Hey You! [my personal pronoun]

Tags

mainsplain, male, mansplainer, peronsal pronouns, poetry, Politically correct, pronouns, social media, white, white male, Workshop, Writing, Zoom

I attended a writing workshop yesterday. On Zoom. It was hosted by the University of Manitoba which is, according to that search engine and map, 3,178 kilometers from my home and a 33 hour drive. The proposed route leads me across Quebec from Montréal to Timmins ON, a route I would never consider driving in winter let alone summer. So make that a 40 hour drive. But I digress. I attended a pretty good workshop I probably never could have attended before the pandemic.

I’ve come to love Zoom. I am on calls every week, and it’s my only contact outside my home and Pete’s Fruitique in the City Market where buddy calls me Buddy: “Hey Buddy, is that everything?” I find myself wanting to tell him my name: “I am not your buddy.” Like a woman saying, “I’m not a deer!” And then last week a young lady was in the checkout line ahead of me and buddy said to her, “Hey Buddy, is that everything?”

Over Zoom, I’ve come virtually face-to-face with people in Ontario, Mexico, Portugal, Egypt, New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, Victoria BC, Toronto, Nairobi — I bet nobody else has had a Kenyan Cow bomb their Zoom meetings! — and now Winnipeg (and wherever these participants lived.) *One of them actually lives in my city. I didn’t know them and made friends with them on Facebook during the call. They could literally be my neighbour, met 3,178 km away.

Anyway, the Zoom writing workshop was on poetry and was led by a graduate student who I believe identifies as gay. His bio contained several LGBQ keywords, and… whatever. He seemed qualified to lead it, so I joined. Honestly, I don’t care about people’s sexual leanings. What you do is your business, and what I do is mine. It’s something we don’t need to talk about.

The session had about a dozen participants: the young, gay-identifying leader who had a trim beard, more than a single screen of participants I would describe as female, a couple of pictures with no picture at all but with female names, and me, the now senior-citizen-white-male. I like to know people. I am a people watcher. I am a people voyeur. I want to know everything about everyone. So I typed the full names (some used only their first name to keep stalkers like me off their tail) into Facebook search to see what came up. The first thing I noticed when I began reading the participants’ names were pronouns in parenthesis after their names, such as “Janet Smith (she/her).”

Cute, I thought, but why? I could find suitable pronouns to match their names/pictures, couldn’t I? I acknowledged that my visual cues might be incorrect, that one of these John-identified-females might actually identify as… whatever. Like sexual leanings, your personal sexual identification doesn’t concern me. Then, as my mind tends to do, I played out conversations that might take place where I might use these pronouns. “She said this, but I disagree.” I shook my head. These were conversations I would not undertake.

The leader gave his — his was his chosen personal pronoun, or I would have written their — housekeeping rules. Good leader! I rarely give any rules in my meetings. In fact, I tell participants in my prompt-writing there are no rules. Anyway, he said please pick your personal pronouns. I watched the remaining screen names expand to include “(she/her/they/etc.)”. I wasn’t sure what he was asking. Pick my own pronouns? The Paul Simon song, “You Can Call Me Al,” played through my head. I did not change my name.

This was a new experience for me. I assume the participants who had their pronouns already designated were familiar with this exercise. Extrapolations ran through my head. Is this some new practice being adopted in social media? I haven’t seen bracketed pronouns in any of my social media circles: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Zoom. Should I look closer? Is this a trend? If I ever get business cards printed, should I add my pronouns to my name and title? John Hanson, Writer. (Male binary he/him/his) My brief research since then indicates this is more of an academia and workplace practice. I am not involved in either.

The leader scanned his screen, probably saw that I had no personal pronouns designated, then went into a spiel about how to change your name in Zoom. And he/him looked right at me on the screen! I bet he/him thought I was the socially ignorant white senior male just getting his feet wet in social media — we will ignore the fact that I began using email around 1987, was a BBS junkie in the early nineties before finally getting on the internet in 1994, and have coded many complex websites and applications in my previous career. I sighed deeply and appended “(hey you!)” to my name. No, I don’t give a shit what you call me. I am the white, senior-citizen mansplainer stuck in his tropes. I have a dozen participants to refer to, to pick pronouns for, but I have trouble finding words to say about subject matter at the best of times. I have no time in a discussion to scan all the names to be politically correct. “I think the volta is this line, and I think… just a sec… her… no, she was wrong.” I have come to use “they” when referring to anyone: they/them/theirs. If they/them/their bothers you, I can’t wait to read your blog.

