Category: Blog

It’s January 30th—around 5PM—and I’m waiting in Toronto for my flight to Keflavík, or at least I was. I’ve been and gone, and now I’m back. Now it’s November 1st—around 11PM—and I’m still waiting, it feels like, still waiting to arrive or depart to where I’m going or where I’ve been. The nature of stationary plays havoc with direction.

I brought with me on my trip to Berlin via Iceland the camera built into my phone from 2014, the camera built into my iPad from 2017, and a Nikon D7100 borrowed from my Dad. I took many gigabytes of pictures—hundreds of them—and they’ve all been sitting on my computer ever since I took them. I love taking pictures, but what to do with them after isn’t anything I’m particularly consistent with. It’s the same with writing: I love it, and there are piles and piles of notes all transcribed into and sitting on my computer ever since I wrote them.

I’d started to cover some of my trip before and during with entries here, here, here, and here, and then another after I got back here. It’s an okay start, but now I’m going to do the rest.

As I take my seat in the plane it becomes clear this Airbus must be an off‐lease deal from an eastern European or Russian airline…

…and with the open cargo door visible from my window, I can see the exterior purple paint is covering what used to be a white airplane. Fun fact—the extra coat of paint on this aircraft adds an estimated 300 kg (about 660 lbs.) to its overall weight. So, Wow air, how about instead of charging me an additional fee for bringing clean clothes in the form of a packed suitcase you scrape a few kilograms of extra paint off that wing?

Anyway—me, my cameras and clean clothes, and hundreds of kilograms of superfluous paint are soon flying over Toronto. The late winter evening sun blasts into the cabin as we bank sharply over the lake. Our path east adds to the speed of the rotation of the earth and the daylight fades away in front of me as we climb. I feel my eyes water. I love flying. I love seeing the city from above, seeing something so full of activity appearing more and more static the higher you get above it.

Dusk vanishes and it’s immediately night. All I see out the window now are the pockets, strings, and smatterings of orange light, the colour of night, broadcasting up from the last remaining roads and towns before being replaced with the uniform darkness of forest and ocean.

There’s no in‐flight entertainment, and I had neglected to load anything onto my iPad prior to departure—so after going through every single possible setting in the control panel and geeking out, I start to sketch on it using a stylus my mum gave me…

I sit quietly for a few hours, meditate on the state of being motionless in my seat as it hurtles through the air, and eventually fall asleep, something I am often unable to do on an airplane. Gentle turbulence wakes me, and increasingly turbulent turbulence keeps me awake for the last hour of the flight. Our decent becomes rougher and rougher as we creep closer and closer to the darkness below—in the distance I see an island of orange light. Closer still and the winds blow and the cabin flexes while we bank down in a series of turns that in my sleep‐deprived state make me wonder if the pilot is lost.

But we’re not lost. The ground catches up and the wheels touchdown. It’s just after four in the morning local time. It’s raining and warmer outside than it was back in Toronto. Winds are so high the ground crew is unable to use the jet bridge—so we’re told to put on our coats and be careful as it is “quite windy” and make our way down the stairs they’ve rolled up to the airplane and walk to the terminal.

It’s an incredible welcome: the wind smells different. The rain feels different. And I can tell I’m no longer departed. I’m arrived.

At just over a month and a half into my program everything is on hold owing to a province‐wide strike by OPSEU college faculty members. I’m disappointed—things were just starting to make sense in my classes. News reports are suggesting this strike may go on for some time—whatever that means—so I’m going to do my best to make the best of the new time I have available to me during this setback.

That said, I fully support the striking faculty members. I do wish a strike could have been avoided—I view strikes as a public display of the failure of two sides to understand each other—but it is what it is, and I respect that. I’m happy also to see various student associations now becoming involved in the process. Fundamentally what is troubling about a strike or lock‐out is how those, usually groups within or the general public itself, who do not have a voice in the negotiations are now not only involved, but being used as leverage. And the term negotiations might not be accurate. From what I understand the College Employer Council dug their heels in and will not budge from any of their points—hardly a negotiation when one side isn’t going to do anything other than expect the other side to do all work. It’s discouraging to hear.

