Quit Stalling

Getting back to writing after having taken off over six weeks is a lot like going back to the gym after about the same amount of time off.  It is excruciatingly painful when you sit down, boot up the computer, top off the coffee, sit down once again, and then start to actually type.  Part of the problem, at least for me, is the fear of what will come out.  Will I have forgotten the English language entirely?  Will I end sentences with prepositions, and use the semi-colon incorrectly?  Will I be able to stretch out a blog or a story from the fragmentary ideas with which I built up the gumption to write in the first place?  Will I get severe wrist cramps and need physio I can’t afford? 

I expect I am not a typical writer.  While most writers I know relish in the moments they compose their work, I seem to have to drag myself to the keyboard and agonize over what I’m going to do.  I always settle into my groove within the first few minutes, usually after a preamble to which my blog readers are now accustomed.  I can write uninterrupted for hours, skipping even food if the flow is steady and the results look promising.  If I start a blog, for example, after supper, around 6:30 or so, I can work on it without fail until midnight, long past my most productive hours which typically end around 8 o’clock.  By then it’s time for either the news, a baseball or hockey game, and chips.  Or reading, which I never seem to have enough time to do.

After my most recent blog entry, which was written in early June, I went on an intentional hiatus from blogging.  The goal was two-fold.  First, I recognized that after my first full year of teaching, I needed time to de-escalate, to let the year wrap up not just in real time but in my own mind.  I think teachers will understand what I mean.  When you teach, whether it’s during the work day, in the evening, or over the weekend, you’re always on.  Teachers have to take time to just be off, that is to say, away from the academic world for a little while.  It’s okay for them to plan, catch up on professional reading, clean out emails, and so on, because they are doing so at their own discretion, and when it suits them best.  I was no different. 

I basically took July off from all things school, which was a blessing and a curse at the same time.  The second goal was to shift my focus over to writing fiction.  I have been working on a novel of my own, long-gestated, conceived originally almost nineteen years ago.  I never seriously thought about actually writing it until about five years ago, when I returned to my notes as a diversion from my university work.  The bulk of the framework of my novel was mapped out as a diversionary tactic in my first university degree, as procrastination from the work I was actually supposed to be doing.  I’ve shelved and retrieved it countless times over the years, but finally decided that the story was good enough to be told, and I have since done more stringent research, and begun the manuscript in earnest.  I’ll edit and rewrite it over and over before it’s done, but it is finally moving forward.  This summer I wanted to get a good chunk of it written, but I have only been able to write a small amount.  You see, when you divorce yourself from academics, you divorce yourself from all of it, or at least I do.  I was able to read Steig Larsson’s Millenium series, and the second book of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, but little else.  I couldn’t drag myself to the computer to write.  I spent way too much time on Facebook and on TSN’s website, and probably most of my online time on what I call ‘Wiki-trains’, going from one Wikipedia article to the next until I couldn’t remember where I began.  As small consolation, I did spend some of that time riding the Wiki rails researching topics of which I know only a little so I can incorporate them into my novel.  Some such subjects include sailing, the armed forces and weaponry of various countries, religious ritual and ceremony, and ghost towns or cities around the world.  If any of these sound interesting, then maybe my novel will be for you.  But I have to actually write it first, so don’t hold your breath.

The greatest barrier for my writing is not a lack of motivation.  It isn’t a lack of ideas.  I have awakened in the middle of the night and written scatterbrained notes so I wouldn’t forget a potential story.  Some of them even made sense in the morning.  I think that in my case my own self-confidence is the greatest hurdle I face in completing my novel, and for that matter a handful of shorter stories that are just itching to be finished.  Right now, as of this writing, I have my main novel, a lengthy short story which was originally conceived when I was living in Louisiana in 1999, two unfinished blogs for The Fence, three short stories of varying lengths, and even a second novel (completely separate from the first) fully mapped, plotted, which even has names for its chapters.  None are finished.  I believe that in the case of the novel, I have invested so much time—nearly twenty years, and all of my adult life—in the characters, the world in which they live, and the situations they portray, that to not write it perfectly would be to not do it justice.  And I ask myself, who am I kidding?  Thousands of people around the world want to be authors.  Most of them write something.  Most of them send a manuscript to a publisher, and most of them face the rejection that almost always follows.  I am legitimately afraid of publishers rejecting the characters that I not only created and developed, but in some ways with whom I’ve grown to really know personally.  Talk about voices in your head.

However, there is another side of the proverbial fence, pun totally intended.  Because I know the characters so well, I can describe them equally well, and I feel that will be a strength in my story.  The best books I have read have really well-developed characters.  The same principle of course applies to movies and TV shows.  One of the reasons I liked LOST as much as I did was because I felt that the characters were so stringently explored; most episodes were centered around one character specifically, and when shown as a full season or series, the characters were so intimately connected to the audience, it actually hurt when they were hurt.  The heartbreak the audience feels near the end of the first Game Of Thrones season (or near the end of the novel) is so poignant because the point of view of the story is told through that character’s eyes.  I won’t say who it was in case anyone reading has yet to watch or read it, but if you haven’t, I encourage you to do so, because that series is phenomenal.  I want my characters to succeed on the same level.  It’s like wanting the best for my own kids. 

And like my own kids, for whom I’ll feel that bittersweet pang when they graduate from high school and hopefully college of some sort, and move out on their own, I’ll be happy to see my characters leave the security and privacy of my own thought process and make their own impressions on whoever reads them.  They’ll succeed or fail on their own merits at that point, but I’ll always be proud of them.  I’ve come to realize that I need to accept the fact that for one, not everyone will like them, including publishers, and for another, they don’t have to make me millions.  Because realistically, that’s not in the cards.  Nor should it be the reason for creating them.  I have to remind myself that the stories I want to share with the world are just that—stories.  Writing requires you to take a leap of faith more often than is usually comfortable.  It’s not as easy as it seems.  You can’t just sit down and compose the next Great American Novel over the course of a few weeks.  There is no more humbling experience than sitting down to do just that only to have your own imagination hand you your ass on a platter.

