2/31

Links to 1/31 &
the 31 Things Launch Post

I haven't touched my guitar for years. I guess we broke up. But I still love her. Hmm, that sounded a tad toxic, didn't it? 

I believe every home should have a guitar, or something to entice the musicians. Music is medicine, but in this metaphor I'm definitely not your pharmacist. 

The only song I ever truly learned was my favourite Christmas song: Happy Christmas (War is Over). Years later now, I can't even recall the first chord, but I will always and forever sing that song as loud as I can until, well, war is finally finally over. The world needs more John Lennon. 

Despite multiple attempts to gain competency, let's be honest: all my guitar ever did under my mismanagement was hide my stomach. And yes indeed, that's another reason to love a guitar. Perhaps it was because I never practiced? 

None of this matters though. Why? Dear friends, a guitar is a passport to  cool people. Despite my ineptitude, my conviction for music (and all arts), plus my commitment to providing exposure and encouragement means both my kids became musicians! Insert high-five here. Do you know what it feels like when your son can guitar-pick Tears in Heaven or when your daughter can strum her mandolin and move a crowd with her singing voice or when your oldest granddaughter is taking fiddle lessons?! It's pure heaven. 

Here's my point: you don't have to know how to play the guitar (or the piano or the harmonica or drums or some other musically vibrant thing) to alchemy music into the world. Support musicians and artists and soak in their sounds. And if you insist on mastering it yourself, do what another imposter guitar player once told me: pretend you know what you're doing and just play the chords you love. 

Sounds like a good way to live one's life, doesn't it? 

1/31

Link to My 31 Days of Things

I touch this bookmark almost every day. This is what my grandchildren call me. I chose this name, Pops, because to me it sounds informal, approachable, and somehow silly or jolly. M, my oldest grandchild calls me Poppy now. 💗 Also this: who doesn't love a pop? Root beer is my favourite. 

Sure, a bookmark is functional first, but it's like those strings attach me to my favourite five little humans. It was a gift from my son's partner who made it for me because she knows I revere books and reading, but better yet it's labeled with my personal grandfatherly identity and directive: to become (like my own Grandma was for me) an always available trusted someone. Dear friends, they are teaching me how to be a better man. 

Furthermore, don't you love the period? Full stop, it emphasizes that for the rest of my life, Pops is my sentence, in the best possible way, my ambition, my purpose, my vow. 

Thirty-one Things

I'm still pondering vibrant matter. Philosopher Jane Bennett theorizes that things have a sort-of agency—they can "speak" to us, they open windows to memories and ideas, they summon a deeper relationship. Unlike empty materialism which whispers more, better, and next, perceiving matter as vibrant invites us to pay attention, to value our everyday things, and by association ourselves. 

I suppose this ideology is not groundbreaking, is it? But in my past I've struggled with self-worth, and I'm a creative, also inordinately curious and it seems to me there is opportunity in exploring this notion for potential insights and lessons about healthy attachment and interiority and in truly knowing myself. Plus, fellow bloggers in my comments have called things potent, evidence of their survival, and even maps. 

Remember the plastic bag scene in the film American Beauty? Could things—our own and those we encounter—be maps showing us how to be more human? And if you get me (and you're still reading this), doesn't this tired world need more human humans? 

Always inspired to pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it, I'm planning to post 31 days of objects this May, a writing exercise exploring my affinity with things and their provenance. 

Which things will be most vibrant? What stories will they tell? What might (you and) I discover? 

Things?

My aunt is downsizing and so I received a box of my Grandma's things. 

Among her things were pins and broaches and watches...but I am most interested in these stamps and decorations from the bottom of her jewelry box. 

No doubt childhood me peeked into this box over those early years and perhaps that's why the silver leaves feel familiar? What I didn't notice then was how prominently my grandfather's photo was featured among her treasures and keepsakes. Of course it was. He died 25 years before she did, but even childhood me knew they were smitten with each other. 

I suspect these items are connected to missing him, loving him. From letters they wrote to each other? Silver leaves from an anniversary party? They wrote letters whenever they were apart, especially during WW2. And they also loved a good party. 

Philosopher Jane Bennet might say these things are not waste, not simply what is left over after a life, but instead possessing their own power: they are vibrant matter. Bennett's philosophy aims to promote more responsible and ethical human engagement with our world. It's easy to see how her position relates to resource recovery and environmental stewardship, but she also speaks to the interconnectedness between ourselves and so many many things. That makes sense to me.

For some, these items may not conjure much curiosity, but to me they are my grandmother's stories, ones I will never know but can somehow imagine. We all know the power of stories; sometimes that power comes from the things we touch, we see, we linger over, the things hidden in books and boxes and bags and pockets and desk drawers, and the memories they evoke...vibrant matter indeed.

Dear friends, what things, what tokens might tell your stories? 

Bonbon...

Made in Camrose (a small city in Alberta, Canada), these artfully decorated chocolates from Brownstone's Curiosities, are dazzling and delectable. 

Their colours hint at their flavours, but would you have guessed that the green confections are basil infused chocolates? 

If that sounds odd, well, correct, but also: yum.  

Other flavours pictured here include cherry, scotch whiskey, lemon poppyseed, and salted caramel. One might refer to their selection and this taste experience as a bit of a bonbonanza. Amirite? 😜

April is Poetry Month

I adore this strange poem. It disturbs, yet... uplifts too?  

