ting!

I have a humming bowl my brother brought me from Nepal. You hold it in one hand, "ting!" it with a little rod of wood, and then slide that rod around the rim as smoothly as possible. As it gets louder and louder you start to humm, and then you move on into chanting and becoming one with the universe.

So far, the becoming one part hasn't worked. I fell off a ladder onto pavement on the last day of my occupation as a gas fitter and although for a moment it seemed as though the pavement and I were becoming one, subsequent pain seemed to indicate otherwise. Fortunately I was only about eight feet up when it happened. Unfortunately, the ladder slipped on the slick driveway just as the homeowner's son and his three twenty-something freinds drove in. This meant that not only was I bruised on my feet, hip, elbow and wrist, but on my ego as well. (The ego, as you know, is a marble-sized, greenish organ that perpetually migrates through your endoplastic aural system - so it was by sheer chance that it was damaged at all.)

The moral of the story is: don't put ladders on slick surfaces and then try to climb down them wearing a full tool belt and carrying a butane torch, a tube of clear high-temp silicone, and a drill gun. Recipe for disaster.

Now that I'm damaged and done with rooftop deeds of daring-do, I guess I can fill you in on what this job actually entailed. First, though, I should point out that I am fully aware that I've messed up the order of the universe by telling you the moral first, story second. I have no good excuses, and should therefore be shot in the face with a large digital camera.

In the meantime I will introduce you to my co-worker, Chip, who's so-named because while planting trees on my brother's crew he bit down too hard on a frozen cookie in the frozen morning and snapped a sizeable triangle off his left-front tooth. "Presto! bango!", he got nicknamed after one of everybody's favorite Disney cartoon characters.

Chip's pretty much a caricature of a person anyway, so "the chip" incident was basically a nomenclative godsend. If you'd met him, you'd know. Chip's a looney tune. He's gotten into so much trouble it'd make your eyes spin. He jumped a train to catch a ride home and went leaping from boxcar to boxcar for fun until the cops called him down with a megaphone (he slunk off through the grass and escaped). He also hoisted his infant brother forty feet up a tree on an elaborate pully system, and after "accidently" sticking a homemade, skill-saw blade battle-axe in the side of some guy's brand-new truck, had the chutzpah to go demand it back. Chip bought a CBR 600 (nasty-fast crotch-rocket) and pulled block-long wheelies down main street, vancouver, running from the cops for the over six months he owned that thing without having a bike liscence.

So that, basically, has been my boss for installing gas fireplaces, to which I will now proceed.

The first thing we did when we got to a house was to go gladhand the homeowner. We were sort of a Prometheus/SantaClause mix, bringing fire for Christmas, so this was a joyous time. We then proceeded to the fireplace, where Chip hemmed and hawwed and poked around and look up the flue. Then he'd pronounce that it looked pretty good, so we'd just go to - at which point I'd pull the ladder off the truck, go up on the roof, and do the termination.

This meant measuring the chimney top, unrolling and pushing down flexible, ribbed metallic liners, cutting and fitting flashing over the chimney for a weather-tight seal, screwing the cap onto the liner, then sucking the cap down and screwing it onto the flashing - all while liberally applying gobs of silicone to the flashing, the cap, and myself.

This, of course, is the grossly simplified version. Every house is different so I might, for instance, get to spend some time hanging off a ladder thirty feet up the side of a house in high winds, using an angle grinder with one hand to cut the concrete cap to a sealable shape while trying my darndiddlearndest not to plummet to my doom.

Chip, in the meantime, was cracking the gas meter to the house, t-ing off with iron and splicing to copper, then running and strapping a copper tube along the side of the house and through a hole he'd drilled in the chimney. Then he'd head inside, assemble the unit and hook it onto the gas and the liners while I folded the ladder up and cleaned up all our garbage so we'd be ready to go right after he'd extolled to the homeowner the virtues of their basically ornamental ceramic-logged fireplace ("This baby will just pump out that radiative heat - twenty-five-thousand btu's are just gonna bake you in here, and with that staircase it's just going to convection its way right up to your bedroom and keep you warm as posty-toasty all night long").

That, again, skips right past complicated reality, which often had us scratching our heads, cursing our stars and problem solving difficult issues while the homeowner's three year old perched over us on a stool loudly demanding an explanation for every wrench, nut and bolt. Still, that was the basic work. We would alternate jobs for variety... but bob's your uncle, that's it.

Which leaves me in the driver's seat without a steering wheel, since I've finished my description unsure of where to go next, having abandoned my "moral" way back at the beginning. I guess the corallary moral would have to be: play your cards a little closer to your chest.

