The Lifetime Under-Achievement Awards.

A proud moment.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you…thank you.

Revelation and enlightenment doesn’t come easily, and to some, it never comes at all.

And yet in a few short years of tenure on this rinky-dink little planet, it has been my good fortune to receive at least a modicum of both.

In a brief Shakespearean aside, I would especially like to thank those who were dragged here by their spouses, quite against their will, and I appreciate that, I really do. I will keep my remarks as brief as possible for your sakes as well as my own.

Okay, here we go then.

I am among the most fortunate of men. But a person, one such as I, doesn’t get where they are today without a lot of help from a lot of good, bad, and indifferent people over the years.

This is my opportunity to thank all of them, and I intend to make the most of it. Such opportunities are rare, unless one is even more truly blessed than one such as I.

I would like to thank my mother and father. I would like to thank my grandparents, and my ancestors, who go all the way back to Pliny, (the Even Younger, not the famous historian or his dad) if you believe the geneologists, many of whom are dead now. (My ancestors, I mean, and of course all the Plinys. Not the geneologists. Some of them are still with us.)

Honestly, I almost said gynecologists, but that is clearly not right, is it, ladies and gentlemen?

I know better than that.

I would like to thank the Ministry of Community and Social Services, the Ontario Disability Support Program, and the Government of the Province of Ontario Task Force on Life-Long Poverty.

What? What’s this?

They don’t have one?

Silly me. I thought they did, or at least, that they must have one by now. But let’s move on.

I would like to thank the Department of Labour Standards, and Ben Dover Construction of Hamilton Ontario, as well as their subdidiary, Scheibe’s Bricklaying Services.

I would like to thank the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, the Sarnia-Lambton Housing Authority, (what a lousy bunch of fucks) and the Bluewater Mental Health Association. I would like to thank the Ontario Hospital Insurance Program and Dr. Pierre d’Elegance, of Main Street in Burlington, Ontario.

Whoever would have guessed that a back injury required treatment, or, at a minimun, X-rays and some documentation.

Ah, well, you live and you learn. Live and learn, ladies and gentlemen.

I must especially take the time to thank the good folks, my former neighbours down on Sigourney St. You taught me what it means not to be quite, er, quite.

I would like to thank the Provincial Court of Ontario, as well as Sarnia Police Services and their Crime Stoppers Rat-Off-A-Buddy Program. I would like to thank the good people down at the Inn of the Good Shepherd and the Salvation Army, and of course the people at the St. Vincent De Paul.

You picked me up when I was down, and then fed me, and then let me drop when the next guy came in the door.

An important lesson in life there, ladies and gentlemen.

I would like to thank Shank, and Squiggly, the Wiggler, and Bumstead, Little Baby Jesus, and all the ships at sea.

More than anything, I would like to thank Miss Hellmore, my Grade Seven teacher at St. Bent-dict’s elementary school on Joak Street, which as you may know, is right across the street from where Commander Chris Hadfield (Yay!) went to school, that is to say Queen Elizabeth II elementary school.

I would like to thank my mentor, Monsignor Notte-Trudeau, for helping me with the anger management, and I would also like to thank all the kids I grew up with; for to grow up without kids to grow up with would be a fine kettle of fish indeed.

(Are we okay for time? How are we on time?)

The producer says we’re good.

Hmn.

That’s about all I had to say.

OH!

I would like to thank every cat I ever had, for you brought some love and joy and if you will forgive me, something soft, warm and cuddly into my life.

I would also like to thank the half-dozen or so foster kids who passed through our household in fairly regular succession.

You helped make a home, until you went and did something stupid and wandered off and got hit by a car, providentially bleeding to death in my arms. (I am referring to the cat, ladies and gentlemen.) As to where all those other brothers and sisters may be today, that is a very good question. And I sure am glad you asked it.

I would like to thank the good old boys at the Paranoid Club, and of course I would like to thank my first girlfriend—such compassion. Such compassion, ladies and gentlemen.