During the two hours and fifteen minutes, only one reference was made to another participant by a participant, and they used the person’s name. The leader referred to several of us but always used our names or the pronoun you. “What did you think of that?”

Nobody said, “Hey you!” to me.

The Writing Walls are Crumbling.

Tags

Biden, bipartisan, debate, discussion, left wing, moving forward, right wing, Trump, walls

I have had a very hard time blogging over the past four years. It wasn’t just Donny and his insane cabal but his many followers. I have unfriended many people during this reign, and I have blocked many of them. And I did try to listen. I tried to understand the divide, not just in America but in Canada and around the world . I have teased and ridiculed not only Donny but these followers. I knew converting the mindless was not possible, but they were never my target. I targeted the middle-of-the road centrists, the non-partisan voters who see truth above party politics. Unfortunately, these people tend to be more laissez-faire and vote less than the indoctrinated [on both sides]. Biden winning the vote feels like a victory but a tainted one. We are not in a good place.

Now that we have a change on the horizon, can I dump the farcical memes and get back to arguing with logic? I hope I can. I hope we all can. I would much rather see far-righters and far-lefties write out what they believe and openly discuss their arguments. I would hope we can all sit down quietly, read others’ stances on issues, and work to some consensus. It is this back and forth playing with ideas that moves us forward. It is how I move my writings forward. I don’t write knock-out stories in one go. It takes many tries of pushing that theme or pushing this character or pushing that conflict. All of my best writing has come from pushing into areas I never ended up in. The same is true, I believe, for moving forward in social and political discourse. Life is story, and those of us who write a lot of story can attest that what we think is best almost always is not.

I could not write much about life these past four years because so many have adopted views of life I do not agree with. And no, it is not just the righties. I am anti-government. When governments in my Canada want to implement new programs, I cringe, because I know my government’s debts will rise with no compensating benefit. Too many pay no service at all to our enormous debts.

What do I want to Write About?

The list is long, and I don’t claim to be qualified to write about much of it. But the following is a quick list.

• Socialism
  • what is it?
  • where should social policies fit in a capitalistic society?
  • what do Liberals really want?
  • what are Conservatives afraid of?
• Competition
  • I am for competition, when it makes sense
  • when does competition not make sense?
  • how do we manage non-competitive units so everyone is happy?
• Executive Accountability
  • this is currently a critical problem in not only America but in Canada and around the world
• Taxation
  • does the low-taxation-of-billionaires model make sense?
  • what is the logical management perspective on achieving good government?
  • of course, taxation of expatriates and management of tax fraud.
• Reading and Writing
  • I work at my writing every day. I have many ideas on making writing more interesting and relevant
  • reading is a forgotten skill. We have millions of experts who do not read anything more than Facebook posts or their favorite news headlines
  • how to correctly punctuate lists 😉
• Racial Injustice
  • unfortunately, the list is endless!
• My many other interests: books, fountain pens, inks, poetry, nutrition, diabetes, and more.

There is so much to write about and such little time to do it. I’ve been sitting on my hands for so long, I don’t really know if I can do this. Is Humpty Trumpty falling off the wall enough to get me back into this? But of course I have to write. The only way we’re going to move forward as a civilization is through discourse and debate. I remember when the Berlin Wall started to come down. It was the day my firstborn entered the world. I was so hopeful. The world really did seem to offer a brighter future. But of course we’ve erected replacement walls, and unfortunately we always will. I think the purpose of my writing and many other blogs has to be the dismantling of walls. These ideological walls need to crumble.

The SAD month of MAY

April was poetry month, and now May is short story month. That’s a short story a day, every day, for 31 days. I’ve done seven NaNoWriMos and eight NaPoWriMos or equivalents. I don’t want to try to name this month. NaSsWriMo?

I sat at my desk on Monday, May 1, 2017, having written 54 poems and a blog post about it, wondering what to write next. Do I pull out 2012 and commit three or four months to fixing it? Do I continue salvaging parts of 2016 to make a short story collection? Maybe I should pull out 2010 or 2014 and have a second go at those unfinished novels. 2016 called the hardest and I’d all but settled on it. That would mean skimming the 50,000 words looking for nuggets. I have pulled the first three scenes as stories already, but where to next? Always the question.

So I did what any good writer would do: I opened Facebook. Almost immediately I found a post by my friend Andrea about a contest in May to write a short story a day. We talked about this in the past on our Sunday morning write-ins, I’ve participated in 15 other x-a-day events, so I didn’t need to think about the implications very much. I went to the Story-A-Day site, signed up, took the first prompt, and wrote a 1489 word story.

