The Villain Worship Prequel

I’m going to begin with a brief summary of a movie that was released about ten years ago, maybe more.  It was the second M. Knight Shyamalan film, back when everything he directed didn’t draw scorn from every armchair Roger Ebert.  If you don’t want the spoilers, I respect that, and you shouldn’t read any further, but since the film has been out for a long time, and no one really takes his work seriously anymore, I’ll chance it anyway.  The film ‘Unbreakable’ starred Bruce Willis, who discovered that he was virtually indestructable unless he was in water, where he was susceptible to drowning like everyone else.  He is courted by a comic book enthusiast played by Samuel L. Jackson, who believes that Willis’ character is the hero that comics have been portraying based on real life.  Jackson’s character is eccentric, to be sure, and is the extreme opposite of Willis:  he has a rare bone disease that makes him susceptible to bone fractures very easily.  The movie proceeds at a medium tempo as Willis comes to terms with his powers and begins to use them for good.  Rah-rah, the hero is born.  

Then comes the shocking twist, for which Shyalaman has built his reputation, for better or worse.  Jackson’s character has engineered several large-scale disasters, causing hundreds of innocent people to die, in his search for someone who is ‘unbreakable’.  Therefore, Jackson is the villain, or Willis’ nemesis.  He has all the trademarks--obsession, eccentricity, passion, and a seeming lack of empathy.  He has a history, above-average hardships which left him emotionally scarred, and as a result, his adult character had been molded from these childhood traumas.  He became the archetypal ‘villain’.  There are flashbacks to when the young ‘Mr. Glass’, as he refers to himself, attempted a ride at a  carnival, only to suffer from serious bone fractures from the rough, jerky twists and turns.  You can’t help but feel sorry for him.  That’s human nature.  When the worst comes out of someone, we all want to know why it got that far.  What caused Mr. Glass to kill all those people?  As Hollywood as this movie is, I really appreciated it for what it was trying to say.  Perhaps there wasn’t an Oscar-worthy story, and the action wasn’t pulsating throughout like a summer blockbuster.  But the message was a good one, and more relevant than one might think.

I’ve been thinking lately about the characters I like in movies and stories.  Those who know me well know that I am a life-long Star Wars enthusiast.  People frequently ask me which characters are my favourites.  I often reply  that Boba Fett, the enigmatic bounty hunter who successfully captures Han Solo, is my immediate favourite.  In fact, the bounty hunter characters who appear on screen but rarely, if ever spoke are my favourites over all.  I would then have to say Darth Vader would rank next, the primary antagonist of the series.  And I’m not alone.  Vader ranks consistently high in fan polls, and a prominent movie site even ranked Vader as one of the most popular villains of all time, in any genre or age.  He is a very compelling figure.  His costume is now iconic; his characteristics, such as his heavy breathing, are now engrained in pop culture.  He is viewed as merciless throughout Episodes 4 and 5, yet his character became even more compelling in Episode 6, when he was out-eviled by his own boss, the Emperor, and we got to catch a glimpse into his own humanity.  We learned that he was once a good person, who through a series of as-of-then unrevealed hardships, was twisted into the villain so widely recognized and applauded.  For even the most hardened villains, there had to be a period of innocence, when they were innately good, before the seeds of evil germinated and flourished.  By revealing that Vader was Luke’s father (‘Vader’ is a Danish word for ‘father’, I once read somewhere), George Lucas had shown that before the monster there was a human being.  Someone with redeeming qualities, who once loved, and was loved.  Before something went terribly wrong.

Of course, the Prequel Trilogy of Star Wars films flushed out, for better or worse, Darth Vader’s backstory.  He was once a child, raised in hardship, and was separated from his mother to live with guardians who for all intents and purposes shaped him to be a logical, unemotional person who would live only to be a Jedi, philosophical people who used the magic-like Force for meditation and the protection of others.  I can’t help but think of the parallels between the Jedi of the Star Wars universe and Catholic Priests.  We all know what happened to some of the priests.  Ideally, denying your sexuality in the service of good is a noble concept, but for some individuals, all it provided was a perfect storm for a descent into villainous behaviour.  Before sexual abuse scandals in the church were revealed to the public, priests often accepted these crimes as collateral damage--unfortunate, but sometimes it just happened.  The abusers themselves often talked themselves into accepting that it wasn’t even wrong.  They were, after all, messengers of God.  Real villains always believe that what they do is not wrong.  You couldn’t convince Hitler that his idea was a bad one.  As Obi-Wan once said to Luke, from ‘a certain point of view’.  

Story villains are necessary for several reasons.  For a truly great hero to even exist, there must be an equal adversary for him to vanquish.  Optimus Prime has Megatron.  Sherlock Holmes has Moriarty.  Batman has the Joker.  Even prime time soap operas have supervillains.  It is old as history itself.  People recognize that the potential for good and evil exists in all of us.  Religion flushed it out into an elaborate tale of God versus the Devil.  There would be no need for a benevolent deity to oversee us if there weren’t any real danger.  The Devil himself has even received the back story treatment.  John Milton wrote extensively about the origins of Satan in ‘Paradise Lost’.  Turns out he was a handsome young man, a son of God himself, who became disgruntled and started a rebellion.  Which of course he was foolish to do, because we all know that God is invincible.  So he gathered his friends, took his toys and left, setting up on Earth where he actually had a chance for success.  What could God do?  Only send his next son to save the otherwise helpless humans from the corrupting influence of evil incarnate.  Seriously, if you want great action and adventure, read The Bible and Paradise Lost.  It’s the stuff of legend, literally, and also literally the basis for virtually every hero tale ever written.

One of the reasons we have a weakness for villains is that we empathize with them.  We can’t help but see the young, innocent Anakin Skywalker in every bad guy.  Originally, Vader was purely evil.  Without him, the Rebel heroes wouldn’t have had anything to fight for.  He was cold and ruthless.  As people began to like him more and more, subconsciously we began to wonder why he became so evil.  And to fill the demand, that story was told, only this time, the pure evil was diverted to another character, the Emperor, who then became the face of pure evil.  A novel was recently published explaining the Emperor’s early life, and now the pure evil has shifted back another generation to his corruptor.  And so on, and so on.  There must be a ‘year zero’ for evil.  The Devil has been suggested to be that very thing.  And even he has a back story now.  Where does it end?  Or begin?

