Online Since 1996

I first got online in 1996 because I had read an article somewhere about the emergence of online discussion boards and I thought I would like that. People from all sorts of walks of life, many countries, many ethnicities all communicating with each other. Sounded like an experience I would enjoy.

So as soon as I got online on my cheap old Windows 95 desktop I went looking for it.

The first I found was at the Utne cafe. The Utne Reader then was a print magazine that collated some of the best writing from progressive thinkers from all over the world though mostly from the US and some from Canada. The Utne Reader now is much the same but is fully digital. It's here. Back then it had a digital presence but was still primarily a print magazine. The Utne Cafe was a digital discussion board that anyone at all could join if they had a computer and a link to the web. It still exists, in a somewhat different form than it once did, and it still uses the same conferencing platform known as Motet, to my surprise. It's here.

There were people there from all over the planet but since it was an American magazine and the Web was an American invention and the people of the US bought the most computers and so on the vast majority of them were from the US.

I learned how to type on The Cafe. I still don't touch type, I'm a hunter-pecker, but The Cafe was where I learned to type well enough to express a cogent thought from time to time. I learned how to argue online and to my shame I learned how to be meanly sarcastic, snide and abusive. Because I wasn't Dana Still. I was known as Banquo's Ghost and for the next decade or so that was my online handle, my nom de plume, my nom de guerre and the name on the email address I used for everyone except my family and friends.

I was Banquo's Ghost in Utne Cafe, in Howard Rheingold's web community Brainstorms and in Kevin Drum's early political blog called Political Animal at The  Washington Monthly. That covers 1996 to about 2006.

All American based. Populated by a wider spectrum of nationalities than only Americans to be sure but still dominated by Americans, American thought structure, American preoccupations, American jurisprudence, governmental infrastructure and processes. The rare occasions when one of us non-Americans introduced something from our own spheres was almost always responded to only by the other non-Americans. Most of the Americans themselves evinced little interest in anything beyond their own borders and then only if it might impact on their lives in some way or other. And on top of that many of them showed more than a little resentment at having that brought to their attention.

In the Political Animal blog I noticed a few more Canadians than I had noticed before. Cathie from Canada, Scotian among others. Erudite, informed, passionate and very active, like me.

Then I found that there were now many more blogs north of the 49th and I began more paying attention. And commenting. Now under my first name only.

Shortly thereafter I was invited to become one of the regular bloggers at The Galloping Beaver. I accepted and for a few years we were a pretty good blog. Good writers. Strong commenters. It felt useful. Blog of the Year award and so on.

So now it's 2020 and I've been hammering away online for 24 years.

Almost a quarter of a century.

Huh.

UFO

In 1978 I was living and working in Toronto and not enjoying it very much anymore. I decided to come back to the west coast starting with a move to Regina to spend some time with my family again. I'd recently shot a national spot for Listerine where I played Harpo Marx (which the Marx family put a stop to after one cycle but that's another story) so I had a pretty good pay cheque coming and with what I had saved I knew I could swing it. So I took the train along with a couple of trunks of stuff and got to Regina in time for Christmas of 1978. I stayed with my parents over the holidays and in January of '79 moved into a little apartment in the Cathedral neighbourhood.

Fast forward several weeks and I'm working at Globe Theatre doing some play or other, I don't recall what. It was probably late February or even early March by now. The routine at The Globe was that after the show came down most of us would gather at The Copper Kettle restaurant on Scarth Street for a bite and a pint or two and then head off home. I almost always walked because it wasn't very far and those winter nights after midnight were very, very quiet in Regina in those days.

On one very cold, clear, quiet night, bundled in a huge down parka, hood up, frosted scarf wrapped around my face revealing only my eyes I walked home westward along 14th Avenue, crunching through the dry snow right in the middle of the empty street.

I looked up into the western sky and saw three lights formed into a triangle and moving. They moved around relative to each other as well as moved as a unit relative to me. The triangular formation remained a constant although it did alter it's shape, flowing from isosceles to equilateral to obtuse and so on. Always in motion.

I stood rooted to the spot in the middle of the street. looking up, and after what must have been only 15 or 20 seconds the triangular formation of lights sped off into the south western night, smaller and smaller until they winked out of sight.

That was amazing.

It gets more amazing.