I think she really did love me, otherwise why stick around so long?

I ask you that.

I’m sure I have a Kleenex or a hanky or something in my pocket. Ah, yes, here we are. It’s just that the lights are so bright.

(Sniffle, sniffle.)

Oh, boy, here we go again.

(Drinks water.)

That always helps, eh, ladies and gentlemen?

So. Anyhew.

So where do we go from here? Well, there is a wet bar, and I know we’re all thinking about that, but more than that, ladies and gentlemen, we will stride boldly (or baldly if you prefer) into the future, where the poor will have more microwaves and the rich will finally corner the market on sanctimony.

(Am I done yet?)

The producer is shaking his head.

Well, frankly, ladies and gentlemen, so am I.

No, literally, quite frankly, and I know how you hate it when I say that, but I really am shaking my head.

Normally, I wouldn’t join any club that would have someone like me as a member, which places this evening among the great mysteries of life—that’s right, ladies and gentlemen—I’m not even a member! A bit of an oversight on the part of the selection committee, but there you go—no one is perfect, eh, ladies and gentlemen?

(Except maybe the bourgeoisie.)

Yes, it makes a fine testament to your generousity and thoughtfulness, and ah, puts everything in a whole new light, doesn’t it.

Did I just say tit?

Not like me, I have to admit, but it has happened before.

I shall try to do better in the future.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, the producer is making throat-cutting motions so I guess that’s it for me.

Thank you for being here to share my moment of triumph, for these moments come all too seldom in life and it is always good to have someone there for you. It’s nice when someone actually sees it happen.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t matter nearly so much, would it?

And now we’ll turn the microphone back to our genial host—almost said ‘genital’ there, but I caught it in time.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mister Butch Padorcik, your master of ceremonies and a well-known local raconteur, drunkard, and a bit of a bully in his off hours.

And last but not least, I must thank you, Butch. Thank you. I have learned much from you, sir.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Bye, everybody—and with luck we’ll see you again next year, unless I can come up with a valid-sounding excuse.

(Dutiful applause.)

Here’s a song for you lovely ladies and gentlemen. Yes, the gentlemen are lovely too! (You know who you are.)

It’s called Howl, performed by Beware of Darkness. Either that, or it’s called Beware of Darkness…by Howl. I didn’t write it, but it’s still pretty good.

Still struggling.

Months later, I’m still struggling with depression. In this post, I talked about how depression is like night and day.

What happened? Winter is very hard for me. It’s dark, it’s cold, the days are short and the nights are long. There’s not much to do. I don’t go cycling, swimming, or walking in the woods.

All I do is to work, and at one time that work gave me hope for the future.

Then after seven months of crap, where I struggled with depression every stinking day, spring was dark, wet, cold, miserable, and it went on forever.

This has been the crappiest summer on record in recent years in terms of cold, wet, dark, windy and cloudy conditions…

Some little thing triggers depression, it doesn’t even have to be much. I think I was at a low ebb anyway, since my dad and my grandmother died last fall. Grief has its own logic.

Thinking about my father always brings sadness. My grandmother was over a hundred years old, perhaps that is the difference. She wanted to die—ever since my grandfather died, she prayed for God to take her. For her, death came as blessed relief.

Depression is a physical illness, with physical symptoms.

In spite of that depression, I wrote another novel, my eleventh. That novel has been submitted to a major publisher. The work is the only thing that keeps me going sometimes. Yet there are times when I don’t want to come home.

I have to go home, otherwise I don’t eat and have nowhere to sleep. The thought of going home, working on a book or story, one that is not going to change or even improve my life, is tough sometimes. And yet it’s all I have. It’s all I fucking have.

I have some thoughts on the subject of book submissions. The odds of that novel being accepted are very slim—about one chance in ten or twenty thousand. It will take eight or nine months to get a rejection slip, and the number of major publishers who do not require an agent is small. It’s a short list. It could take years at that rate to go through all of them, and the odds don’t improve in any way.