The problem is that writing this way reminds me too much of poker and talking through your teeth, which is what everybody seems to do in businesses like gas fitting. I don't like it, so I end up doing ludicrous things (like giving away artwork on random thursdays and reversing the established literary order of the universe) just to feel I'm a little less impotent in the face of the malignant, stinky forces infecting my world.

Which brings me, in the end, to Christmas. This year I have stayed the holidays in Langley, away from family and a lifetime of Christian traditions. Being here, I have been struck full-force for the first time by the commercialization and secularization of this season. Although I hear people, movies and the media trying to justify their hollow holiday by saying things like "it's all about caring for family", I find myself echoing that paragon of parable-ick virtue, Mr. Eminem, by saying that "it seems so empty without [Him]".

So here is me, not playing my cards close to my chest. Here is me, who tries to be open minded and non-exclusive on this website, saying to the those who would have it be just a "happy holiday" with loved ones and credit cards:

"you know what - screw that! This is a Christian holiday, so Merry Joyous Freakin' Christmas!"

---

Oh, and post script (I can add those, since this is like my Christmas letter) : I have put some pictures up on our good freind the internet of my trip way back in 2005 to my hometown in Peru. The camera I took them with is basically a glorified digital point and shoot, so any complaints about the quality of the pics should be addressed to the Canon Central Office. Thank you, and have a nice day.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61634777@N00/

zazzle your face off

The rumor is true! The internet, as they say, is not just for pornography! Here are a few amazing "sites" I have discovered that very well have the opportunity to change your life (or at least eat up a lot of that "quality time" you'd otherwise have to be spending with freinds and family). I may have already ranted on here about these babies, but that's because they're so darn-tootin'-skunk-shootin'-fabulous. Here goes:

First of all, there's pandora.com . My little brother Jake showed me this website that lets you create your own commercial-free radio station based on personal music preferences. It also lets you hear a lot of sweet new music you'd otherwise never find on that radio dial.

Secondly, I would like to take this opportunity to endorse craigslist.org, introduced to me by my pal, Chris. This online marketplace is a sweet-action, rambunctious, free, on-going garage sale. It's an excellent way to ensure that perfectly useable stuff doesn't end up in a landfill or in the donation bins at Value Village (which is obviously a front for the Hell's Angels).

Thirdly and finally, there's zazzle.com, which I discovered through a nifty weblog put out by my childhood neighbor with the howler monkey. On it, you can create your own personalized products, like t-shirts and such. I'm planning on doing some stuff based on my art, but for now here's a link to an experimental, copyright-violating t-shirt I cooked up this morning.

http://www.zazzle.com/product/235868879913751922

Happy Browsing!

meet Joe

I'd like to introduce you to Joe. At least, we're gonna call him that. Even though Joe was raised in South America, in some ways he's a pretty typical North American male. For instance, Joe likes baseball and most anything else to do with sports. If tree planting were a sport (and it is), Joe would have to be considered a professional. First, because he's been paid to do it for eleven years, and second, because he was recently mentioned on a National Canadian Radio program (CBC) for his tree planting prowess.

Why have I brought Joe up? First, because he's my brother, and the last time I tried to write a book I got a whole bunch of complaints from my family that I basically wrote them out of stories that were essentially property of them, and I was a theiving little monkey. I have been trying to rectify that little donkey dimple here on this website, a bit at a time. The second reason I bring Joe up is because he's used to being more famous than me (he's far cooler) and the popularity of this website and my own personal subsequent notoriety has been crimping his style.

The reason for this is that Joe (as I mentioned) is the cool one and has far more reasons than I for fame. As I mentioned nobbut two paragraphs ago, for instance, he's a famous tree planter. Also, Joe is well known for his puppetry. He's travelled the whole planet over, knows how to surf pretty decently, is fluent in Spanish, and was told by a University Drama teacher that he has what it takes to make it on the Floridian improv. comedy circuit. Also (and more importantly), Joe has always had this bizarre animal magnetism for women, to the extent that absolute strangers will come up giggling and shyly ask if they can take their picture with him. He's married now, so he's staunched the waves of his femmagnet musk, but nonetheless it's there, waiting at his beck and call.

What a guy, hey? Well, don't worry, we're not going to let the burgeoning of his brain pan last forever. What kind of brother would I be to stoke the fires of his ego without simultaneously preparing to skewer him at the point of my proverbial pen, I ask? (It's sort of a rhetorical question - but if you must know, the answer is: "A better brother than I actually am".)