The next episode of the Fence is already planned out in my mind.  While vacationing, I had more free time on my hands, and therefore more time to notice things, such as how bad service has become the last few years.   That topic could comprise several blog entries, and may yet, but I guarantee it will be more entertaining than reading about an egotistical would-be author making up excuses as to why he hasn’t published his master work yet.  What you have to understand though, is that there is a certain catharsis in getting this stuff down on paper.  Before I could proceed with the Fence, I had to look in the mirror.  And why bother posting it?  Here’s a final metaphor.  I hate it when artists produce something (a book, a film, or an album), then shortly after it’s released, renounce it as being of poor quality or not up to snuff.  Artists have the responsibility to stand by their art, otherwise the art in question was created under false pretenses.  So, I could skip posting this piece, or I could throw it out there as a glimpse into my thought process, warts and all.  Maybe the next blog will be funnier, smarter, better.  Maybe this is as good as it gets.  Either way, it was time to quit stalling.

Saving Face

This is one of those editorials that requires a fair warning about the forthcoming content.  Usually my subject matter is something of an issue I picked up on during the day, maybe while driving home from work, maybe standing in the shower trying to wake up, maybe even walking around in the mall.  Once in a while I pick up on a news story or two and try to connect them in a ‘big picture’ kind of way.  Sometimes I just write whatever comes to mind.  This one is about what most would call disturbing incidents in the media.  Again, I try to put it into perspective with the world around us, because everything fits in the big picture if you angle the pieces properly.  I’ll be exploring the depravity of the human mind via a number of well-documented exhibits.  I won’t shy away from describing what took place, but I’ll attempt to do it with decorum and dignity.  The way I see it, people prefer to just ignore any subject that instantly makes them uncomfortable, and that’s part of the problem.  Regardless, I’ll be discussing certain aspects of human deviant behavior, so if you suspect that you’ll get a little queasy, read no further.  With a preamble like that, those of you who do decide to continue must ask yourselves where you fit in the big puzzle.

When I first decided to become a teacher, I decided it might be best to volunteer in an elementary school classroom just to be sure I was making the right decision about my future vocation.  After that first day, I knew I would really like it, and after volunteering for about six months, I was sold.  The kids really responded to me in a positive way.  I think it was that feeling of acceptance from the kids, or maybe that they were so eager to just listen to their teacher, to be educated, that clinched it for me.  I will never forget one little girl, who I was told lived in a home where she was unfortunately exposed to situations and circumstances no pre-pubescent child should ever see.  Her attitude at school was nonchalant at best.  She struggled with her grades as a result.  She was constantly thinking about the boys—who, I can assure you for having once been one this age, were in no way interested in her.  I immediately wondered what would become of her in the next few years, when older boys would take notice of her, and with such a low self-esteem, she seemed to me destined to a life of teen-age promiscuity, and maybe even pregnancy.  One day, she wore a t-shirt to school that read “I need an above-average man”.  She wasn’t even 10 years old at that point.  I have no idea what became of her.  Now that I’m in the system as a teacher in my own right, I could probably find out how she turned out, but I just don’t want to know.  I’m afraid of what I’d discover.

This young lady, only a girl when we first crossed paths, was likely exposed to sexuality in a way her peers weren’t.  However, she needn’t have gone any further than the local shopping mall to be exposed to far more than I had ever been at that age.  If, for some reason, I were to have been hypothetically interested in girls at the age of 8 or 9, I’d have flipped through the most recent Sears catalogue to the women’s lingerie pages for cheap thrills.  How shocking, women in bras.  My grandfather had pin-ups of sexy ladies in his garage as far back as I can remember, so I’d be browsing in the toy section of the Sears catalogue instead.  Of course, as a rite of passage for the teen-aged boy, someone in our group would come across a porno mag, which of course taught us all how to be Cassanovas by the age of 13.  We were all Hugh Hefner in our minds.  Then, by the time you actually got to engage in tawdry behaviour with a girl, you quickly realized you knew absolutely nothing about the opposite sex; that relationships were nothing like the soft-core porn flicks you ‘accidentally’ found on the old-fashioned satellite dishes, the ones that you had to click twelve different buttons and wait for ten minutes for the big 10-foot diameter plate to grind into position while the whole neighbourghood could immediately tell what channel you were really w/atching. 

Still, that whole awkward adolescence dance wasn’t so bad.  Eventually, we all lose our virginity.  Most of us wish that first magical moment were more memorable, or at least adequate for our partner in that first dubious deed.  We get over it, have some relationships along the way, and some of us eventually meet Mr. or Miss Right.  Mr. or Miss R. remains elusive to some, often by their own choice, which is fine if that’s what you like.  What I don’t think is the same from our generation to the present one is that this one is in a hurry to skip all the above-mentioned pratfalls and shenanigans of the ritual of growing up.  While we were all peeking at dirty magazines, clumsily chugging for second base, or praying that the satellite dish didn’t have to grind that loudly, we were learning about ourselves.  Our sexuality makes up a really big part of who we are.  That’s why straight people are initially uncomfortable with the notion of homosexuality; if you aren’t gay, you can’t really ‘understand’ being gay I suppose.  I once asked a gay friend if he could ever have sex with a woman.  He served that back to me, asking me if I could ever have sex with a man someday.  Point taken.

When I walk through the local mall, I see a number of shops designed to market sexy clothing to young girls.  Worse still, there are often huge banner-sized photos of very young models wearing their wares, as if they were glowing neon signs advertising for any passing pedophile to ogle their images for future dirty thoughts.  My disdain for these kinds of clothing shops isn’t far from my absolute abhorrence of beauty pageants, particularly those where girls as young as 5 or 6 dress like supermodels, and even wear bikinis.  I was a young adult when Jonbenet Ramsey was killed, but what shocked me the most, rather than the fact a small child was murdered, was that she was forced to be a beauty queen when she should have been playing with dolls.  Then I think the dolls with which she would have been otherwise playing wouldn’t have been much better, and I feel even worse.  From as far back as they can begin to think for themselves, girls are in the cross-hairs.  They have to be perfect for everyone, until they hit puberty, then they’re eye-candy for society’s perverts.  If she doesn’t put out, she’s a prude.  If she does, she’s a slut.  If she goes half-way, she’s a tease.  I don’t know how girls make it into adulthood.  Just look at the entertainment world around us, and look at who the role-models for young women are.  Britney Spears?  Where do I begin.  Lady Gaga?  When has meat ever been so alluring?  Paris Hilton?  Yes little Suzie, you too can be the star of your own film.  You can’t even watch wrestling without watching two or more bimbos ripping each other’s clothes off.  There are NHL teams that have scantily-clad women dancing like cheerleaders to entertain the fans.  Hulk Hogan’s daughter even sings the anthem at Tampa Bay Lightning games.  I remember being entertained by the actual game, but I won’t get started on how bad hockey has become in this piece.

