Rêver

Good evening!  Thank you all for coming.  It's Saturday night and it looks like it's going to be an awfully slow one at this rate, so time to perform some writing and some thinking and then slather it all over the internet for everyone to gawk at.  Tonight's topic, for anyone who cannot or will not read French is to dream.  Follow along with me as we take a look down memory lane and see what dreams may come.


Explorer

Now, if you take a look around the mess of my upstairs office, you'll notice that I have more than a few books on exploration and cartography, including, I might add, the only biography of Mercator written in English.  To my knowledge, anyway.  Jealous?  Maybe, maybe not, but I read it all cover to cover while I was having this done to my left foot.

Well, there's your problem!  Hard to believe that those are medicinal in any way by just looking at it.

Jealous?  Oh, and my Mom was amazing, too, while I was in the hospital that weekend!  Thanks, Mom!  Anyway, I loved the book.  It was just amazing that someone who could and did map the entire world without traveling more than, say, 500 km his entire life.  It's just mind blowing.  Such a cool guy.

Anyway, back to me and the encyclopedias.  I would sift through the encyclopedias and look at all of these countries (circa. 1979, by the way) and read about all of these far away lands and look at all these amazing maps.  Places like the splendor of Machu Pichu, the venerability of Stonehenge, the vastness of Siberia captured my imagination.  More than that, I'd look at the little maps and see that there was oil in Romania, and that people mined this stuff called bauxite, and that hey!  This book knows there's potash here!  How cool is that?!  There were these trains that you could get on and sit down and drive around in - not just freight trains, but people trains, and that they went really fast in Japan!  And Japan had their own Eiffel Tower and it was red.  And the Romans and Greeks and Chinese of old built all kinds of cool stuff that's all broken these days.  It was all truly awesome in the real sense of the world for someone that thought that...

It looked a lot bigger when I was a kid.  I mean, it had stop and go lights!

...was the biggest place in the world.  And so I read about everything in the world and was amazed.

And then something dawned on me.

Come in Pelham 123.  What do you mean the train has been taken?

Satellites.  Once I realized that Galaxy and Anik and Telstar existed and that what they could do was they could take TV in some far off place and beam it over to somewheres else and BAM! you're watching Disney Channel, the world got a lot smaller.  Then it dawned on me that those same things, those satellites, had cameras and could take pictures of the whole world, wherever they wanted to, the world didn't just get smaller, it got solved.  There would be no more Bartolomeu Dias sailing beyond where anyone had thought possible or Abel Tasman finding things off the grid and beyond belief, or Samuel Fritz charting some of the most wicked, anti-human places on earth.  There wouldn't need to be cause there were now planes and satellites and all kinds of inventions which pretty much said "Congratulations, humanity!  You win!  There earth has now been fully explored.  Take a bow."  So that kinda dashed my dreams of being an explorer.  Sure, there's underwater exploration and space exploration, but it's just not the same, you know?  Not near as romantic or as cool.

And a dream of mine was dashed, but something good did come of it.  When the 1994 Great Canadian Geography Challenge came by and I took the test, I got first place in the school.  Then I got 3rd place in the province and got a sweet ass trip to Ottawa to take part in the Nationals and shake hands with this guy.

That's Alex Trebek - with mustache, as it should be.

This wasn't the first time that I actually, you know, won at something.  For that we have to take a look at the next dream.  Oh, and I finished in the middle of the pack in Ottawa, so whatever.  But it was awesome!


Musician

Well, I couldn't be an explorer - that much was established.  So it was to be a few years later that I discovered that, hey, I'm pretty gifted musically.  I picked up a trumpet and took organ lessons.  Know what the first cassette tape I can remember owning was?

Here's a hint: it wasn't Glass Tiger.