See, Joe and I have traded sword strokes most of our lives. When our parents decided we needed "privacy" and strung a sheet across our bedroom when we were five and six, we started to individuate and grow apart. Sure, we met in the hall sometimes to torture Hanners (our younger sister) and Jake (our even younger brother), but mostly we meandered off in our own directions - me, to introspection and the drawing of fuzzy animals (for the girls) and hot girls (for the guys), and Joe to social rabblerousing and athletic huzzahs!

Two strong-willed, close-aged, very different males were forced to live in the same house, or nest if you will - to scrabble for food, attention and power. At times, of course, it got bloody (them's brothers for ya), but eventually a sort of a gentleman's truce was reached, whereby hot-button topics could be skirted and mutual enemies vanquished with extreme prejudice by our two-pronged attack. With time, we learned to appreciate eachother's strengths and the fact that brothers make excellent natural allies.

Every once in a while, however, skirmishes still flare up in the hinterlands (here is where I make up for the flattery). The fights are inevitable, of course, since I am an opinionated, sanctimonious little poo and Joe is, without a doubt, The World's Most Stubborn Male, which is exacerbated by the fact that Joe married a women who agrees with pretty much everybody I know that I'm a bit of a freaky extremist when it comes to things like money, consumerism, and the wholesale destruction of the earth by soul-less, scum-sucking corporations.

Our latest kafluffle was about board shorts, or "boardies". I bought a nearly-new pair at a thrift store for two dollars. They're shiny blue, nice, and a really upscale namebrand I won't mention because they don't need my advertising help. Joe, who hangs out on foreign beaches as a hobby, had dragged me into a skate/surf/snowboard shop I absolutely hate called "Replay" (my first snowboard was stolen and I caught them using it as a rental - which they denied) and was looking for help in buying a new pair of boardies.

Unable to stop myself, I launched into an oratory proclaiming the virtues of all things second-hand and then BAM! was hit upside the head by a counter-diatribe from Joe's wife on how it's better to buy a quality product once than a crappy, skid-marked product eighteen times. Now, I may be a pinko/commie/hippie/whatever, but I know better than to spar with that blondie when she's on a roll, so I waved my hand floridly and in my most regal voice said, "truly, you have a dizzying intellect", which re-routed a careening conversational train from cataclysm into yet another earnest discussion of how I cannot seem to stop quoting "The Princess Bride".

I can do this, see. I can go ahead and lose an argument because I have what Joe and Amy do not - a pen. By which I mean a PEN. By which I mean a website where I can rant and rave and win every single argument because, hey, I'm the one with the administrative password! Boo-yah-kah-shah!

So, here's where I win: "Yeah right, Joe's wife. New boardies cost fifty bones. Mine cost two dollars, so you'd have to wear out twenty-five pairs before you'd paid for one name-brand. And speaking of name-brands, that's what you're buying - the opportunity to walk around advertising some fashion magnate's logo, just so you can identify with the idea of cool cooked up by his compendium of underlings, a concept he deliberately proceeded to meticulously sculpt with a media blitz designed to make you feel like you're less of a person unless you shell out fifty bucks for something made in fifteen minutes by Third-World-Maria, whom he paid fifty cents an hour, which she quietly accepted so she could put another plate of fried rice on her kids' plates.

This PR demon convinces you you're in charge and cool and worthwhile but you know what, he doesn't like you at all. He thinks you're a sucker, and he's using you to get a few pennies closer to a new Lexus. He's mocking you all the way to the bank, calling you a card-carrying cog in his consumer/conformist machine. And he's laughing, too, you know why? Two words: planned obsolescence. He's making crap and he knows it, but he doesn't care because he knows it doesn't have to last very long - it's going to end up in a thrift store somewhere because next year, Brad Pitt's going to get caught on film doing something totally cool and and amazing in boardies of an entirely different cut and color.

Wow! That's a flippin' mouthful. I guess you could mark down a couple of extra points for me (victory dance!). Really, though, the whole fashion thing is just sick if you stop and think about it. I know a whole lot of people have to be idiotic, fashion-following follicles swaying in the breezes of corporate cool for me to be able to buy cheap clothes at thrift stores, but I'd much rather pay more money for a few quality, fairly-made products than buy cheap and live in a culture that judges a person's worth by the fabric they use to be not naked. Let's not forget inner beauty and all that whiz-bang awesome stuff.

But there I go again, arguing and alienating when I should be hugging and dancing. Truth is, I love Joe and Joe's wife. A lot. This rant isn't about them, not really. It's about me feeling extremely uncomfortable with the damage we (the ecological equivalents of wrecking balls) are wreaking on a world growing hungrier and thirstier every day. We're doing this with our wallets and our self obsession and yes, we're doing it by being cool.