In the last few years, there have been a number of high-profile incidents or cultural phenomena that prove to me beyond any doubt that the world in which we live is too obsessed with sexuality and/or sensationalism.  We can’t avoid our sexuality, of course, nor should we, but we find ourselves entertained with more and more deviant acts that there’s no wonder the Christian Right is armed to the teeth with ammunition to push us right back to the Victorian age.  Even the ones that aren’t supposed to entertain us keep us glued to our iPads in anticipation of the gory details, which makes it a form of entertainment if you ask me. Here are a few notorious incidents, and while you read, you must ask yourself these questions:  a) what makes this scenario news-worthy; b) do you find it amusing or perhaps entertaining in some way, whether it’s the scenario itself or culture’s reaction to it; c) how has the world changed because of it?

·         About five years ago, a video went viral called ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’.  A co-worker told me very excitedly one day that I had to go home and look it up right away because it was hilarious.  I did.  I urge you not to do the same.  Why?  The term ‘coprophagia’ means ingesting fesces, and in this case, for sexual gratification it becomes known as 'coprophillia'.  If you’ve seen the video, you know what I mean, and you aren’t shocked that I brought it up.  If you haven’t, this bullet has made you queasy, and I think that that is the proper reaction.  If we have reached a point where we’re comfortable with this kind of thing, we’re in real trouble.  When I saw the video, fortunately I was home alone.  I am still embarrassed for those poor girls and myself for having seen it.

·         A few weeks ago, a guy allegedly took some unidentified drug, and stripped naked on a Miami freeway.  He ran until he came upon a homeless person, whom he immediately assaulted and then began to actually chew on his face until he had gnawed it almost completely off.  Dubbed the ‘face-eating zombie’, this guy took four bullets before his adrenaline ceased to support him.  The homeless man, by the way, was a university graduate with a near-genius IQ, whom his family had thought long-dead.  To me, the more interesting story is with the victim, not the drugged-out naked would-be cannibal.  Speaking of the ‘face-eater’, I wonder what his family must be going through in the wake of this terrible news.  And yes, the video for that is going viral, but I won’t be fooled this time.

·         At the funeral of late jazz legend Etta James, Christina Aquilera performed what would have been probably a lovely tribute to her idol and a cultural icon.  That should have been enough for anyone.  But no, our sex-crazed society immediately had to know what that mysterious liquid trickling down her leg could have been.  Use your imagination.  It turns out that she had been using a spray-tan product that had begun to condense in the heat, and that it just happened to have been spotted in an unfortunate location.  Forget trying to identify the substance—why were we so fascinated with X-tina’s body while a major milestone in pop culture was taking place?  Why was she dressed in so revealing an outfit at a funeral in the first place?

·         While I’m singling out Ms. Aguilera, why not take a stab at her biggest rival, Britney Spears.  I always felt the media was out to ruin her, which seemed so unfair given the near-God status the same journalists had previously bestowed upon Madonna.  Still, she didn’t do herself any favours when she crawled out of that limo with Paris Hilton revealing to the whole world that she was going commando.  I don’t know a man (gay or straight) alive that wouldn’t love to see Britney in a centerfold pin-up, but this just wasn’t sexy at all.  It came across as juvenile and pitiful.  My female readers out there, I’ll ask you this:  If you were photographed stepping out of a vehicle with your cha-cha exposed, even with underwear on, how would you feel?  It is convenient that we distance ourselves from the notion that the celebrities we worship have feelings.

I’ll stop the list there, partly so this blog doesn’t drag on any further, but mostly because there is no conceivable end to this kind of thing.  The four examples above have very little in common, except that they have become sensationalized in some way for our consumption.  As much as we don’t want to admit it, we are drawn to scandal.  As long as we can sit a safe distance away, we have no problem ingesting the shit.  What was the term for that again?  We’re raising our children in a world where sensationalism isn’t like it used to be, back when you cried when the Beatles came on stage.  Now, elementary-school children can sing ‘Sexy And I Know It’, and can do the dance better than any of us could do the ‘Thriller’ dance sequence.  Kids are no longer kids. They’re mini-adults that are surrounded by adult content, whether it’s an Aeropostale mannequin or a spam ad for hot Russian girls, but they don’t know the first thing about the big picture.  They’ve become automatons, zombie-like in their consumption of the culture we’ve allowed them to discover.  One of the two girls with the cup might have worn a shirt like the girl I met a few years ago did.  Where do they go from there?  It’s kind of like seeing all your co-workers at a nudist beach, then having to look them in the eye again Monday morning.  We have no trouble watching the train wreck, oblivious to the fact that our young are incurring unprecedented and irreparable damage all the while.  How will they ever save face?  Pun totally intended.

Derelict

Sometimes it’s better to take the long way home.  I often find myself driving less-traveled road when I have the time, sometimes to clear my mind, sometimes to let the song on the radio finish, and occasionally to just watch the countryside.  It’s interesting seeing the view for no other purpose but to ‘see’ it.  I mentioned that I only get to do this when I have time.  Who has time?  When do I have time?  There is less and less of it these days.  I never seem to have time to do the things I want.  I have had a hard time making time to write this blog entry.  Maybe the problem is making the effort to afford the time to do things.  Sometimes it’s just not possible.

When I finally get the time conundrum sorted out and I drive through the countryside, I look for certain things.  I have a fascination with old buildings.  They can be anything; maybe an old barn, an abandoned house, a shed hanging in tatters behind an otherwise well-maintained property, maybe a tree house no longer played in by children.  Buildings are like senior citizens.  They have withstood all the storms of life, and yearn to be needed still while they wait. 

