1623 was the new 1690. Fashion cycles. Nothing changes.

“He was not of an age, but for all time.” -Ben Jonson

“Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.” -William Shakespeare

It took awhile for me to warm up to Billy Shakes, and looking at history, it seems the world did, too. Macbeth was my first. My highschool English teacher managed to make studying the play the driest experience of all time. I would rather have been left in the Sahara with a Rubik’s cube.

But, then I studied Hamlet, and thank God for film versions. To study Shakespeare, you really need to see these things performed. His words, while utterly beautifully complex and playful, become

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Sometimes I get the feeling that things on this earth were created for us specifically. And it sends me on an existential blitz.

The holiday time is dawning and that means food, lots of different kind of food we don’t eat during the rest of the year. Assorted nuts, fruit cakes and puddings are on the shelves. I assume these are things we’ve all collectively agreed would be better eaten in moderation, thus being limited to winter. Every special holiday recipe has some sentimental memory wrapped up in it. Peanut butter squares still remind me of family Christmas dinners, and how I would hijack the desert plate. But there’s no other food I eat more of at this time than mandarin oranges.

Mandarins fascinate me. Other than the obvious fact that they are the desert fruit and are as addictive as iPhone apps, I find their design utterly mind-blowing. It’s incredible, they are crafted for consumption by humans.

Easy to peel, segmented for mess-free, one-bite eating and each piece packaged to hold the juice in for a flavoursplosion culinary experience. I’m reminded of Fight Club when I think of how perfectly single-serving they are.

I doubt other animals would eat them the way mandarins are built for. It’s just proof to me that the human race is supposed to be on this planet, despite what we do to it. It’s like we were inserted into this environment handcrafted to cater to us.

Something I’ll always mention when talking about things that amaze me is the human body. The precision engineering of the body is inspiring. Every single thing has a purpose in keeping the whole thing running and it’s tied up in one perfect unit.

Mandarins are similar. I’m not religious, but I do lean towards Intelligent Design. These things are simply too complex and pristine to have been made by fluke, adaptation or mutations.

And it freaks me out. I would wish that we were all thrown into this orb as randomly as everything else, but it’s just so in my face that we live in a world where almost everything that exists can be used by us.

So, the mandarin. I guess the mandarin orange is here to remind me that there is something much bigger out there, or around here. There’s something that makes and does all this, and it appears to be caring and protective. It seems to want us here.

I hate the war-crying that we’re pests on this earth. I want us to be able to heal everything and make it all better. I don’t want to be on Team Villains by default. How do I fix it? I’m just too small. There’s a school of fish, and me there somewhere. What can I do.

What can I do? I have fins. I make a ripple. I use my words, venues like this, to make a splash and hope some concentric, fluid ring affects someone. Perhaps someone will look at their mandarin orange a little differently. Perhaps they will wonder.

LHC: imagined & created, a creator of new worlds.

These days, it’s incredibly easy to name the things that shame us about our species. But, I’m not in that mood. Sorry. You may as well just hit up some other blogs if you’re in that enviro/prejudism/warring/virus mood. I actually admire mankind.

Gasp! What?

Yes. I admire our species. Not everything, but enough to be proud. I go through phases of what those are. Today, I’m struck with admiration about the things we collectively chase.

Other than love, that is,… as love is always a given. The most beautiful given at that.

The marvel about humans is that we’re self-aware on different levels, from physical to subconscious to universal. We’re driven by the mysterious. Our minds, and quite possibly our souls, crave the information on why we exist, how we exist and what we exist for. You aren’t living unless you

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“This is major Tom to ground control, I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today”

-David Bowie, Space Oddity

There was no afterparty, so I’m writing this, so completely amped that I could moonwalk a mile and back. Tonight was the editors’ reading for the publication I’m editor-in-chief of, This Side of West, and there must have been magic afoot because the whole night sparkled.

It’s funny, I always prepare myself for the worst because something always ends up happening. Someone doesn’t show up, batteries die, the ad said the wrong time or venue, I fumble my speech, whatever… some snag always happens, it sucks, and I deal with it.

But, tonight? How is it that absolutely nothing went wrong? There were all

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“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

As I get older, and my mind matures, I admire those who possess traits that I aspire to. These are people who, through their actions and legacy highlight the follies of my current ways, the bad patterns I need to move beyond. The current one I need to shake is Talking Shit About Others. Dissing, talking behind backs, trash-talking, talking smack, back-biting.

I’ve always been gossipy. This I chalked up to being Gemini, like I could just excuse myself on the basis that I was born on a certain day of the year and I fit the characteristic astrological mold. I can hold a secret damn well, but I

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Yeezy for sheezy

But they’re gonna have to take my life before they take my drive
’cause when I was barely living, that’s what kept me alive
Just the thought that maybe it could be better than what we at at this time
Make it out of this grind, before I’m out of my mind.

-Kanye West, Bring Me Down

There’s a huge stigma with being a fan of rap music. It seems all everybody knows about it is the lasting misogyny and violence that NWA and Boogie Down Productions gave the genre in the early ’90s. Thanks to them (specifically NWA’s “Fuck the Police”), we now have the PARENTAL ADVISORY EXPLICIT LYRICS sticker and a millions that want to run it into a tower engulfed in flames with their pitchforks.

And of course, we have an industry that caters to males 13-21 and their hunger for gun-toting, egos, female objectification and drugs. It sells, so they make it. That’s commercial rap. That’s what the public knows.