Bang. #1 done. It felt great.

\The story had nothing to do with anything I’ve written before, but it was based on reality. For that reason alone, I will not share it. Especially where fiction is weaved in, and some of that fiction is not nice. Sorry I had to kill you off, X.

May 2’s prompt fit almost perfectly a scene/story for 2016 I had been pondering. I sat and wrote. I took a break at 500 words to think, ponder, and write nasty political tweets — Even though I gave up my U.S. Citizenship, I still fight for Americans living abroad. And I’ve been quite acerbic lately towards the liberal shills out there supporting #FATCA and calling people like me tax cheaters.

I could not fit today’s prompt into any existing project, which is no concern, but I could fit it into a potential 2017 NaNoWriMo story. I’ve been pondering writing Science Fiction instead of my social conscious urban literary stuff.  I only invested 313 words in it, but I think it is full of theme, conflict, and potential. The conflict is implied: we’re all becoming the same, and what does that mean for humanity. Could be my backbone theme for my seen-book series *grin* It is a very thin piece, trite, but I actually love it. I will try to write more around this piece and other ideas this month and through the busy summer ahead of me. NaSsWriMo might just make NaNoWriMo very productive.

Enjoy

Prompt: People called him The Doll Maker. Nobody ever wondered aloud why every doll had the same face.

“Did you guys see Doctor Davis’ new robots?”

The lunch table paid no attention to him. Jared set down his tray and pulled in his chair.

“He can choose any face he wants with a few clicks but he picks the same face, the same physical features for every one of them. You guys don’t find that odd?”

“Jarrod,” Emily says. “You had a busy morning? You’re late.” She stuffs a roll of California Gold into her mouth.

“You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“Sorry,” she says as she crunches on the crusty, green roll of processed unknowns the government has certified as optimally nutritious for young scientists. She chases it with a glass of fortified water the color of the noon sky as displayed in the wall monitors. “We were just discussing Doc Davis’ new robots. Did you know he ordered them to all look identical? Why would he do that?”

Jarrod picked the gray New Jersey Jets roll up from his gray plate. “It makes no sense. You’d think he was building an army or something.”

Emily inspects her mint-green plate for crumbs but finds none. “I know. It’s so creepy. We’re not going to be able to tell which is which.”

“They’re all fucking robots,” William chimes in with his usual cheer. “Who cares what they look like? You ask for a Solar Coffee, they get you a Solar Coffee. It’s not like you’d have sex with one of them.”

“Speak for yourself,” Emily says.

“They’re all male,” Jarrod says.

“So?” says William.

“They’re all so…unremarkable,” Emily says and smiles.

“He could have selected at least some variety,” Jarrod says.

“They’re robots,” William says.

“What does he have planned?” they all say simultaneously. They stop but don’t laugh.

William picks up his blue Florida Fish Roll from his light-blue plate and looks at it. “Why are they all the same?”

 

Blizzard

Tags

blizzard, chronic pain, shoulder pain, sleep deprivation, weather

I write this from the middle of a blizzard, our second in four days. I don’t use the term blizzard lightly, but I live in a winter storm belt and 30 plus centimeter (1ft) snowfalls are common. The National Weather Service defines a blizzard as a storm which contains large amounts of snow OR blowing snow, with winds in excess of 35 mph and visibilities of less than 1/4 mile for an extended period of time (at least 3 hours). Being unable to see the road from a sidewalk is not unheard of. The image below is from two years ago.

 

My life the past few months has been blizzardy. In August 2016 I somehow partially tore a tendon in my shoulder. I’ve lived with nearly constant pain since then. It is not intense pain but it wears on you. The worst part is trying to sleep. An arm hangs straight when I sit or stand, and the tendon likes that. But lie down and the arm wants to move sideways or backwards. Ouch. Most of my sleeps have been two-hour sessions, and I wake in stiffness and pain. I stay up for a couple of hours, try to write, let the pain dissipate, and go back to bed for hopefully two more hours sleep. I’ve slept six hours maybe three times in the last six months.

Lack of sleep is an insidious condition. It slows your thinking, your memory, and your concentration. Writing, editing, thinking, learning, exploring a poem, whatever I try to do is impacted negatively. Yet somehow I finished NaNoWriMo, Robert Brewer’s November Chapbook Challenge, have written at least a poem a week, have studied poetry, and have edited some of my novel. Short sessions. Even now my mind drifts back to my throbbing shoulder.