God, I remember listening to this album on my little cassette deck with these little metal banded headphones at night in my bed with the lights out  under the covers with my eyes closed just letting my mind drift and wander.  I had no idea no idea who this guy Coltrane was, whether he was living or dead or what.  My Uncle Dale got me this for Christmas one year and I listened to it and it was like my world was changed!  I grew up in a world of AM country music, Beavis and Butthead, and church hymns, and that was about it for music.  Oh, and Mom's Culture Club cassette.  But this Coltrane was unlike anything I had ever heard before because there were no words!  No words!  It was all just instruments playing, in sync with each other, fighting with each other, raging and screaming and silky smooth.  I listened to that tape over and over again and I embraced it, and I will tell you this: after listening to Coltrane my mind would not be blown again until 1998 when I first heard...

Little known fact: they're not actually brothers.

...and all of a sudden my mind is blown again because they're making music without instruments at all!

But now I'm getting sidetracked.  So in early 1994 I was given my first trumpet solo and I will never, ever forget it.  Shorty George.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I borrowed the cassette one of the recording of the song for a while so I could listen to it and get a feel to it and I fell in love with the pride of Redbank, NJ.  As far as I'm concerned, he was the embodiment of minimalist piano playing.  And the music just swung.  It just broke later, glided smoother, and hung out further than anything I heard before.  The best way that I can think of to describe Basie's style is like this: get up, get outta bed, have a shower, get yourself looking and smelling real nice, put on your nicest suit, take a walk downtown, sit down on a bench in an area with heavy foot traffic, lean back, relax, smile, and watch the world go by.  That's Basie.  And I loved it.  So, I did my solo, and it was great.  I was in band, jazz band, and choir and I loved music, and gee whiz if I didn't get the shock of my life.  I'm sitting at another boring assembly in the gym, minding my own business when all of a sudden my name is called.  My name was called.  I was the Jr. Musician of the Year.  I'd never won anything in my life before and all of a sudden there it was.  There were others that I thought were better than me, sure, but I won.  Wow...  It was a shock and a true,  deep joy that I still carry with me - literally, since I still have the little trophy.

So then later on we packed up and moved to Estevan and I went to band again, but it was all new people.  And they were rich!  And snooty!  And they went to band camp!  Horrors!  And they had silver trumpets!  And I had by dented $50 trumpet that Mom got for me at MacLarens in...

It really does look a lot smaller from the air...  The Parkland Mall's there somewhere and I swear it's huge!

 ...and so I didn't have a chance.  It took me three years to, you know, get over it and start re-asserting myself, and it felt good to, you know, be good at it cause I had a lot of pride in it.  It was one of my best classes and the one that I looked forward to most every day.  But then when my teacher said that I should try out for a scholarship for musical education at Minot State University, I got vetoed.  Mom said no.  That was kind of a heart-breaker, but I now appreciate her reasoning.  The ratty old trumpet, which the teacher wouldn't even let me play for my last major performance cause it was so decrepit...  Well, I abandoned that old trumpet one day.  I just left it in the band room on the last day of school and along with it the dream.

I still played some piano, though, and I bought a mandolin later.  Lost the mandolin to the flood last year, though.  The piano may be beyond my capabilities, but there's just something about playing Strange Meadow Lark...  The F# that you hit there - if you know the song, you'll know what I mean - the one most poignant note I've ever heard or played.  And if I could sum up how I feel about the dream of being a musician, really, it would be Strange Meadow Lark and that F#.  You want the lark to fly high, you want it to hit that G, but no matter how many times you play it or listen to it, it always, always comes up a half-step short.


Writer

Now here's a dream that I haven't totally given up on as evidenced by this blog!  Ha ha!  Well, let's see now.  My first time out of the nest was a disaster.  Total failure.  I got two jobs but lost them both quick, got depressed, and moved back home a wreck.  As a de-wrecked myself, I started, well, writing.  I would listen to music and sit on my bed with a mechanical pencil and these coil bound books that I picked up in town and I would write.  Write what?  Short stories.  Well, they weren't short-stories.  The first ones weren't, anyway.  The first ones were like this huge nebulous mass that was chapter after chapter after chapter of two different stories.  But they were spy stories...

Only in my iteration, it was more like a Sandra Bullock from Demolition Man crossed with James Bond.  Weird, I know.

...and fantasy stories...

I'd illustrate, but man were they God awful in hindsight.