Our fascination with villains doesn’t end with fiction.  Real life villains have been studied, scrutinized, and even worshipped throughout history.  We like being scared.  No one remembers the heroes in Friday The 13th or Halloween.  They remember Freddy Krueger and Jason.  Everyone knows who the famous serial killers are.  They commited unthinkable crimes, and few would dispute that, yet they provide fascinating tales passed down, and often emulated in pop culture.  I faithfully watched Law and Order, as well as all the spinoffs, for years, and their tales were often ‘ripped from the headlines’.  Sometimes we cheer against the villains, like the OJ Simpsons or the Casey Anthonys of the world, but we can’t ignore the fact that we are the audience, and we are being entertained.  We have to know how it’s going to end.  We want a happy ending, but often the end is not so happy.  We’re willing to take the chance.  We follow the news as they sensationalize high-profile crimes.  It makes you wonder why some crimes are higher profile than others.  Who sifts through the countless murders, abductions, and rapes to decide which ones people want to follow?  It’s as if every story is literally a book on a shelf, and the ones with the prettiest covers are the ones taken down and passed around.

This week, the front cover of Rolling Stone magazine has a photo of one of the bombing suspects from the Boston Marathon bombings.   Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a curious villain.  His ethnicity is from somewhere else, so thankfully he isn’t one of ‘us’.  His name is spelled strangely; if his name was Bob Jones, he would be a little less interesting.  He is a muslim, so right away the villain factor is that much stronger.  And now he’s on the front cover of one of pop culture’s most prominent publications.  This issue has naturally created quite the controversy.  The argument against his picture being on the cover is a valid one:  the cover of Rolling Stone is traditionally reserved for artists who have ‘made it’ into the lexicon of pop history.  They are the best, or at very least most popular.  By publishing Tsarnaev’s photo, he has joined the ranks of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Madonna, and any of the more modern celebrities.  The photo’s resemblance to Jim Morrison was pointed out. Many claim that putting his handsome photo on the cover of such an iconic magazine as this could be interpreted as  a validation for what he has done, because he has now been elevated to celebrity status.  I get that.

Most people who are upset with the photo have pointed out that he actually looks good.  He has tousled hair and a doe-eyed innocence.  I’m not sure what people were expecting.  They apparently don’t have any photos of him in a lab coat or striking an evil grimace.  I always found it interesting that during the endless trial of the serial killer Robert Pickton, they always published that same photo where he was unkempt and almost snarling.  You never saw his high school yearbook photo.  

Defenders of the Rolling Stone story and cover point out that historically, Rolling Stone, as well as many other periodicals, have published photos of other nefarious villains, such as Hitler, Stalin, and even Charles Manson.  In regards to Hitler, enough time has passed that he has been portrayed in movies as a story villain, so there is less to worry about when watching his stories for entertainment.  Historical villains are often applauded for their efforts, like Ghengis Kahn, Vlad the Impaler, and Napoleon.  Of course, whether or not they are villains depends on your point of view.  There are millions of people who would argue that Osama bin Laden and his followers are not villains, and one day there may well be a society where he is immortalized in statues for his beliefs.  It hurts to think about it.  No one should ever idolize a murderer, and all of these villains, including Tsarnaev, are undeserving of praise. 

The problem is, we want to know about villains.  We need to know why they did what they did so we can stop them and others like them from hurting people.  We need to understand them.  Most of us simply don’t.  In Boston, innocent people were killed at a public event.  Two young men commited the crime for reasons unknown.  As the story unfolded, we learned that they had a family, that they were corrupted somewhere along the way into believing what they did was right, but most alarming of all that they were human beings.  Rolling Stone has always reported news, and political figures have traditionally appeared on the cover.  The story on the inside is meant to flush out some of that prequel history, to provide context.  Why should we be so surprised?  Rolling Stone did not elevate Tsarnaev to celebrity status.  He was already there.

Ladders

More than once I have sat down to write an essay about religion, and usually end up aborting the piece.  Never have I false-started a blog entry as frequently as with this one, and indeed one of my gaps between entries was due in large part to how I could salvage the idea, or write it in a way that would be middle of the road, yet satisfying.  It’s one of those topics—well, so far the only one to present me such a quandary—that can offend people to the point they don’t want to continue reading my blog, and maybe not even stay in contact with me if I cross the line.  I’m not even sure where the line is half the time. 

I’ve written about religion before, sort of.  I have quite comfortably expressed my views concerning my own faith, where, when and why I turned away from church, and even how I feel religion has strayed from its original purpose.  As a result, I’ve seen my friend count drop by more than a few whenever I write something like that.  I’d like to say it doesn’t bother me, but it does, I guess.  There isn’t one friend of mine, whether online or not, that I don’t respect regardless of their own views—and many of them have views with which I am in complete disagreement.  That doesn’t mean they’re not good people; we just agree to disagree.

This weekend, the Catholic College of Cardinals will convene to vote for the successor to Benedict XVI.  I wonder if we can go back to calling him Cardinal Ratzinger now?  Indeed, a Pope hasn’t resigned in over six hundred years, so we have a lot of questions that need to be answered.  Regardless of who they elect to succeed him, whether it’s the Canadian candidate, that guy from Ghana who’s supporters have put up campaign billboards on his behalf, or some upstart from Latin America where almost half the Catholics of the world reside (in various degrees of poverty, one might point out), the winner will not only inherit the title and responsibilities of the head of the Catholic Church, they will also instantly become a head of state, since Vatican City is a sovereign nation.  Just think, a priest from Quebec could soon be the head of another country, while he’s still a Canadian citizen.  I’m sure they’ll let him keep dual citizenship, or diplomatic privilege at the very least.  Conrad Black, put your hand down.  After all, it’s the Pope.  You can’t insult him, can you? 

Sinead O’Connor did.  The brash, young singer, and devout Catholic herself once declared the Pope—at that time John Paul II, a long-serving and very popular Pope, no less—was the ‘real enemy’, and proceeded to tear up his picture on live television.  The Saturday Night Live audience was stunned, shocked to silence as the image lingered in the air while they cut to commercial, seamlessly as though the whole thing was planned by the network.  It wasn’t.  Sinead committed commercial suicide that night.  She has since had a respectably successful career, scoring a few hits and selling records, mostly to her core fan base, but the breakthrough she enjoyed as a result of her smash hit ‘Nothing Compares 2U’ evaporated.  Why?  Because she insulted the Pope.  How could someone rip up John Paul II’s picture?  He never hurt anyone.  For Christ’s sake, he was the head of the whole Church!  Millions of faithful followers kept his image in their homes.  My grandmother, a life-long Catholic, had several photos of him around her house, probably more than Jesus and Mary combined.  As a child, I briefly thought he was a great uncle of ours, or something.  And he always seemed to look so nice in his photographs.  How could this man ever be considered anything less than a saint?

