Human beings are tribal. They are hard-wired to value sameness, not otherness. Tribes fashion cultural habits and artifacts to emphasize their belonging (and in consequence differentiate themselves from the others). These differences took generations upon generations to build; they are not easily extinguished or assimilated. Nor should be.
I don’t know if Francine would describe herself as a virtuous person, or someone consciously seeking to live a more virtuous life. I doubt she had a ‘top six’ list of virtues she aspired to, but I do believe she was naturally virtuous in two or three domains. And these are the things that, for me at least, make her an exceptional person: generosity, tolerance, sense of humour.
For months and months I have watched in dismay these pro-Palestinian demonstrations on continuous display through our various news media and on-line sources. To me it beggared belief that so many people, and many of those rooted in traditional western values, could so naively misjudge the true objectives of the Hamas terrorists over the legitimate aims of Zionism.
Nothing prepared me for this. NOTHING. So now what? Clearly, Brian was now on the Dementia pathway. But also I’m on the pathway of a pain that doesn’t heal and crying in the shower doesn’t relieve.
Book covers are intended to summarize in an image the theme of the book, draw some connection with the title and together, hopefully, invite the prospective reader in. In most cases I was very pleased with the covers of my books, but, it has to be said, I’m quite unsure whether the covers made any difference in the sales of those books.
The apostrophe signals to the reader that expected letters have been left out (but not forgotten): I suppose when people began to take on names, Gronk didn’t need to say, ‘that stick hims’, he said, ‘that stick Jons’ and later it became ‘that’s Jon’s stick’ with that Johnny-come-lately apostrophe stuck in the middle. But what did he say about Gus?
The 2024 Paris Olympics has raised a number of questions in my philosophical mind, not for the first time. And the questions also raise troubling dissonance.
Our last bike ride was only eight months ago and today he doesn’t know who I am; the rapid progression is devastating. Dementia isn’t logical – that part of his mind is gone – it is emotional. The only thing that matters is the feeling of care, calm, and presence – minimizing frustration.
This July is the tenth anniversary of the start of Marlene’s journey with cancer. Ten years is a long time to grieve. But grief never goes away, it just gets quieter.
Canada Day, despite the clumsy ring of the word on our tongues, should be a hallowed day of reverence, gratitude, appreciation, and celebration. Instead, vacuous tv and radio personalities juvenilely wish us all ‘Happy Birthday, Canada’. It is to weep.
So it is that despite living with my Filipina partner for more than five years – more apart than together – my patterns get perturbated each time she joins me in Canada. It’s like the first time all over again. But different.
I’ve never been one to sleep on a plane, nor even in a car; even with the aid of a glass or two of wine, dimmed cabin lights, elevated levels of nitrous oxide from the other sleeping passengers, I don’t sleep. I squirm, and turn, and shift my weight yet again, trying to find some comfortable position for just a few hours. And it’s not just to have the health benefits of the needed sleep, but to have the relief of a few hours of unconsciousness from this interminable flight.
Here we are now in the third week of our seventh tour in The Philippines and the observations continue to pile up, some as echoes of 2018, some fresh and offering new perspective. Here are the Chapters: Checkers and Chess; Eating Order; Jasmine’s Graduation; Filipino Wedding; Montezuma’s Revenge; Mount Mayon Vulcan.
Philippines is a third world country, not as desperately poor and backward as many African and Asian countries but nevertheless dramatically different from prosperous Canada. Five years and five tours later it is just as desperate a scene as it ever was but somehow no longer shocking. I think to myself, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, but it does bring acceptance of a sort.
I took a last glance at the eclipse, nodded to my neighbours, and the sky, and took myself back to my desk. This eclipse business had stolen many hours from my productivity goals working on R3 of ‘Alex’ Choice’.
Christmas is fixed in our minds because it is fixed in the modern calendar – December 25, but with Easter, we have to look it up. The date is slippery, it falls somewhere in late March, more often in early to mid-April, but we never know for sure – we have to google it. Easter Dinner is a moveable feast.
If it wasn’t for William Shakespeare and his Julius Caesar, we probably would have no idea of this ancient Roman calendar marker. I suppose that’s a credit to the power of the cultural arts – to imbed memes in the societal landscape.
Even so, I hazard to guess most people, if they know anything at all about the Ides of March, know only that it portends foreboding.
The recognition that the calendar needed reform because of this calendar creep was centuries in the making. And who was the genius who figured this out and lobbied for the change? It wasn’t Pope Gregory, nor Phillip II of Spain – they just brought the political clout.
February 14 is Valentine’s Day, that curiously celebrated day for romantic love, when the rituals of courting begin, or reset. We think of Spring as the time for awakening love interest, so why St. Valentine’s Day in mid-February, surely two months short of Spring Fever?
In this sense, the adage, ‘don’t let excellence be the enemy of the good’ applies. It may also be variant on the Nike slogan: if a thing is worth doing, do it.
The concept of quality, and its derivatives – poorly, well, good, badly, worth doing – are largely subjective, and as such there is a certain relativism in the terms.
Every author, surely, wants to be ‘good’ writer, but this illusive standard can be soul destroying.