Smaller publishers have fewer production slots to begin with. They tend to be more conservative, they tend to take fewer chances with the corporate wallet on new, unknown and untested authors.

My books are always just a little bit different. They’re looking for the next Harry Potter, and I don’t write that sort of thing.

And when all else fails, the specter of do-it-yourself vanity self-publishing looms before me.

You know what I’m talking about: Amazon, Smashwords, Nook’s Pub-It, Createspace, etc.

It is clearly vanity publishing—for to publish in vain is what it is for most of us. Some of us don’t have much ego left. It’s all been smashed out of us.

I get to stand on a big cliff and pitch my book into the black hole that is the fate of most self-published authors. I get to read enthusiastic blog posts by newbie authors, who are brimming with confidence and have no idea of what they are talking about, and then there are the blog posts by successful authors, brimming with confidence and who have no idea of what they are talking about.

I’m sick of it all. Unfortunately, I’ve spent thirty years leading up to this writing, this ability to write well.

It seems like a terrible waste of time.

I have never considered what else I might do.

That was clearly an oversight, but nothing else really interests me. I’m fifty-four years old, after all.

See, here’s one of my problems: book cover images. It might cost as little as $35.00 for a pro marketing image, an image that will be virtually indistinguishable from ten thousand other marketing images in a given genre. Good covers help to sell bad books. We all know that.

Unfortunately, I’ve been on a provincial disability pension—one that is thirty-five percent below the poverty line, for the last sixteen years. I’ve lived in pain, poverty and deprivation for over twenty years. I can’t afford twenty or thirty marketing images, all of which would have to be paid for by subsequent books sales. I would still have to go without food, or make some sacrifice to come up with the money in the first place. I’m already lining up at food banks three or four times a month. I would like to know where is the slack in my budget, where I could cut something out and get that money in a reasonable time-frame.

A better solution would have been to use my Smashwords royalties, along with a GST cheque and a Trillium Benefit cheque, and buy a $500.00 computer, one that has a minimum of Pentium IV, so that it is capable of running Adobe CS-6. I would have to go through the learning curve, and then I could create my own covers.

Kick-Starter and other crowd-funding sources would be deeply misunderstood by the Ontario Disability Support Program, and so it’s unsuited to my needs. They would consider it ‘income,’ even though I might not have access to the funds and the funds would of course be dedicated to those marketing images, (a legitimate business expense if almost any other person in the whole wide world were to do it.) I can’t do it on the sly, as the world is full of rats, and I have been subjected to trolling in some small degree in the past. It’s not worth losing my pension over it, and then having to fight the ODSP for the next two or three years while they wriggle, squirm, and force me to prove my innocence—a perversion of justice in anyone’s book.

Unfortunately, Smashwords decided to withhold 30 % of my earnings in taxes. This is a bit odd as they cheerfully admit to having my ITIN, (U.S. tax number) on file. So no new computer for me.

It took me four fucking years to earn that computer. Unfortunately, Smashwords knew better.

The neat thing about depression is when it flips over into anger mode. When I think of all the crap people keep bottled up inside, out of politeness, or not wanting to draw negative attention to themselves, for surely few people will understand, (or admit to understanding,) it’s no wonder people go postal sometimes.

They can’t deal with it.

They keep it inside just a little too long, maybe.

When that happens, all bets are off.

Here I am looking at another long winter without much to do except…fucking write, in the rather forlorn and unrealistic hope that it will, eventually, help to change my life. And with every year that goes by, my time on this Earth gets shorter, and shorter, and more precious and valuable with every passing day. I despise wasting my precious time. I fucking loathe wasting my time, ladies and gentlemen.

I’m also a bit tired of being alone all the time.

Surely I deserve so much better than this.

***

All my books and stories are currently free from iTunes and other fine online bookstores.

https://itunes.apple.com/ca/artist/louis-bertrand-shalako/id412091968?mt=11

Snakes and ladders, bad bosses.