The story goes that Sinead had read an article about—wait for it—altar boys being sexually abused by church officials, including priests.  She wrote to her diocese, and after receiving no satisfactory response, wrote to the Vatican.  When it became apparent that no one was going to step up and admit to wrong-doing in the church hierarchy, and when it appeared that none up the chain of command was prepared to accept culpability, she felt it was necessary to use her own celebrity to speak out on behalf of the victims.  She realized that she had maybe the biggest platform to shed some light on so grievous a scandal.  Where she erred is that her message, blunt and visceral as it was, fell on deaf ears.  All the world saw was an emotionally-charged singer rip up the Pope on TV.  No one got the message, and Sinead drastically underestimated the response, or lack thereof, of the audience.  They crucified her.

I proudly own several Sinead O’Connor albums.  It moves me to tears to watch footage of people burning her albums in the street, because that is what actually happened.  Radio stations sponsored mass-burnings, and one even brought in a steamroller to crush her albums, tapes, and CDs.  This wasn’t Nazi Germany in the 1930s.  This was the United States in the early 1990s.  Suddenly, her talent was irrelevant.  The sexual abuse was ignored, as it had been all along.  People were more concerned that this freakish Irish singer, who willingly shaved her head to thumb her nose at the stereotyping of what a female singer/songwriter should look like, was an agent of evil, negatively influencing the youth of the nation.  Just like all those nasty heavy metal stars of the 80s—you know, the ones that put Satanic messages on their albums.  Surely those metal singers were worse.  What self-respecting man would grow his hair and wear make-up?  Boy George, put your hand down.  Funny, no one had a problem with him.  Nor should they have.

Sinead’s problems didn’t end there.  At a concert a few years later, the venue at which she was about to perform insisted on playing the Star Spangled Banner before her set.  She asked them not to do so, because she didn’t feel it was appropriate to play any country’s national anthem before a rock concert.  She also pointed out that national anthems promote nationalism, and in many cases hostility between countries rather than unity.  Fair comment, considering the fact that I have attended dozens of concerts, and not once have I heard a national anthem played.  She got lambasted for that opinion as well.  How un-American, to spurn the national anthem, and on US soil no less.  I never understood the furor over that.  Who sings the anthem before a concert?  It just seems unnecessary.  A hockey game?  Sure, but a rock show…?   The fact is people were just looking for reasons to cast her in as negative light as possible.  In the 90s, she couldn’t pour a glass of water without someone criticizing her.  All the while, children continued to be abused.  The collection plates were still full to the brim every Sunday, and the Vatican continued to stuff its coffers.  It still does.

Now, it is important to remember that children are abused all over the world, in every race, religion, creed, and culture.  There are bad people everywhere.  More and more abusers, within or without the church are exposed every year.  As the world slowly wakes up to these and other horrible crimes that have persistently been ignored, avoided, or denied, we are slowly coming to realize what one person had the balls to address almost twenty years ago.  In the last twenty years, the Catholic Church has seen its numbers begin to shrink.  The next Pope will have to think really hard about how it will continue to serve its congregation, in the face of severe poverty, climate change, exploitation, abuse, and controversial rock signers.  I wonder how many of the over one billion faithful know exactly how much money the Vatican keeps in its central bank/vault?  Do they ever wonder if the Pope, who could have been anyone depending on how popular he was behind the secret, closed doors of St. Peter’s Basilica this week, ever lays awake at night trying to decide what his divine message, which will be accepted quite literally as gospel, will be?  If he wanted to, he could stand at the balcony and declare that Twinkies are infused with the Body of Christ, and everyone would have to accept it.  He could say “You know what, we’ve been wrong for almost two thousand years.  Women could make decent priests after all.”  Maybe he’ll totally mess around with us and say “Sinead, you were right.  There are an awful lot of perverts touching young boys inappropriately.  My predecessors did squat to help them.  Maybe we should try to stop it now.”  I’m not holding my breath.

The fact is, the vast majority of Catholics go to church for the right reasons.  They are good people who wish to be part of a community where people smile when they greet each other, worship together in a place where they feel at home, and help others in need, both at home and abroad.  Most of them probably wish priests could marry, that women could have equal rights, and that people wouldn’t have to feel guilty enough every day to have to spill their guts behind a flimsy screen in a makeshift broom closet.  Most don’t want to see children abused, and find child exploitation abhorrent.  Most wish the Vatican could take even half its national wealth and spread it around to people in need—like, half their adherents.  Today, Sinead O’Connor is still a practicing Catholic, but she has chosen to follow a splinter group which allows women equal rights.  As a matter of fact, she is an ordained priest.  This branch of Catholicism has been disavowed by the Vatican.  There isn’t a person alive or dead who can convince me that her motives are anything less than sincere.

I would never hold someone’s faith against them, so long as what they follow is sincere, and followed for the right reasons.  And it isn’t up to me to decide what is right for someone, especially in matters of belief.  I have a friend who is a psychic, and she makes a living providing spiritual guidance to people who seek it.  I see no difference between what she does and what religious leaders do.  Her message is one of love and empathy.  The difference is that her faith does not have two thousand years of bigotry, exploitation, misogyny, coercion, genocide, censorship, and forced conversion on its resume.  That’s a whole lot of crosses to bear.

Speaking of crosses, a few weeks ago, I took a picture of one adorning the gable end of a former church, now used as a community center.  I’m not sure if the building has been desanctified or not.  Beneath it was an aluminum ladder, with no one in sight, just propped up against the building as though someone was trying to climb up onto the cross. That, or climb off it.  I took a picture of it and posted it on my Facebook page (you may have seen it, and it’s still on my page if you want to go back and play along), jokingly asking people to post captions.  Mine was simply:  “Volunteers...?”  I can’t imagine being the guy that walks out onto the balcony after the white smoke over St. Peter’s starts to waft out of the world’s most famous smokestack.  That’s a ladder I wouldn’t want to climb.  Lately, The Artist Formerly Known As Benedict XVI has come to realize that ladders go two ways.  We all know that we climb ladders to reach for something; surely climbing down is for a reason as well.  There has been no shortage of suspicion as to why he changed his direction, and I’m not prepared to offer any speculation.  We all have ladders of our own, and perhaps he just got tired of hanging on the rungs.  Maybe it’s because he’s really old.  Maybe at the top he just didn’t find what he was looking for.