‘Maestro’ is a biopic about Leonard Bernstein. I won’t comment on the film (mixed merit) but Bernstein surely is an iconic example of the notion of a man passionate about his career as a musician, or more so, as a person living a passionate life. Or possibly a man with a bipolar condition.
In my early days in recruiting (40-50 years ago!) I don’t think I ever encountered anybody who had a ‘passion’ for accounting, or glassblowing. ‘Passion’ seems to be a more recent phenomenon: people have a ‘passion’ for market research, or ‘people’.
Really?
When it comes to motivation, my blood curdles every time I hear the word, incentivize.
Motivation comes from within. No-one is actually motivated (incentivized?!) by some external force – moved maybe, but not motivated.
Canadians can have an opinion about the complex issues that are the Middle East, and more particularly the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, but to justify, not to mention celebrate, the terrorist acts of Hamas (or Hezbollah for that matter) is ethically, morally and even intellectually wrong.
pressure to produce this blog on time was now having to compete with my other obligations and passions. So what does an old dog do? – take nap.
Marshall McLuhan famously said ‘the medium is the message’ (by which was meant that the choice of means and transmission of the message was more impactful than the message itself) but this could also be restated as ‘the medium is the legacy’. If the creator hasn’t provided for the means to preserve their work, and retrieve it, it vanishes, and the longed-for legacy is lost. Hoping to be remembered is a mug’s game really, since in actuality the means to preserve and retrieve records is fragile and likely temporary.
That may sound like a stupid question, or at least one with a simple answer – just keep on revising the original draft – but you’d be surprised how many authors save their first draft and begin revision on a duplicate copy, renaming the file, R1 (or D2 if you prefer that nomenclature). (Of course, if you choose to make continuous revisions to the first draft, you never need to face the question of what to name the file in subsequent revisions.) But why do they do it?
When I start a new book project, I name the file with an appropriate title and mark it R0 – Revision Zero. I suppose the original file could be called Draft 1 and the revision would be Draft 2. Or it could be First Draft and then Revision 1 but that annoys me. So I call the first draft R0 and the 2nd draft R1. (I know, quirky.)
Each of these movies say something to me, or meant something to me at the time I saw them and the memory stays with me. Some of these titles will always be on the top ten list while others might slip to 11 or 19, depending on what other titles might come to mind at any given time. But for now, let’s accept these as my top ten.
But now it’s back to the movies and people are flocking to the theatres again. But things have changed. Now a pair of ducats cost at least 50 bucks and by the time you wind your way through the self-serve junk food court and pay too easily with your tap bank card, you’ve spent well over $100 bucks to see, to see, well, a mediocre film.
I’ve had experience with medical assistance in dying, with my dogs. Scoff if you like, but I’m sure the rituals and emotional experience of it is very similar. And the worst of it is, the trusting quadrupedal family member has no idea what is coming. For our pets, and severely injured and ill animals of any description, we have almost no reservations about euthanasia for them.
With bipedal family members the experience must be different. Sentience in the human makes the difference, and so we defer to the one who will die to make the decision? But what if they can’t? Or leave it too late?
Beyond the gift of god argument, attitudes to suicide may vary with cultural norms. In some cultures it seen as the ultimate in cowardice, and selfishness. In others, suicide is seen as the failure of society to rescue the suicidal individual from the social and psychological demons she or he is living with. In yet other societies it is seen as the height of honour. But mostly, suicide has been seen as a tragic end to an unhappy existence, and an outcome that society should do whatever it can to minimize.
I found exploring cemeteries profoundly thought-provoking. Marlene found it mildly morbid. I understand her point of view, even though I doubt she understood mine.
Ageing happens every day of course but we don’t tend to notice, until one day. Somewhere around age 70 I began to notice changes in Dad’s skin, brown spots on his hands, and face. And jowls. Clear signs of ageing. And it bothered me.
His skin also became increasingly wrinkled. He’d take off his perma-pressed shirt and remark his skin needed ironing. Miraculously his hair never went gray!
Having an MBA and managing my own consulting business for 30 years, meant I had some sense of business management, including the imperative of effective marketing and distribution. So I applied this wisdom to my book business: I did some research, I developed plans, I made calls. I made progress. But not enough. I needed help. I joined the Canadian Authors Association.
Now that [Terry Fallis] is a successful published author, he has speaking gigs all over the country. I’m not sure if his fame has reached the US. He mentions enjoying Whitehorse very much, but no mention of Wabash. I imagine he no longer drives himself to give a Wednesday afternoon talk at the Campbellford Public Library, but I could be wrong.
The marketing strategy here is to attempt to lever the word-of-mouth angle (‘word on the street’?), by far the most effective method to draw attention to your book. It’s one thing to tickle somebody’s fancy on TikTok, it’s another thing to get that amused potential buyer to become an actual buyer; she needs one more bit of encouragement. People are much more likely to buy your book if her friend recommended it than if she only saw a video. You need to get people talking about your book, and then friends telling their friends about it.