The world of work has an armload of promises for you.

When I got hired in the industrial door business, they made me a helper. I had never done any carpentry or welding, although I worked on my own car and had a few simple tools. They put me with Pete, a guy with exactly one year’s experience and sent us off with a handful of orders, a pickup truck, a torch and a welder. I had used a torch in high school shop—about four times as I recall.

We had a few tool bins and a few ladders. We tried not to forget anything, materials, tools, fasteners, you name it, and we made sure it was aboard the truck.

You learn a lot by doing, and a few things by watching. One time we were putting a heavy-duty wood sectional door into a pole barn outside the city. I was only a small ways up off the ground, with my feet maybe seven or eight feet above the floor. I was on an aluminum ladder with the swiveling sure-grip feet on it. With the siding on, and in a new building, there was nowhere to tie the top off. Theoretically we could have screwed something into a beam and used a bit of wire.

There must have been some grain dust on that highly-polished concrete floor. I can’t quite recall what I was doing, but whatever torque or force I applied—perhaps I might have been trying to screw something to the ceiling, to hang the back of the track on that side, but the feet slipped out and the ladder went.

Nowhere to tie off, and where's your nine-buck an hour helper?

Now a pole barn is constructed of vertical beams with narrow horizontal laths, which is what the metal siding is screwed onto. They’re one above another, set about a foot apart. The top of the ladder hit every one of them. I ratcheted down the wall, one lath at a time. I had time to think, and to enjoy the scenery. The frickin’ irony of it all. I was younger and fitter then. Like a cat, in some ways, after clambering up and down ladders and scaffolds all the time. Some big doors had catwalks above them…on a really big door, you can go across from side to side on the tops of the sections. But this was a small door. I danced on the ladder all the way to the ground, where I ended up with one leg sticking through and under it and me, and the other leg all ‘akimbo’ as they say. I had bruises all up and down both legs, and it wasn’t too good. I said a few things.

Another time we were in a brand-new, municipal trucking garage. They were going to bring the dump trucks and salt trucks indoors. It was easier to maintain them, they were less prone to theft or vandalism. Nuff said. Due to the big trucks, we were installing a high-lift door, which basically goes up a couple of feet and then the tracks lay back just like the normal type. They were such nice guys. They let us use their scaffolding and everything as the guys putting in the sprinklers weren’t there that day. It was their idea and everything. I’m not sure if Pete and I had used them much before that.

So my buddy welded some angle iron across between two trusses, and hung another bar on there. When I told him it was straight, he tacked her on. One side of the tracks were hung temporarily. I unlocked the six-inch wheels, all four corners, as he was telling me to push him across to the other side.

Running down the middle of that truck garage, as yet still under construction—hence the new door and stuff, was a twelve by eighteen-inch concrete trench, covered for its full length by twelve-inch spruce planks laid in there just so, on the little rabbit they had for the purpose. All that melting snow, and they were going to wash trucks in one end of the building. The metal gratings hadn’t arrived on the site yet, probably still being fabbed up in town or just down the road in some welding shop. And when the two far wheels hit the plank the thing split right down the middle. The feet dropped into the trench, and including my buddy, it was a half of ton of dead weight. My end tipped up. The force and the leverage might have been enough to catapult me up into the rafters, but the scaffold had stringers across the bottom and they hit the edge. The far vertical risers hit the far side of the trench. My stomach was on the bottom cross-stringer, and at that time I weighed about one hundred and eighty-five pounds. There was a long moment when I knew there was nothing more I could do. But she didn’t go over. My buddy was saying a few things, and his body didn’t go plummeting past me…

“Hey, Pete! Are you okay?” Finally four fingers clapped over the end of the planks he was on.

The other hand came up and over and clamped on. The top of his head appeared and then his eyes. He said a few things, I said a few things.

Theoretically, we had been in and out of industrial plants many times, and we had sat through any number of safety meetings, and safety ratings, and I guess you could say we had seen all the film strips in the industry.