So, I find myself always educating people when I tell them I love rap. If I don’t,

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watch it

“The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s sounds ludicrous to think that lightning strikes that split trees in half and cook people aren’t very far removed from the electric activity in the brain synapses. Are all of these strikes destiny or chance?

Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes) explores this in her new documentary, Act of God. I’m a fan of this film. It made me look at lightning in a whole other way.

In the film, English experimental and improvisational guitarist Fred Frith dons a cap with more leads and hook-ups than he’s probably seen in his career. But, these aren’t to play music. His cap registers his brain activity. When he’s told to riff for seven minutes, a graph readout jumps to life, sketching a painting in multiple colours, a record of his lightning strikes.

Another scene I was amazed by was of a small Mexican community that lost six children to a lightning strike atop the hill overlooking the town during a religious festival. Each of the mothers spoke on how devoutly religious the townspeople were. “It was God’s will,” they say in one breath. In another, they speak about how they have doubts in their own God now.

The hill in question was adorned with a 12-foot high white cross. It was what conducted the lightning that horrific night that left all the children dead, and only the parents to survive and question their faith.

Through the collage of lightning videos and stories of friends being hit and killed, people affected by an event where ground and sky are connected by electricity, I began to think about how electricity affects me.

When I create a setting, a world, and then a character to move about in it, what’s happening? These creations are happening from lightning strikes in my brain. Each strike changes something or adds something. The worlds I create in story, art and film are all from electricity. Strikes of imagination and creativity.

Maybe the world is a synapse, jolted from time to time to carry out some greater being’s creative wishes. Or maybe it is all by chance. Maybe creativity is an unpredictable thing, one which makes its mark by random natural occurrence.

Whatever it is, my spine is a lightning rod, and I’ll let it be.

Once upon a time in Berlin, now simply memories and photographs.

I never want to know what singular moment in the war caused my grandfather, Jack, to come home and demand that no one mention he went overseas at all. Sure, he was never in the war, and those shakes weren’t from shellshock.

I never got to know him. Jack died a year almost to the day I was born. He died on Ascension Day. He’s always been the hero of the family, a warm father and loving husband.

I have a wooden tie box he made with his brass Army Corps. badge as a handle. My family has his medals in another box. We had his gun, too. On a day set aside to remember what that generation did to win everyone else’s freedom, it’s hard to ignore what Jack did despite his wishes to keep it all locked away.

Do we respect his living wishes after death? If he were alive and knew me, would things be different? Would he find pride in what he did?

Jack was a prisoner of war. Luckily, he was the one ally who had the shortest time spent as a POW in WWII, but what does that really mean anyway.

He was a Canloan officer, a Canadian soldier on loan to the British, a Desert Rat, a soldier in the massively talented 7^th Armoured Division that kicked ass in the desert campaign. He and the Rats were moved up for D-Day to pave the way for the rest of the troops. Though, “pave the way” means a lot more than how it reads.

Jack hit the beach on D-Day Plus One (the day after) and pushed into Germany over the next few months. On a routine patrol commanding his troops through a forest inside enemy lines, Jack and his crew were ambushed from the trees by the infamous SS.

They killed everyone he was in charge of, and he lay on the forest floor with a gunshot an inch from his heart. If his Brit troops hadn’t told him to throw away all of his Canadian badges and insignia, he would have been executed on the spot.

What happened next only he knows. The German’s fixed him up and sent him to a French hospital-slash-makeshift-prison for a period of time.

My grandmother got an MIA news report and mourned his death.

When the American’s started bombing France, the French Underground warned the American’s which buildings not to bomb. Jack’s was one, and the Americans burst in and saved him.

He spent days on a Red Cross train eating moldy bread and eggs. And he was free.

My other grandfather was in the Atlantic Canadian Navy. Herbert was renamed Jock by his fellow sailors. It was something derived from his successful underground Naval boxing career.

He spent his time hunting U-Boats. He told me about the day when he hit one. They dropped some depth charges on it and watched the plume bubble burst on the surface. An eruption of oxygen and flame. Then, nothing.

They ask us to remember on this day. I’ve seen enough war movies to relate to the patriotic feeling, but do my grandfathers want to remember what they saw? Do they want to remember each moment when they ripped the life from their exact counterpart?

They were brothers together in Hell. I thank them for their heroism, but I remember them for their love as family and men.

men about the world

I was finally sitting in the front seat of a car. Awesome. My grampa was at the wheel of his dirt brown Ford. A tank of a car, when I say I sat beside I him up front, I mean to say there was room between us for his carpentry workshop.

I knew I shouldn’t be up front, but grampa was a sucker for breaking people’s rules. My mom would have been choked to see what I was watching, the white line of the odometer arch across the 50, 60, 70, and we were doing 90 km/h across the bouncing roads on Gabriola Island.

This is what the exciting life of being a grown man had in store for me. I sat on my knees, sticking to the green vinyl, and watched the leading edge of the car swallow up the road. Grampa nudged me and laughed like he always did when he knew he was breaking the law, from his gut.

We parked in a sunburned crop of grass. I leapt out as Grampa swung the car-length door open. My dad and uncle were helping Grampa build a small cabin on the property. I assumed it was a place for him to go when he wanted some time to himself from my granny. You know, because that’s what men do: build escape cabins.

I remember how my dad and his brother were

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