Still, how many books will they sell? This is the classic queuing problem every B.Comm. student ponders in Operations Research 299. It’s the same problem every baker ponders when trying to decide the right quantity of buns to bake. Too many means wasted inventory and costs, too few and you sell out of product and have unrealized revenue. And therein lies the big problem with book fairs.
So in seeking retail channels for our book, ‘The Treasure of Stella Bay’, we abandoned the Indigo empire and sought out local independent bookstores instead, especially those located in Ottawa (local author angle) and the Lake Ontario/Kingston region (to exploit the Amherst Island/Stella Bay locale angle). You can see my strategy here: if my book could get traction with these parochial stores, I could then lever this reputation into indie stores in the ‘big smoke’ (i.e., Toronto).
To get noticed on social media, words are not enough; even pictures are not enough. You need more than pictures to get and hold people’s attention. You need moving pictures.
And we’re not talking about black and white Charlie Chaplin movies, we’re talking talkies.
TikTok.
Writing may be challenging enough but marketing and promoting one’s book is anathema. And most marketing these days is done through social media – a living hell.
In the face of this daunting market-place for books, most Canadian writers don’t realistically expect to become rich and famous, nor even become ‘best-selling authors’; they just want to be read. (I suppose that might be said of all writers. How many aspiring American authors also live in obscurity, their books languishing in their closets, unsold, unread and unloved.)
Meteorology records tell us that the first Ottawa snowfall in the fall of 1970 was November 10 but on the 12th, 9½ inches (24.6 cm); citizens didn’t see the ground again for 139 days.
You don’t have to be a lifer to be a virtuous volunteer but you need to be committed; many volunteers, though, have other motives, or find out they aren’t as motivated to make a contribution as they first thought when they volunteered, caught in a moment of enthusiasm, or pressure.
I provoked sufficient comment (and maybe more thought) last year about setting an annual plan that some readers might feel cheated if I didn’t let them know how it turned out. Besides, it might also prove therapeutic for me to reassess the progress of the year 2022.
in Northern Europe, a new rival for the affections of the people began to creep into the collective consciousness. Alongside the messiah of hope we now had the generous Saint Nicholas, he espousing the virtue of giving. But this wonderful virtue gave rise to an all-new kind of angst – what to give! And spawned another perturbation – debt.
I’m not a natural gardener, but over a 35+ years span I became one, and even saw the psychological and therapeutical merits in the hobby, possibly even the fitness benefits.
On impulse last September as I packed to accompany Carmen returning to The Philippines, I threw a double pack of playing cards into my suitcase.
Even before we left Canada we knew the original model of living together six months in Canada and six months in The Philippines had to change. Our model now has to be the Filipino Balikbayan concept – working off-shore for ten months, home for a couple – Doug attending to his consulting business in Canada to earn extra funds to support his pamilya in the Philippines and join Carmen from time to time in Trece, or Kanata.
Carmen came to Canada at the end of April 2019 and after six months we returned to The Philippines, October 12, to continue to explore our relationship. While there, I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that as a Canadian, my unrestricted entry was good for only 59 days; after that I had to apply for an ‘Alien Certificate of Registration’, which was mildly disturbing to me, naively believing I had unrestricted liberty. An alien! I felt a bit like ET.
Rainy days severely limit commerce and economic activity in The Philippines. With Super Typhoons, everything comes to a halt, government and schools suspended. This is a chronic problem for the Philippines economy but acute for the millions of Filipinos who operate micro-enterprises, called tindahans, out of their tiny houses.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II could not help but bring a pause to all our lives. It marks the end of an era, the beginning of a new reign, and a moment to reflect on the changes that come to us all, even if we don’t think so.
But when the really critical moments come, it’s more than advice that you need. You also need a hand; an introduction, a recommendation; real help. Without that help, an opportunity that might make a significant difference may not become manifest. At times like these it isn’t the advice we need from a mentor, it’s his connections.
As our lives diverged, contact was reduced to the banality of weddings and funerals, and the shallow wish that ‘we must try to get together more often’, and not just at funerals. It’s a common story I think, but one that brings with it some regret.
My inquiring mind began to be stretched in University through some of the optional courses I took in pursuit of my Bachelor of Arts degree. I wasn’t on some troubled quest to challenge and betray my earlier religious education, I was just curious to know.
Science now explains thunder and lightning, and even how life began, but the fundamental questions remained. But because the mind abhors uncertainly it prefers magical thinking to the horror of the abyss. Religion gives people comfort, and who can blame them for that.
As much as it irritates me, many Canadians seem to love the eponymous national holiday, or have never thought about it. But it is awkward sounding and uninspiring to my mind. Scroll through google and see how many other countries name their national holiday after itself: I can only find two others: Australia and Russia! And the way broadcasters mindless chirp ‘Happy Birthday Canada!’ is enough to make one nauseous. Talk about an unserious country.
Even though only a 15-year-old self-absorbed teenager, I had become politically interested and got caught up in this national debate. My instinctive preference was the Red Ensign, mostly because, as Canadian of anglo heritage[3], indoctrinated with British history and pageantry, I liked the Union Jack and its inclusion in the Ensign. In any event, I liked this new Pearson Pennant and I urged my mother to make my/our preferred variant of the blue borders flag so we could fly it and thus show our preference.