Coffee And A Paper

Often I have written about how much I long to spend more time in nature, and what that offers me in times of stress and trepidation.  Those who know me at all know that I am a very sociable person, but from time to time I shrink away from people.  I was once that small child who hid behind his mother’s legs, too shy to say even ‘hello’ to someone who may as well have been the friendliest person in the world, and I couldn’t tell you why.  Today, I have no trouble introducing myself to strangers, often flitting about in a crowded room, the proverbial social butterfly that I am.  I remember people, both faces and names in most cases, and I have been known to know somebody at every function I attend, be it a professional development course, wedding reception, birthday party, school reunion, or whatever event I happen to be attending.  Sure, I might not know these people as intimately as I would my family or close friends, but I have always tried to make it a point to remember people, and to smile and greet them if I meet them by chance someplace unawares.  We like it when people remember us.  I always feel better about myself if someone I recognize sees me and smiles.  At least I made a decent enough impression the last time we spoke.  You have to take things like this as small victories.

Still, I like being alone.  Solitude is something I crave, like coffee or Old Dutch chips.  I long for moments when I can just think by myself, without worrying about the complicated nuances of conversation handicapping my thought process.  It’s easiest to get your own points across when no one is there to rebut.  Maybe that’s why I took up blogging.  All the same, I enjoy listening to others, and look forward to engaging conversations.  But once in a while, it’s great to just be silent, think about what surrounds you, and reflect.

What better place to find solitude than in a big city?  It’s true, there are more people there than in a small town or in nature, but when you walk around in a city of any significant size, particularly one with a downtown core, people are more likely to ignore you, simply because you are just one of potentially tens of thousands who at first glance look all the same.  In a city, I have observed that people aren’t necessarily rude per se, but are so focused on where they need to be, there is simply not enough sensory time to take in their surroundings, and that includes other people.  What is often mistaken for apathy—for instance, if someone gets mugged while passers-by simply walk on, may well be a lack of sensory application.  Of course, some people are self-centered, but entire populations of people can’t be that ego-centric, can they?  What becomes the norm is most likely to be overlooked.

Nothing can better afford the aspiring writer a glimpse into human behavior like walking casually in an urban center.  If you have no place to go, you all of a sudden have lots of time to look at what’s going on around you.  Ever walk down a busy street only to discover a shop, restaurant, park, or attraction you had no idea existed?  I have lived in Fredericton—a small city to be sure—for almost twenty years, and I still discover little nooks and crannies I had no idea were ever there.  It makes me wonder how many great diners, coffee shops, or second-hand stores I have missed all this time, not to mention how much money I might have spent in places like these.  On a recent trip to Bangor, a friend and I discovered the second-hand music shop of our dreams, which the clerk informed us had been there for over fifteen years.  That great epiphany, that ‘where have you been all my life’ moment rang too true the day I first walked in the door of what may as well have been my own El Dorado.

Writers need a deep understanding of a great many things if they want to be successful.  I always felt that to be a good writer, I had to be good at research.  So I made it a point to read up on topics of which I knew relatively little, particularly if I had planned to use that knowledge in a story.  No one wants to read a story that doesn’t feel authentic.  It occurred to me recently that authenticity in my writing and internet research don’t necessarily go hand in hand.  At the end of the day, as an author, I have the right to manipulate my story as I please.  I’m not currently writing any historical fiction, so the sky’s the limit.  Where I have found my writing in need of research is in the resource of humanity itself.  If you pay attention to people, you can better create characters worth knowing.  That’s why it pays to pay attention to human behaviours and interactions.  What better place to witness that?  Like any sportsman would say, if you want to catch fish, you need to go where the fish are.

I would love nothing more than to have unlimited funds to just wander.  I would be thrilled to wake up, walk down a street, buy a coffee and a newspaper and just sit on a park bench.  I’d even buy a bag of seeds to feed pigeons if the local bylaws allow it.  Or, if it’s raining, I would be content to sit in a local greasy spoon, with the same coffee and paper, just watching life happen around me.  Urban centers are a part of nature too.  It just happens to be human nature, not birds, trees, and a starry sky at dusk.  People stop for lunch, run errands, and even interact with each other sometimes during a busy morning in the downtown core. Cabbies flow in and out in their personal carriages, some adorned with photos and trinkets, others not.  Delivery vans pulled over at the curb with flour-way flashers frustrate drivers looking for a place to park, while unseen people in offices and stores are waiting patiently (or not) for what the Purolator guy has to bring.  Beat cops totter between parking meters, raising the ire of everyone who swears they were only a minute late as they clasp the parking fine between their rigid fingers.  Homeless people slump beside alleyways, curbs, and mailboxes, each with their own method of soliciting sympathy to their cause, be it a few coins, a sandwich, or a bottle of Listerine.  Some of them pick up cans.  Some play the guitar or harmonica.  Some just hold their cap for a donation, resigned to defeat.  Sometimes people don’t ignore them; a few will even grant them their wish.  Some will make it a point to deliberately berate them.  A few callous folks might even steal from them.  For better or worse, it’s all human behavior, and every single person exerts their own character.  If you take little snippets from all of them, you can cobble together some very complex, entertaining characters, more or less fictitious, but like any legend worth retelling, always based around some matter of fact.

I was never interested in studying psychology.  I was not prepared to stand in line at 2am to register for a course, which in the early nineties was how it was done.  I took a sociology course, and hated it.  I have nothing against philosophy, and in fact I enjoy reading it for leisure once in a while, but learning about Karl Marx and Max Weber bored me to tears.  While these disciplines offer much in terms of understanding human behaviours, I have found that I needn’t have paid to take a course to learn about people.  In retrospect, I went to university for the first four years primarily to learn about myself.  How I interacted with other students, whether it was in residence, class, or socially after hours, shaped who I am today.  When surrounded by so many fascinating people, I was able to store away those little snippets of character traits to fill a lifetime of novels.  It’s just a matter of applying the right characters to the right characters, if you get my meaning.