That summer I accepted a contract to do two one acts plays in Banff, Chekhov's A Marriage Proposal and The Diary of Adam and Eve from Bock and Harnick's The Apple Tree. This was an attempt to get a professional company off the ground in Banff. The company transformed one of the ballrooms in the Banff Park Lodge into a theatre in the round and that's where we played. Decent enough notices, reasonable sales and massive interference from the Banff School (but that's another story).

This is where I met Jane. She was the resident costume designer at Theatre Calgary but with no summer season at TC was at liberty and took on the assistant producer gig for this. We've been together ever since.

Fast forward again. This time to November or December of '79. I've moved to Calgary from Regina. Jane's already expressing an interest in getting into film and television. I'm still wanting to get back to Vancouver and we've begun talking about all these things and more.

One clear, cold, snowless night we decide to go for a long walk around the parts of the city she likes the most. I don't remember what street we were walking along though I do remember we were walking west. I was telling Jane about the night I was walking home in Regina the year before when I saw the triangular formation of lights in the sky.

I pointed up into the south western sky saying they were just up there-

- and there they were.

Again.

As though I had, like Prospero, conjured them out of air, out of thin air.

The same triangular formation, the same flowing movement, the same everything although this time it seemed they actually remained clearly in sight for a slightly longer time before once again moving off, in flowing formation, into the south western sky, becoming smaller and smaller before they winked out of sight.

We both stood rooted to the spot this time, asking one another if that really just happened. It took a moment or ten before we continued our walk. Much more contemplatively.

Neither of us have ever seen those lights again.

The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam

One early morning, as I left home for school, in the late winter or early spring of 1963 or ‘64 I found small book, bound in soft, brown suede leather lying on the ground just outside our back yard fence. It was lying on top of, not in, the mud. I picked it up. It was no larger than my hand. On the cover, in gold coloured lettering were the words, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I had never heard of this book before that moment.

I opened it and on the first page I saw the title again followed by the words Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. 

I turned the page to find that each page contained 3 verses or as I eventually came to know them – quatrains. Three quatrains on the verso page and three on the recto. 

“AWAKE ! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo ! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.”

These were the first words I read of this little book that, unbeknown to me at that moment, was to change my life. 

I had already developed a fondness for Shakespearean language as the result of a particularly enlightened high school English teacher so the poetry I encountered in The Rubaiyat didn’t intimidate me. At least it didn’t intimidate me as language. As a philosophy or an aggregation of thought it was so new, even confronting, to my 15 year old self that it was pretty intimidating indeed. 

The only philosophy I had any familiarity with was Christianity and by the time I read the 7th quatrain I was pretty sure this Rubaiyat thing wasn’t in the least concerned with an afterlife or sobriety or repentance. All three of which were omnipresent themes, if not obsessions, in the sermons I heard from my father’s pulpit every Sunday. 

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly - and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”

This was heady stuff. 

And then quatrain 11.

“Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness -

And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”

Now the idea of Paradise itself came up for reconsideration, for heaven’s sake. Or perhaps not for heaven at all. 

By the time I got to school that morning I think I had read all 75 quatrains through, eyes down on the page as I slowly trudged through the muddy, snowy alley aware of nothing other than the words on the page, the completely novel and foreign ideas and the sheer beauty of the poetry. 

I certainly didn’t understand all of it, or even very much of it but I knew beyond certainty that I wanted to. 

For the next few months I found out as much as I could about Omar Khayyam, about this Rubaiyat of his and about Edward Fitzgerald. In those days of yore the internet was known as the Dewey Decimal System and it was kept in places known as Libraries. I found out what hedonism was and Epicureanism and Islam. I found out Fitzgerald had been something called a dilettante – I had to look it up. He’d done 5 different translations – although none of them were literal translations. He’d tried to capture what he felt was the essence of Khayyam’s meanings. Many, many years later I found cause to reflect on the essential absurdity of an 19th century English agnostic in Imperial Britain attempting to capture the essential meaning of a poem written by an 11th century Muslim mathematician and astronomer. And now, since I decided to tell this story, I’ve learned that Fitzgerald’s first self-published run of 250, published anonymously, didn’t sell a single copy until 2 years after they first arrived in the book store. By this time they’d been relegated to the penny bin where a man named Whitley Stokes bought two copies to give to Dante Rossetti and Richard Burton – who subsequently bought others to give away and the wheel turned and turned again. 