Jeffrey Mason, whose book ‘Dad, I Want to Know Your Story’ which has inspired the writing of my auto-biography, invites the journalist to list the critical events of the year of one’s birth, in my case 1947, but I think this is a bit empty because in 1947 I was pretty much oblivious to what was going on at the time. It may have been a significant year to my parents but are just entries in a history book for me. More significant I think would be my formative teen years, 1962 perhaps. I would have turned 15 that year.
May 9th was Election Day in The Philippines, and Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos was elected in a tremendous landslide over his closest rival, Leni Robredo. Since then the alarmist reports out of the Western press, and echoing comments to me, now an apparent expert on Pilipinas affairs, have been distressing, and to my mind, insulting to Filipinos.
[Dad] used to watch the ponies running at Fort Erie Racetrack of a sunny summer afternoon in the early 1960s when we lived in Welland Ontario. A few times he took me with him. No doubt for him an afternoon at the track represented a business expense entertaining a customer, but to me it was pure excitement, especially to stand by the rail and see those thoroughbreds thunder by.
I was born on August 27, 1947; at 5:00 pm, I was told, just in time for dinner. The source, of course, was my mom – I’m not sure my dad ever told me anything about my birthday, nor much else about my life, as we shall soon see.
The most compelling difference [between Canada and the Philippines wrt covid consequences] is how significantly more damaged the Philippines economy is and the adverse affects on the people. … For all of this, Filipinos in general are not complaining
When I arrived in Philippines March 4 (and survived the bureaucratic storm of documents – both print and electronic) and was driven to our modest resort hotel in Dasmariñas, I was struck by the heavy traffic and claustrophobic congestion, even though only 6 o’clock in the morning. It was just like the last time I was here, pre-pandemic, in 2020. But somehow different. The country is tired.
What has been the response to covid-19 protocols on Philippine society is something I hope to uncover during my visit to The Philippines over the next few weeks, and see if there may be similar disruption to social cohesion as there appears to be in Canada. Stay tuned.
Even though we’re not quite out of the pseudo-apocalyptic fear period, one can see a light that looks like freedom. And I’m not talking about transport trucks, just a small beacon pointing the way to a time of more choice, more options, and hopefully, more tolerance – more like the ‘olden times’ normal.
I can return to The Philippines and bring my asawa back to Canada. I should be happy.
But, yet….
I wish I had been paying more attention when I had the chance to plumb the depths of my own parents’ memories to learn more of their histories, and mine.
But enough of 2021, what do we intend to do about 2022. Well, assuming continuing decent health, both physical and mental, and hoping that life’s vicissitudes give me a pass this year, I think I’ll try for the same mission as 2021 but modified thusly:
Unlike Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, for the most part my Christmases Past, especially those of my youth, were largely pleasant, a middle class boomer generation cliché, a Saturday Evening Post magazine cover, privileged in a rather unaware way, though when you’re six or seven years old you’re not much aware of anything; but when you are seventy-something wholly revised perspectives emerge, patterns that weren’t altogether evident at the time.
[Trudeau fils has said he is the leader of the world’s first post-national state, because ‘there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada’ (this last remark may be, sadly, correct)
I think, [CFL and the Grey Cup] are symbols of Canada’s unique identity and a heritage that must be protected and preserved.
The Chart looks complicated enough, but if you are an indie author/publisher you have to pick your way through all of that yourself and more, or less. Missing from this chart are the shipping companies, perhaps the only winners in the chain.
My Marketing and Promotion strategy was sort of a five pillars plan: (of which prayer is one part but, probably, the least reliable – though if my goal is to find ‘flow’ I should try more prayer).
An effective sales and marketing plan, whether for books or boats, requires two main elements: having in place a distribution channel, or channels, and bringing
So, facing my fears, I decided to make the Marketing and Selling of The Treasure of Stella Bay my Project for the next five months. I would try to bring my talents to bear, even if they are not my best talents, and strive for some modicum of fulfillment, if not actual joy.
I hadn’t been on the hustings before. Well, not quite true, but the last time I was on the hustings I wasn’t even old enough to vote (you had to be 21 in those days! – and wouldn’t you know it, my candidate didn’t win that time either).
It seems to me that September 1, or at least Labour Day, is more like new year than New Year. In January we drag ourselves back to work or school after ten days of Winter Solstice celebration – knowing we had 90 more days of winter to go. But in September we rouse ourselves from our summer slumbers and get on with life – new plans, new prospects, new purpose.
Do you recall Roy Orbison’s tier two hit song, In Dreams? (Probably not, but it’s a beautiful song.) It starts as a fantasy, of a lucid hopeful future; but true to form, it ends badly. I think that’s the main point of dreaming, to reconcile our internal conflicts. (Roy must have had a depressing life – almost all his hits are sad songs full of doubt.)
Have you ever noticed, we rarely wake up to emotionally satisfying dreams? Mostly we don’t wake up at all because your busy little brain had no problem with its filing assignments that night. If you wake up with a dream there’s usually some sort of conflict going on in it, some emotional trigger, enough to disturb your sleep
I dream. A lot. I’m not sure I dream any more than anybody else but I seem to remember my dreams more than the average person.
