Gratitude

What am I grateful for?  That I live in a society generous enough to support freeloaders like me.  That my nation is one of the world's more tolerant multicultural societies. (I'd hate to imagine what it would be like living in the U.S.A.!) That my city has a good transit system--for its minimal financial support--a good library system, good parks and a lot of Meetup groups.

I'm grateful for friends, whom I appreciate because I didn't get a lot of them when I was young.  And for the internet, which ensures that I never get bored.  And for foreign languages, which ensure that I can always have something new to learn.

I'm grateful for two parents who set a good example for me. (I really appreciate my mother's love now that she's no longer with us.) I'm grateful for people who inspire me, like the kooky genius Mohandas K. Gandhi and the politician Bernie Sanders.

And I'm grateful for music and poetry and classic movies, and Daffy Duck and Uncle Scrooge and Mark Twain and London, England, and heroes. (My idea of a hero is anyone who gets the work done, like foot soldiers and nurses and mothers.)

Cemeteries

When I was growing up in Sackville, N.B., we lived not far from the town cemetery.  I hardly ever went into it.  There's someone buried there with the name Hiawatha Dixon.  I also noticed a small marker saying "Sailor."

Here in Toronto, I've visited the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery several times.  If you keep your eyes open you can notice some interesting things there:  in one corner I saw the small headstone of CBC journalist Norman DePoe.  I read somewhere that there's an eccentric buried there whose only stone is an unmarked boulder!

In Palermo, Sicily, they have a monastery full of mummies from the 17th through 19th centuries.  What's really creepy about it is that you can tell when they lived because they're still wearing the same clothes!

In India the Parsee sect, who go back to Iranian followers of Zoroaster, have high towers where they put out their dead for the vultures to eat. (They do that in Tibet too.) I must admit that's eco-friendly!

In China some people have a "tree burial" where they cremate you and plant a tree over your ashes.  I think that's what I'd like done with my body. (I like the idea of having a living memorial.) I have nothing against worms, except that they work slowly, while fire can reduce you all at once.  And I don't like the idea of taking up ground that posterity has to treat with sanctity!

Celebrations

I'm not big on celebrating things.  Neither of my parents were.  I recall the time of their golden anniversary when my sister Margaret wanted to have a celebration but they weren't interested.

I recall that we had a bit of a celebration after I finished my Ph.D. (We ate Indian food.) I celebrated somewhat, but felt rather burnt out inside.  It was like the scene in Easy Rider where Dennis Hopper said "We did it!" but Peter Fonda said "We blew it." I imagine that's a common feeling among Ph.D.s.

Christmas doesn't mean so much to me.  I look at it as a time to stay home and do nothing.  And at New Year's Eve I make a point of being in bed at midnight, though the noise outside tends to wake me.  And I don't care so much about birthdays, though I always get this cake with white chocolate and strawberries.

Even an event that's good news to me, like Bernie Sanders winning the Michigan primary, doesn't make me so excited.  I've seen too many disappointments in my time!

I remember in junior high when I was in this dispute with a friend of mine, who got his way in the end. But he insisted on celebrating, and kept saying "I won!" for some time after. Ultimately, he lost a friend.

Roadkill

They say that you can learn a lot about someone from what he finds funny.  Now to show you something about me!

When I was young, there was this Loudon Wainwright song that I found really funny.  It went:

Dead skunk in the middle of the road,

Dead skunk in the middle of the road,

There's a dead skunk in the middle of the road

And he's stinking to high heaven!

I remember a story in the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes where Calvin entered a road safety poster contest.  He drew a picture they never showed, colored with ketchup, with the caption "Be careful, or be roadkill!" Calvin imagined winning the contest and the city putting up a statue of him, but he lost in the end.

I read that as part of the so-called welfare reform movement in the 1990s, New York City forced its welfare recipients to pick up roadkill.  That city sounds like an unpleasant place!

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE

I've read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books.  She was a wonderful writer.  But I must say that the TV series Little House on the Prairie was shameless '70s cheese, made for the sort of people who voted for Ronald Reagan or buy Thomas Kincade prints.

Laura's father was a great character in the books. But the way Michael Landon played him, I always felt that if his kids gave him any real trouble he'd burst into tears!  The show had such an anachronistic feel--one episode even involved telephone gossip!--that it could have been called Little Suburb on the Prairie.  And of course, everyone had clean white clothes (unlike the real frontier).

Shall I compare the TV show to the books?  In one book there's a chapter where Laura goes to Nelly's birthday party but when she tries to touch the dress on her new doll Nelly snatches it away, leaving her feeling humiliated.  In the TV version, she also knocks Laura down!

There was one episode where a guy convinced the town to entrust their money to him so he could buy them seed corn, but he went and bought it alone, and on the way back his wagon crashed and the townsfolk thought he'd absconded and started bullying his pregnant wife.  You know, he should have taken some assistants with him, but then there'd be no story! (I hate that kind of plot that depends on characters being careless at crucial moments.)