One of my earliest memories is standing (rapt and terrified) next to a cow in bloat. Maybe four or five years old, I longed to run but I couldn't move. A medical emergency, bloat occurs when a cow overeats, the ingested feed ferments and excessive gas expands internally; it must be released or the cow will die quickly. But the men in that field that day (including my father) just paced and grimaced and stared. They seemed to be trying to decide something. I didn't know it at the time, but a veterinarian was on his way. What I recall most clearly was the cow's suffering—its frantic and unrelenting bawling—and although childhood me couldn't fully grasp the procedure and its intensity, finally, finally, finally someone arrived and I witnessed a puncturing and heard the gas release like a balloon deflating. The bawling ceased. The cow stood up.

I apologize for these images which are especially potent for animal-lovers, also for the poem which may be upsetting. But I share these words and this story, because no doubt this experience helped me learn compassion and empathy, key factors in shaping my neurobiology, my emotional intelligence...but something more too, something dark I continue to confront.... 

This formative event thrust me into a degree of discomfort I'd never experienced before and one I never wanted to experience again. Already an anxious and stressed child, this incident reinforced avoidance.  Childhood me longed to ESCAPE and quite frankly, it became my default. I'm not proud of it, but I only have enough capacity to remain in the north field with those closest to me. I soooo admire people, those nurses, and doctors, and counsellors, the firefighters, the death doulas...but I am not a rescuer.  

This is why I appreciate this poem—despite featuring a seemingly imminent death—Gilpin focuses on an alternative perspective, a less sober and severe inevitability—albeit temporary. The poem features no rescuer, just a cow and her calf in a cloudless field, alive. In this poem, I am not the farm boys seeking notoriety, nor the cow or her calf, but instead I relate to the poet.    

Dear friends, I can't save you, and I'm sorry for that, but I will always want you to notice the stars. 

Let's be honest

(uncharted territory feels very 2026)

My GPS either needs an update or it's a Robert Frost fan, because it seems to me it chose the road, um less graveled?

Sorry. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Crews

as seen on the outside of an adorable
kids' appliance-cardboard-box fort

I'm still so uplifted by the crew from Artemis II. 

Fresh from space, they spoke so eloquently and warmly about each other and their team experience, their lifework, an incredible legacy.  

Moved, Astronaut Christina Hammock Koch praised her team, describing the four of them surviving and working and relying on each other as "inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked." She continued, saying this about observing "tiny Earth...a lifeboat [suspended in] the blackness...I know one new thing...Planet Earth: You. Are. A. Crew." 

Inspiring. I heard her, and I needed to hear it. Dear friends, we are a crew, but let's be honest, back here on Earth, our planet is not so tiny. And unlike those astronauts hurtling through space for ten days on a mission, we don't have to be inescapably joined to recognize our value to each other. To me, her key word was dutiful. 

Think of children making forts from their cardboard boxes and couch cushions. Remember those fun spaces? They felt novel and energizing, like drawing a magic circle around your squad, your peeps, your crew. But then it happens...someone is excluded, or the older siblings would arrive... (mean? jealous? suspicious? power-hungry? insecure? intolerant? controlling? bored?) and for whatever stupid reason, the fort is destroyed.

We humans are messy, complicated, fearful, puzzling—essentially children at times—and there's no possible way we can all belong at once to one crew. Yet most of us know we have a fundamental duty to each other and when we live in service to our own and others' well-being, there can be more peace among our crews, among us all. 

Fed up?

Fuel your body & feed your mind.

I've been thinking about breakfast for supper: it's refreshing, uncommon, even a tad disruptive. 

I'm interested in disruption, in being unruly. Aren't you? 

If you're thinking that my example isn't exactly rebellious, you're correct. It's a meagre example, but the sentiment is what's important. 

I've been reading some terrific books, two classics. 

1. In Letter to my Father, Kafka denounces his father's callousness and cruelty and yet never shares the letter with him. However, for over 100 years now, we the public can read it and perhaps feel a bit emboldened, a bit inspired to challenge authority, even an authority that has provided much but is stuck by mental rigidity, discord, and selfishness. 

2. I also read Camus' The Stranger, and it's clear now why this book is a philosophy must-read. The protagonist is so damn frustrating; his entrenched mindset leads to his downfall, but that is Camus' greatest maneuver: we readers must ask ourselves why we think so differently and then wonder perhaps are we just as entrenched in a status quo? 

I bet Kafka and Camus liked breakfast for dinner.

Dear friends, haven't we had enough of the current (and appalling) status quo? The chaos? The corruption? The unchecked oligarchies? The nauseating greed? The shame flung at the Pope for not endorsing war? WTAF? Is it finally FINALLY time to eat this chaos for breakfast? 

I think the world has had enough; recent backlash feels different. I know feelings aren't facts. I know. I know. How dare I be optimistic in this economy? But isn't optimism itself rebellious? We are made to feel small and powerless in this doom culture but we can still read and write and tell and resist and persist and vote and boycott and protest and multiply and amplify those voices likewise fed up. 

Things that deserve the pink-eye:

Big sniff energy?

whatever this is. 

Gross. 

😒😷👎

Yes indeed, practically every time I acquire a head cold with a runny nose, if I blow my nose too hard AIR ALSO COMES OUT OF MY EYE! 

Yes, you read that correctly.

I did not have rebellious tear-ducts on my aging bingo, but here we are. This condition is apparently more common in older folks, babies, and those who've broken their noses, all conditions that currently describe me—the baby part is apt since I have a cold and I'm a man—and yes I did add this for preemptive reasons in the comments. ;)

The only bonus: no pink eye. YET. 

Dear friends, aging is no a (decidedly) laughing matter.