There are whole lot of kids out there who don't eat well enough to keep their hair from falling out, who have to hop around naked while their moms (or orphanage-moms) hand-wash their one set of hand-me-downs. It's not really our fault, directly, that we have sixteen more t-shirts than we need, but indirectly the world's going to hell in a handbasket and we, the rich, are holding the steering wheel.

I want to stop writing there, but I can't. I have to remind myself that I am the biggest hypocrite of them all because I have spent my life with my eyes largely glued on this stuff, and I do next to nothing, which is basically just enough to salve my conscience. I want to thank God for grace, cause with out it, I'm the most God-Damned of us all - but in my current state, it just feels like a cop-out.

sitting on the edge

Humility is found in silence before truth, but silence can be both good and evil. Silence in the face of evil becomes complicit.

Evil is not-good. Neither good nor evil can exist without at least the potential for the other. Evil can exist. Evil exists (I've seen it). Good exists (seen that, too).

Evil is eternally itself, as is good. All empirically observable reality is elementally good and evil. People are good and evil. The balance between the two can be manipulated by the will. The will is easily misinformed, and the mind can preconceive evil acts and convince itself that they are good. This neither makes the acts good nor the person evil. It is extremely difficult for a person to differentiate between the two, because of the mind's mischeivous, evil bent.

What is required is an ultimate judge/criterion. That judge must not be a person, because it must be an end unto itself, which persons are not. Persons are also highly unreliable and self-deceptive in all that they do. Therefore, if there is to be any meaningful ultimate distinguisher between right and wrong, it can be neither a person or that which has been created by a person.

I, therefore, am not that judge, and should probably shut up now. I do not shut up now. Is this because I am not humble, or because there is great evil and to shut up makes me an accessory? I don't know.

The only possible ultimate judge/criterion is that entity implied by the word "God" to a person (such as myself) raised in the shadow of a monotheistic religion. If that entity is constructed by people, then it is not a reliable judge. In that case, God can be viewed as a useful foil for the struggles people have with their own moral dilemmas, but still no ultimate judge is available.

If, however, "God" exists, that existence begets the question of whether God sides with good, or evil. The answer cannot be determined by observing human behavior or expressed belief, because human behavior and expressed belief are, as we have seen, morally unreliable.

Why, then, should I bother to believe in God? If I need God in order to have some ultimate judge of good and evil, but cannot trust my mind to allow me an accurate picture of what that God is (or even if God is), it would appear that I am caught in a vicious existential circle. I tell myself that my reasons for belief in God are good ones, but admit that I (as I understand mySelf) am an extremely unreliable source of information about reality.

So why do I persist? Here's what I think (here is me, blathering on, not being silent). I think I want to know that there is an ultimate judge, and that the injustices and oppressions of this world are not all there is. Because I cannot give up on this desire and maintain a belief in the value of continuing to live, I persist. As I persist, I find evidences to indicate that there is rhyme and reason to it all (rhyme, to me, is more important than reason). I begin to believe that there is God, and that God made me to try to know what God is. Is my mind once again playing tricks - fortifying my will so that it will continue to persist in the chosen path? Possibly, you cynical, ivory tower philosopher.

Nonetheless, while I will attempt to maintain the humility required by True self awareness, I do believe in God.

I will not fight you over this.

I will, however, love you over it. Because the more I live, the more I value Love. The more I see Love (graceful, patient, kind, self-sacrificial, forgiving, humble love) as being at the centre of Ultimate Reality. Love Is the way things Are, and while I still don't understand or like evil, I believe that it is a necessary (possibly temporary - I hope?) counterpoint to Love (and by the way, I don't capitalize evil because I don't respect it).

Because I believe without knowing that Love is the ultimate, then I believe that Love is what God is, and that everything that is not Love is not-God. Again, I DO NOT KNOW THIS. I believe it. So I look at the world. I read about different people's understandings about God. I read about Jesus and I think, *&%$ yeah! This is what it's about.

I know what you're thinking - "well, that's convenient. Guy's raised in a christian family in a somewhat christianized culture and he comes to see Christ as God and the centre of reality". This is where I don't want you to get me wrong. I don't see Christianity as God. I see the evil, non-loving acts and lives wrought in the name of the church and I shudder. That, I think, cannot be God.

Nonetheless, I read the story of Jesus and I think, bang on! I study the claims and life of Jesus, and I conclude that he claimed to actually be that Ultimate I need to believe in for the sake of the stability of the universe. I read about what he did and said, and I can't find anything I want to disassociate myself from - everything he said was really and truly loving. I read about mohammed, and I cannot do the same. I read about pantheistic religions and I think - interesting, but not ultimate. Jesus - now that's something/someone I can identify with.