There are stanzas of The Rubaiyat that have remained engraved in my memory since I first read them that morning of my young manhood. 

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it”

After all the reading I’ve done since those days, all the study, all the conversations, after all the drama and comedy and history, the kernel that was planted in my soul that morning has remained. I don’t know what became of that copy I found. It got misplaced somewhere in the ensuing years and really, its physical presence is almost beside the point, almost doesn’t matter. 

I’ll leave you with the final 4 quatrains. When I finally shuffle off this mortal coil think of these as my last words no matter what other drivel I might utter. 

“Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose

That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close !

The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,

Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows !

Ah Love ! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits - and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire !

Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,

The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again:

How oft hereafter rising shall she look

Through this same Garden after me - in vain!

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass

Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,

And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot

Where I made one - turn down an empty Glass !”

Katherine Hepburn

Another story. 

In the latter ‘80s I got a gig in a Katherine Hepburn TV movie of the week called Laura Lansing Slept Here. I would be playing a talk show host interviewing a best-selling author named, yes, that’s right, Laura Lansing. Who would be played by Katherine Hepburn. 

Then a couple of weeks before production was to begin we were all informed that Miss Hepburn had contracted pneumonia and had been hospitalized so shooting was being postponed. Well, she was in her eighties by then so I, at least, figured that postponed was being used euphemistically. 

But it wasn’t. A year later my agent called to tell me that the production was back on and did I still want to do it. Duh.

So I showed up on set on the day, got into costume, went through make-up and hair, was escorted to set and met the director again over a year after I met him the first time. This was a man named George Schaefer, a lovely man who had been directing television since the early 50s. 

I sat in my chair behind the desk and only a couple of minutes later Miss Hepburn was escorted to the seat beside me. To say I was excited would be accurate. George introduced us to one another. It turned out that, although the show had already been shooting for a week, today would be her first day on set and she too was quite excited and happy to be there and we chatted happily away for several minutes while the shot was set up. I managed to avoid asking her about Spencer. 

Anyway, we did the little scene, which actually set the hook for the story that was to follow, I said it had been a pleasure, she said something similar, I was thanked by George and off I went. 

A few weeks later I got a call from the shows production office telling me that I was invited to the cast and crew wrap party on the following weekend and would I be attending. Well, yes I would and that wrap party is what this story is really about. 

The party was held in a restaurant, now long gone, downtown on Robson Street. The production had taken it over for the evening and all the tables had been rearranged with one quite large round table in the middle of the room on a slightly raised dais. The bar was open as well as open ended. 

Once most of the tables were full Miss Hepburn, George, the executive producer (an utterly lovely, kind man named Merrill Karpf) and the rest of the above the line people came in. They all, including Miss Hepburn went from table to table and personally welcomed everyone, including significant others. This took a while because as far as I could tell every single person who’d worked on the show from PAs to teamsters to day players like me had been invited and everyone was there. They then seated themselves at the big round, raised table in the middle. 

George and Merrill then came down to the front of the room and a microphone on a stand appeared. They thanked us all for coming and told us that bottles of champagne would be arriving at our tables shortly and that food would be served shortly after that and that Miss Hepburn would be pleased to accept any and all visits at her table but please not in large numbers so please try to keep it to only a few at a time. And then the party got underway. I think over the course of the evening everyone there went to that table. 

After we’d eaten and the tables had been cleared George once again came to the front of the room and the microphone reappeared. He told us that Miss Hepburn had something she’d like to say and Merrill then escorted her to the mike.

You could have heard a pin drop in that room as this legend stood before us at the microphone, looking at us a wee bit nervously and seeming sort of shy. 

Then in that unforgettable, tremulous, Boston Brahmin voice that had been burned into our minds from so many memorable performances over the six decades of her career she told us about the first movie she’d ever made and her first experience of being on a film set. 

The film was A Bill of Divorcement starring John Barrymore and directed by George Cukor. Miss Hepburn had been cast as a result of a role she was playing on Broadway at the time. She knew nothing at all of how a film set functioned or how to make the best of it as an actor and, she told us, was terrified by all of it. 

She told us the crew took her under their collective wing. They taught her, they coached her, they protected her and generally made that first experience one that she had remembered all these years as one of her favourite work experiences. She told us that she hadn’t thought that an experience of such warmth and caring would ever happen again in her career.