So, to assuage my melancholic mind I have turned to reading lighter stuff, and viewing ancient Johnny Carson YouTube videos. I’m reading Alexander McCall Smith’s quirky series about a seriously cloistered university professor of philology, 2 ½ Pillars of Wisdom, including Portuguese Irregular Verbs; and Bill Bryson’s, Notes from a Small Island, an Affectionate Portrait of Britain.
Marlene rather liked birthdays, her own included, but she wasn’t especially effervescent about it. Not for her, ‘birthday week’. She liked modest celebration of her birthday but was not strange about it as I am/was. She revelled most in the fact that on my birthday she was now a year younger than I, for three days.
It’s amazing how we put off doing what we know we must, somehow hoping to buy time and maybe a miracle. It’s certain we have to do our taxes. (Though maybe not for everyone – I’ve heard of people who avoided filing tax returns for years, maybe even know some of them, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because they have no taxable income.) It seems just as certain we have to accept our own demise too (though maybe those serial avoiders also know something about certain death the rest of us don’t).
The problem of death for the mourner is the pain of loss. It is not the loss of the past – the past is already past, and we still have our memories and photographs. The grief of loss is for the loss of future experience of the loved one – the promise of the future is that we can live again the present we take for granted. But with death, we have no more presents, we can no longer enjoy the company of the lost loved one.
Still it’s the 50% of regular ‘openers’ of my notification emails who don’t click through I wonder about – why don’t they stop and read my wonderful stuff?!? But then I recalibrate my ego and allow for the fact that many of these people have busy lives, and competing interests, and haven’t the incentive (the title doesn’t appeal to them, nor even the excerpt) to click through to my blog and actually read it. I have to accept that people, even covid cloistered people, are not sitting at home counting the days until my next blog comes out.
Ennui is not quite the same as boredom… Ennui is more than that, a general feeling of lassitude and listlessness that dulls the mind and torpefies the spirit, and persists. It is this feeling of ongoing sameness that enervates; even people exhausted by their heightened workload and demands of the pandemic and its consequences are suffering mental fatigue. It’s a hamster wheel with no joy.
And then there is the problem of giving and receiving feedback. Giving feedback is hard to do, which is why it is seldom actually done. Receiving feedback is hard because of our tender egos – but we self-protect by not listening, or rationalizing, or dismissing. Accepting ‘constructive’ feedback from social sources is especially hard. Who really wants ‘constructive feedback’? What we want is complimentary feedback, lots of it. How nice to have affirmation of our terrific traits and talents. But then, in the backs of our minds, there lies doubt.
Today’s post, already three days late and a dollar short, is not on the topic originally planned, but to quote John Lennon, life is what
Not only should the cover have a clever and pithy summary of the book which entices browsers to pick it up the and browse through it, it should also have a couple of short and sweet blurbs from noteworthy reviewers recommending the book to hesitant readers. And let’s not make too fine a point of it, anybody who makes the cover of a book with a recommending blurb must be noteworthy to the otherwise ignorant browser.
Never judge a book by its cover’ so goes the saying, but if readers never crack the cover, they will never know what they’ve missed. Not everyone will be interested in your book – not their genre, not in their present mood, they’ve already read one of your books and one was enough – but for those who might be interested in the extent of your book, they need to be captured by the essence and the essence of the book has to be demonstrated somehow in your cover.
Or how ‘bout this one, don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good. Absolutely. How many of us get mired in design detail seeking perfection (or even excellence) and never make deadlines, or even produce anything at all? But you know, the devil is in the details. And there’s that damn word ‘good’ again. What is good? Is it good enough. Good enough is hardly excellence.
My purpose in life is not necessarily to be happy so much as to be worry-free. Regardless, you can put yourself into that state by becoming absorbed whole heartedly in something. Some people can do this through ‘mindful’ meditation. I can’t. I have to do something. So I write.
I won’t burden you with all of the Objectives I have set for myself in 2021. You won’t be that interested and I know historically my plans have been too ambitious and subject to perturbation from unexpected events. But here are a few:
I wonder what 2020 would have been like if the world hadn’t panicked in response to a pseudo-calamity, covid. As I wrote my annual plan in my virtual Harvard Planner last January while I was in The Philippines, who would have guessed the events that turned my plan upside down.
Illusion or not, [sense of self] is pretty powerful magic and while I doubt we humans are anything so magical, it’s hard to resist. So we may as well go along with it. … And even though I doubt we have any special purpose in the universe we may as well give our minds satisfaction by inventing some purpose it can actually do something about.
I’m sure you will all agree I’ve beaten this dead horse long enough. Wasn’t the whole of the last week’s post, and its supplement, The End of Days, dreary enough? I’m sure many of you are saying, we get it, November is dreary. Enough already.
I reflect on how agrarian pagans must have felt, with increasing dread, as they watched in apprehension (fear, not awareness) at the shortening of the days and worried that the sun would not come back to warm them again from eternal night.
