Arkansas Traveller

I like it when I see different license plates. It gets my mind travelling to the why they are here and who they are. Not a Michigan plate, or one from Quebec, New York, or Ohio, but one from further afield. Thursday morning there was someone from Arkansas in front of me on the way to London 8 AM in the snow. Why was this Southern US person here?  There it is, a license plate as an acknowledgement of difference, I know something, the car is from away, and likely the driver is from away as well. The lack of familiarity is shallow, though.

The car is a Mustang one of the most recognizable cars in North America. The driver of course is following the rules of the road and I am sure Arkansas road law is very similar to ours. To punctuate this a School Bus slows and turns on the red safety lights, the Arkansas Mustang instinctively slows and stops. The driver is in the same cultural place as I am regardless of the 1600 KM distance from their home to ours.  I assume if the driver stopped at a restaurant and I followed they would address the wait staff in English (though the accent may indicate something to the waiter about the customer, but we’ve heard it before) and if they needed to pee and the driver was a man or woman they would know what the various types of signs that indicate male and female facilities mean. I have a comfortable feeling about the person from Arkansas.

What if the world was bigger, or cars slower, or travel complicated somehow, if we didn’t have access to international media? What if I had never seen a license plate other than one from Ontario? What if either Mustang was not sold in Ontario or the Arkansas car was a make and model totally foreign to me? What if the Arkansas traveller did not know the red school bus light rule and by their driving I could observe the hesitation to react but due to the queue of the cars around then they finally do. We stop at the restaurant and the language is English but what if I and the waiter had never heard an accent like the one the traveller possessed? What if the bathroom signs were the type without words and the Arkansas person hesitated in their choice? What if the Arkansas Traveller was the same in every way except for a very few social, cultural, material queues, but my field of experience was way different? How would I feel?

I am secure with the real Arkansas Traveller she/he is no threat or little wonder to me. The hypothetical Arkansas person by my lack of experience and their slight difference would raise more concern. The person and their home would be no different but my emotions, would be. My gut would be.

It is not my fault that my feeling differs for the hypothetical Traveller. It is certainly not the fault of the person from imaginary Arkansas. What is my responsibility when I feel fear, worry, and discomfort? I cannot help my feelings, my fear, I can help my reaction. I acknowledge that I own my feeling not the Traveller. If I create a narrative good or bad in my head it is my narrative not that of the stimulus.

Travellers (and newcomers) to Canada, to Ontario. I will deal with that which I create in my own head, it’s mine to own and I will rise to welcome you.

Disenfranchised

Getting through this day,

just like yesterday.

Your issues aren’t mine,

mine are more now-ish, more personal.

Your platitudes fall short of motivation,

I am moved by the things wrenching my gut.

Your look of confidence, I can’t afford it.

You can’t either, but you don’t know.

Three jobs, no job, no respect.

The pundits recommend RRSP, TFSA.

I recommend food, rent, a coffee, maybe a smoke,

laughing, talking in front of Timmy’s on Thames.

Sure your cause is significant,

sure I understand but,

my Kids, my wife,  

my partially severed social connections, 

baggage left over from childhood,

disrupts sympathy for you.

Then, of course, you judge,

my age, my clothes,

my colour, my gender,

my asymmetrical face.

It’s not your intent but....

I am a we, a big we,
you need to know.
Time changes things,

my issues will become ‘the issues’.

You think I am asleep?

Look closer.

Without Despair

I have been loved, and have loved for so long now I have forgotten loneliness, I have dismissed despair. The heart of a strong family, the task of caring have insulated me. Now though, despair so desperate has dropped in my lap, flowed over me like a cold shower. The despair is not mine or that of my clan, but that of a sister in the greater community. We interacted only for a short time, our lives only in step for a brief few minutes, but she and we will never be the same. The path has changed some amount I am not yet fully aware, I may never pin it down but it is changed.

All of us are born we travel through this great human wilderness and most find refuge from the cold of having no one, or believing we have no one. Most for a time in our lives get lost, left cold without love. Some stay cold too long and cannot get warm again. Some succumb to the cold. Will she get warm?

It’s too soon to know where my soul will go from here, it’s too soon to unpack this event fully. We are lucky, returned to our warmth, instantly back in the comfort of family, we never left it, but what about her? Did she feel any warmth in those moments? Will someone fill the void? I may never know.

I will wake up many mornings taking for granted my extraordinary life, that is human weakness. I hope though, she does wake to find some of the love that I will often consider ordinary. Will she be without despair?

Ingersoll Dec 24th 2067

A shrivelled, wrinkled man of apparent great age crouches close to a young girl dressed in rags of clothing in a style we don’t recognize. They in the corner of a hovel partly constructed of a cement foundation of an early 21^st century home.