We still did dumb things. Even when we thought we knew something, but no one saw fit to mention the drainage trench. It was safe for their purposes. There’s no telling why we sort of missed seeing it, never even comprehending it as a possible threat.

No matter if you’ve got thirty years in the industry, just because you have experience, doesn’t mean the last guy did or the next guy will.

I don't care how much you make. It's not worth getting killed over.

You see, one time I was working for these bricklayers. We were on a building, six stories, in Hamilton. We were using two sections of scaffolding, with planks across the centre gap to bridge and make it three sections long. I built the thing myself, all those years of experience you know, and it was okay. I was slugging mortar, and carrying twelve-inch heavy blocks, with another guy, and we were keeping three bricklayers going. We were doing okay and would make it through another fine summer’s day—at nine bucks an hour.

I went across to bring a guy something and one of the planks just let go. It cracked right in the middle. What you don’t know can kill you, because apparently some guys, who were in fact laid off for stupidity, had been asked to clean off the roof one day, a few weeks beforehand.

The silly buggers decided the quickest way to do that was to yell down and clear the area, then chuck it all off the roof. I’m thinking the plank that had my name on it was probably one of them planks they threw off there.

What the hell are you going to do? By the time the boss, the foreman and a lawyer had a go at me, I was ready to sign anything, even a false incident report.

They said I hurt my back ‘lifting blocks.’ The boss’s kid was a lawyer (Snakes and Ladders—get it?) and I was in a lot of pain. It never occurred to me to get a lawyer of my own.

They promised to help me with the Worker’s Compensation forms. They promised to take me back when I felt better. Of course the first thing Worker’s Comp wanted to see was the incident report—and it didn’t make a lot of sense considering what I put on my application form. But it was too late.

Why did I sign it? Otherwise the place would have been knee-deep in inspectors and they would probably have shut the job down, and then everyone would be out of a job. That’s what they said. And my brother worked there too. See, we never get any training in how to handle situations like that. But my employer clearly did have some previous experience, didn’t he?

Yeah.

Like a fool, I signed the damned thing.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

END

D-Day Remembered.



Canadian troops come ashore on Juno Beach.



D-Day means different things to different people, yet history is a generally agreed upon thing. Children are taught the story of those who lay in Flanders Fields, and most adults perceive dangers represented by various ‘isms’ – Imperialism, Fascism, nationalism, communism.

When taken to extremes, when men cannot be checked by reason, force ultimately

becomes the only answer.

In 1914, Canada went to war in joyous outbursts of patriotic fervour.

In 1939, Canadians went to war of necessity. The alternative: enslavement of the

world by Nazis.

In 1950, the country went to war with a new sense of purpose and national identity, (we get this shit out of history books) part of a United Nations effort to ensure that aggression would not pay.

Today our Armed Forces have developed an important role in keeping world peace

when called upon.

To the cynic, Nov 11, Remembrance Day here in Canada, may be about ‘the brave lads who died to keep India British.’

To most it is about recognizing sacrifice and perhaps, in some sense, validation of our own values.

And we all know someone.

Alec Ambroise

Alec Ambroise joined up and served in Europe in the Signal Corps (later transferring to the RCAF).

Would anyone like to be on a troop ship in the mid-Atlantic? He was there. A rumour flashed through the tightly packed men below decks. The Bismarck has broken out and is roaming the seas. The ship makes radical course changes for the next few hours, which comforts no one.

Another uncle, Peter Davidson of Strathroy, was wounded in Italy. The Italian campaign was one of bloody attrition, with house-to-house, hand-to-hand fighting, accentuated by rough terrain and atrocious winter mud.

My great uncle, John Farr, was with the Canadian Third Division, from Normandy to northern Germany at the surrender. His pay book shows his place of birth as Dawn Township. He was a farm boy and likely didn’t finish high school. He was trained as a rifleman and with a light machine gun, also as an artilleryman and signaler.