And then she said – until now.

Well...

She went on to tell us what she meant and actually named people on the crew and detailed what they had done for her. She thanked the teamsters who had driven her for their kindness and consideration. She thanked the caterers for looking out for the dietary issues of an old lady. She thanked her fellow cast members, thanked the day players, thanked anyone who’d had anything to do with the production. May have even thanked the restaurant staff.

I glanced around the room a few times during this speech and let me tell you there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. Teamsters with tattoos had tears running down their faces the same as everyone else.

Then she pointed back toward the door of the restaurant where there was a table set up with a bunch of cardboard boxes on it. She told us that she wanted to give us all something as a gesture of gratitude so in those boxes were copies of her recently published book, The Making of the African Queen (subtitled How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind). She had signed each book personally to each of us. On the overleaf George, Merrill and the screenwriter James Prideaux had signed it too. It’s one of my prized possessions.

Ware's Wares Wear Well

Ware’s wares wear well. That was the motto of the Regina men’s tailored clothing store called Ware’s I worked in from 1966 to 1967. 

Ware’s had had been around since the 1920’s I think. It was reputed to be the largest purveyor of men’s tailored clothing in western Canada and I believed it. There were no shirts, ties or shoes to be found there. Just suits, sport jackets, trousers and seasonal coats. In almost any size you’d care to mention. 50 tall – sure, no problem. 34 stout – what colour would you like? And with two professional tailors working in the back we could fit anybody. Any body at all. 

The tailors were both old European Jewish guys. One of them was a rather surly, chain smoking German. The other was a sad eyed, sweet natured Pole who’d survived a camp, I don’t know if I ever knew which one. They hated each other and wouldn’t speak unless absolutely necessary and then with a barely veiled animosity that was unnerving. The tailor shop was always silent except for the sounds of steam, sewing machines and the hiss of thread through tightly woven worsted. They were both brilliant tailors who could take a suit of clothes apart, alter it to fit, and put it back together again so perfectly you’d never know. When we sold a suit that would need alteration beyond pant legs and sleeves we could summon one of them from their lair by means of little recessed buttons located in multiple places throughout the store. A chime would sound in their shop and one of them would come out. The German guy always came out with one his roll-your-owns dangling from his lip and looking like he was ready for a confrontation and the Pole just shuffled out in his slippers with his spectacles half-way down his nose, looking sadly resigned to seeing how much work we’d made for him this time. 

The store was owned by a former traveling clothing company rep who lived in Montreal. He visited once a year. The mainstay brand we carried was Freedman, from Montreal, which I recently learned was owned by Leonard Cohen’s family. Freedman no longer exists, just as most of the once thriving Montreal rag trade no longer exists. 

The clothing in the store was made of wool, cotton, linen, silk and sometimes mohair and virtually all the fabrics were from the British Isles and Europe. China and Japan hadn’t really got into the game yet. 

One of the tasks assigned to me, as the junior guy, was to see to the mailing of altered suits to the men who’d come in to the city to buy their suits, usually farmers, but who lived too far away to come in again just to pick them up. I learned how to correctly fold and pack a suit so it came out of the box wrinkle free. Hint: the jacket is packed inside out.

The sales staff worked on salary plus commission. The manager, a man I came to like and admire, would regularly go around the store with his inventory list and once a suit or jacket or whatever had been on the racks for a certain length of time he’d mark it as having a higher commission. The suits and jackets all hung on the racks with lapels facing left, meaning the left sleeve was the one that hung down on the outside. When you turned the left lapel over up near the neck line you’d find the paper factory tag basted on there with the size, fabric information, inventory number and so on. The manager would mark these factory tags with a little star shaped ink stamp. The number of stars determined the commission bonus you’d get for selling the suit. There was a commission on all the products in the store including the brand new stuff but whenever possible we tried to sell the bonus stuff, especially the 4 star suits. Money, it’s a gas. 

One day a guy who’d been my physics teacher in Grade 12 came in. I turned to the only other salesman there and told him who this was and I had to be the one to sell him. This guy was one of those teachers that pretty much nobody in the school liked. He was a poor teacher for starters, a pedant with no capacity for making something interesting. He had a tyrannical streak too. And a really silly mustache. We never came to blows but we had a couple of doozy yelling matches. Yeah, I was one those guys.