Then there was the election. The election affects my novel as my story is set in Canada’s political environment. It is a trip across the nation and explores various protests, the divide between left and right. It is not so much a political book, but it is. It was written when this extremist divide was more or less defined in my head. left likes this; right likes that. But now President Trump has thrown a bag of hammers into the political machinery. I struggle with trying to understand him, people who support him, and people who defend him. I struggle with the left too but on a more purely ideological scale. The question of whether my story is relevant haunts me, and it has hobbled my progress.

I think it is still valid, and in many ways I think my message is more relevant than ever. I’ve been through reader feedback and am now reading to myself aloud.  I am up to page 65 of 303 in my Word document, and I hope today I might knock off a hundred more pages.

Anyway, I wrote a poem this week after the last blizzard ravaged us. I had originally written it with longer lines, but it didn’t work very well. Too much wallowing image and emotion and not enough tension, so I busted it into short, tight lines. I had it all in one stanza, but I do have some logical breaks in scenery. I don’t know if it will speak to you, but it speaks to me. I have lived through at least one blizzard a year for the last 46 years.

Oh, and the shoulder is slowly improving. Motion is up, MRI was definite, and back to physio today if the storm lets me.

Blizzard

a biblical plague
snowballs from
the fists of God
smack you in the face
the wind sucks
the breath from your lungs
a frozen sneeze
spraying your world
the howling ghosts
of dead trains

slippery footing
hobbling
plunging bodies
shoulders lean into
conflicted heat differentials
slams you hard
into the boards
grabs your collar
throws straight punches
tight knuckles

a father and son
killed
the New Jersey Turnpike
doesn’t care
if you are hunkered and afraid
the raid comes
brave cower
the regretfully stupid
quantum motion
of infinite chaos

the day before
calm
wet and clammy
you could smell it
coming up the coast
throbbing temples
filled with supplicants
refugees
nobody lays claim to
a blizzard

The front window view at 6:20AM

Can we stop trying to grow our population?

Once again I read a Facebook plea from my mayor Don Darling that, “Growing our population in Saint John,” is a key success factor for our future.” It is a rather ubiquitous political stance. Former NB premier Frank McKenna wrote in the Globe and Mail a year ago, “…parts of Canada are dying for lack of population growth.” In Ottawa, a 14-member council formed to advise the Trudeau government on economic growth recommends tripling the Canadian population to 100 million people.

I am not against immigration; I am an immigrant. My wife is on a team helping a refugee family, and I help out. I am all for open borders, globalization, and economic well-being for all. But I am tired of us killing our planet.

Have you ever thought about the finiteness of our planet?  We have water shortages worldwide; we are very close to killing our oceans to the point of the only fishes it will support are jellyfish (enjoy your jellyfish casserole!); our air literally stinks; global warming is a fact; animal extinction is accelerating; and I could run on and on and on. The cause, while seemingly complex, stems from one simple fact — we are growing the human population base unfettered.

Did you know we cannot make iron ore? We can make oil, but we don’t want to yet. We can desalinate water. We cannot make rare metals. We can grow more trees, but we keep cutting them down faster than we plant them. We can probably grow more food in the ground, keep adding fertilizers, and … no, before much longer all our food will be hydroponically grown as all our topsoil will be dead. What is, what isn’t, what can this planet sustain, have we passed its limits: these are arguments that meet resistance. People oppose the thoughts we need to cut back; because we like our elite lifestyles and want to defend them. We want our children and our descendants to live in an advanced society where they can flourish. It is a noble goal, but can the planet support us?

Let me ask you resisters a simple question: how big is too big? We have 7.5 billion people now. What’s your cap? 20 billion? 40 billion? A trillion? An alt-right man argued to me once that we could fit the world population in the state of Texas; therefore we are not even close to maxing out this planet. In my opinion, 7.5 billion is way too many people, yet at the rate we are growing, in 100 years it will top 22 billion. Enjoy wearing your life-support suits.

In the 1950’s, geophysicist M. King Hubbert realized that Earth’s resources were finite and devised his peak theory to predict the lifetimes of its resources. Primarily applied to oil, it has been expanded to other natural and renewable resources. We will at some point exceed the earth’s capacity for human demand in many if not all categories: oil, iron, copper, food, air, water, minerals, etc. At some point, humans will stop growing because they cannot grow anymore, and at that point, it is more than likely that great reductions in human populations will occur. Laws of nature. Foxes and rabbits.

It might take decades, centuries, or even millennia to prove the finiteness of this planet, but we will discover that population growth is not sustainable, so why do we push it? Short term gain? Let our kids worry about how to feed themselves?