Yet another uncle, Frank Nalepa of Port Huron, Michigan, stormed ashore on Omaha Beach. It was a bloodbath and the attack nearly failed in the first half-hour. He was lucky, he got through. But 4,649 young American boys became casualties that day on Omaha and Utah beaches.

They are all gone now. When the last Second World War or Korean War veteran passes, it will be the end of an era. It will become a dusty memory, stacked on forgotten library shelves.

I suspect they all came home sadder but wiser, more committed to living life to the fullest.

We take so much for granted. Maybe that's the real message here. We take it a little too much for granted.

If prophecies are self-fulfilling, let us believe that Canadians will continue to serve with honour, integrity and distinction.

This country is a beacon of hope for starving, oppressed masses of humanity in other lands.

Let us remember that too.

Canadian family values are really just corporate values.

90 Sparks St., Ottawa location of the Royal Bank of Canada. (SimonP.)

Family values are really corporate values…

We  live in substantially nastier economic times than our parents did, with all of their high regard for authority and social customs. From 1990 to 2000, families in the top 10 percent income bracket saw incomes increase an average of 14.3 percent.

Families in the middle brackets saw incomes increase by a measly 0.3 percent, and Canadians in the lowest brackets saw their incomes reduced an average of 0.7 percent.

In October 2000, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced, “We must reduce the gap between rich and poor. We have always said this…” In 1990 the average income of the top ten percent was $161,000 and by 2000 it was $185,000. The lowest ten percent’s average income in 1990 was $10,341 and by 2000 it had only increased an average of $80. The top ten percent increased their earnings by over 295 times that of the poor.

In 2004, the top 20 percent of Canadian families earned 42 percent of all market income. The bottom 20 percent of families in this country earned a microscopic 3.6 percent. The 1990s saw an unexpected increase in numbers (of people, not income,) for the low-income groups, even as unemployment fell.

A report issued in November 2006 by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows that, “If the rich keep getting richer and the poor getting poorer, Canada will end up more like the U.S. Approximately 65 percent of those polled believed that most of the benefit from Canada’s recent economic growth has gone to the richest Canadians, and hasn’t benefited most Canadians.” The facts bear this out.

The Globe and Mail stated in May 2007, “It is a mark of a healthy society when incomes grow and no one is left behind. The system is working…” Once again the print media in this country reveal their strong ultra right-wing bias and a complete disregard for the truth. They don’t even seem to read their own papers.

In recent years the top income families took home an average of 13 times the income of the lowest ten percent of families. This compares with 5.6 times in Finland and is twice as much as the average in the Nordic countries. In 2004 the gap between rich and poor in this nation was greater than at any other point in our history.

A poll that came out in 2005 reported, “While a record number of Canadians believed that the country was in a period of strong economic growth, the majority say they are not receiving any of the benefits. Only 11 percent of Canadians believe their household income will keep pace with the cost of  living.” (Pollarca/Globe & Mail.)

In The Rich and the Rest of Us, issued by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, economist Armine Yalnizan showed that 40 percent of Ontario families with children saw little or no income growth for the last thirty years.

Countries that do better than us in income distribution include Hungary, Croatia, Slovakia, Mexico, Turkey, Poland and the U.S.

Norway, Sweden, Japan, Austria and others do a much better job than Canada.

Here on the National Newswatch website is an important article on how tax cuts represent a ‘race to the bottom,’ and how the gap between rich and poor is not just widening, but at an accelerating pace.

ING, owner of Intact Financial, & Trafalgar Insurance,
Grey Power, etc. is a global corporation. (MapLab.)

Payoff.

(British Formula Ford. Wiki Commons 3.0)



I want it all. You remember me. I was the kid who wanted to be a professional scuba diver, and a private detective, and a cowboy, or rather, a gunfighter/rancher. I was the kid who wanted that 1967 Triumph Spitfire, for only $350.00 way back when—I was sixteen, and I had my license. I’m the kid who wanted to play ball, and hockey, and God knows what all. I’m the kid who wanted the parents to drop everything and scrape up $1,400.00 for the Jim Russell Racing School.