I put on my best smile and greeted him like I was delighted to see him. Which I was because he was tall and thin with rounded shoulders and I knew exactly which ugly 4 star suit I was going to put him in. When he told me needed two I smiled a bit wider cause there were two ugly 4 star suits in his size range. 

When it was time to summon a tailor I went back to the shop instead of ringing their bell because I wanted a moment to tell the Polish tailor why this guy was in these two suits that didn’t really fit him all that well and weren’t really good colours for him. He got a lovely little twinkle in his eye and played right along. If the alterations had been any more extreme than they were he might have said something but they weren’t and he didn’t. Ka-ching. 

I stopped working there in December of 1967 as I was going to be moving north in January of 1968 to start working in radio at a little country and western station in Lloydminster. 

About 6 months later, no longer in radio and living in Vancouver, I bumped into a guy I’d worked with at the store, a salesman who’d been there since the war years. A large, florid, rotund, never married, hail-fellow-well-met guy with a widow’s peak, mildly drunk in the middle of the day, who had no idea who I was even though we’d spent a year working together just a short time ago. It made me inexplicably sad. 

And then in 1975 or so, after I’d moved to Toronto, I was back in Regina doing a play at The Globe Theatre and I saw a going out of business sign on the front window of Ware’s. I went in. The manager I had worked with was there, looking older and tired. He was overseeing the sale of the remaining stock and the fittings. The owner in Montreal had died and his family didn’t want to keep the store going and no one wanted to buy it. We reminisced for a bit, I told him why I was back in town, he told me his daughter was a playwright now and we shook hands and said goodbye. 

American Race Relations

In the summer of 1960 I was 12 years old. That summer our family moved from Calgary to Regina but we did it by way of Atlanta, Georgia where my father was born. We were going to visit with my father's parents who themselves would be visiting from Hawaii. We would all meet at my father's aunt and uncle's place in Atlanta.

Along the way we would visit with some others of my father's extended family. An uncle in Pittsburgh in the newspaper business, a cousin in Columbus, Mississippi who was also a minister and probably others who I've forgotten

Driving through the deep south in 1960 was an experience I've never to this day forgotten. Prisoners in the cotton fields wearing the classic black and white striped prison uniforms. The prisoners in the fields were all black men while white men on horseback with rifles perched upright on their thighs oversaw them. Every town where we stopped for food or gas or a bathroom break had nice clean water fountains for the white people to use and filthy, half broken stained water fountains for the black people or as the signs said "Colored" or sometimes "Negroes". I assumed the bathroom facilities were similar. There were no black people in the cafes or even in the office areas of the gas stations.

Once our car had a minor breakdown and we had to kill a few hours while it was repaired. We went to an afternoon movie. I don't remember what the movie was but at one point one of my brothers had to use the washroom. When he didn't come back right away my father went to find him. He was sitting in the "Colored" area of the theatre talking to a little black kid about his own age. My father quietly brought him back to where we were all sitting and later explained that he could have brought the little black kid a lot of trouble if the wrong people had seen them sitting together.

When we stopped in Columbus, Mississippi to visit with my father's cousin and his family we ended up not staying as long as originally planned. His cousins two sons had taken me for a high speed ride in their pick-up truck through "ni**ertown" laughing and rebel yelling as black people jumped out of the way. Dad became so angry that we left the next day. He and his cousin never spoke again.

Dad's uncle in Atlanta was a wealthy man who owned and lived on a small pony riding facility with a riding ring. Very lovely place. Very racist people. The man who saw to the well being and breeding of the ponies was black.  He was a lovely old guy I took to almost at once. He would have been in his 50s or 60s I think then. I spent a lot of time with him down in the stables. His parents had been slaves. I remember him telling me that. I wish I could remember his name. I enjoyed his company a lot. It reveals a certain racism in my 12 year old self to say he made me think of Uncle Remus in the old Joel Chandler Harris stories and the Disney slavery apologia production of Song of the South.

I can't think of a time my father went back to the lower 48 at all after that. He went to Hawaii a few times to see his parents and siblings and their families but that was the only part of America he would visit. He was very grateful and proud to have become a Canadian by choice.

America's civil war was never really resolved. The south surrendered but the war simply became cold, went underground, became covert.

