Hello from New Brunswick!

My wanderings of Eastern Quebec and Eastern Canada have now brought me into New Brunswick. I feel really blessed by this experience- I think it came at just the right time for me, and has been really beautiful. Travelling also teaches you to take things as they come, and take the consequences of your mistakes as they come, and maybe be creative in dealing with them. Photos to come later....

Zines and things

I'm on vacation now! But although I'm going to be leaving town for a few days (if all goes well), first I'm taking some time chilling and finishing the second issue of my zine, Subversive Creation. It's just about done, just need to have some copies printed.

What's it about? Well, I studied philosophy for my undergrad, and I think in a way this zine grasps at creative ways of "doing philosophy", using poetry and stories, drawings and articles The theme for the first one was "learning life's lessons". For this one, it's "telling stories". This issue includes stories of trying to find an apartment in New York City, of war, of disintegrating friendships, of leaving a job, of silent phone calls from the Old Timers' Hockey Challange, of a flag-hating kleptomanic and his early morning bonfire. Are these autobiographical stories? Well, bits here and there are from real life, or based on it....

Went hiking on Mt. Temblant today with a friend. It was really nice to be away from the city, and it was an excellent workout.

So Many Montreal Pauls Listed

Different parts of my life come together in interesting ways. For instance, my friend David-Jan and his playback troupe performed at a conference we had at work a couple of weeks ago. Also in that troupe was Mira, who took part with me in "The Dictatorship of Debt", a dinner theatre on global economic (in)justice that ran in early February. (I also do the dinner theatre in French. Here's a photo from one of those performances).

Also in the playback troupe (but not there when they played the conference) was Chu-Lynne, who I met I met at the French Immersion in Trois-Pistoles last spring and who I ran into on a Montreal street a couple of weeks later (I didn't know she was a Montrealer!).

Last Saturday I was in the mood to enjoy the rain when it came down- it was a time when I didn’t mind getting soaked. In fact, it was the most joyful I’d been in some time. Later, I went to a workshop & party at David-Jan’s, and was surprised to run into another friend, Nikki. She wasn’t so surprised. She said there were so many Pauls on the invitation list, and “I figured one of them had to be you.”

How About Some Protest Theatre?

Marched in a big demo in Montreal against the war in Lebanon this grey rainy afternoon. Should have brought a camera.

It was good to see so many people standing together and marching together to take this stand. But the mood was angry and confrontational. My mood was more sorrowful, and didn`t really fit in.


There`s an Elvis Costello song that features the line:

I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused

and it`s been my motto. But there`s really nothing amusing about this. Can`t laugh about it, so I`ll cry instead.

For years I`ve been saying to myself that I would like to make protests more interesting by introducing elementa of interactive popular theatre. At times I`ve been involved in attempts to do this (see above photo for one example) none of them very fruitful in the long run. At some point I`ll have to seriously study some theatrical forms- Forum, Playback, etc.- and see how some of those ideas could possibly be applied to a mass protest action. Of course the logistics would be a huge problem- it would have to be organic in the sense of not being all set up in advance, but with differant elements (music, minmes, dancers, clowns, actors)- that would enable the emotions that bring people to the protests to be played out and amplified, in ways that would simply happen- the theatrical set-up and structures would just facilitate this.

Hmmm.....I look like Jean Charest in the above photo....is this why I grew a beard?

Went to a demo at noontime today against the war in Lebanon. Across the road was a counter-demonstration “in solidarity with Israel.”. I suppose some people feel that Israel needs all the help it can get nowadays- perhaps this betrays a certain lack of perspective on their part about what’s going on. Tomorrow I’ll go to a bigger demo. I might not be protesting were it not for Canada supporting a military operation that is killing hundreds of people and driving hundreds of thousands from their homes and communities (so far). Didn't we go to war a few years ago to supposedly put a stop to that sort of thing in Kosovo? (Not that I favoured that war either, I must admit) As it is, I feel obliged to stand up and say in response to our government “Oh no you don’t. Not in my name.”

I won’t go into detail here about my views on the whole Mid-East mess. One problem with the last blog I did was it became dominated by tirades on politics. I invite you to read about what’s going on from people who are actually seeing it, like Robert Fisk, if you’re interested in having an opinion based on fact and on love for people rather than on lies in the service of nationalism, fundamentalism or ideology. I also like this column by Rick Salutin: “Lebanon, Israel and obscenity” (http://www.rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=51434)

Principles

"Harper insisted he took a principled stand by staunchly supporting the Israeli offensive, even though it killed an entire Montreal family during their holidays. .... "One thing Canadians will increasingly understand about me is I will make my own decisions," he said.
"Our government will take whatever position we think is right - particularly on strategic matters - whether we think it's popular or unpopular in the short term." (canoe.ca)

People admire people who stick to their principles. But why? Shouldn't they be more concerned about whether those principles are any good to begin with?