Yeah, I’m the kid that wanted to be an archaeologist. As I recall, I was going win the Medal of Honour, and I’m the kid who wanted to invent his own religion.

I’m the kid who had tennis lessons, and swimming lessons, and sailing lessons, and Saturdays at the YMCA climbing up ropes and jumping over saddle horses, and I’m the kid with the new red bike.

I’m the kid who had those long summer vacation drives to a campground way off in the middle of nowhere, with little brother, little sister, feuding in the back seat while necks and faces became heated and voices were raised in the front seat. Some kids don’t even get that, when you think of it. Travel does broaden the mind, that much is true.

I’m the kid who sent off, long before the internet, for information on how to stake a gold claim in Northern Ontario, and I’m the kid who wanted to run off and live in a cave and feed myself with a muzzle-loading musket and black powder. I’m the kid who grew up in a house full of books, music, and adults with brains in their heads and some ideas of their own…

I’m the kid who should have taken flying lessons, I suppose. I’m the kid who was actually turned down by the recruiting office—not quite so much demand for cannon fodder back then, and I’m the kid who went off to be a newsman, and I’m the kid who went back to school fifteen times and still never finished. Yeah, I’m the guy who wanted to be a wildlife photographer, and I’m the guy who was planning to buy a sailboat and live on a desert island somewhere. I probably should have taken in a good university or two along the way, but of course I was too busy wasting time.

All that precious time.                                                                                              

I’m the kid who still has that grubby coin collection, and a few stamps. I’ve still got that pocketknife that my Uncle John left behind.

I think at some point that I made up my mind that I would never get married—otherwise, how in the hell was I going to find time to do all these other things? People just laughed. Look who’s laughing now, for surely you people are the ones doing all the interesting stuff, all of the above in fact, whereas I’m still sort of hung up on what might have been. You even got some posterity to show for it.

I suppose at some point we just have to let it go, and get on with what’s left of the rest of our lives.

You want to know something funny? I still want it all. It’s true. I even think I can have it all; I mean, when you think of all them kids around the world who will never have what I have had and enjoyed. I guess that’s maybe the lesson in all of this—shit happens and we make the best of it. Yet the streets really are paved with gold around here. I firmly believe that. It’s a question of what do you want to do?

There’s nothing stopping me from taking flying lessons, or canoeing to Belize for that matter.

It’s a question of how bad you want it, and how hard you’re willing to work for it. It’s a matter of how much you are willing to sacrifice for it. And I guess I sacrifice much for the dreams that I do still cherish.

But I will tell you this: if this really is a business, that is to say the business of writing books, which I have set myself to do, then at some point there had better be a payoff. Because anything else is just nonsense.

“Oh, the vast bulk of writer’s have unreasonable expectations.”

Yeah, they do.

But I don’t.

I think it’s a perfectly reasonable perception, and that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it through thick and thin.

Why are there so few atheists?

 (Henri Rousseau.)



Why are there so few atheists?

Atheism is the toughest religion of all. It demands much of its practitioners, not the least of which is the ditching of sentiment and a linear, logical approach to all things in life. A life which is completely subjective, based on sensations, based on raw emotions, and as some would have it, one that is hallucinatory at best. Some people believe that, or at least they say they do. They never really live that way, do they? Everything is an illusion, they say. My opinion is that therefore they cannot possibly have any knowledge, but that doesn’t hold back the tide of their opinions, does it? It’s not going to hold mine back either.

To be an atheist is to always be alone, without even God for comfort. You think about that for a minute—even the smuggest hypocrite secretly relies on God’s forgiveness, for surely He understands when no one else could. When caught, (in anything,) they hang their head in shame.

Surely they must believe at that exact moment in time. Otherwise what are you ashamed of?

