A Lucky Escape

From May to December (isn't that a song?) I lived in an apartment on the corner of St. Mathieu and Ste. Catherine, in the heart of downtown Montreal.

The other day, I ran into my brother on the steet:

"Good thing you moved", he said to me.

"Tell me something I don't know", I thought (it's a long story). "What do you mean?", I said.

"There was a fire there. I saw the outside windows of your apartment boarded up."

I went to investigate, and sure enough, what he said was true. My apartment was right next to the next door building, which had been gutted. What damage had been done to the apartment itself wasn't clear from the outside, but the windows being boarded up boded ill.

Turns out it was even in the news, and I didn't know:

http://www.montrealmirror.com/2007/022207/news2.html

http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=3bbd8333-4607-47af-9370-c6c35edc0706

Safety Through Joylessness

In the college where I work there are these public service announcement posters promoting safer sex through condom use. This is all fine and good, but there are two problems: One, what the girl appears to be about to unwrap looks suspiciously like a lollipop - get your minds out of the gutter, I would be alone - and Two, the rather blasé demeanour of the young couple featured makes me think that there ought to be an accompanying speech bubble that reads “Right, let’s get this thing over with.” And today, for some reason, this image seemed to me to be a premonition of a dystopian future in which a rather canny set of killjoys manage to take the fun out of sex by making it mandatory. This would possibly even be a logical extension of our current societal attitudes towards sexuality, come to think of it.

I read in the news that anti-Valentine's Day sentiment is becoming mainstream: once a possibly edgy response to an overly Hallmark'ed holiday, it is now being successfully exploited by cardmakers sensing yet another marketing opportunity (see
“Card makers capitalize on 'anti-V Day' with loveless Valentine greetings’
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/070212/koddities/anti_valentine_s_day_1)

This is what people forget- cynicism is as easy to manipulate as sentimentality. The feeling of resisting the marketers can itself be marketed!

So perhaps it would be good to get beyond the dichotomy of cynicism vs. sentimentality and embrace something harder but likely more rewarding: courage. It takes courage to love (and I don’t specifically mean romantic love). For to love is to care, but to care is often painful. For instance, how can one love human beings without being pained at what they (we) do to each other? Yet to retreat into cynicism about human beings is self-defeating, for if it is based on anger that was based in love- once you lose sight of the love, what are you left with? Only negativity remains.

You know, I'm starting to get a bit tired of this weather. Freezing cold, biting winds...OK in moderation, perhaps, but...well, I'm in the last of my three stages of dealing with weather: 1) the initial shock; 2) finding the fun and the adventure in it; 3) getting tired of it.

Could be worse though. We could have a mild but continuously grey and rainy winter. I used to envy the people in Vancouver, but not any more.

The very mild December and early January period was deceptive, but at least it helped put climate change at the top of the national agenda. Not that warmer weather is bad in itself, you understand. In fact, I remember when we had our first major snowstorm last month- and this following weeks of "where did our winter go?" angst in the media- the Montreal French-language daily La Presse ran a cartoon showing two people digging their cars out of a snowbank, and one turns to the other and says "Remind me why we were missing this?". But of course, we Canadians love to complain about the weather- it doesn't even really matter what it is. Even those Quebecois who don't regard themselves as being Canadian share in this.

No, but seriously, I like springtime in December as much as anyone- it's just that when you start screwing around with a complicated tangle of interlocking systems like climate, which is itself interlocked with complex natural systems such as ecosystems, you stand a good chance of reaping the whirlwind. After all, we humans also depend on ecosystems for survival. If this planet were just a bit differant in some ways, we wouldn't even be here.
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For me, there's no more complete feeling of energy and power than that of artistic creation at its peak. I've been working on a play- reworking the script, working in new songs, adapting it to a new vision- and this feeling of creating something in this way is so exiting and engrossing. The only problem is that because of this I can become obsessed with it and so caught up in it that it becomes stressful- it gets hard to sleep or do other things I need to do, because my mind is always darting back to resolving problems relating to the script or the songs and different possibilities for resolving them.