Not content with sorting out mere months and weeks in the celestial calendar, the ancients decided to divide up the day too, and the night
So, despite my introversion, I do not like being alone, living alone. My normal planful proactive self would take action to solve this problem. Even in my crazy year after Marlene died, hair on fire, I was desperately trying to fill the void in my life, even if that meant traveling half way round the world to do so. (I hasten to add, I don’t really recommend my course of action – I was certainly being proactive, but grief hugely distorted my normal behaviour.)
I’m not sure how other authors do it [research for their books]. Highly successful authors with large revenues, or publisher advances, can hire students and staff to do it for them. But if you’re an independent author (the modern vernacular is ‘Indie’, hmmmm) you do your own. Or if you are mildly schizophrenic, or merely eccentric, you could delegate, to yourself.
Not to claim I am a Mahler or a Russell, but I go through a similar [creative] process when I am cooking up my annual Groundhog Day cards, and the [almost] annual Lammas Day cards. (Go to my website, afscounsting.ca (here) to refresh your memory on my comic genius!)
I mention all these metaphysics in this blog because I have been struggling with the problem of willpower for a while now, not the metaphysical problem but actual problem of overcoming stuckness. Inertia rules my days, I’m a little short of ‘ertia’.
I freely admit I have attachment needs. When I am involved with my love interest it is intense and persistent, and I am loyal and
Entrepreneurism means more than opening a business, or even having a better mousetrap, and a marketing plan. It requires that you have sales. And selling, constantly generating revenue, turns out to be the hardest part of running a business.
And on other fronts I am proud to state that I have overcome my skepticism of lulu.com and rejoice at having successfully put up my book, Travels With Myself. (Well, I am still skeptical of lulu’s claims that self-publishing a book is as easy as 1-2-3. It is if you have perfect knowledge of Microsoft Word and how it must be formatted in absolute compliance with the PDF criteria in lulu’s print engine.
Said to be a virtue (though, curiously, not one of the ‘Great Virtues’ (André Compte-Sponville)), Patience can be learned, or so we are also told, and there is no doubt in my many years, and even more so in the last many months, I have had plenty of opportunities for honing this virtue.
I lament my forced separation from Carmen Beauty; I am missing her company and constant companionship and feeling quite lonely. We Skype twice a day, sometimes four times a day, adjusting for the twelve hours difference in our time zones, and keep ‘in touch’ (ha!) that way.
I know I said I would only issue a new edition of Travels With Myself II twice a month. But some stories can’t wait two
Many of my readers, when they had read the last instalments of my blogs that they were in fact the last, were mildly alarmed at the news: I had said I would convert the two blogs to books: The Pilipiñas Packet ended because I had returned to Canada from Philippines, Travels with Myself ended because my journey from the abyss to recovery had largely been complete. But then my caring readers were relieved when I said I would continue the blog, I still have a life to live and stories yet to tell.
I have been trying to live my life differently. I’ve tried to accept the Platonic challenge[1]. I’ve tried to follow Scott Peck’s (and Matthew Kelly) and James Hollis’s guidance to live life vigourously; but I’m aware that I am running out of time and then I remind myself when I get discouraged or bogged down of Dylan Thomas’s anger.
Still, it might be nice to have a home to come home to.
I set down in the previous chapters some of the Lessons Learned of the Philippines. But what have I learned about myself? And have I been able to convey some of what I have learned to my readers? Indeed, what hubris for me to think they would want to know what I had learned.
I suppose every country and society has these social contrasts but in The Philippines they are often dramatic and you wonder how stable the social fabric is.
I had come to Philippines to learn about the country and the people, its clichés and its paradoxes, to prove to others that I could understand, and to learn something about myself.
One goal is output – not the ambitious thousand words a day, more like five hundred. In any event, a thousand words a day is pointless if it’s mostly crap. I think of Hemingway at his typewriter, tearing pages out of his carriage and filling his wastepaper basket, so much more visceral than modern hard drives. I’ve learned to be content with merely a decent paragraph, and just walk away.
And what do we learn from all this Trivia? That The Philippines is a country of contrasts, a curious combination of west and east, old and modern. Of tradition and of a rapidly changing society. And it gives me pause to consider aspects of my own life in Canada.
Family is big in the Philippines and it’s not a cliché. Not only are the families big but the value ‘family’ is big. It’s a specific cultural condition widely understood by Filipinos. That doesn’t mean they all get along but they certainly know where everybody lives.
A big part of the reality of The Philippines are calamities, of which the Philippines experience a couple every year, and some years those calamities make world head-lines. The Filipinos mostly take these calamities in stride, but even for them, some of these are wrenching.
Maybe I was living a romantic fantasy of my hero of the Pacific, a vague notion of walking in the footsteps of history. I was returning to Philippines, maybe to find happiness with my own Filipina companion.
Travels With Myself has a different purpose than The Pilipiñas Packet; Travels is the account of my journey of self-discovery and transition in the twilight of my life. The Packet recounts tour of The Philippines but was as much a vehicle for discovering myself, as it was for having a life experience.
My author friends said I would never be able to please all the readers all the time, especially family and closer friends. I needed to put their ego issues aside and consider who my ultimate audience was. But that was still not clear to me. What was the real reason for writing this book?