I don't trust myself, of course, so I digress and regress and progress (maybe?) as my mind pinballs off of possibilities and perchances.

In the end (today), I come to this conclusion: I cannot trust my mind. Therefore, it doesn't matter what my mind tells me it believes. My true beliefs will be revealed by my actions. I will try, then, to act in accordance with the love I tell myself I believe to be exemplified in Jesus, knowing ahead of time that I will fail.

This is another reason I like Christ. This is another thing that distinguishes him from all the other prophets and "spokesmen for the truth" I've been offered (Mohammed, Benny Hinn, George W., Neitche, C.S. Lewis) : GRACE. I think it was Bono who said that Grace is why Christ is different from the main figure in any other religion. As I see it, Grace is a completion and transcending of Love. It is Love itself, the ultimate judge of good and evil, saying that It understands that the human mind/body/spirit cooperative is a deceptive little bugger. It understands that failure to comprehend and to do Right is almost inevitable. And it responds, in essence, by saying "no big whoop".

So that's what I think, today. God's this Loving, Playful, Graceful entity who understands Reality (who is that Reality) and is OK with it - with us. God is a bit like Alanis Morissette, in the movie "Dogma" who, when confronted by a big, sticky, evil mess made of the passions and perplexities of human behavior, walks up to the chap responsible for it all, taps him on the nose with a finger, and says "boop". Then she fixes the mess and goes and does a headstand. This is what I don't mind spending my life convincing people to believe, to accept.

My life will be short, and since I want it to matter I am going to have to flip a figurative bird at established modes of thought that demand that I figure out exactly what I believe and exactly (to the teat) how it all works together. I will hold my faith and I will try to live in accordance with it... but I will not box my reality. I will not discuss this reality with you (my internetial bretheren) in such a way that presupposes that if you don't agree with me you are evil - and possibly an idiot.

Just remember whom it was that Jesus got pissed at when he was walking around in sandals. Not the hookers, the swindlers, the marginalized or the working man - it was church people. I don't want to be church people. I don't want to hang my hat on systematized propositional beliefs. NEWS FLASH - until the past few centuries, unless I was a cloistered monk this would not have been an option.

I want to live. I want to love people who are not like me. I want to make a difference to the marginalized, poor Other whom Jesus came to hang out with. When Jesus said he was there for these people because it's the sick who need a doctor, he was not implying that the church people were not sick. He said that tongue-in-cheek, folks, because he knew that the real problem with the church people was that they were not willing to admit that they were sick, and in the realm of human well-being only people willing to admit they're sick can be receptive to the restorative medicine of Loving Grace.

But there I go again, talking. And again, I am not sure exactly why. Hopefully it's a humble annoyance at evil and not an arrogant presumption that I am good that has prompted this tirade.

God, I guess, will be my judge.

And by the way, God (since I believe you're reading this), thanks a lot.

cool beans and the homeless

I live in Vancouver. Well, not really. I actually live in Langley/Aldergrove, but unless you're from around here or otherwise concerned with the gerrymandering that goes on to create municipalities, I live in Vancouver. Great big bulbous Vancouver: home of rain, canadians and more rain. Home, also, to a whole bunch of homeless people, whom most people don't care a lick for.

Or didn't, until the Olympics came to town. Ever since Vancouver/Whistler won the bid for the 2010 Olympics, them there unsightly street folk have become a bit of a hot-button issue. We can't have the rest of the world seeing our dirty little secret, can we? Gotta figure out a way to white-wash this little blemish in the next four years, or people might think less of us. Therefore, surveys have been taken, articles written and, strangely enough, the Mayor has asked my wife's first-year-level Anthropology class to write a proposal for ways to solve the "public disorder" issue. So they did, and today around noon presented their proposals to City Council (welcome to bizarro world).

I am not the only one who thinks this is strange. They've already been interviewed for a couple of newspapers,and tonight at 5:45 p.m., Anya and another girl from her class are being interviewed for CBC's nationally broadcast program, Coast to Coast. For any americans reading this, that's like NPR in the U.S. - big beans.

As you can undoubtedly tell, my chestal area is puffed with pride for my wife (I edited the proposal for them, and it's GOOD). I could go on and on about this, but as it is I'm already embarrassing her and contravening her wishes to post this, so I will finish with the headline in tomorrow's national paper: Big City in Trouble Finds Salvation in Advice from Josh's Wife.

Cool frickin' beans, my freinds. Enjoy your day with your not-famous family members.