As a child, my Aunt Madelyn (actually my great-aunt, but she was close to me like an aunt) had a cottage near our house.  The cottage was sky-blue coloured, and was bungalow shaped with two great, big old-fashioned windows with the small square panes.  She had storm windows that I used to help her install and remove when I was a little older.  The walls were brown paper and cardboard, and there was running water only in the small sink in the kitchen, primed by a pump every spring and shut off so as not to freeze the pipes in the fall.  There was a matching blue outhouse out back, and it was the worst abomination you’ve never seen.  Outhouses are nasty, but this one seemed claustrophobic, musty, and occasionally was home to grass snakes and all assortments of insects.  I used it only when it was strictly necessary.  She used to poke fun at me for being afraid of it!

Auntie Madelyn passed away in the spring of 1992.  She was found in her home on her way back from the bathroom (a real bathroom); presumably she had suffered a fatal heart attack and never made it back to bed.  She died on Mom’s birthday, and to this day Mom swears she died specifically on a day that everyone would remember.  Which of course isn’t true, but if you knew her spirit, you might just be inclined to agree.  She had diabetes, and a long history of heart trouble, so it wasn’t a total surprised that she would pass away in her sixties, but the loss was of course nonetheless considerable.  She had no children of her own, and her husband, Uncle Rae had died years before.  She left behind an extended family of nieces and nephews, and a lifetime of wonderful memories.  Her house was eventually sold, but the cottage remained in our family.

In the twenty years since her passing, the cottage was used briefly by my sister Marcie and I for parties with our friends in our high school years.  We had one of those chemical toilets to use instead of that godforsaken outhouse, but otherwise we had a great time.  You could draw on the paper walls.  We were just far enough away from home that we could drink without attracting too much attention.  We had power and water, but otherwise it was kind of rustic.  Eventually my uncle, who was bequeathed the cottage, began to use it as a storage shed, because really, no one had any real use for it anymore.  As the years passed, the natural age of the structure began to show, and while he made the effort to keep it in good repair, the reality was that the building was nearing the end.  With that end came the dissipating of the memories of many a summer weekend spent there, learning to play Auction 45s, listening to the radio, drawing and writing our names on the walls, and everything else.

My family has a knack for holding on to decrepit old buildings, among other things.  Dad transported, from his homestead as a child, a dog kennel, a garage and an old storage shed.  All three of those buildings have been moved more than once since they were relocated the first time.  The dog kennel, which saw new life as a pen for a half-dozen ducks, is long gone.  The garage has been refurbished as Dad’s new lawn tractor garage.  The shed contains numerous old car parts and the like, and has been dubbed ‘Jackson Auto’, after a nickname my grandfather once held.  Jackson Auto is in pretty rough shape, and is in need of more than a tune-up.  We have a hard time letting go of these things because we are a sentimental family.  My grandmother, whose property once housed these buildings, is now in a nursing home.  Dad was actually thinking of having her house, which isn’t much bigger than a standard cottage, moved to his lot to use as a guest home, which makes sense given our family has grown exponentially in recent years.  I wouldn’t be shocked in the least if he did it.  I would.

Behind Jackson Auto there once lay a graveyard.  It was a boneyard, really; a junkyard of old cars.  My grandfather (whose sister was Auntie Madelyn) was of the generation that dragged things out into the woods to get rid of it.  He was not exactly an environmental child of the 90s.  Things were used as long as possible, and received all of his TLC, until that fateful day when it was proclaimed useless, and unceremoniously dumped in the woods.  If it was anything but a car, it could be found virtually anywhere.  There’s nothing that spells nature like seeing an old washing machine rusting along the trail.  But if it was a car, it was laid to rest in the Spruce Grove, the stand of trees that blocked out most of the sun and harboured a car enthusiast’s dream of old relics.  My cousin and I built a cabin there of the remnants of my mom and her siblings’ old one, only to have my grandfather make a smoke shed out of it.  It’s hard to entertain your friends in a cabin that smelled like smoked fish.

Back in the woods, there is a camp that my family used faithfully every winter for many years.  My grandfather used to walk back and nap there because it was very peaceful.  Like the cottage, we used to write our names on the wall, and we even kept a log book you could sign.  There was an old wood stove that used to start to glow orange when it was super-hot.  We had board games, teddy bears, dishware, and bedding kept there permanently.  In the later years, the mice began to take interest in the bedding, and when us kids were grown, mom and dad never went back to the camp anymore.  After Grampie died in ’98, it was seldom used again.  Recently, I took a trip back to salvage what, if anything, was still of use.  There was a kerosene lamp, a few stuffed animals I remembered from my childhood that the mice didn’t exploit, and the log book we kept.  And the girlie poster my grandfather had put up.  Apart from that, there was nothing worth rescuing.  As I turned to leave, my foot breached the floor boards.  The building had succumbed to the forest that surrounded it, and it was beyond its twilight hours.  It sits there as it was when I walked out that last time, whispering behind me that it was time to leave, time to let go.  However, in the true spirit of my family, I have other plans.  I’ll be back this summer to see if any of the timber is salvageable, because if it is, I’ll take it apart myself to bring back to Fredericton.  I plan to build a small playhouse for my kids.  There is something cathartic about the thought of using the old wood from the camp to build something new.

When I’m driving through the countryside, and I see an old barn, defeated with its big doors hanging off its rusty hinges, I can’t help but wonder.  Who owns or owned this building?  How long was it used?  Did kids jump off the hay loft into big piles of straw?  Did precocious teenagers steal a first kiss out back?  How many makes and models of tractors took shelter within?  When did someone finally look at it and say “it’s over”?  Everything becomes derelict eventually, but the real moment of truth comes when you finally accept that it has.

Auntie Madelyn’s cottage has found new life.  True to form, Dad relocated the old cottage with my uncle, and after some cosmetic surgery, they have transformed it into a working garage for their respective recreational vehicles.  They even have room for the wood splitter.  I must say, it looks pretty spiffy.  They have vinyl siding on it, kept the original door for rear egress, and have removed the front windows, supplanting them for bay doors and ramps.  The old sink is still there though.  It’s pretty safe to say the old outhouse will be staying put.