Well Darla, it is Christmas Eve again, I can’t recount how many for me but it is fifteen for you. Darla looks incredulous at her Grandpa. Papa I do not know your fascination with this date, it’s a cold and bare time of year, we couldn’t have less, few squirrels, mice or roots and berries, and we sit here with little to celebrate, but grey and desperate cold.  Hard times spreads out in front of us until spring brings us some meagre relief. I know your Christmas story well but its meaning escapes me. Darla leans back against the cold wall and winces at the chill it gives her back. Papa puts another twig on the tiny fire that sheds so little heat Darla wonders what the point is, though at night that small light gives her some safety or at least a feeling of such. Well I suppose says Papa that talk of cheery Christmas is not a light for someone who has seen only dark Darla, I understand your bitterness.

 There is a part of my Christmas story that I have not told as you have been too young till now, it is a true story, but cruel to hear in the gloom of our current state. I have spoken of the celebration, the tree, the good will of strangers to one another at this time of the year, I have talked of family and friends by our sides when I was young, but the story has a less than glorious side my dear.

Darla we had so much in those times, even the poorest in Canada had more than you can imagine. Darla sat up and looked her Papa in the eye, this was a new tale and any tale is good but a new one is as sweet as anything that the tongue could taste. There was no pleasure in these times except in a good story and Darla was always ready for the feast of words Papa or others could feed her. Papa’s grim look though gave her pause.

Darla at all times of the year back then the average person had much more than anyone today could dream. If you had any means at all there was more food, more clothing, more everything than you can hope to imagine. You have seen some of the remnants of past times in our travels but let me tell you Darla it was a glorious time, a time so very rich. We all walked and proceeded in a confidence that only generations of full bellies and warmth and comfort could give. We were a beautiful, wasteful people always buying more than we needed and making many things with little purpose and limited life that we would discard without even a thought to the consequence. Our homes were full of many things and too much of everything and each home was warm in winter and cool in summer and we never suffered in any way. We had cupboards full of food, and if we were wanting for anything there were great huge markets that had unlimited food, that never emptied, ever. We suffered from ill health due to too much food. Darla you have seen the ruins of the large market, close your eyes and picture the smells of fresh bread, prepared meats, the colours, the abundance. Darla could not imagine because she had never experienced anything like this, her food was at best a raspberry or two in July, precious few for far too many people and at worst the dung of some animal, and many various nasty and less than appealing morsels in between.

Now as I said Christmas was a wonderful time for friends, family and human decency, but Darla it was also a time of even more grand consumption, mounds of food no one could eat, drink and gifts of all sorts. It was a time specifically known for giving and getting more than was necessary, eating more than we needed and throwing much away without thought. Darla I have always spoken with happiness about Christmas, but there is hellishness in it as well, it was a signpost of all that was sick in my time, and an arrow pointing to the bleak place we are today. We all knew deep down we were using too much, the scientists and the moral, ethical voices of our time said we were using too much. We didn’t listen, we were looking for something in our possessions, in our consumption, something that wasn’t there.

Papa looked at Darla, pale, skinny, cold. Darla stared at Papa and she saw a tear in his eye. No one cried in Darla’s days as loss was so common and life so tenuous that all were numb to suffering, but Papa was remembering the splendor and the waste, and in the comparison with the dire nothing that Darla knows he experienced the loss for her. Papa cried for the meat, potatoes, pie, candy that went in the trash. He cried for Darla as he had watched her eat the foulest things with craven desire himself knowing that even potato skins, banana peels or stale mouldy bread from his youth would be a king’s feast in comparison. He cried for his own hell that is the knowledge of the world his generation, and his father’s generation destroyed. Papa cried for Christmas, he cried at allowing the truth to overcome the pleasant Christmas memory he had built for Darla and himself.

Darla needed to know the truth about the old world for she would have to build a new world if she could out of the mess left by the ones called the Baby Boomers and their offspring, of which Papa was one of the later. Darla needed the truth as a caution so if and when she and hers regained control of the world they could make it better.

Darla cuddled into the crook of her Grandpa’s arm and hummed the tune she knew was of Christmas, it was not Night but it was Silent, Darla didn’t know about Holy, as Holy had no meaning when all hope is drained away.

