I often think what a sweet luxury it is to just be ordinary; to be possessed of only modest talents, and no all-consuming ambition for recognition or legacy.  Being able to amble through life having not too much, but not too little.  A small circle of friends, perhaps, a handful of people I love, enough… Read more »

We humans have done so much shifting and transforming of the natural landscape: bending the shape of the planet with all of our bright, infernal machines, fueled by our reckless brilliance and boundless greed.  We seldom remember that there are some landscapes which, if we move slowly through them with an open mind, an open… Read more »

Like all our fellow travelers, our journey is too long, our journey is too brief.  We are immortal and god-like, filling up the universe; we are tiny and fragile, our lives as flickering and insubstantial as sparks from a campfire.  We carry our burdens across barren lands beneath what must be a thousand years of… Read more »

More and more, as my life experience accumulates, I find myself gravitating towards the side of darkness when it comes to that whole God vs.  The Devil situation.  I don’t mean this in any formal worship sort of way.  I don’t do rituals of any kind, for one thing; I mean, I’m not much of… Read more »

If there is one thing I should probably not be doing in this life, it is giving advice.  Whatever good fortune I have come across, I have typically stumbled into ass-backwards rather than achieved through any sort of strategy or wisdom.  Nevertheless, you just never know when somebody might benefit from a word or two… Read more »

“Transmit the message to the receiver/ Hope for an answer some day” – Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime” There is a battle raging all around us, a deadly skirmish in the only war that has ever mattered: the struggle between the opposing forces of love and fear.  It’s a senseless conflict, one that should never… Read more »

I’m twenty years old, living in the basement of a ramshackle pink building in Vancouver’s wild West End.  My upstairs neighbour, appropriately named Byron, is about seventy years old, a salty and poetic soul, a former flight attendant for a British airline.  His studio apartment is cramped and narrow, but the furnishings are suggestive of… Read more »

I’m typing this at 6:20 in the morning, sitting in my backyard beside a small bonfire, wearing pyjamas, a toque, fingerless gloves, and a lumberjack shirt from the grunge era.  My dog is lying beside me on her ratty Mexican blanket.  In the east, there’s a faint flash of lightning in the sky, but, for… Read more »

I sometimes believe that we reach our highest human potential at some time during the earliest years of our childhood.  In those early days we are all poets, artists, scientists, fearless explorers, and relentless questers after knowledge.  Then, just as we are revelling in the joyousness and sensory overload of sheer existential experience, we find… Read more »

Isn’t there such a sweet, sad irony to the sorry shenanigans of Jussie Smollett? Apparently in hopes of furthering his career, sweetening his contract deal, and winning public sympathy and support, the poor schmo allegedly conspired to fake a hate crime against himself. Of course, since the whole ill-conceived shitshow has blown up in his… Read more »