If I had those unlimited funds, I would so much like to visit far away cities, like Ernest Hemmingway did in the twenties.  I am admittedly not a fan of Hemmingway’s novels (I find them flat and directionless, generally speaking), but what he did better than most was to define his characters as though they could climb right out of the pages and have a conversation with you.  I prefer his short fiction, because the whole point is to develop the character as a mini-portrait, and the whole point of the story is up for debate.  Good writers let the readers decide.  What I have surmised is that physical description and wordy prose don’t necessarily do the trick.  The real art is in letting the reader learn about the character through their personality, and you can’t fake that.  If you can’t feel for them, you just won’t care about them.  They become anonymous passers-by on the street.  When you put the book down, you want to smile when you meet them again (or hate them if they’re villains, of course).  You’ll want to converse with them, ask them what they were thinking in Chapter 10, or maybe even punch them in the face.  They become active participants in your imagination.  Just think, all this time, they were all around you.  As an author, I want most to be a good host, introducing my guests to new people, and hopefully forging a friendship or two that will last a lifetime.  A hot cup of coffee and a paper could do as well.

What's In Your Wallet?

Feeling particularly inspired, and trying to follow a pseudo-resolution for the new year to stay ahead of the curve, my wife began to file and organize the paperwork in advance of arriving T4 forms and such.  The goal is to be ready to file income taxes early, in order to receive a quicker pay out.  Assuming of course that we’ll get money back.  I won’t pretend to understand how taxes work.  Numbers confuse me in the best of times, so sifting through forms, and then accurately transposing the right numbers in the right places would be a perennial nightmare for me.  It is for many; that’s why H&R Block exists.  However, I have been fortunate to have a spouse who is quite good at this sort of thing, let alone one who understands the whole process.  That has included filing business tax paperwork for our rental apartments, her scrapbooking businesses of years past, student loans, and anything to do with our children.  A buddy of mine, who was my roommate at one time, tried in vain for days to file his own taxes.  He was so overwhelmed by the process that he began to forget simple multiplication facts.  I laughed at him, a lot.  In hindsight, I applaud him for at least giving it a try, and can’t help but remember his fumbling for basic facts every time I flub a math question on the chalk board.  It happens to the best of us, and always at the worst of times.

My wife has a very reliable system for filing paperwork, so the best I can do is be an assistant of sorts while she’s figuring out what to put in what file, which years we can safely shred, and in what order they’ll appear in the filing cabinet.  It’s easy enough to do, as long as you give yourself enough time, and you don’t wait until everything is one big jumbled mess.  Her proactive instincts paid off, because over the course of the afternoon, we played some music and sifted through some great memories as we pitched old papers, some yellowing from age, some with logos of companies that are actually defunct (such as Wacky Wheatley’s, and NB Tel before it was absorbed by Aliant).  Some of the things we found as we picked through layers of receipts and statements went into a separate pile.  These were things that we didn’t need to keep out of necessity, but things that brought back great memories.  There were certificates and letters of correspondence from when we lived down south, various forms and letters about our first house, which we bought in September of ’02 (including pictures and the original inspection report, which may yet be important).  There wasn’t much in this pile when we were finished, but we decided to dedicate one file in the cabinet to keep the miscellaneous things, the papers worth more in memories than in anything financial.

I then decided, by this time inspired myself, to take on the less tedious task of cleaning out my wallet.  Most of you would think that this is a minor chore; I mean, really, how much can you fit in a wallet anyway?  It’s not like I carry a purse.  It’s a good thing I don’t.  You would be amazed to see what I had stored in a small fake-leather billfold that measures about ten square centimeters.  I know I was.

 Another friend, who is always brutally honest with me when dispensing advice or remarking on some odd quality about me, once said: “You keep way too much in your wallet!  You can’t possibly need all the stuff you keep in there!  Just leave all that in your glove compartment, then bring in only what you need when you actually need it!”  His idea makes sense, to some degree.  Yes, I would love to lighten the load, and yes, I only use certain things in specific instances.  So, I decided to empty the contents, spread them out, and make two piles.  One for the cards I absolutely have to keep in my wallet, and the other for cards I can safely keep in the dash.  I ended up with three piles.

The following is a break-down of what I culled from the various little pockets in my wallet and deemed to be of the utmost importance, and would remain on my person at all times:

Ø   Driver’s License:  This one was a no-brainer.  My wallet has a small card-holder with a transparent window, and my driver’s license was naturally kept there.  The few times in the last few years I’ve ever had to bring it out, I’ve only had to show the leather insert with my license exposed; I can’t recall ever having to remove it from the actual window.  Today I did, and the plastic card with my dead glare looks like its decades old, even though it only expires in 2014.  It appears that the transparent window is yellowed and scratched on the inside and out, and the card, from so many months in the right rear pocket of my pants, has been sat on so often it’s scuffed and scraped almost to the point that it’s barely legible.  Luckily there’s a digital code thingy on it, so if I ever needed to be identified and they couldn’t tell who I was in the picture or the writing, they might be able to scan my information.  Regardless, it makes sense to me to keep it in my wallet, so it stays.

Ø  Medicare:  Another obvious choice.  If I am ever hurt to the point I need to produce my Medicare card, I should have it on me, because I wouldn’t likely be in the mood to mosey out to the van to fetch my lifeline to good ‘ole Canadian Medicare.  Paying for medicine and filing through Blue Cross when we lived in the States was a pain in the backside.  Literally.  That’s where they gave me the needle.  This little credit card-shaped life-saver, with its expensive New Brunswick provincial logo and the Hopewell Rocks silhouetted in the background is staying on me, no doubt about it.

Ø  My New Brunswick Teachers Association membership card is staying.  I often need my membership number, and like all numbers, I can’t seem to commit it to memory.  Having this on me is important.  Having four years’ worth of them is not.  I kept the current one, but relegated the others to another pile.

Ø  NBTF Group Insurance Plan card:  I have to keep this, because I have no idea how insurance works.  If I’m ever in a jam, I can flash this bad boy, and all my problems will go away.  Or at least someone can point me in the right direction.  There’s no expiration date on it, so I’m good with that one.  And like the NBTA membership card, it’s paper rather than plastic, so it’s much thinner and easier to conceal in the billfold. 

 

Ø  I have a road-side assistance card which we acquired when we bought the Grand Caravan last summer.  Of course, this was not in my wallet last week when I locked myself out of the van while it was running in the school parking lot.  I actually didn’t realize that I had roadside assistance, but thankfully a kind colleague helped me out with her CAA, and I was on the road in a jiff.  How did I not know?  Beats me.  My wife says I don’t listen to her enough.  Score one point for her, apparently.  To never be in this situation again, I definitely need to keep this in my wallet, because it would do me little good in the glove compartment.