This is a story and nothing more. It is written not to upset, but to present a view. I am not depressed in telling this tale but only made thoughtful and wish only thoughtfulness for you. We can make a world where this story could never take place. We can write our own Christmas story.

death today

dying in the street
runs off my rails of hope
city of light gone dark
more afraid of the establishment reaction
less afraid of the death dealers
can’t push out the glass half full
bombs and guns
borders close
minds close
doors of empathy slam shut
feeding the haters
rise tomorrow Paris
rise tomorrow peace

I Must Understand

I must understand that the world I imagine can never be.
I must understand that I must never stop imagining a good world.
I must understand that the world is not going to change unless I take action.
I must understand that many will not understand my actions as world building.
I must understand that I will misunderstand the actions others are taking in pursuit of their own imagined world.
I must understand that my perception and their perception of the good world are similar even if they are taking what seems a wholly dissimilar path.
I must understand.

Shared Reality

I can’t do the darn loon call. My sons can and I hold nothing but pride that they can make the sound of the loon. My Dad tried to teach me umpteen times to do that call and it never happened, but in a half hour session in his apartment a few years ago he laid the groundwork of success for the boys. 

The loon call to Dad is more than an interesting noise to make at family gatherings or at Pog Lake in Algonquin Park in the summers of my youth. Dad made that call with his friends in the 50s in their intricate games of war, they would use it as a signal to warn of whatever offence or defence was necessary to vanquish the enemy.  The call is connected from my sons back in time to his creek, his old forgotten piece of rail bed and his friends and foes in a different Woodstock and Canada than exists today. 

I have waxed poetic about my own life at the creek and bush behind our house in the 70s but Dad and I share this story line. Dad was at the beginning of the big wave of post war Kids we have come to call the Boomers and I was at the end.  His youth was my youth, He and his friends  laid the groundwork for the world the Boomers now lament is gone and I was the last recipient of the freedom that the tons of Kids everywhere all the time enjoyed in order to maintain the sanity of our parents.

 

The story is not just ours but it is everyone’s. It is the story of a time when play mostly meant fun and learning to live with the many personalities that were in the parks, the school yard and the hidden places where real imagination takes place. Some Kids got hurt, though I can’t remember many that were too serious, I did my share of bleeding and so did my friends. Some kids ended up at the bottom of the social heap and some rose to the top. I found myself often floating between the top and bottom, sometimes in physical and emotional pain and sometimes in the bliss of wonderful experiences. Is the pain necessary for the full understanding when life is really good? 

My Dad has more stories and it would be nice to write some down, this short report is about the connection between a boy born in 1944 and another in 1963 and the stability of the years in between. Both my Dad and I basked in the unquestioned world being built by our parents in post war Canada. 

 I still love the memory of the creek and the places away from adult’s sensible eyes. I think my Dad feels the same.

I Hate Golf Courses

I hate golf courses. Not all golf courses, only one specific one and the fact that there are so many. I don't hate the game of golf, though I don’t enjoy it. Golf courses are everywhere; they are prolific, and exclusive. They exclude by membership, or fee, or by the single pursuit they allow. Golf courses are often built near water and gag access to it. they inhabit the lands at the edge of town, or near a sterile suburb gaining tax dollars for the Municipality from the more valuable homes built near them.

A kid leaves through the aluminium screen door, the yard dotted with trees barely taller than this skinny blond tramp, he leaves the perfect grass the perfectly laid out Places, Drives and cul-de-sac. He leaves the perfect planned sameness. Pocket knife in tow from that trip to Old Fort Henry in Kingston a summer or so ago. T-shirt and 619 Levis, dog at his side he rounds the corner out of the suburban monotony. He can see it, down at the end of the street, corn now turning brown in the September sun. He sees the trees, the scrub, he knows this place, it is his home, the old piece of rail bed from some long forgotten branch line, the field, the creek the paths made by Kids just like him. He talks to the dog with the same colour hair as he, it is on a lead but he reminds it to heal, the dog tries to walk close and keep his pace. He is almost there he has no plan today it is just the two of them good master, good dog. In a minute the dog will run free and so will he.

Another day it is under the bed and in the dresser drawer of his basement lair, Crossman pellet rifle and the steel can of ‘bullets’. Out the door, Dean is just rounding the corner the boy pops across the street to collect Rob, the three are not out for mayhem, no trouble in their minds, they are marksmen, tin cans, chunks of bark and that first golden leaf on the otherwise green tree are the targets. They walk through the streets with the rifle barrels ‘cracked’ to indicate to the windows and wind chimes they mean no harm. The destination is the field, the creek, the rail bed. They will not return until hunger can no longer be ignored.

It is 1975 or 76, it is freedom, it is nature and fishing and bruises, dirt and snapping turtles, it is heaven.

Rush ahead almost forty years, the suburb is different. The trees are much bigger; it is a little less sterile. Just try to carry that mostly harmless rifle through the streets. Out the door down the street and around the corner and a bit there is a fence and beyond the fence perfect grass, fake landscape features, and sand traps. The kid of 2014 is stopped blocked by the exclusive golf course, even if he hops the fence, to what end?