Saying we need to grow through population growth is lazy. Think about what you are really saying when you say Saint John, NB, or any other jurisdiction, needs more people for its economic well-being. Its area population base is about 100,000 people. You are basically saying any city with such a population base is too small to sustain itself. Sussex at about 5,000 cannot possibly survive. Bathurst at 12,275 people is a hopeless cause. Every other community around the world less than what, a million people maybe, is pointless. If population is so vital to economic well-being, then let’s merge Canada’s population into one single city: Toronto.

These are stupid assertions, but that is what you are implying when you say we are too small. We are not too small, we are too lazy. If it’s good enough for much of the world to live in small communities, then why can’t it be good for us? Let’s get innovative. Let’s put our heads together and find ways to be prosperous. But let’s not keep expanding our footprint on this beautiful planet; because it just cannot sustain us that much longer.

Writing and Drinking

Tags

alcohol, Irish Whisky, Literary, Scotch Whisky, Single Malt, Strathisla, Whisky, Writers Tears

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”

This quote is from Peter Devries’ Reuben, Reuben and not from Earnest Hemingway

I like to drink. I like the taste of beers, wines, and spirits. I like the sensations of tingling tongues and burning palates. I like the off-centered sensations. My mind works looser but not better. I feel freer to explore ideas, but almost always the result is crap. Writing and human relationship.

I think our brains are finely wired. Our Apollonian and the Dionysian modes are not independent but work in tandem. Each alone is almost useless. Alcohol sends us into this Apollonian mode, the creative world, but it blocks out the rational, focused world. Our thoughts and actions become psychedelic, not constructive.

I also have health issues that heavy drinking would only exacerbate and append. While getting lost in the netherworld of the bottle is attractive at times, getting lost from the world is not as pretty. Yet, I have decided to try to incorporate alcohol into my writing.

I am going to try to use finer drinks as a reward system: accomplish something significant, have a toddy. Some significant milestones include finishing editing chapters and scenes, revisions of stories, and of course any awards or publications (should that ever happen). Finish a chapter, celebrate with a shot of Writers Tears.

Reading is also important to me. I firmly believe any writer needs to read and study what he or she reads. A writer cannot write that killer story without understanding the lessons of both published masters and clunkers. Reading is so important to me, I would almost consider a good old drunk for each book, but I’ll settle for a lone shot of single malt.

I do not condone writing or editing drunk, and not because I think it’s evil. If you want to do it, go write ahead. But I know it doesn’t work for me. I am now calling bottles of spirits bottles of encouragement and each shot a notch in my pen marking success.

Bottoms up!

NaPoWriMo/PAD 2016 Day 28

For today’s prompt, take the phrase “Important (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write the poem. Possible titles could include: “Important Documents,” “Important: Read Before Assembling,” “Important People,” and so on. I hope everyone finds something important to write about today.

Importance raised a lot of possibilities and issues, mostly important ones. I asked myself what is important, and an old argument, and old battle took over: administration versus creation. I have seen too much emphasis in my life placed on administrative brilliance: we need to do this more efficiently. Government laws and regulations are largely based on administration: adherence, compliance, and subservience. Rewards are given to businesses who can do paperwork and complete contracts to the T. There are no regulatory or administrative awards given for creativity. Much of what I am saying is subliminal. It is why I have given up on accounting. Much importance is placed on people who can count beans correctly, not on those who can devise a new and better bean burrito. I’ve sat too many days at a desk wondering why I was there.

This poem is not about me but a hypothetical entrepreneur with a great idea, with un-capped and untapped creativity who falls to the system. I do employ some abstract metaphor. One of the banes of an accountant is being faced in tax season with a new client and their shoebox full of receipts — the shoebox accounting system. But what if you don’t even have that?

The Big One

The decisions accumulate like bad debts
a once promising pillar of the community.
Important people took notice, before they served
the latest in a string of beads and baubles

Take them to a bank and let an expert take care of it. An expert
at taking money, at snuffing and suppressing. Creativity
only for those administratively supple thinkers.

Who can you trust anymore?
What do people do when shoes are sold in a plastic bag?
Is there an app for climbing out of the muck?

Prioritize, my accountant says.
Might as well be my IT support dude. Reboot before it crashes!
Take care of the big ones first, running a business
a Labrador fishing vacation for Grandpa.

I’d rather stop at the local brew pub, and support
a low paid business student with my last plastic bill, better advice
than from some asshole at a shiny desk
who treats my life as a folded page.