flash a mouth full of teeth and describe how his low-tar cigarette is good for him. Wine makers try to convince us that sour grapes not only help to embarrass us at parties but can help us live longer to apologize for the damage. Marijuana kills brain cells, heroin will just plain kill you, but good ol' romance is responsible for a litany of destruction: divorce, depression, murder, suicide, STDs, war and of course, getting addicted to other drugs. If somebody had just simply told me that "falling in love" was a type of physio-psychological-chemical dependence, things would have been a lot easier.
Now it was true I didn't ask or even if I had or did, I probably wouldn't have gotten the answer that I wanted. My parents never gave any information even remotely close to what it was all about. I knew if your parents smoked, you'd probably smoke; but on this matter, I could never fathom the random musings of God that put my parents together. Luckily around the time I was graduating, my father did check up on me. He asked, "So you know about sex, right? They taught you in school?" I nodded. "Good." He then joined into a nodding which was tinged with an assuring hue.
The best part about love as a drug is its you still get a kick out of it even when it goes bad. You can remember the funniest time you got high, but you can't remember anything after being completely blotto. I can however, remember every time I've been turned down. There is always that moment, the twist, the increasing pitch of the faltering airplane propeller, the turn of the screw in the stomach, the forming of the 'o' on the lips. Hours, days and possibly weeks later, I am replaying the tragicomedy of it before my friends. I'll remember each break-up and at various times afterwards I'll forget the bad parts and remember the good, cheerfully and blissfully bringing the glass/bong/pipe/needle towards me again.
The next time I'm at the local DVD pusher, I'll probably run into a colleague, we'll probably drone on about work and then they will gush at having found "The Little Mermaid". I'll nod, smirk, keep my mouth shut, cast my eyes downward and also think wistfully about a fish story.