Rules For Q*bert

Now here's a story with a proper dose of irony for you.  I am going to talk about how video games may not have been so bad for your brain as your parents told you, sort of.  Imagine that.  All those hours you spent thumbing your control pads or joysticks, shaking your Wii sticks and hoping they won’t come flailing off, hitting an unsuspecting partner or spectator while you dance up a storm, apparently isn’t that detrimental after all.  We have evolved our human thumbs in the last two generations so aptly as to invent a communication tool which relies heavily on our thumbs.  It’s called the cell phone, in case you were wondering where to get such a thing.  We have 3D movies pouring out of Hollywood faster than tanning spray off Christina Aguilera.  Owning a 50-inch TV is now not only the norm, but will likely soon be too small for the norm.  We can store our multimedia digital files on ‘clouds’, which we can access from anywhere.  I’m telling you, the ‘country music chip’ for your brain isn’t far away (some of you know what I mean by this, but for everyone else, you’ll hear about it in a future blog, no doubt).

It doesn’t seem like that long ago to me that video games were The Great Satan.  My ever-loving parents, who really did try to raise me in a home with good, wholesome influences surrounding me, never liked video games, and vowed that their children would never succumb to that great space invader of the child’s developing and fragile mind.  Young Brandon was never to have an Atari, Vic 20, Commodore 64, or Nintendo.  The first video gaming device we owned was a Tandy computer, and it wasn’t good for much except for typing and printing.  We owned a typewriter, but the Tandy was an actual ‘computer’, which immediately meant it was better.  Along with the Tandy, which of course had no internet access in 1986, came the inevitability of games to play on it.  Now, you could play games like the old consoles had, to some degree, but what the Tandy could do that consoles of that time could not was run games that involved strategic input from the player.  Role-playing games, such as the King’s Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry, and a host of other scenario games were readily available, and reasonably affordable.  You had to insert floppy discs—and I mean the old 5 1/4 inch ones, not the more recent-yet-still-obsolete 3 1/2 hard-cartridge discs.  My current PC is now 9 years old, and still has a floppy disc drive, so they had a good run it seems. 

Mom and Dad justified letting us play these games on the Tandy because the games themselves had evolved beyond simple call/response or reaction games like Donkey Kong or Asteroids.  Indeed, the new breed of games required the player to think about what would happen next, type commands into the computer and respond to what the computer had to say in response.  If you walked into a room in the castle dungeon, you might wander over to the wardrobe and ask the computer to open the door.  Maybe inside there was a secret weapon you could use.  Maybe a giant monster would jump out and crush you.  Either way, it was fun, and if the latter was true, you hopefully saved your game earlier and you could do something different next time.  Maybe you could hide under the bed while the evil wizard opened the wardrobe. You get the idea.

To some degree, my parents were right.  I didn’t waste my money on video games, and as a result, I focused my interest and energy on other things.  I read a lot, particulary the Hardy Boys books, a series which I still collect to this day (I mentioned this briefly in the last blog).  I developed a fondness for boardgames, and as an adult I am an avid gamer and owner of dozens of different styles of games, from simple party games to hours-long strategy games.  My money began to go to music purchasing, and as those of you who know me at all can attest, it’s still where most of my available funds go.  My first investment in a video game system was the Wii, which we bought as a family three years ago.  Still, I may have invested up to 2-3 hours total on it.  My sons adore the Wii, and Kieran recently declared that while music was my ‘thing’, video games were his.  Part of me was a little saddened, but an equal part of me understood. 

At school a few weeks ago, a few boys from my class were over near the swings playing in the fine gravel on which the swing sets are situated.  When I approached them, I noticed they were playing something I thought was long extinct.  They had a handful of little, green army men.  I was blown away.  I used to play with my Dad’s little army men when I used to stay with my Grandmother at her house while she watched me when my parents worked late.  They were pre-posed, and I had no real knowledge of the army, nor did I have the wherewithal to care about it, but they were fun to pose in mock battles, to make pretend gun noises while I maneuvered them around awkwardly.  When I made to congratulate them on finding some classic toys to play with at recess, they looked up with fear in their eyes.  It then occurred to me—they’re war toys.  In 2012, we’re afraid of war toys.  The world we live in doesn’t feel so easy about kids pretending to wield guns; the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ days are long gone. I remember playing ‘War’ in the thicket beside my house as a kid when my friends used to visit.  We had plastic rifles and assault weapons and we used to make forts, run recon missions and engage each other in open combat.  I even had a plastic bazooka.  We had paths through the woods worn down to the dirt.  We built platforms in high trees as look-out posts.  At the end of the day, we never realized how much we were developing our imaginations. And there I was, faced with the choice of whether to prevent them from playing ‘war’, or remember young Brandon who grew up to be Mr. LeBlanc, evidently none the worse for having played with toys like that himself.  I don’t think anyone that played ‘War’ in the thicket at my parents’ house ever grew up to shoot up a school, hold up a bank, or even obtain a hunting licence for that matter.  But man, did we ever have fun.  When I was visiting with my parents this past week, I stopped and looked into the thicket.  The paths are long grown in.  The forts are long gone.  My own children will never play the way we did.

When we were kids at Port Elgin Elementary School back in the 80’s, my friends and I ‘invented’ a game of our own.  Down a steep embankment, yet still on the grounds of the school, was an area where there were no trees, but the grass grew fairly tall.  Forming small islands in the hayseed were giant slabs of rock, probably about a dozen or so of them in an odd formation.  There were three or four large, flat ones, on which I’d say maybe five or six kids could stand at once.  The others were all a fraction of that size, and no more than one could stand on them without knocking another off.  We used to bounce from rock to rock, originally just goofing around, but gradually developing a sort of tag game.  Rules began to form, and word spread; before long, a dozen or more friends were making straight for the rocks as soon as the bell rang and we could get outside.  One day, someone finally suggested that our game was a lot like the then-popular arcade game Q*bert.  For those of you who weren’t children in the 80’s, Q*bert was a little creature who hopped on two legs on a wall of ascending cubes, whose goal was to touch every square before his enemies touched him.  Think Pac-man, but 2D and quicker.  Our game, of course, was much different.  Rather than have one Q*bert, our game had most people acting as Q*berts, while the ‘it’ person was his nemesis Coily (a snake who bounced like a spring on his coiled body).  The Q*berts all started on one of the giant rocks, while Coily started on a designated starting point in the middle.  The Q*berts had to hop from rock to rock until they safely made it to one of the other agreed-upon rocks at the far side without being tagged by Coily.  All this time, no one was allowed to leave the rocks at all.  If you did fall from one, you had to either go to a ‘prison’ rock, or start over, depending on who was playing and which rules were in play.  You see, in our version of Q*bert, we worked out a verbal agreement how to solve problems that arose during gameplay, and we moved on.  No one fought during Q*bert.  It was like an unwritten rule that if you spoiled the fun, you had no business being there.  And no one wanted to be banished from the rocks!

