To thine own self be true

(Plays “You Are My Sunshine”)

Mimosas (this year made with French Veuve Clicquot Brut Champagne), apple turnovers, coffee, and the Rose Bowl Parade from Pasadena, California.

after a second pandemic year.

.
Happy Days!

presented by our remarkable IT guy J-Man who also services and set up both long-running blogs.
He also fixed the technology for transferring my ’72 Legacy Recordings to computer files and CDs, helping me to complete my major 2021 musical project.

tobogganing on an Ottawa hill.

Currently, they are living with frostbite, hypothermia, and Omicron.
Their situations have been exacerbated by the pandemic and winter deep freeze.
Provincial and city governments should be all over this crisis.
(Not in AB though, where porking-up Kenney has also pulled the plug on injection centres. Users are now dying outside in the cold. )

You can be sure there will be even more problems when the Bissell Centre closes to please the optics of the Katz group across the way. Let’s hope a new, larger facility north of the Bissell will be open for all those poor guys living on the street.

(inspired by Glenn Gould’s The Idea of North)

………………………………………………………………………

(We have administered these vast territories of North in an almost continuing state of mind…)

High latitude
vast flatness of poles
wind a whitewash
breathing lungs
stone-cold

(I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas and I find that this is growing apace each year, so that I really want to get it out of my system somehow…)

Cold enlarges consciousness
an inner feeling: hinterlands
We are stirred & sharpened
made precise, altered–
a mental nordicity

(The North is almost everything beyond the comfortable and familiar, everything frozen and dark, treeless and windswept…)

Arctic night
blizzard bone
drift of pelt & parka
polar values
break the ice in rime
evoke an introversion
like isotherms

(When men live in the North their values change…)

permafrost/permavision
cold Judas chill
solitude
& idea-flakes

(They live a lifetime and die when they emerge. They become citizens of a different country–that tapestry of tundra and taiga…)

blue-planed spirit
frozen subsoil
keen surface
cutting/nipping
uninhabited
vanishing point

(There was something spiritual about it, elements of magic having to do with the magnetic pole…)

brush-blade pointillism
breath & breathe
vision elemental
inland seas
frozen sonata

(Something really does happen to people up here…)

ice age cold snap
cold storage
icefields
pro-found snow-bound

(It cares so little and sort of diminishes you…)

pack-ice growlers
overhang design
spirit gathers hoarfrost
terminal moraine

(It looks so odd and cold you wouldn’t want to live there…)

chilblain shiver
raw polar night
boreal abstract
a treeline sensibility
gather & evoke
this nordic index

………………………………………………

The ultimate performance of this signature poem about Canadian winter was performed by my performance trio (Glen Kirkland and The Legend of Dean McKenzie) at Block 1912 in the dead deep-freeze of Edmo in January

(live at the old Woodward’s Books, Southgate Mall, on a Saturday afternoon, 1990ish, bringing shoppers to a halt!)

Winter City? Frozen North? (fact)
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”
or Sam McGee incarnate.
Too bloody cold for rats.
Snow blown across Xmas potholes.
Someone else’s bad dream
rammed down a senior’s throat
like feckless mayors, windrows
or snow-covered bike-lanes.
City of a dead downtown
awaiting invisible people.
Awaiting the day when the power
conks out for apocalyptic grid-hours
and all will simply freeze and die:
pets, plants, taps, houses, taxpayers.
Or else as some huddle in their monster trucks
idling the pipe-dream mirage
until all that UCP gas runs out.

(illustration by Frank Newfeld–of Alligator Pie fame–done for my first high-school English textbook in 1980’s Connections 1: Imagining)

“As far as the world is concerned, the most important thing is to say to yourself, “This really doesn’t matter. I think there are very few things that really matter, and those are to do with protecting your loved ones from harm. But I don’t think anything much else matters.”