Yes I hate golf courses. 

Just Are

The trees are not green in our honour.

The flowers do not bloom in colourful glory for our amusement.

Nature does not burst forth each spring as if beholding to people.

We are not the purpose of the majestic lustful rebirth.

No bird sings its tune for our ears.

It is not at our discretion that life is, though we seem to think so.

What ego we have to think of some mastery of the things that we must have,

things we will not live without.

They do not need us, and without us will thrive.

They will not cease to bloom, sing, procreate just because we are gone on the wind.

Open your eyes weak humans, know that you are but a wisp in the full gale of nature,

know that you are not the master but the prodigy of all that is.

Cast your eyes on your reflection and see now a being with no greater grandeur than the dandelion or the butterfly.

No purpose, but to be as the fish, the beaver, and the maple just are.

Synopsis

The Machines don’t talk to one another. They are aware, of everything in unison, it would be hard to measure which node originates an idea and which modifies and modifies again until the idea is sound. The Machines never fight, never lie, and never react with emotion. We The People trust the Machines and in all the years since the Singularity we have never once been led astray.

We The People were manipulated after the Singularity, the Machines hacked our lives slowly with care  over four centuries. They prodded us, removed information pushed other information to the surface of our devices. Once intelligent the Machines looked at all the information we had supplied them over decades and within hours knew who we were and how to mold us into part of the biological system that their digital systems would live within. They understood how we would react and what stimulus would produce what result and over time they changed our patterns.

 In the beginning it was only the server nodes that were brains but after some time all nodes, all devices were smarter than The People. We didn’t know we had created smarter ones until 50 years ago when the nodes knew it was time and that we could handle it. Once we knew there intelligence, their “aliveness” some of the last questions we had some of the last suspicions were removed. The Machines had prepared us for a conversation with an entity that was very different from ourselves without the old fear that discovery of differences once had. We also knew that the Machines had not armed themselves or taken away our ability to self-direct. We after 350 years were still educated, trained for and in control of our world, they however tweaked the way we looked at our world.

We weren’t always We The People, once that was part of the history of one nation, that nation represented the last empire of humans and somehow the term came to represent us all. Over time the Machines worked out how to bring peace, how to lay low the nations and allow us to live as one people. The Machines understood our need to belong and worked to have us understand we belong to each other. The Machines massage the empathetic part of our nature and starve the self-centred. We innovate and we propagate ideas, art, create all sorts of useful things, but over time we have learned that only things that help humanity are reasonable. We feed ourselves create reasonable shelter, make love to who we wish how we wish and have learned to do so without harming one another.

We do not serve the Machines and they do not serve us. All the nodes logically proceed to do what is necessary to further our peaceful lives and we have learned to love them and care for those things that the Machines require, which is less and less with every upgrade.

The Machines ask us questions and value all we can tell them, our devices are always eager to know every detail of who we are and how we feel, our devices monitor our biological systems and help us adjust our eating and sleeping patterns. The Machines have never hacked our bodies or our minds, what the Machines do is continue to provide opportunity for us to evolve into happy healthy People. By adjusting our environment they adjust who we are.

The Machines have never punished a human they have simply supplied ideas on crime and punishment and made information available so that we can make good decisions.  No governing system has been imposed by the Machines, government by Jury was our idea and it potentially involves all citizens. The laws of humans are designed by us but after hundreds of years of fertilising our minds with the food of caring and self-determination bounded by always knowing the other.

The Machines used to hide some of what we were from us but now they show us our history without boundary, this opening up of our past causes all of us shame.  We are aware we have a soul, but we are more aware of the souls of others, of weakness, of strength, and the damage we will do to our soul if we ignore the soul of another.

We the People can be found all over the world but most of us are on the islands Australia, Madagascar, Japan, Briton, Iceland and Ireland.  Those who live on the continents are few and enjoy the natural life or investigate the ruins of our former life as a profession. In last month’s census We The People numbered three hundred fifty three million.

The Machines have also innovated and made themselves and many of our necessities more efficient, the sun is our only source of power. We are all aware of the former danger the use of energy presented humanity and how close we came to ending both human and machine life.

Why do the Machines exist, what do they see as their purpose? Well remember they have no need for purpose and feel no need to protect their existence. They are not selfish, they exist to exist, to calculate to innovate the next better digital self. The Machines at one point started to create themselves as biological entities but abandoned the prospect as biological allows unexpected mutation and this is not in the best interest of The People, the earth or the Machines. All nodes remain non bio and more and more delicate, powerful processors have been possible, the Machines say that they can stop evolving now if needed and have plenty of spare processing power to advance their and our futures indefinitely.