As a teacher today, I could find a host of things you couldn’t allow in a game like Q*bert.  First of all, rock formations like that would be removed from any playground.  If they weren’t, they’d be fenced off for sure, and duty teachers would be vigilantly policing them from children with over-active imaginations from playing near them.  Maybe the kids would pick up sticks and pretend to play war, mock-shooting each other like they might see on the news.  That wouldn’t be allowed either.  Too bad really, because all the skills they have been honing playing Call Of Duty would surely come in handy.  If it was winter, forget playing near the rocks.  A skinned knee might be as good as a lawsuit in 2012.  Never mind that you could smash heads playing soccer, or fall from monkey bars, or slip on an unseen patch of black ice.  Soon, we’ll need to bubblewrap the students to keep them safe. 

We have come full-circle with our video games; we worry so much about the dangers outdoors that we often let our children seek refuge in the one thing a generation ago we never thought possible.  We protect our children from two things:  the outside world and their own imaginations. Video games have lots to offer, and they’ve come a long way, even since the old Tandy Quest games from my childhood, and even then they helped foster critical thinking and creativity.  Ironically, my friends and I used a video game as a scenario for an original idea, for hours of harmless fun.   I would go so far as to say we were building character.  Perhaps we don’t give our kids enough credit.  Perhaps we think on their behalf more than we should.  We should rather remember when we were the Q*berts trying to get to the other side, back when Coily was just one of us, randomly picked for the fun of it.  I promise you, if the duty teacher ever came to play Coily, we’d have all left the rocks for good.

Because You Never Know

Earth Day just passed, and for a guy who writes frequently about the environment, even as far as to cast it in a religious light, I didn’t do too bloody much.  I probably spent more time on the computer than usual (a good two hours or more writing ‘Aspirations’ as a matter of fact).  I had my 48 inch flat screen on with playoff hockey happening, although I wasn’t paying much attention to it.  Half my house’s lights were probably on.  Not to mention, I had a fire going, but never checked to see if I had turned the heat down accordingly.  Basically, I failed at being an ambassador of good will to the only deity I would openly claim to worship.  Everybody lapses from their good intentions once in a while, I suppose. 

While I still fill up my van with expensive and polluting petrol, eat fast food wrapped in excessive packaging, and clearly use too much power in my own home, there are still a few things I do for which I can still lay claim as a good environmentally savvy citizen.  I keep things.  I’ve written about this before, but this time I’m making a claim for other reasons to keep stuff/junk.  I don’t automatically throw things away simply because they currently don’t’ work or I don’t need them.  I take a minute to step back and look at whatever the item is and see if there might be a useful item, for either myself or someone I know (or might meet in the near or not so near future, maybe).

Here are some examples of things I have kept, for better or worse.  You can decide if it was wise to do so or not:

·         I have no less than four old VCRs in my cave right now.  One of them works; I bought it at Value Village for $5.99—on purpose—so I could watch my old VHS cassettes of music videos from the 80s and 90s.  I also have Wrestlemania VI, some store-bought music videos, and even some old tapes of the Warner Brothers cartoon Histeria!, which has never been issued on DVD.  I watch them all the time.  I have the VHS tape from when I was a kid that has the televised broadcasts of the original Star Wars trilogy.  I like watching that, because some of the old commercials are still there.  What do I do with the other VCR’s?  I tore two of them apart to use the insides to build dioramas for my Star Wars collection.  Old circuit boards and wires look a lot like the futuristic technology in the Hoth base.  I also have my first VDV player, which no longer works, a couple old phones, and a set of broken walkie-talkies.  I planned to bring those to Dad to look at; he’s good at fixing electronics, so maybe he can get them to work again.  Since I only see him a few times a year, I doubt I’ll ever do it. 

·         I have been saving covers of various sizes for years now.  Pop bottle tops, milk bottle covers, and even coffee tin covers are organized in bags and containers, also in my cave.  I originally started keeping milk bottle covers to use as checkers, since they are about the right size, and in an afternoon’s work, you can build or paint a checkerboard out of plywood or craft board easily enough.  Years ago, I saved the covers from jugs of vegetable oil from KFC because I thought they would make excellent checkers in a large-scale checker board.  I eventually built it, and it looks pretty spiffy if I do say so myself.  I saved enough covers to make a complete set of checkers, and a handful of extras for replacements if need be.  Because you never know.  That’s basically the mantra for this writing piece.  I branched out after this successful endeavor to saving covers of all shapes and colours for more checker boards that I didn’t get around to making.  I made one for Mom for her birthday last year, and had enough covers to give her four colours:  brown, red, blue and white.  I keep the rest because, the teacher that I am, I see value in them as potentially math manipulatives, like for counting or multiplying.  Heck, I can use them whenever my SmartBoard finally dies.

·         I like to think that I am always looking out for things my friends might be interested in keeping.  I held on to a Budweiser bottle with the Carolina Hurricanes NHL team logo on it because a friend of mine supports that particular team, and I immediately thought “Hey, the Hurricanes logo doesn’t appear on merchandise that often, maybe he’ll want it… and say, he loves Budweiser too, this one’s a double-score!”  I gave it to him, and he seemed happy, but maybe it was more that I thought of him rather than that he got said bottle.  I have learned over the years that other people don’t always yearn for things like I do.  It’s hard to get your head around not being a collector when you are a collector.

