To thine own self be true

Here in Alberta, Kenney rushed to drop the restrictions against the advice of medical professionals as the new variant moved in. This, to please his Stampede backers. The Stampede goes ahead in 10+ wildfire smoke endangering animals (cruelty to animals plus the usual horse deaths), performers, and audiences (cruelty to human beings). Attendance is so low, they drop the admission on the Sunday for attendance recording. Monday the Stampede officials declare the event a success as the Covid cases start to come in…

After fighting the pandemic for 16 months, health-care workers face a wage cut from UCP as a personal thank-you. Already short of workers, hospitals start closing beds in and out of cities, including emergencies. No one is available to work these shut-down places. And no burnt-out, overworked, underpaid health-care workers are likely in a positive frame of mind to rush back to work for UCP peanuts.

Wildfire smoke settles in for another week, making leaving home a dangerous, unhealthy proposition. There will be an increase in respiratory cases which will lead to an increase in emergency visits with their already predictably long line-ups. “Move along, move along” says Tyler Shandro. “Nothing to see here. Everything is normal and under control.”

And so Kenney’s stupid, very risky pipeline choice costing AB a cool 1.3 + billion will be paid back by the decent people who no longer work for or want to work for this health-care system disaster. Madness!

Be prepared for more bed and hospital closures, folks. We are fast becoming a ‘shithole’ province under the UCP and the tubby, arrogant Stampede street-bum in charge.

and Joseph Haydn:

160 CDs of music.

What modern musicians and artists have equalled his output and career?

that have made me what I am and kept me focused , structured, and moving forward to the future and toward unexpected epiphanies.

This morning I retrieved my very rare signed book by Virginia Woolf (Street Haunting) and roamed through its 35 pages, revisiting what she had been inspired to write some 91 years ago, uniquely having the book published in San Francisco–her only exclusively American publication with her purple-inked signature.

A winter ramble through London streets memorably encountering a young woman dwarf trying on shoes, and an old couple, owners of a shop where she finally found the pencil she had set out to find. Mission accomplished and the feel of adventure from something so personal and meandering.

Looking back, I would have to concur that my life, too, has been one long, continuous meander in search of excitement, adventure, insight, and, ultimately, meaning and purpose within the random transitoriness and ephemerality of one ever-changing relatively brief life. “Brief candles” as both Aldous Huxley and the UK pop group The Zombies both, ironically and coincidentally, described it.

(our former Mill Woods family doctor, Paul Arnold, used to play bass with The Zombies originally, but left them seeking job security in medicine and Canada)

on a Sunday summer morning, these parts start to resemble Peter Brook’s King Lear or Orson Welles’s Macbeth, both shot in black and white. These are apocalyptic days of Nature’s “eruptions” when “Nothing is but what is not”. Best put by Frost perhaps: 

It looked as if a night of dark intent/Was coming, and not only a night, an age./ Someone had better be prepared for rage./There would be more than ocean-water broken/Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken. (“Once by the Pacific”)

then you make it up on the backs of hard-working Albertans, buzz-sawing their meagre wages. Today, add the general support service health workers to the list of medical workers as Kenney continues his war on ordinary folks who keep us healthy and keep things up and running in hospitals. Totally egregious and gratuitous. God help us all in Alberta for his many stupid, wasteful financial errors!

He is shameless, thoughtless, and downright evil, especially after all the hard work put in by health care workers during this wretched pandemic which he himself exacerbated. Instead of rewarding these people as done in places in the States, he, heartlessly and unconscionably, cuts their wages. Not a moral bone in that tubby bod.

“Kenney says daylight time and equalization referendum questions will be on fall ballot.”

Pandemic. Heat dome/wave. Variants. Wildfire smoke for the rest of the summer. (Welcome to B.C.)

It all came back in seconds. The farm. My mother’s childhood home. Several miles west of Libau, MB. down one of those archetypal dusty country roads.

Sitting on the old-fashioned wooden swing with facing seats inside the yard. There with my cousin, pretending we were on a train or a bus, rocking back and forth from stop to stop, calling out imagined stations while eating fresh-picked peas from the bountiful garden on the other side of the driveway.

Today, 66 years later, we collected fresh-picked peas from my daughter’s yard–a large enough batch for fish dinner with garlic mashed potatoes. Before sup, opening a pod and savouring some small sweet peas. And the above memory reactivated itself by the taste and smell just like that–immediatement.

Then later, the meal and how the peas turned the other two items into a veritable mid-summer feast. A Wednesday to remember for sure.

The caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within
Caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is….