I did find one thing that cheered me up, and that’s the following video. I like numbers and what they do, so I’m ending the post here on a positive note before I start to rant about money, power, control, and the cost of idiots—just remember, proper education is important and requires proper investment.

School has been keeping me busy, so I haven’t been able to share news of someone who came to live with me last month—a wonderfully friendly and talkative black and white cat.

Luna is a rescue cat brought in off the streets by a good friend of the family who wasn’t going to be able to keep her permanently—her existing cat wasn’t too keen on the new guest. So now Luna, who I liked the moment we met, lives with me. I’d forgotten what it’s like to have a pet cat. I’m glad she’s here, and I hope she is as well.

As is always the case with a cat off the street, I can’t help but wonder how she ended up there. From what I was told about her initial condition—dreadful—she had been there since she was a kitten. Given her social demeanour, I don’t think she has a feral background, so she was either lost or abandoned. And if she was abandoned, I have nothing but scorn for whoever did it—whatever. What goes around comes around. But if she was lost, knowing how painful and sad it is to not know where your cat is, to whoever might be missing this delightful animal, please rest assured she is safe and loved and cared for, and will be for the rest of her life.

And now—pictures!

Luna enjoys sleeping in her claw scratching box of shredded cardboard.

When she’s not sleeping in it she likes to stretch out.

The back of the couch is also good for stretching out.

And when it’s dark she blends into the carpet.

On October 1st an American armed with legally purchased, owned, and modified semi‐automatic weaponry opened fire on a music festival crowd from the window of his 32nd floor Las Vegas hotel room. Fifty‐eight people were killed, 489 people were injured, and the gunman shot himself in the head before police used explosives to blow down the door to the room. It is currently the most deadly mass‐shooting in American history, and as horrific as it is to be able to rank such an event, it gets more horrific as it’s the only the second most deadly mass‐shooting perpetrated by a single gunman in the world.

Now, as to not cause yet another hypocritical Republican tantrum, there will be no politicizing the tragedy and discussing gun control in this post since now is not the time to have that discussion. So let’s ignore the just under a year and a half of time there’s been to not have the discussion since the last most deadly mass‐shooting in the United States. And we’ll certainly ignore how after airplanes were used as weapons on September 11th the Republicans created the Transportation Security Administration almost immediately to ensure airplanes couldn’t be turned into weapons again—and that the TSA spent $7.55 billion doing so in 2015 alone. That said, based on observing their inaction in the face of guns being used as weapons, and given the repeated context of these massacres, Republicans appear fine with Americans, and in the Las Vegas incident 4 Canadians, dying in mass‐shootings. They also appear fine with the victims dying at the hands of a fellow American. They even have a special, almost dismissive and diminutive term for the shooter: the lone wolf.

I’ve always been fascinated by the metaphor of the wolf—this vicious killing machine lurking in the dark woods ready to eat my face and all my family for the pure satisfaction of doing it, this fearful, despicable, wicked creature deserving of sneer and scorn—this big bad wolf. But I never saw any of this from the wolf. What I saw was a beautiful animal, potentially dangerous—yes, but no more dangerous than any other large predator, no more deserving of my hatred or mistrust than a polar bear (who sells pop in the winter) or a Bengal tiger (who sells gas all year ’round). One of humankind’s oldest animal friends, the dog, traces its roots back to either the first wolves who were not afraid of humans or the first humans who were not afraid of wolves—or as I like to think of it: the first animals who were not afraid of the other met somewhere in the middle.