Partly because of its intellectual rigour, and possibly because it claims no higher source of knowledge, law or even succor, detractors would state that atheism is completely amoral and therefore without worth. The fact is that the sacrifices demanded of the individual atheist are many. Some of them are quite onerous.

Think of a lifestyle with no Halloween, no Easter, no Christmas. Think of a belief system with no angels, no demons, no vampires, no cupids, no goblins, no spirits and no ghosts. Think of a belief system that pays no credit to miracles, accepts no divine intervention, no revelation, and has no dogma. It has no ritual, no candles and no prayers, no hymnology, no great body of organ music, no vast literature of analysis and criticism. It has no sects, no cults and no schisms—and it is my belief that these are vital to the survival and growth of any religion. We have no one to point a finger at and say, ‘This is wrong, this is immoral, this is evil, this is unjust.” We have nothing to go on and nothing to back us up.

It is a system with no priests, no interpreters, and no obscure and irrational points of crossover into another realm. We have no Heaven, no Hell. No Purgatory. No resurrection. No redemption. No sin, no guilt, not even the original kind where billions as yet unborn must pay the price of future mental slavery because of a mistake long in the past in some mystical garden.

We have no cathedrals, ladies and gentlemen. We have no mythology, no pantheon.

No cutesy fucking icons.

Think of a mind-set where empirical facts rule and the demands of the majority don’t matter because factuality, empiricism, is not a democracy, and doesn’t rely on mass opinions for its validity. Think of a belief system which doesn’t pay any heed to prejudice, sugar-coats nothing, and panders to nobody.

Atheism has no fortune cookies, no gambler’s luck and no horoscope. There are no mediums, no prophets, no visions, no speaking in tongues. There is no smoke, no incense, no magic incantations. We have no tenets of social control or persuasion. Nothing.

It is not for the masses. It promises nothing to its practitioners, and justifies nothing for its abusers. Atheism excuses no prejudice and allows for no form of discrimination which can’t be justified by some arithmetical measurement from some verifiable factual baseline.

Atheism conducts no seances, communes with no dead spirits, and accepts no superstitious folklore bearing glad tidings of future pie in the sky. It worships no ancestors. If atheism can be called a religion, which it really isn’t, it is one that has none of the pretty trappings, no spooky ceremonies, no symbols, no decorative icons on the wall that the ignorance of the perfumed masses demand and have come to expect. We have no costumes and no robes. We have no special shoes.

In a world where the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm is seen as worthy of comment by the most popular pundits, atheism doesn’t have much to offer except to say that tales where good always triumphs over evil are a bit thin on the intellectual meat and defy the reality on the ground.

What will the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm do for science fiction? Nothing. Nothing at all.

But of course that isn’t their purpose.

It is why folks take the kiddies to the next summer blockbuster film, and woe betide those who don’t, for their children are deprived of the most basic element in their education—a belief system which accepts, accommodates or even demands the fantastical. We can even justify it.

We are stimulating the children’s ‘imaginations.’

You will always do better by telling people what they want to hear. And who do those children grow into?

When grown men can’t wait to go see the warm and fuzzy Koogly-wooblies save Oscar the Penguin from The Grinch who stole Halloween from the Big Pumpkin, and are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to do it, an atheist turns away with a shudder of revulsion, and if not careful, gets trampled in the stampede of mouths, eyes and stomachs.

There but for the grace of wit and knowledge go I…what else can I say?

Some of the words, some of the basic concepts we need to express ourselves haven’t even been properly invented yet.

There is much work yet to be done. No one among us can say who is fit to lead, or even whether it’s strictly necessary. But holy crap, there’s just no way I’m going to follow.

I don’t rule out the possibility of love. If we have one rule, it would be tolerance, which implies a kind of forgiveness. What’s lacking is condemnation and retribution, a remarkable oversight by any standard. It’s a hard sell, as you can imagine.

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Also, what he said: (Guardian, U.K.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/dec/24/christmas-atheists