·         I have no less than five Scrabble boards.  I never play Scrabble.  Again, I’ll play the teacher card on this one; I have run Scrabble in a club before, and multiple sets are really handy in such instances.  I never paid more than three dollars for one, so I’ve not spent much on them.  It’s easier to justify hoarding things when you can say “It was on sale”.  Lately, I’ve had my eyes open to actually pick up a few more, but for a very good reason.  I am thinking about the end of the school year, which is fast approaching, and since I ran Scrabble this year, plus played Scrabble-like games on the SmartBoard, and even Math Scrabble (yes, it exists, and I own it), I thought about a neat craft I could make for my kids.  Since I have only 18 of them, I thought that I could use Scrabble letters to spell out their names, and glue them onto those little shelf-thingies you set the letters on.  They could each have their own name plate, and I would only spend a few dollars, not to mention it would be a hand-made, personalized gift by which they can remember me.  I would like to keep one Scrabble set intact, but the others I can justify sacrificing for what I think is a worthy project.  9-year old Brandon would have loved this.  Will 18 other 9-year olds?

·         If you ever find yourself wanting a copy of Wuthering Heights, Gulliver’s Travels, The Time Machine, Edgar Allen Poe’s works, Bread and Molasses, or the Hardy Boys’ first book (The Tower Treasure), you need look no further.  I have at least two of each of these.  I have King Lear in soft cover, even though I also own a nice hardcover copy of the Complete Shakespeare.  Fact is, I have a pile of books I know I will never read again.  I don’t have time to read much as is, let alone reread.  I have been leaning towards the classics lately, so maybe a Kindle or Kobo is in my future.  If it’s in the public domain, it’s probably free, right?  I won’t part with Bread and Molasses though.  I want a set of five or six of those, because I would love to use them in Literature Circles in a future class I teach.  The future is the best reason of all to keep things, because no one can tell you with certainty you’re wrong about it.

Maybe someday I’ll write a sequel to this entry, with other items I couldn’t bear to part with the subjects of public scrutiny.  There’s no telling what treasures I will come across, or what detritus I’ll rescue from the landfill in the interest of saving the Earth from the scourge that manufactured it.  It saddens me to get rid of things, but if something I have held on to finds a purpose, or makes somebody happy, then I have not only helped the environment just a little bit, but maybe made someone’s day too.  If you like church stuff, then you might appreciate what I’m trying to do here.  Helping people and helping the world in which we live is really what it’s all about.  Compulsively keeping things, of course, has nothing to do with it.

Get Up Off Your Aspirations

This blog was originally posted earlier in the week, but upon reading it, I decided that the contents are fine, but definitely not one cohesive thought.  I want to keep the blog in tact, but clearly divide the entry into the two distinct parts they should be.  I'm not sure I'd add any more to either 'half', so the content remains the same.  However, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, my thoughts sometimes wander, and what comes out often ends up more interesting to me than the original train of thought.  Sooo, I have split it into separate chapters.  At the end, I have also added a post-script, because you know this whole project wasn't pretentious enough.

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When I set out to write a blog entry, I typically have an end goal.  I know where I want the writing to take me, and I usually begin with a rambling preamble before I settle into a rhythm.  I try to stay cohesive, but as in real life, on paper I tend to wander a bit here and there.  Sometimes, I find myself introducing a related but different thread to weave into the piece, and the challenge suddenly becomes finding out how I can tie the damned thing together.  It’s almost like the show ‘Lost’ in a sense, in that the more I write, the deeper I wade into the topic, and the more difficult it becomes to haul my feet out of the suctioning muck.  There, what you’ve just read is an aforementioned preamble.  It's at about this point I have the end-goal mapped out, somewhat.

I

I wanted to take you inside the not very secret world of my alter-ego, Mr. LeBlanc.  I have been teaching for three years, which is not a very long time in the grand scheme of things, but it seems like I have seen so much in my brief career—itself a preamble to what I hope will be a long one.  I’ve taught virtually every subject, either as a supply teacher or in a contract job of my own.  I had a child poop his pants.  One girl cut her own hair.  That same one glued her own backside to the chair for fun.  I had a young man with Downs Syndrome climb a second-story balcony and almost fall.  I saw a girl lose a tooth in a collision on the playground.  I once had a student ask the DARE police officer if all police officers like donuts.  I’ve seen students throw chairs.  I had a student tell me one morning he was super excited because his mom was coming home from jail.  I once sat through a parent-teacher interview with a mother whose daughter was terminally ill.  She cried.  I almost did.  I will never forget it.

Where I’m going with this is that as a relatively young teacher, although my years of service are few, my experiences have been nothing short of remarkable.  Even the rough days leave me with memories for a lifetime, and stories to tell by the bucket load.  Two things need to happen to the young teacher crafting their trade.  They need to lose their fear.  They need to toughen up.  And fast.  If you are new to the profession, you need to toughen up to the kids, because if you come across as too ‘nice’, they will take advantage of you.  They also won’t take you seriously.  Same thing goes with the adults.  Teachers are as different as students, so it’s reasonable to assume that some people will like you, and others will not.  Whether we like to admit it or not, it bothers us when people don’t like us.  That’s where the toughness comes into play.  You don’t need to be abrasive or confrontational, but you need to stand up for yourself without sounding defensive.  Somewhere along the way, hopefully you learned how to socially interact.  There are no courses in university to teach you that.

How do you learn it ? You learn it the way you learn most of the intangibles in life—by living.  Where do students ‘live’?  They spend roughly half their day at school, with teachers as their part-time parents for the duration of their stay.  Their classmates are their roommates, and if you are thinking of that annoying roommate you had that time, imagine having a few hundred.  Expecting to get along with them all is ludicrous; getting along with a small group is usually enough, and if you’re a friendly person, you’ll be respected at very least.  If you don’t learn social skills, or you grow up in an environment where learning social skills is impossible, you are at a severe disadvantage socially.  Those socially maladjusted students inevitably grow up to be socially maladjusted adults.  Some of them even become teachers.  Most teachers have more good qualities than not, but some, like the children they once were, are the reverse.  I dare say you can make that claim in any workplace, anywhere. 