But now it seems this ancient friendship is muddied, superseded as it were by the ever‐growing human need for control, for obedience. The wolves who did obey evolved into today’s dogs. The wolves who didn’t, didn’t. They’re still wolves. But they’ve also somehow become entangled within the descriptions of mass‐shootings and other incidents of single perpetrator domestic terrorism within the United States. I don’t care for the term lone wolf. It offends my inner wolf—the part of me who knows more people will be killed by their own countrymen in America before breakfast than wolves have since the turn of the century. Americans kill each other at an average rate of 44 murders per day. The number of confirmed fatal wolf attacks in America in the last 17 years: one.

I like wolves. Something of their story speaks to me—a biased one filled with vilification—something about being not only sought out but killed for what you were born into this world being. As someone who identifies as queer I have the good fortune of being able to in a country where I will not forfeit my freedom, personal safety, or life by doing so. In other parts of the world to be queer is to risk imprisonment or death. And as someone who identifies as a queer wolf, when I hear a shooter described in that same cliché way, as another solitary canis lupus, it offends me as much as if they said it was some crazy faggot on the roof with a rifle.

Let’s remember where the threat is coming from, ditch the euphemism, and address the issue by calling it out as what it is. Some of America’s own citizens are demonstrably more able and willing to kill each other in increasingly violent and numerous ways without any help from wolves, so the word you’re looking for when it comes time to describe the individual responsible for a mass‐shooting is terrorist.

I love when I find stuff like this in my drafts folder:

Today was my last day at work. Tomorrow I head out of town for my annual camping trip away from the city and mobile phone signals. In five days I’ll be back

And that’s all I’d written before I’m assuming I’d forgotten I was writing and turned off the computer before finishing the post. In my defence I know I’d been up for hours after getting home around midnight to pack for my trip the next day. I remember waking up and finding I had everything I needed ready to go—thank you past Patrick…

Now I’m back from camping and can’t help but also remember around this time last year I’d posted about looking deep into the sky while I was in Algonquin Park. I’d changed my stars, as I put it, and I knew I would return the following year another year closer to being finished design school—no more delays or procrastination!

But it didn’t happen. When 2017 started I was still working—I’d told myself there would be no school. It wasn’t feasible. I couldn’t afford it. My optimism for the future was converted slowly into tolerance for the present. I worked hard, got another raise, even applied for my manager’s job when it became available. And then the best thing at work happened that could have happened—I didn’t get the job. My plan to move forward into the present came to a dead stop.

Honestly—despite in retrospect it being the best thing that could have happened—I went into fuck it mode: where I half‐ass everything because why bother exerting any effort beyond what is minimally serviceable. Mediocrity for the masses is the name of the game anyway, so why be miserable as a precise instrument going nowhere when I can be content as a blunt stone sitting in a pile…

Light depression ensued. And then I remembered the future, my favourite thing. And then I remembered how life’s too short—and then immediately realized how wrong the expression is. Life isn’t too short. Life is too long. Life is too long to spend it unlived or unenjoyed or uncared for. Life is too long to spend rudderless or complacent. Life is too long to not do the things we want to try to do.

So when I said at the beginning of this post it was my last day at work it wasn’t only my last day before my camping trip, it was also my last day as an employee. Starting next week, the day after Labour Day, I am back in school. I’ve got some of my textbooks already, my ID card is on its way, I have a parking pass—it’s all very official. I’m going so much now I cannot not go anymore.

The only thing I’ve changed is the program: instead of graphic design I’ll be learning how to design renewable energy systems. Rather than perpetuating the problem of over‐consumption by producing endless corporate branding and marketing materials I’ll be helping to generate and distribute electricity ecologically and economically—though hopefully not to power the over‐production of endless corporate branding and marketing materials.

It’s exciting. It’s textbook future—solar panels, wind farms, and electric cars. It’s learning about the environment and how it and technology can work with each other instead of against each other. It’s about challenging myself and my world to be better. And it’s about the beginnings of a small apology to the planet and its inhabitants for a world I know I helped build through my own ignorance of the true cost of a way of life. I know I want to make a better place for all who live here—the forest is for everyone.

So let’s raise a glass to the future—again—since I’m pretty sure I’ve already been there.

Why else would I know it so well?