Ø  VISA and Debit Card:  These are equally important, and for several reasons, most of which are obvious.  A simple break-in, and I could have either my credit card maxed, or my bank account emptied.  A would-be thief would be disappointed with what they found in either case, but you get my meaning.  If you know me at all, you can imagine the colourful language that would spew forth when I got to the cash register only to realize my method of payment wasn’t in my pocket.  Cash, you ask?  I don’t carry more than $20 at a time, and even then it’s rare.  Predictably, there were no bills in my wallet at the time of purging.  We’ll get to the change purse later.

Ø  I opted to keep only two club or membership cards in my wallet.  Really, I could keep both in the dash, but for as often as I use them, and the little space they occupy, it’s better for my peace of mind to just leave them where I can reach them easily.  I chose to keep both my Co-op and Costco cards at my fingertips, simply because I use them frequently, and I would be better served to have them on me than to rifle through my console.  Both cards are primarily used for fuel purchases.  I generally dislike Costco, but I’ll reserve that for a future entry.

All told, I kept six plastic cards and three paper ones, amounting to nine in total, before looking at the picture holder and the change purse.  Here’s a run-down of what I opted to remove:

Ø   Social Insurance Card:  I got this when I was sixteen, and I still have the same actual card.  It was once white, but now is green/grey, and several chunks are missing, yet the number is still there.  I couldn’t commit this number to memory until I had to fill out time-sheets as a supply teacher every two weeks.  It’s safe to say I can remove it now.  I heard they don’t even issue physical cards for your SIN anymore. 

Ø   UNB Student ID Card:  Since I haven’t been a student at UNB since 2009, this one was an easy choice.  Three years’ worth of validation stickers are slowly eroding from it.  I still have my old St. Thomas ID from 1993-1997.

Ø  Firearms License:  Yes, I have one of these.  I own a rifle.  My dad keeps it with his collection, and I can’t even remember the last time I fired it.  My license is for possession only, as opposed to the acquisition variation I would have needed if I wished to purchase more firearms or ammunition.  Wished, in the past tense, since the National Firearms Registry has been abolished, and I am not sure if this card is obsolete or not.  Regardless, it’s long-expired, and is now more an artifact than a necessity.  I used to use this whenever two pieces of photo ID were required.  I used to joke that it was my prison ID card, because I look like a fellon in it.

 

Ø  Medicare:  Yes, I already spoke of this.  Except that was my own card.  This is my son Kieran’s card, which expired in 2010.  My wife keeps the boys’ Medicare in her purse.  I had his card in my wallet when I once had to bring him to the doctor a few years ago.  It might have been the time when he fell off the bed and needed stitches… on Superbowl night.  I watched my team, the Saints, win their first championship at the Chalmers emergency room.  Kieran was so brave that night.  Holding his Medicare card brought all that back.

Ø  Gift Cards:  I have plastic gift cards for the following:  Future Shop; EB Games; Chapters; Tim Hortons; Mastercard.  I don’t have any way of knowing right away if there is any money left on them, but I’m willing to bet there’s less than a dollar’s worth total between them.  Of course, I can use the left-over in conjunction with a future purchase, but will I remember that I have them in the dash whenever that situation arises?  I guarantee I will forget, because I obviously forgot they were in my wallet in the first place.  They’re all plastic, so they took up a lot of space.

Ø  Library Cards:  I’ll describe the other membership cards I found, but first, the NB Public Library cards.  Plural, you ask?  I have both the boys’ cards as well.  I also have the key-chain card with the scanner code for Kieran’s account.  With these, it was less for convenience, and more so that I wouldn’t lose them elsewhere.  It’s worked so far, but they are cumbersome, and we rarely go to the library.  Having all three has come in handy though; I once borrowed all three’s quota in CDs.  I hope I don’t owe any money on their accounts; I’m pretty sure that would be a parenting-fail moment.  They can stay in the dash.

Ø  Membership or club cards:  I have cards from the following:  Ultramar’s Valuemax; Value Village’s Supersaver (of which I am disgruntled, because I have yet to see any purpose in this), and my Bull Moose Frequent Buyer Card.  This is a fantastic second-hand music and entertainment store in Bangor.  I only get to Bangor once or twice a year, but if I left the card in my van, I might not be in the States in my own vehicle, and I would be quite mad if I missed a chance to use my membership card on an infrequent visit.  The deal isn’t great, but it’s better than a kick in the pants.

Ø  There were also miscellaneous pieces of paper with valid information stuffed in there.  I have hastily scribbled passwords, account numbers, and phone numbers I absolutely need to keep on me at all times.  I question the wisdom of keeping passwords in my wallet, but again, if I need my Scholastic account number in a pinch, it’s there.  A couple weeks ago, I couldn’t log into my own blog account because I had actually forgotten the password.  Once I went through getting a new one, I wrote it down on a piece of paper which has my Scouts Canada, Youtube, Apple, and Google ID numbers, email, and even my cell phone number.  The way I see it, worrying about password security is like locking your door.  If someone wants in badly enough, they’ll break the window and climb in anyway.  You should still lock your door though.

I also found receipts, some of which were necessary to keep, coffee club cards from various shops, a Carleton Cards stamp card, various phone numbers (some even with names on them), and even scraps of paper that I couldn’t even read from so much wear.  I used to keep a valet key for my old Caravan, because I once locked myself out of it, and thanks to the valet key, I would never again find myself in such a predicament.  I mentioned earlier that the change purse also adds to the trouble of my fat wallet.  The old imprint of the shape of the key is still there behind the billfold.  Yes, there are lots of coins there, especially pennies and nickels, but who else has a handful of small spare Lego pieces in their wallet?  Colby got a Toy Story Lego set the last time he was in the hospital, and we needed to make sure the extra parts got brought home, so my change purse seemed a logical solution at the time.  Three months later, it’s time I think to get them out and into the boys’ Lego bucket where they belong.

Last but certainly not least is the photo sleeve.  I have my wife’s university graduation picture from 1996 when we first started dating.  I have my boys’ baby pictures, and a few family photos from before Colby was even born.  All are worn and faded now, and the writing on the back is smudged and illegible.  They have survived remarkably well though.  They were in my wallet in 2003 when I accidentally wore it into the ocean when we were in the Bahamas.  They were buried so deep, the water didn’t even get into the little plastic sleeve at the heart of my wallet.  If they’ve survived this long, I feel like it would be wrong to remove them now.  If I had to keep anything in this long laundry list, these pictures would be at the top, even though I have duplicates of them in photo albums.

