malanayonaise

I will buy a video camera. This will give my life meaning.

(Lies, Lies, Lies.)

Why is it that injecting meaning into my life seems more and more difficult the older I get? I know, I know, the meaning is inherent, and if I just had the discipline to sit down every day for fifteen minutes, clear my mind of any thought, and just bask in the glory of existence I'd be just FINE. But why is it I end up in front of my computer doing mindless little activities to distract myself from larger goals?

Well, because the world is in a really overwhelming position right now. (Okay, Okay, so what else is new? The fall of Rome, the plague, there's always been something HUGE going on.) But there haven't ever been this many people!! For God's sake, there are so many people in the world. SO MANY. And it makes me feel less necessary. It's so difficult to squeeze your way past the competition and convince the world that you are vital.

Malaise+Mayonnaise= my tuna sandwich.

G20, I shake my fist at you!!!

It has been said that the world is balancing above a giant campfire. Turning slowly over millions of years, and someday the Gods will taste us. Eat our broken, dead cells as tiny particles in a finely-cooked outdoor delicacy. And the Gods don’t even know what’s cooking. They just think it’s a mighty fine dinner after their day of portaging canoes, and hiking up trails. Yes, that’s right, I’m picturing the Gods as good canadian boys going for an indian-summer canoe trip on labour day. Sue me.

*****

Ever wonder if time travel and size-realm travel are intricately connected? Like if I got tiny enough, I’d actually be going back in time. Or maybe not back in time, maybe just to a parallel universe....

This is fiction, and -

***** THIS IS A FUTURISTIC RECONSTRUCTION of a dystopia in canada ***** and it was written in response to the G20 protests in Toronto.  It’s called “G20, I shake my fist at you!”

I was at the protest yesterday and something happened to me.  Call it delusion, but I swear I saw three angels pointing at me from behind a cloud.  They seemed to be huddled together, like a group going tiger-watching at the zoo, and I could see one of their fingers pointing just beyond the edge of the cloud.  Simultaneously, a cop’s baton hit the back of my head, and I was out cold.
When I woke up I was in a cage.  Wait, let me rephrase that.  I was in a giant warehouse with garish orange lighting, and salivating cops waiting with bated breath for any of us to make the wrong move. That’s right, it wasn’t just me in that warehouse with the cops.  There were hundreds, if not thousands of my fellow activists, caged up like dogs at the SPCA.
This had happened before, many times.  The first time it happened we had all kept our spirits up, singing protest songs, and being defiant, until the early morning hours brought us such a lack of clarity from loss of sleep and crummy food that we sang softer, and less often.  We were let out quickly.  There was a media frenzy, a class action law-suit, an uproar.  That was years ago.
Nowadays the cops round us up at every small protest and keep us in that warehouse indefinitely.  A method for containment of the rebellious masses.  They know we’re almost harmless, but there are millions more of us than there are of them, so they keep their duckies in a row, so to speak.  
I remember talking to my colleague earlier that day:
The public is too busy trying to make ends meet to be able to give two shits about the possibility of a revolution, he said.  
Ironically, the media call us communists, when we are fighting for freedom of speech, I snorted back, A culture so devoid of spiritual practice created the perfect circumstance for every high-functioning, self-serving intelligent sociopath to rise to the top and dominate.  But how can its citizens complain when they still muddle around with no connection to their higher spirits?  

But then Tom, while eating his apple, had said, Buddhism could be nothing more than a mechanism of escape for a mind under considerable duress. Complacency and forgiveness don’t change the values of a society, they sustain them.

Unless our society is perpetually unforgiving, I retorted.

I hear all of this familiar dialogue in my head as I wait for my processed cheese sandwich like an eager five-year old waiting for ice-cream.  I hate how my hunger works against my convictions.

I yell silently in my head:
People think we’re crazy even when we tell them that it’s their tax dollars financing internationally organized crime!
And I tell them, your government’s actions greatly effect your lives! I know you don’t see it, because it is hidden cleverly in overly stylized language, forever allowing blame to be passed around the government’s table like crappy fruitcake at a christmas party.

And maybe you assume that there is some kind of legal corner, or economic term that you are just not educated enough to grasp.  Maybe you feel a little dumb for not understanding the situation at the level that the politicians seem to, and boy do you feel tired from a long day of work.  And then, suddenly, a new piece about celebrity getting arrested for a D.U.I. comes on the news, and the mental investigation of the possibility of change has ended.
Were we always this way?  We don’t revolt unless there’s nothing to eat?  And what if there’s plenty to eat, but the food is filled with harmful chemicals, bizarre modifications, moral-compromising methodologies of development, cancer-causing mutations, heart-clogging, body-scratching blister-makers that give you small symptoms early on in order to justify the larger illnesses they will cause sometime in the not-so-distant future?

Together behind the bars, we sing- Oh Canada, We stand on guard for thee.
And still the cops cry, “We are the good guys! We are not the bad guys!”
And still we remained wet, broken, hungry and afraid to continue to speak our minds.

For quite some time we had felt that revolution should be in the air.  But we, as a country, never rose to the occasion. We were too distracted by the mesmerizing lights of prosperity.

And what did we expect, when the very nature of our entire economic system was built on the principle that selfish motivations will churn the wheels of innovation.  What did we expect, when greed was all around us, and celebrated for its particular tastes, and snobbery. Delicacies were the norm.  Vanity was a value to strive towards.  If gratification wasn’t instantaneous, we’d throw a tantrum, and the natural world was measured by, and for, its resources.   And anything we had, someone else wanted, so we thought we must defend it and protect it.  And any new luxury somebody else acquired was something worth striving for.  And we need more nukes than that guy.  And we need so many nuclear bombs that their exponential potential exceeded anything imaginable, even by the human being with the largest bank account.

And late at night, all of the pot heads wondered to themselves if they were just being paranoid, or if it really was the end of the world.

We stopped trusting each other.  We no longer believed in each other’s souls.  

And all the jokes on TV were dick jokes.  As in the jokes a dick would make.

And soon life became a joke that a dick would make.  

Please don’t let Canada become a joke a dick would make.