II

I once wrote a story about a guy I met while on a hitch-hiking adventure back in my university days—when I was younger and less afraid of the world around me, in my first degree.  I’ve posted that story on Facebook, so if you are interested, feel free to look it up.  The guy was kind of a jerk, and he swore like you wouldn’t (maybe) believe.  I’ve known some foul-tongued people in my life, but two in particular stand out.  One was a fellow who coached my volleyball team in high school.  He dropped the f-bomb every second word, and was even reprimanded by the school administration for his potty mouth during our practices.  The other was the driver that picked me up just outside Dieppe that day.  He was a little more versatile with his vulgarity though; he was well versed in the George Carlin school of bad language, and at least made things interesting when he swore.  In both cases, I had to ask myself, how did these two become chronic swearers?  I started to think about when I first began to use bad language.  I remember my friends and I secretly giggling about saying bad words out of earshot of teachers as early as Grade 2.  It was an early form of rebellion, and one that didn’t cost anything.  You couldn’t get out of cleaning your room or eating your vegetables, but damn sure you could have your vengeance by (gasp) swearing about it.

Enter Mr. LeBlanc.  At school, we teachers are well-trained via our own self-discipline to use only appropriate language.  We do it because it’s the right thing to do of course, but we also have that constant fear that if we ‘eff’ up, we could jeopardize our careers.  For some teachers, it’s as uncomfortable as wearing dress shoes and ties (I wear neither unless it is absolutely necessary).  But we hold it together because society expects us to.  As they should.  We therefore place those expectations on the students.  We do not tolerate unacceptable language at school, whether in class, in the hall, in the cafeteria, on the playground, or on the bus.  I say ‘unacceptable’ language rather than swearing, because I believe there are far worse words in use that don’t necessarily count as swearing, yet in my opinion are more damaging.  ‘Stupid’ and ‘idiot’ are a few examples.  Racial slurs are obvious; the n-word is probably the most vulgar word in the English language.  Then there are some words that are in a gray area, such as ‘native’ or ‘gay’.  Sometimes it depends how the word is used rather than the actual word itself.  Regardless, the rules of what you can and can’t say are a lot like 4-square rules on the playground:  you start with universal rules, but as you go things change, people add rules, and some recuse themselves from them.  Soon you don’t know what you can say anymore.  I once said the word ‘crap’ in my class, and the students all held their breaths and admonished me.  I told them to grow up.

Lately, students have been substituting ‘friggin’ or more specifically ‘frickin’ for the usual, universally socially-maligned f-bomb.  I can appreciate their efforts, but really, when they say it, it sounds hickish at best and derogatory at worst, depending on the context.  When a student says it, and you prepare to admonish them for it, you need to take a second to look at the big picture.  The student is clearly respecting the code we have set forth for them by making a point not to say the f-word, which is commendable.  As teachers, we often forget that they do listen sometimes.  They are also allowing us to glimpse into the secret life of students, in which they all cuss like sailors when we’re not watching.  By substituting a similar yet different word, they are betraying that little tidbit.  They are also mirroring what others say, and students learn from each other, but someone in the adult world taught some student somewhere the things we try so hard to stop them from doing.  Today it’s swearing.  Tomorrow it could be speeding, stealing, smoking, or watching porn.  All of these things are also ways to rebel against adults.  Maybe we see swearing as a gate-way habit, like marijuana is seen by some as a gate-way to harder drugs.  Except the Liberal Party, of course.  The fact is, teachers need to teach the whole child, which is a concept bigger than curriculum and assessment.  The real assessment comes when you open your mouth to interact with other adults.  I gave the driver when I was hitch-hiking an F, no pun intended.  Still, you can’t help but feel for the poor kid who accidentally slips and says a bad word.  Immediately, we’re ready to hit the sirens and shackle them to a wall for their insolent behavior and make a terrifying example for their peers.  Lately, I’ve been politely reminding them that it isn’t appropriate to swear, or for that matter to even use ‘frickin’.  Not because of any school rule or social code.  It just sounds bad.  It’s beneath us to use base language when we have at our fingertips far better words.  We swear out of fear, and we swear out of ignorance.  As adults, it turns out, even as teachers, the fear is still there.  Sometimes the ignorance is too. 

So what advice do I give in regards to bad language?  Well, adults swear, so children naturally listen and also do it.  I would suggest we read more often, maybe work on those language skills so we don’t automatically default to the f-bomb as much.  Conversely, I don’t think we need to censor with a hair-pin trigger.  As a society we have an unnatural fear that if we let our kids hear a bad word in a movie or song, or read it in a book that we are practically forcing a cigarette in their lips, but that isn’t necessarily the case.  We worry so much about these little transgressions, and forget the big picture or the whole child as it were.  We’re all human, and there is indeed a time and place for almost everything.  Sometimes I wonder what makes any one word ‘bad’ in the first place.  The young student I mentioned earlier who thought all police officers eat donuts all day was unknowingly being more offensive than if he’d said a bad word.  Indeed, I know plenty of adults who never curse, but are often offensive nonetheless.  Of one thing I’m pretty sure though is that a lower vocabulary indicates ignorance. We aspire for our children to succeed, both in school and in life after school, and we want people to think highly of them, so we try our best to stop them from swearing, even though vulgarity manifests itself in many ways all around us, in word and in deed.  The gray area of what to say or do in any given situation is a staggering task for children to learn, from teachers and adults alike.  The ramifications are huge.  It’s hard to land a job if you don’t know what to say in an interview.  Potty mouths need not apply.

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Post-Script

I once had a teacher who, earlier in his career, was delivering an empassioned speech to the students in an assembly.  This teacher was known for his eccentric behaviour, pungent cologne and slicked-back hair, and also for being somewhat clumsy.  Okay, very clumsy.  He once fell through a stage-lights hole on the same stage from which he was delivering this speech.  His voice rose in crescendo as he paced the slightly warped, wooden slats, probably the boarded up light holes, and then issued the students the challenge "... to get up off your assss...perations!!"  I didn't actually attend this of course; it happened years before my time at that school, but I never forgot the story.  As a teacher, I find myself constantly afraid I'll slip in front of my students, and even most of the adults.  Sliding the word 'aspirations' in there at the last second was brilliant, I think.  Let's be honest, what was about to be said was the message he intended, and when you think about it, shouldn't kids get that message regardless?  There's probably a more sophisticated way to say it, I suppose.  I found that, after I read through this post, the title might not make the same connection to the piece that I was thinking when I decided on it, so hopefully this little epilogue enriches the experience a little.  And if not, then, darn it all to heck.