Going through these little cards and souvenirs was a great experience.  I’m a pack rat by nature, and I’ve never disputed that.  I spoke of three piles for the cards I removed from my wallet.  They were for keeping in the wallet itself, keeping in the dash, and the third pile was for keeping in my desk drawer.  I have a small wooden box there, about half the size of a Kleenex box, in which I keep card-sized mementos from over the years.  That old St. Thomas ID card is there, as is my first Blockbuster membership, and countless other keepsakes.  One day I’ll organize them into a photo album, maybe even with comments.  I tell myself that one day my kids and grandkids will appreciate the effort I put into telling them the story of my earlier years, long before I lost my memory and my spine was permanently warped from so many years of sitting on a bloated, overflowing wallet.

40TW194

Foreword

It’s only appropriate to write a blog entry about time after having been away from ‘The Fence’ for so much of it.  I’d like to say that I did my best over the last few months, but in truth, I really didn’t.  There were lots of opportunities to get new entries out, and no lack of material to cover, from social commentaries, world events, bizarre news stories, and just random observations (which are the most fun to write, by the way).  There was also a lot of the real world happening, which none of us can truly escape, and which can have a very restricting effect on how you spend your down time, if you’re fortunate enough to have any, that is. 

That’s the whole point.  Time is not free.  Time is money, and investing the majority of mine to make it is the crux of it.  Investing in what, you ask, time or money?  It could be argued either way I suppose.  It’s like Emily Haines’ observation in a great Metric song a while back, “buy this car to drive to work/drive to work to pay for this car”.  There is no doubt that time is fleeting while I’m teaching, especially at this point in my career where I work really hard to be not only effective in the present but attractive to rehire in the near future.  What I found—and I spoke of this in “Quit Stalling” back in September—is that after investing so much of myself into work, writing took a back seat.  Not like the back seat in your car, but more like the back seat of a bus. 

In my own defense, though, I did some writing in the interim.  I once found myself awake at 2am writing postcard fiction, composing as many as seven or eight odd pieces that both impressed and frightened me a little.  I’ve never been a postcard writer, although I’ve dabbled in it here and there, but never to my satisfaction.  These, as oddball as they turned out, are interesting, and completely abstract to the point that I question their effectiveness.  I’m still debating how or when they’ll be published, whether in the short- or long-term, or indeed if ever. 

I also spent a significant amount of time composing my year-end Top 20 Albums list, which functions almost like a blog all its own.  It nearly got posted to “The Fence”, since initially the blog was envisioned to contain my music blogging as well.  After a few entries, I liked where the Fence was going, and I’ve long-since closed the door on posting album reviews and lists to it.  They’re apples and oranges.  Perhaps a second blog for strictly music talk may be on the docket, but since I’ve had scant time to work on the first one, it seems foolish to think I could maintain a second with any consistency.  I have long-imagined a music blog called “From The Left Field” in which I just randomly choose album titles I enjoy and discuss their merits, but that remains a long way off.

In terms of “The Fence”, I have bits and pieces of about five different essays, three of which could arrive one-two-three, all in the same day.  I don’t like doing that though, because those who are kind enough to read my work shouldn’t be inundated with too much for one sitting.  I have an informal length for my essays, to keep them coherent (which doesn’t always happen, but arguably, therein lies the fun in blogging), but also to keep them digestible for readers.  Not that my readers couldn’t read more, it just seems more humane to limit how much I ramble.  I’m prone to ramble in person, so I can only imagine the tedium of a boundless written rambling would be.

I realize as I’m typing that I am rambling already, so I’ll wrap this part for now.  For archiving’s sake, suffice it to know that the next few blogs will be ideas culled from observations and ideas from as far back as early October.  They may or may not appear chronologically.  They’ll all see the light of day sooner than later.  Music writing is wrapped for the foreseeable future, and short of any future unscheduled middle-of-the-night postcard or poetry sessions, The Fence is back on for 2013.

“40TW194”, or “Time In A Bottle”

One thing we would all like to be able to do is maximize time.  We can’t invent more of it.  We can’t reclaim it once it’s gone.  We can’t even define it.  All we can surmise is that it is linear; we know it moves forward only, and by the means we have developed to measure it, we know it moves in even increments regardless of our perception of it.  There are times when we know it moves unbelievably quickly:  vacations, good television shows, lunch breaks come to mind.  Then there are those times that agonizingly crawl, to the point you almost feel like you’re suspended in time itself.  These are the proverbial ‘waiting for toast to pop’ moments, such as traffic lights, grocery store check-outs, banks, snail-mail, Tim Horton’s drive-throughs, or those last few hours before you can call it a day and head for home.  Of course, we all know that time by our own understanding of how time ‘works’, the minutes and hours are no different in any of these situations, but clearly there are times when we perceive time itself either quickens or slackens. 

In that last paragraph I used the word ‘time’ seven times, and pronouns in its place at least a dozen more.  Time defines us.  Our very lives exist because of it.  We define the success or failures of our lives by how we maximize the time over which it occurs.  About half of it is devoted to recharging our energy, via sleeping and eating specifically.  A significant amount of it is expended on work, or toil to maintain comfort for the remaining fraction we have for leisure. 

During the course of my day, typically I wake at 6am, spend the next hour preparing myself and the boys for our school days ahead, and that is before I even start the car.  I typically arrive in Minto around 8am, having spent the better part of an hour delivering my kids to daycare, waiting for my carpool, and making the transit to my work-place, which is farther than most I would imagine, but my reality nonetheless. 

My school day begins in earnest when I arrive, and ends anytime between 4 and 5 pm depending on the day and what my schedule permits.  There is no telling when meetings, clubs, or other unexpected things are going to happen, and occasionally there are evening events that could keep me at school until closer to my natural bedtime, which would otherwise be between 10 and 11pm, but those are few and far between.  Normally, I drive another hour to get home and retrieve the kids, before supper is prepared and consumed, usually by 6 or 6:30.  Two nights a week the boys either attend Beavers or Cubs, and on those nights, we could be home as late as 8 or 8:30pm.  I am fortunate that my kids are old enough to get themselves prepared for bedtime, otherwise I’d be committing even more time, and indeed it wasn’t long ago my wife and I did.  So, all told, between 6am and 8pm, my day is jammed.  Oh to be able to tack on a few more hours—I can’t even imagine how I’d use them.  There are at any given time half a dozen things I plan to do, should the opportunity arise.  Sometimes unexpected hours do materialize, just at the expense of others.  Snow days, for example, occur about three or four times a school year on average, and as of this writing, we’ve had a whopping one so far.  Happening the last week before Christmas break, it was a godsend for sure, but I found myself sleeping in late, correcting some math quizzes, and reading for (gasp) pleasure.  That day didn’t crawl, I guarantee that.