Everyone has principles,
Some are to die for,
Some are to cry over.

Some, reinforced by iron will
are licenses to kill

Tiny Talk

(OLD POSTING: originally January 23rd, 2005 )


All my life, I’ve been bad at small talk, and have always felt awkward about starting conversations with people, especially people I don’t know. That’s why I’m taking the Tiny Talk (Small Talk 101) course from the good people at Creative Resurgence. This course teaches you how to improvise chatter so small as to be invisible, simply by recounting the mundane with an edge of drama.

For instance, have you noticed today that it is cold? Well I did. When I ventured out this morning, one of the first things that occurred to me was that there did seem to be a certain chill in the air. My suspicion was confirmed when I felt those parts of my skin coming into contact with the air becoming cold. And when I could see the trail of condensation of my warm breath as it charged forth valiantly into the pitiless cold mass, I thought to myself “Well, Paul, you sure hit the nail on the head this time with your suspicions. This air is cold alright. Lucky for me I dressed up warmly, or I’d be getting really cold myself right about now.” I could go on, but I don’t want to monopolise the conversation or anything. That’s my weather story for today, have you got one?

Hello Silence, My Old Friend: A Series of Silent Phone Calls

This is an edited version something appearing in the July issue of my zine, "Subversive Creation"

November 2005- The first of the silent phone calls. The phone rings, rings, rings. I pick it up. "Hello?" I say. No answer. Nothing at all. "Hello?", I repeat uncertainly. Still no answer. Oh well. I hang up.

This was the start of the mystery of the serial silent phone calls.

Most calls from 1-800 numbers are not mysterious. You get to know what they’re about quickly enough, although extricating yourself from them tends to take longer.

It’s easy to get really annoyed with the person at the other end of the line, who’s intruding into your home to try to get you to part with your money, whether it’s for charity or to take advantage of a special offer to save money by spending it. But then, that person who’s annoying you and me by calling at dinnertime probably isn’t enjoying it either. Very few people work in call centres because they want to. They do it because they need the money. They might be students scraping by, juggling doing their studies and finding ways to pay the rent. They might be starving artists who are trying to not literally starve. And there are many other stories to hear about people working in call centres, all courtesy of our screwy priorities and screwy economy.

I wonder- what’s the story of the person behind the mysterious phone calls?

The calls came once a day or every two days. Was someone trying to say something to me or to the folks where I lived? The statement might have been the call itself- “I’m here- whoever I may be- and I can reach into your home whenever I want.” That was all. But why?

I knew it was a 1-800 number because I had one of those phones where the number of the caller appeared on the screen. I called that number and got a message that told me that I'd reached the Old Timers’ Hockey Challenge. All that told me was that someone at this organisation was calling my home repeatedly to say nothing- an interesting new approach to fundraising, taking the concept of the “soft sell” a step further.

It became a game for me, really. I kept a log of the calls registered, with the date and time of each. When I answered one of those calls I would adopt a singsong voice, saying things like ‘Hello-hello-hello? Hello? No hello? Then it’s time for goodbye. Goodbye-goodbye-goodbye”, or recite a (not very original) poem I wrote in response to this that started:

Hello silence my old friend,
You’ve come to talk with me again,
With words that will remain unheard,
And pauses that will never end...

The phone calls went on holiday during the Christmas break:

Wednesday Dec. 28, 2005- (Diary entry) “Whoever (is responsible) seems to be on vacation at the moment. There have been no calls since last Thursday. I wish that person an excellent vacation. But perhaps no person is responsible. Perhaps the calls have been due to a bizarre computer glitch, in which case I think the computer needs an excellent vacation. Computers have feelings too, as anyone who`s tried working with them can attest.”

Then...

Thursday Jan. 5, 2006: after a 2 week break, another silent call! The Christmas Vacation Theory was correct!

January 2006- anticlimax!: The calls only went on for a few days this time, and ended as inexplicably as they began. Now I’ve just realized as I write this: I have gone months without getting a single solitary silent phone call! Hopefully making those calls was beneficial to the caller- but the whole thing remains an unsolved mystery to me. Oh well.

It is time for an end to illusions. They sparkle and they dazzle the eyes, but before too long only lies remain to sustain them. Lies, rationalisations and other forms of dishonesty tangle thoughts in an ideological web.

Has love blinded you? Can you not see what's been going on? How did love for one lead you to hatred for the other? For when you talk as if the lives of one people are worthless compared to the lives of another, what are you expressing about the people who are not your own?