None of those ones ever got finished, but I can't tell you how good it felt to have some sort of creative outlet again.  I still have them in a box upstairs.  After I realized, though, that massive, never-ending stories don't work, I switched to short-stories and then my output just hit overdrive.  I would write one or two a month on top of a full course load at university - which I think ended up being part of my downfall, because instead of Musical Education, I decided on Administration cause we all agreed that I'd have a knack for that.  Well, I bombed (among other things) economics and threw my hands up in the air.  But I still wrote and still do from time to time.  Not as much as I would like to, though.  I suppose working seven days a week...

This is an artist's rendition.  May not be completely accurate.

...doesn't leave a whole lot of time to pursue intellectual projects.  I find that this here blog helps, though, to keep me creatively limber, or thereabouts, in case I do get, you know, find inspiration and get to writing again.  Someday I'd like to write something wicked cool and publish in some crappy journal and have a modicum of success just to say that I did it.  Someday, but it's still just a dream right now.  An achievable one, perhaps, but just a dream.


Philosopher

So, the world was ending.  Like this:

Boom goes the dynamite.

Well, sort of.  I left home, crapped the bed, and came crawling back to my parents' place.  While recuperating, though, on top of writing, I did some reading.  I started reading the Tao Te Ching.  Up until then all I had ever known as far as any sort of religion or philosophy was concerned was Lutheranism.  I had felt useless, powerless, and abandoned.  I don't mean abandoned by my family.  No matter how bad I've ever screwed up, they've always, always been there for me.  I felt abandoned spiritually.  So, in order to save myself I had made the conscious decision to take everything I know and everything I was taught about religion and spirituality and strip it down to the foundations and start all over again.

So, I went to university in Regina and took Administration.  And bombed.  Like this:

But I did do rather well in Philosophy - so well, in fact, that the Philosophy Department sent me a letter saying "Don't be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Philosophy Party".  I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.  And so I thought to myself, gee...  No one else sent me a letter.  Well, fine then.  And I started studying philosophy.  Not only do I enjoy it, I really enjoy it.  And I seem to excel at it!  You know, I'll never be Spinoza, but I'm competent.

Here's the thing.  In 2003, I quit university to move to Guelph, but last fall I took my first class since then and I did fine.  I brought up the class average and I did it writing philosophical essays about...

What better illustration of medieval philosophy is there than a sandwich?

...and...


Oh, I know!  A baseball!  Genius!

...and other sundry topics.  And it worked!  I remember planning the sandwich essay over and over again in my head and I thought to myself that this will either work or get laughed out of the classroom, and it ended up getting an 84 with a class average of 70.  Being a decade older than the other kids in the class, not taking a class for the best part of a decade, and then come out smelling like a rose?  This is one dream that's alive and kicking still, and it feels good.  I suppose more than anything that this is one dream that got away and then I chased back after it, corralled in and brought it back home.  It can be done.


Procurement

Now, after looking at this list, there's not a lot that I can really add to it.  I wasn't ever going to become...

Mua ha ha ha ha...

with this...

...ha ha ha ha- ow.

...so that was never really a dream.  Beyond that, not much.  Maybe have a family, see some more of the world that I've seen, but that's about it.  So, you know, I wonder...  Can new dreams be... planted?  Seeded?  Cultivated? 

It seems a lot easier as a child.  When your world is playing, games, neat stuff to do at school it seems to me that dreams come a lot easier, move around more freely and are more easily grasped and taken hold of.  Nowadays it seems like there's work, there's home, there's bills, there's friends and family, and there's good old bed, which is gonna feel so nice in three hours, by the way.  Honestly, I don't even know where to begin. 

Or maybe I do.  You know what?  Sunday.  Sunday I'm going to go to Victoria Park.  It's nearby.  Seems like it'll be a nice, warm day that day, too.  I'm going to take a walk, think, maybe meditate a little bit.  Watch the sunset.  I haven't done this in a long time and it's something that I've been putting off.  That, I think, is what I'll do.  Yeah...  Anyway, I'll keep you posted.

Now, I think that's all I got for tonight, now, so I'll call it a night.  Have a good night and thank you for reading.