this IS my blog

published weekdays

  • negative stimuli

    As much as we like to think of ourselves as reflective and thoughtful creatures, the hard truth is that our brains are highly reactive. They are, perhaps literally, hard-wired to respond to stimuli from our senses.

    It may even be true that much of this reaction occurs outside of our conscious perception of it: visual cues give us thought, sounds that make us spin our head to look, slight variations in the terrain below our feet as we walk shift our gaits, scents wafting in the air trigger memories—or any of a hundred thousand million combinations of things we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel cause a reaction outside of our awareness of it.

    Each of these cause a cascade of neural energy through our nervous system and into some part of our brain that has been evolutionarily adapted for self preservation and to react in a way that will keep us alert and alive. 

    We probably don’t think about it enough, but I’m almost certain that the same reactivity holds true for the words and images that we watch and read. These things enter our brains and as much as we are able to logically think about them and be rational, thoughtful human computation engines about big ideas and moral philosophies, and social insights, it is also likely that these same stimuli pass through our unconscious selves and drive reactivity that we can neither sense nor control. 

    They say you are what you eat, and you probably only feel as good as the media you consume, too.

  • gossip

    Realizing that someone is talking about you behind your back can be a jarring experience.

    Realizing that two strangers are talking about you through the trees more difficult to categorize.

    I had gone for a walk in the sweltering heat.  The last few days have been marked by temperatures that are neither unexpected nor unseasonable, but definitely uncomfortable. I was out for my morning coffee and had spent a couple hours in a local cafe writing, and on my way home the thought popped into my head that I should go for a walk at the botanic gardens when I bought a pass earlier this summer. It is a beautiful park full of flowers and shaded paths and quiet, contemplative places to sit, even in the heat—maybe especially in the heat. Yet, to say that I had not thought this out nor planned accordingly was an modest understatement. I didn’t wear sunscreen, I neglected to bring my art supplies, I had not a drop of water with me, and I was dressed head to toe—literally—in black: black shoes, black shorts, a black t-shirt, and a black baseball-style cap.  My walk took me back into a sheltered garden near the far reaches of the park, and as the heat had grown over the morning my lack of preparation was catching up with me. I sat down on a bench to plan my next move.

    Set far back from the roadway, and at least twenty kilometers from the city limits, the ambiant noise there was limited and I could hear the voices carrying through the trees. Kids on summer camp field trips were laughing and shouting in the distance as they played near the edge of the pond with aquatic nets, the summer gardening staff were rustling about with their equipment whilst they pruned and watered and tended, and just past the copse of trees where I had been walking a few minutes prior some stranger was gossiping about me and having a detailed discussion about my poor choice to dress in a black wardrobe.

    They were not wrong.

  • hot and cold

    It’s sometimes easier to heat things up than it is to cool things down.

    See. I figured out why I prefer the winter to the summer. As I sit here writing this the outside temperature is climbing into the thirty Celcius range and simply existing outdoors is legitimately uncomfortable. Living in Canada I get to experience both ends of the thermometer, and six months from now I’ll no doubt be lightheartedly complaining that there is ice on the windows and how cold it is outside. In fact, I was sitting in this exact seat in this same cafe on the coldest day in January of this year when the glass a foot away from me layered in a thick coat of frost seemed to be slurping the heat right through my sweater and leaching the warmth out of my skin. 

    Yet, in this heat I am reminded that we seem to have many more options to warm ourselves up than we do to cool ourselves down.

    In the winter I can turn up the heat, put on a sweater, bundle up on the couch with a blanket and watch television, tug a toque down over my ears, or even go for a run and work up a warm sweat.

    In the summer we crank the air conditioning, turn on the fans, splash ourselves with cool water, eat a lot of ice cream and run from puddle of shade to puddle of shade—but at the end of the day it just seems more difficult to maintain that thing we call comfortable.

    In the last week we’ve not only been thinking about turning down the air temperature, but we’ve been hearing a lot about turning down the political heat, too.  I think the same sort of axiom applies: it’s sometimes easier to heat things up than it is to cool things down. 

    Not that we can’t do both.

    Heck, we’re a fairly advanced technological civilization that has stepped foot on the moon: heating and cooling technology should be a piece of cake, right? It doesn’t change the basic fact, though, that pulling energy out of any system—the air or politics—is just plain trickier than putting more energy into it.

  • pet-ships

    Shit happens.

    This is a truth universally acknowledged by dog owners all around the world and all through time. 

    And when shit happens, it is almost always the responsibility of the owner of the dog from which the shit happened to bend down, pinch one’s nose, and scoop that poop into a bag and off the sidewalk.

    In 2024 the most common method to accomplish this task is by unspooling a small biodegradable plastic bag from a roll that one must always carry in one’s pocket when walking the aforementioned canine.  The bag is usually fiddly and awkward, especially when the recently relieved pooch is excited to move along and continue the walk, but with practice finding the opening on the lateral end of said bag can be swiftly achieved. One plunges one’s hand into the bag’s interior, slightly inflating it and with another practiced motion creates an improvised fingerless glove from the hair-thin plastic. The warm deposit, laying there in the grass or snow can be clawed from the ground, inoffensively swallowed by the bag as the slightly-embarassed owner inverts the bag in its entirety and turns the outside of the bag holding the fresh shit into the sealed inside of the bag containing the same, sometimes holding up for a casual inspection. A pinch or a twist of the open end is enough to complete the task, but many people choose to tie a small single knot to contain the excrement from the rest of the universe.

    If all this sounds mundane and simple, imagine one’s horror to discover even as one is standing there watching the reality of shit happen, that one has inadvertantly left that little roll of bags at home sitting on the table.

    And then imagine the immense relief to see me, walking along with my dog whom you recognize from previous friendly encounters in the park, and whom is happy and eager to bum you a fresh bag from my roll.

    In such ways enduring pet friendships are certainly forged.

  • sum total words

    You have a finite number of words in you. 

    Oh, sure, that finite number may be huge.

    But it is finite.

    And there is absolute truth in the notion that every word you say or write removes from the remining tally one more word and brings you one word closer to the sum total of every word that you have sad or written and will ever say or write.

    Should this thought paralyze you or make you rethink each of those words?

    On the contrary. This notion should implore you spend every word that you can and get those words out into the universe sooner to be enjoyed, cherished, listened to or read sooner. You shouldn’t hesitate to send as many words as possible now—today, tomorrow, and then again every day after that—to grind down from the list of words you have left and spend every syllable in your due with raw abandon. You must do this because the more those words swirl and whirl around the world, through the eyes, ears, and fingertips of anyone who might hear or read them, the sooner their effects can be enjoyed, compounded, and folded back to you in a vast loop of feedback and communication. The sooner their value propigates. The sooner you will feel their purpose and effect.

    The list of your words in is in of course fininte, but surely none of us know what that total number will come to until at the end our days and maybe into our last moments, we’ve typed our last keystroke or muttered our last gasp.

    Thus, I implore you—don’t let that number come up short.