So what was my future to be with Carmen? And what was I going to do about it?
I got lots of advice.
The thing she did comment on though, was how far we had to drive to see these many friends. Living in suburbia, your friends were scattered in their own distant suburbs, or downtown, and this meant much travel. At least the travel on relatively uncongested expressways was not the tremendous thief of time that commuting in The Philippines is. For this we cannot thank city planners for inventing suburbia, only for adequate infrastructure.
when Marlene died and I sold the house I had had enough of suburbia. I imagined myself instead moving to old house, in an historic town, Perth, and savouring life of a different sort, the life of an author, eccentric perhaps, within walking distance of the library and interesting pubs where I could study the various inhabitants of a life so different from suburbia. Or so went the fantasy. Instead I moved to a downsized, though substantial, three-story townhouse, in Kanata. There I languished for a year, confirming once again that a house is not a home.
I was surprised she was fearful of my dogs. Maybe it was the size – standard poodles are twice the size of the semi-feral mutts she was familiar with; maybe their eagerness was a little off-putting to a reluctant visitor – responding with enthusiasm if you gave them any sign at all.
I am proud of my country and if Carmen is to know me, she also needs to know where I come from, just as I need to know more about her. And into the bargain, traveling with someone is often a real test of the relationship.
Carmen often would claim to be my new medicine and the reason for me getting off my psycho-pharmaceuticals, and this was almost certainly true, to a degree. But maybe more importantly, her catalyzing me to get back to boxing was even more significant for my improving mental outlook. It suited my Ernest Hemmingway self-image as well.
It wasn’t just the challenge of dealing with the cultural and experiential differences between Carmen and me, nor even the strangeness of getting to know another person. It was the mundane of how to load a fridge.
We arrived in Pearson and faced Canadian Immigration, but a nod and a smile from the Immigration Officer soon gave us to know we had nothing to dread: ‘Welcome to Canada Ma’am, Welcome home Sir.’
And the more I learned, the more confused I became. Could I spend the rest of my days with this woman, so culturally and linguistically, educationally and experientially different from me? Time would tell, but I already suspected there was a lot more to this woman’s story and at the least I should discover it, maybe write the book.
I still have problems to solve and still need to find the courage to solve them. Chief among these are dealing with aging, living a more considered life (James Hollis), practicing virtue and dying (with dignity). Bundled with this is leaving a legacy to my children and grandchildren, memories they can be proud of.
[two things that have stayed with me] : ‘we never stop grieving, it just gets quieter.’ And, ‘[he] doesn’t believe in closure’. If there’s new information that explain things you didn’t understand before, that helps; but there is no closure. It’s not like closing the lid of a box, or a coffin.
Returning to the sun was not all sunshine and warmth. It seems transitioning is not a sudden turn but a gradual bend in current realities. I may have been regaining my mental health, and feeling energy returning, but many questions remained about what my new reality was.
So here we were, all packed and ready for a whole new adventure. And I knew I wasn’t ready.
But what if Carmen is the answer; if she can get a visa to visit me in Canada, we could still see if things might work out. I didn’t think I had many options, but the mind does wander.
After eight days in dreamland it was time for me to return to Canada. I promised Carmen that, like my namesake, I would return. Doubt occupied my mind throughout the Christmas break, but I rebooked tickets for Manila January 15 – 22. I had come to Philippines to discover if she could fill this huge void in my life. It seemed pretty unlikely that she could.
As I anticipated my trip to Manila to meet the Filipina Cupid, I fretted about being drawn away from my [renewed interest in writing and completing my ‘novel’]. Such is the mind of the writer when the writing bug is upon him, he doesn’t want to do anything else.
I knew I was searching for more than Discovery Suites Hotel. I had come to Philippines to find Carmen, but I also knew this was an adventure with many dimensions.
Of course it was surreal. I had never done anything like this in my life, quite, and it seems this was a completely new experience for Carmen too. But it struck me from the beginning, she may have been more certain of her goals than I was.
The door closed and two strangers eyed each other warily, ‘what have we got ourselves into?’ each probably thought; certainly that’s what I thought.
I retrieved my bags and worked my way through the exit and surveyed the throngs of greeters on the other side of a barrier, looking for a familiar face in a sea of faces. Hopeless. Carmen and I had talked about our Hollywood moment, locking eyes in the crowd and rushing into each other’s arms, and ‘the kiss’. I lingered at the exit looking for her but it looked as though our Hollywood moment wasn’t going to happen.
The progression of a relationship in on-line dating predictably follows the same pattern, it’s only the pace that varies. In my state of mind, the pace I set for myself – or was it set for me by my subconscious mind? – was hectic. Carpe diem, time is of the essence, and running out fast.
My disenchantment with on-line dating had reached its peak, or should I say depths. After a couple of dozen failed encounters I saw only a long lone jaded journey into increasing cynicism. It was probably not a fair assessment,
Whether I knew it or not, whether I was conscious of my decisions and actions or not, something was changing in my life.