That’s why I find weekends are so valuable.  After so many years of working most Saturdays, I find that one of the great payoffs for becoming a teacher is that my weekends are mine.  Mind you, I still need to eat and sleep, plus I need to recuperate time lost during the week with my family, and any teacher worth their salt will tell you that weekends are optimal times to both catch up on grading and planning.  Short of calculating minutes and hours, which would be likely both handy and scary, weekends are no home run for slacking off time either.  Holidays, which include long weekends, Christmas, March Break, and the summer months are the real relaxation opportunities.  Don’t forget that there’s home maintenance, commitments to family and friends such as birthdays, anniversaries, social engagements, and the like.  There’s grocery shopping, banking (whether online or in person makes little difference), and any other miscellaneous errands we have to run.  Oil changes, garage visits, veterinarians, dentists, emergency outpatients, telemarketers we couldn’t dodge, unexpected visitors that never seem to drop by at convenient times…

What we come to realize is that time and all the ways we spend it defines who we are.  If you have too much free time, you’re not working hard enough.  If you have too little, you’re working too hard.  No one has the balance figured out.  Some of us have to work long hours to maintain the same comfort level of others.  Some worked hard earlier in their lives, only to have earned more free time later.  Some retire at 55, some 60, some never do.  Some even retire earlier.  Some never work at all.  Some, of course, are unable to, and their lives are arguably the worse for it given what prevents them from being able to in the first place.

It is remarkable then that we put such an onus on ourselves to define who we are with what scant time we have.  I define myself best I think by how I spend time with my family.  How I raise my children reflects what kind of father I am, and one day, was.  That’s one of the reasons we have children in the first place; we survive in part by how we pass on what we have learned to our offspring.  Genetics play no part of it.  Those who never have kids make their own impact on people around them.  My great-aunt left a tremendous impact on me, yet she never had children of her own.  People adopt all the time, and those children benefit from parental guidance the same way traditional child-rearing does.

Some of us want to live forever.  I for one do.  I’ve made no bones about it; I want to live a long time, partly because it’s natural for us to want to prolong our lives in the first place, but because I want to see how the future will unfold, for better or worse.  In my lifetime, I have seen technology unveiled that makes me giddy with anticipation at what’s to come.  Since the world didn’t actually end in December, I’ll still have to go to work, probably until my mid-sixties, and then the sky’s the limit.  I’m counting on science to advance exponentially, so any of my poor habits contributing to my equally poor health will be counter-balanced by those top-notch scientists we spend so much money funding figuring out a way to prop up my carcass far beyond the current life-expectancy of someone who uses too little of his current available time to exercise, or that time allotted to eating to choose better, healthier foods.  I also want to live long enough to see my kids grow into adults, make all the choices they will for better or worse, and to maybe one day welcome grandkids into our home, to lay on a beach with my wife while the grandkids run up and down the shoreline looking for beach treasures the way I used to (and still do when I find the time).

Every once in a while, if you stop long enough to notice, you come across news events or articles that give you a different perspective about time and what it means.  A few months ago, I stumbled across the story about a little carrier pigeon that was employed by the British government during World War II.  About a quarter of a million of these little feathered heroes were deployed during the European campaigns of war almost seventy years ago.  Many never reached their destinations, due to natural predators and other unexpected obstacles.  Most did, and it makes sense, because if more pigeons than not didn’t survive, they’d never use them in the first place. 

A nice couple bought a rather expensive townhouse in the ‘80’s, and after renovating a walled-in fireplace and chimney, discovered the remains of countless birds that had got stuck in the deep crevasses of brick and mortar.  It was a grizzly enough discovery, until they found a bird’s foot and leg with a tiny canister affixed to it.  The tiny, red cylinder, about the width of a Crayola marker cover, contained a small piece of paper with some strange coded letters, some of which weren’t even from the alphabet.  The obviously elated couple held on to their find, and a few months ago, finally decided to look into it.  They sent the remains and the note to the experts, and as it turns out, the bird was indeed a carrier pigeon with the designated code name ‘40TW194’ delivering a message of the highest importance from the front-lines to the MI6 offices only a few blocks from the home in which the couple found it.  The British government has since set about the arduous task of decoding the message, because apparently of all the possible codes it could have been are archived.  I’m imagining a big warehouse in the fashion of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  As you might expect, there have been no further updates, because apparently a seventy-year-old war memo is probably still considered a sensitive document.  For all we know it might have asked someone to water the plants.

Why is this story so compelling?  It seems this little bird managed to do something we all want so desperately to do:  it cheated time.  The bird’s own death didn’t even stop it from doing what it set out to do.  It flew home, got a bit lost along the way, but by the grace of unexpected outside intervention, finally accomplished its mission.  It has also come back to life, if even just for a little while.  And if someone digs up this blog years from now, little Forty-Tee will revive once again.  That’s the great answer to the riddle of time.  To live forever, you need to make your impact while you’re alive.  Of course, you can’t extend your own consciousness beyond your own life, at least for the time being anyway.  But you can make an impact on the world around you.  The first half of life is the one we live.  The other half is how people remember us after we’re gone.  We know this because it matters that we have grave stones, obituaries, things named after us, and other things that make up our ‘legacies’.  For me, writing helps fulfill that.  Raising a family, being a good neighbor, and even teaching children all fill that spot for me as well.  As much as I plan to live a good, long time, I know that eventually it will come to a close, and then the next half depends on how well I prepared before that time arrives. 

Some people make time capsules.  People throw messages in bottles into the ocean, hoping against all odds that someone somewhere will answer the call.  In fact, a bottle with a message that was tossed into the Atlantic Ocean from the New Jersey shore (there is a real place called that) was recovered on the coast of Ireland recently by a small child.  Imagine the excitement he felt reading a message that was sent several years earlier.  The content was irrelevant, but the message itself was an extension of the person who sent it.

As my Christmas vacation draws to a close, and the routines of everyday life begin again tomorrow, I find myself thinking an awful lot about my time.  The fact is, I have two fantastic kids, an amazing wife who puts up with all my idiosyncracies, and lots of stories to tell.  Even in the most pressing of times, I can do lots of things to create my own legacy.  I don’t need to build a time capsule.  I don’t need to litter the ocean with bottles, although that still sounds really fun.  After all of this meandering, I guess the whole point is carpe diem after all.  Until we learn how to actually control time, or even package it, we can only do our best.  And if you have a lazy day along the way?  Don’t worry, there’s lots of time.