There was another episode where a boy was dying of leukemia and his last wish was to see California before he died.  So he and Pa Ingalls sneaked onto a train and they went out to California, where they boy died in view of the surf.  Sob, sob.

The show could be very predictable.  I remember one episode where Mrs. Oleson went out in all her finery to meet the new schoolmistress.  I thought, "The new schoolmistress will turn out to be African-American!" and she was.

Don't get me started on The Waltons either! It was truly cheesy to end each show with the family bidding each other goodnight. (That house must have had thin walls.)

I admit that I actually watched The Waltons at the time, but I'm ashamed of myself now.  The French writer Gustave Flaubert grew up in the provincial city of Rouen, and later said about his hometown, "Disliking Rouen is the beginning of good taste." For me, the beginning of good taste was disliking The Waltons!

Water

I read somewhere that fresh water will be as valuable in the 21st century as oil was in the 20th.  And the nation with the most fresh water is Canada!  I wonder if the U.S.A. will take us over for our water?  Here's a prediction:  if the U.S. ever acquires Canada, we'll stay much the same, but they'll be transformed!

I remember another cartoon (Aqua Duck) where Daffy Duck was wandering through the desert with a big nugget of gold, but couldn't find water!  There were some funny bits where he started hallucinating and saying things like "Belly up to the bar, boys!" There was also Wet Hare, in which Bugs Bunny found his river being dammed off by a French-Canadian desperado called Blaque Jacques Shellac. (They never explained what he wanted to do with all that water.)

Kevin Costner made this movie Waterworld where the ice caps have melted and most of the earth is underwater, and he plays a character who's so evolved that he can breathe through gills when he's underwater.  Anyway, there's this attention-grabbing scene at the start where he filters his own urine to obtain drinking water.  Two questions!  Why hasn't he developed a tolerance for salt water, a much shorter evolutionary leap than sprouting gills?  And why doesn't he just filter sea water?

Chickens

The Royal Winter Fair is on just now.  One of the things they have there is prize-winning chickens.  I wonder how judges choose the best chicken?  You'd think they'd eat them, then decide which one tastes best!  

I remember this cartoon You Were Never Duckier, where Daffy Duck was at some fair but the prize for best chicken was a lot bigger than for best duck, so he put a glove on his head Howie Mandel-style and pretended to be a chicken.  Of course he got carried off by Hennery the little chicken hawk and almost got eaten!

When I was at Mecklenburgh Square in London, England two decades ago, the nearby children's park of Coram's Fields had chickens, and I heard roosters crowing in the morning!

I wonder how farmers can tell when an egg is going to hatch?

This subject reminds me of a joke!  A woman comes to a doctor and says, "Can you help us?  My husband thinks he's a chicken!" The doctor says, "Really?  How long has be been that way?" "Six weeks." "Six weeks!  Why didn't you tell me before now?" "Well, I would have, but we needed the eggs."

It also reminds me of a story from the Actors Studio in the 1950s.  The actors were given an exercise where they pretended to be chickens in a coop that's about to have an A-bomb dropped on it.  Everyone else squawked around wildly, but Marlon Brando just sat down and pretended to lay an egg.  He explained, "A chicken doesn't understand anything about A-bombs!"

Also in the '50s you had the game of chicken.  When governments played chicken with A-bombs, it was called "brinksmanship"!

And there's this The Far Side cartoon where a farmers wife collects eggs from the henhouse, only to see a hen carrying a baby out of the farmhouse! (Another one features a "boneless chicken ranch"...)

Government

In our time neo-conservatives like Ronald Reagan have sold a spin that Big Government is the enemy.  This appeals to middle-class suburbanites who don't want to take responsibility for society's problems, don't want their tax money spent on people they don't identify with, and feel a vague fear toward the poor. The result is a system in which big business gets their way and even the liberals are afraid to take on corporations. (Witness Britain's New Labour.)

I'm rather sore about the current situation.  There are some problems that can only be resolved by the Black Hand of big government.  Some even call for government ownership!  I think that the way to achieve gun control is by nationalizing the weapon manufacturers.  And they should also nationalize the companies that sell cigarettes and cheap wine.

You may denounce me as a socialist, but I know where I stand.  Ecological problems like climate change can only be solved through regulation and aggressive taxation, not through free markets for big business.  Without assertive government, there's no hope for the future.

The unpopular child in school

Yes, I was one of the less popular kids in my school.  In Death of a Salesman, Biff says about a schoolmate, "He's liked, but he's not well liked." I would have been happy just to be liked.  It's like there's well-liked, there's liked, there's not liked, there's disliked, and there's "people enjoy being nasty to you"!

I remember in phys-ed class when they'd choose their own teams, and I'd always get chosen last.  On one occasion both teams insisted that the other team take me!  Now that's just mean.  They were drunk with power.

Back in the middle grades, I had a vague hope that people would be more mature in high school.  Wishful thinking!  I actually don't mind if people talk about me behind my back--it means they respect me.  What gets me is when people see you coming and that reminds them to talk about you so that you can overhear.  I suppose that status in school is a zero-sum game, where you raise yours by lowering someone else's.  Like in prison.