It may seem odd to think of anger as a sign of returning to mental health, and it wasn’t obvious to me at the time either, but instead of the nihilism of anger that I had been experiencing I was seeing something different. The anger was no longer directed at blaming and revenge, it was more generalized. I’m sure I offended some of my friends during this period, and for that I must apologize. I just hope they can see that this was part of my healing process.
In the months of my struggling to find a way out of the abyss I have almost no recollection of people and events, women I dated, promises I may have made, people I may have offended. Instead I relived and reworked the memories of Emily, the months of love and loss and might-have-beens. It was obsession of course, those persistent thoughts; I couldn’t just block her out of my mind. Probably I didn’t want to.
My journey through the Fog, and then into the Abyss, gave me much experience with what mental health is. Beyond academic knowing, I now had
I had been dating for about three months and already beginning to feel discouraged. Rather than feel the excitement of the new, I felt only increasing cynicism. I may have been living as if my hair was on fire but my energy was being sapped. But I was compelled to carry on, and match.com kept sending me prospects.
I preferred ‘organic dating’ – going out with people I already knew, if only slightly, or be introduced to somebody – but I knew the name of the game in 2018 was on-line dating. Kinda like a lottery – if I wanted to win a prize I had to buy a ticket – and maybe just as soul-destroying. I took a deep breath and posted my bond and my profile on match.com.
After that dream, and all through that awful summer of Emily yo-yo-ing me I had considered hanging myself more than a few times from various staircases, but now, while visiting Marlene, I thought the branch of the tree reaching over her headstone would do nicely. I wondered where I had put my rope.
Word on the Street (WOTS) is one of the biggest [outdoor] book fairs in the world, certainly the biggest in Canada. And you’ve got to admit, it’s a clever name, both of them.
If I was to be a real author, not a closet pretender, I needed to sell a lot more of my books.
Despite my reservations, and fear, I wanted to get wider exposure. I wanted affirmation. Endless ego needs may have been at the base of all this, but if I wanted exposure, I had to promote my books. As any author, successful and otherwise, will attest, the better mousetrap gets no attention by itself.
It may have looked like desperation to others, and maybe it was, but to me it was about regaining my life force, to live with eros, not in a rocking chair.
My plunge into the abyss lasted four months. Maybe abyss is the wrong metaphor; it didn’t feel like falling into a black hole. It felt more like I was walking underwater, trudging, dragging my feet on a sandy bottom with an undertow holding me under. And maybe this agitated aimlessness lasted longer than four months. It wasn’t as if I suddenly woke up one day and felt well. But from August to December I have only fractured memory of what happened to me. Here’s a list of what I do remember.
I drove back to Ottawa the next day. She called me at four o’clock. We talked for two hours. The upshot of the whole conversation was simple.
‘I’ll jump with you.’
Okay,’ I said, ‘We’ll jump together.’
I knew I was having an emotional episode, even though I had never experienced anything like this before. This is what is commonly called a ‘nervous breakdown’; though professional people don’t use the term anymore, it nevertheless feels apt if you are experiencing one.
I wanted her back, but after my anger and petulance, how was that possible now?
Help came from an unexpected quarter: A former neighbour who was also friends with Emily.
‘I’m going to fix this.’ she said.
One Sunday afternoon of hopeless staring I suddenly saw my story unfolding in my head. I rolled out of bed and sat down at my computer. The words started to flow from my fingers. And in the erratic days and nights of the next three weeks, I wrote. And wrote. And wrote.
I drove to the cemetery to consult with Marlene, but she had nothing to say to me. In the fog of my grief I had hoped Emily would be the answer to my next stage of life. Now I felt completely alone. I was a mess, an admixture of anger and anxiety, possessiveness and petulance.
And I already ‘knew’ about Grief, Empathy and Aging. But I didn’t really ‘know’. You cannot know these things until you have actually experienced the depth of feeling these can demand of you. But my year in the Fog brought whole new lessons.
All through that fall and winter I had been gently but steadily moving ahead with the task of downsizing my household. It was a painful but necessary step to me redefining my life following Marlene’s death. I now had too much house, and too much stuff for one man living alone.
I only felt alive when I was with her. But even then, I knew this was more fantasy than real. I knew I had to get my life in order, and my finances in order, and start over. The confusing part was when the fantasy and the reality merged.
Little did I realize I was also tampering yet again with my core identity. We are creatures of habit and we are especially attached to our own territory: house and office are core to our sense of self.
As our relationship progressed, I began to ask myself what sort of relationship I really had with Emily. ‘You are too unstable for us to think about this relationship. It has only been a few months and you are grieving hard for Marlene. And so am I. We are not ready for a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship.’ Emily found lots of evidence of my instability. There were many signs:
At the Kingston station I noticed a young couple greeting each other with an excited kiss on the platform. I smiled at this public display of affection and then a dull yearning began in my chest. I suddenly had an impulse to text Emily. Was she available to have dinner with me that evening when I got back?
The fog of grief was real enough: I lost concentration, I had no plans, I was forgetful. I couldn’t sleep. I knew there were things I needed to do to start putting my life back together, but not today, maybe tomorrow. I went to grief counseling; I read many books about grief. I finally read The Emperor of all Maladies. All I wanted to do was escape all this grieving stuff.
And there she was.
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