Today it's breaking hot once again.

The National Arts Centre

My connection to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa began in the summer of 1975 with a summer long clown and circus workshop in a disused and unrenovated studio space on the backside of the building on Albert Street. This was the second summer clown and circus workshop I’d done in Ottawa. The first had been the previous summer in the theatre at University of Ottawa across the canal. 

Those two summer workshops were life changing in several ways but they weren’t paying gigs. 

My first paying gig at the NAC was in January of 1975 with the production of John Coulter’s Louis Riel. I had one speaking scene. I remembered my words. There was no furniture. I carried a musket. All the other scenes I was in were as rabble or soldier or spectator. That was true for all other cast members too. I think the only cast member who just played one role was the guy who played Riel and he didn’t really leave the stage. The production was touted at the time as the first production in the country to be played in both official languages. About half the cast were French speaking Quebecois. 

The first day of rehearsals was a kind of shock for me when I discovered that I was going to be working with some people that I had been watching on Canadian television since I was a kid. Star struck isn’t the right word really – more like gob smacked. 

The Canadian War Museum loaned all the weapons for the production. On the evening Pierre and Margaret Trudeau came to see the show there were plain clothes members of an RCMP security detail backstage to check every weapon before it was taken on stage. One of the Quebecois guys I got to know fairly well said it was because he and a couple of the other guys were known to be separatists.

The next time I played at The NAC was in the summer of 1975 only this time it was in the opera house. The NAC had a fairly generous federal government budget in those days and they used to run a festival of high culture in the summers. Operatic productions with name stars, symphony concerts with guest conductors and soloists, ballet companies from all over the world. That summer they produced Mozart’s Magic Flute. So what was I doing in it?

The guy who’d written the English translation, for reasons never explained and best known only to himself, wrote in speaking roles for 3 “slave boys”. See if you can imagine my svelte 26 year old self in café au lait full body makeup and a costume that would have not have been out of place in a gay brothel in Khartoum. 

It worked out well though. Only 4 performances, really good paycheque and we slave boys weren’t required for the curtain call. And of course Mozart. 

The next time I played The NAC, back in the theatre again, was 10 years later when we toured Talking Dirty in the winter of 1985. Packed houses, cascades of laughter and standing ovations on several nights. We used to go down to the bistro on the ground floor next to the canal after the show for a bite and a drink and there were more than a few nights when the tab for our first round was picked up by a table of people who’d just watched the play. There were a couple of nights when we didn’t get a bill for anything because some member(s) of our audience had picked it up for us. 

The Members of Parliament for Vancouver and surrounding areas invited us to come have lunch with them at the Parliamentary cafeteria and then to observe Question Period from the visitor’s gallery. Mulroney was PM then but he wasn’t in the House that day. One of the MPs we’d just had lunch with introduced us to the House and to our surprise almost all of the members there that day stood up, looked up to where we sitting and began to applaud and smile and wave. They’d clearly been to the show themselves.

I’ve been back to Ottawa a couple of times since to see shows at The National Art Gallery. Once to see a traveling show of The Queen’s Pictures in the summer of 1993 when Windsor Castle was being restored after the fire the year before. Then a few years later when they hosted a wonderful traveling show of The Impressionists. Each time we’ve gone to the bistro by the canal for lunch and a glass of wine and bowl of sweet reminiscence.

Top of the Malahat 2 ways.

 

 

 

Ray LaMontagne salves the wounds

Grave New World

The two nations that have traditionally been our closest allies are now both in free fall.

The US is embarking on a new hot shooting phase of their century and a half long civil war with a demented fat orange copraphage perched on the roof of the White House like a gargoyle cheering on the carnage.

Great Britain is slowly, mutter by mumble by sneer, ripping the seams of its unity open with a dull and rusty pair of sheep shears while the Queen goes riding in the grounds of Windsor Castle on a horse named Fern.

Here at home op-ed writers in what passes for our national newspaper have decided that a pandemic and rapidly spreading global instability are a good time to throw some red meat to the Conservative Party of Canada's chapter of Canuck deplorables.

And while our climate warms and the weather gets weirder we pump more bitumen out of the Canadian north as though the survival of the planetary biosphere has nothing to do with us.

I don't know what to make of us here on Earth.

I don't know what might happen next. I won't even guess.

I'd like to be able to ignore it all.