To thine own self be true

The evil US pipe bomb suspect as he is now traditionally being identified by the Jewish people. He is so evil that he cannot be personally named except by the traditional one descriptor of evil within Jewish culture. The horrific name, certainly and accurately, cuts to the main point.

are the best arguments for specialization today.

2 blacks killed in Kentucky trying to buy school supplies.

(a true gentle man, a master teacher, the former head of Edmonton Catholic’s ELA, past president of ELAC, poet and playwright, co-author of some 40+ textbooks and teacher’s guides, close personal witty friend who died too young at 60 in 2010. I was lucky to read my eulogy to him at his huge funeral.)

The local Stroll of Poets honored the dead yesterday at Audrey’s Books, an annual event. I got the opportunity to remember Glen Kirkland, my writing partner of 25 years, and read one of his ‘scary’ poems. A nice range of readings and readers yesterday.

The Mexican Day of the Dead comes up on November 2 (just in time for the midterm American election!). I’ll personally remember several departed that day in the blog.

I’ll let Glen have the last word today, with one of his final poems (from the funeral program):

is to serve children and youths, to serve the community and society, and to maintain civility and other aspects of civilization. No question that teaching is a worthy, worthwhile higher calling like being a doctor, nurse, dentist, police worker, and firefighter.

Good teachers are part of everyone’s growing up and coming-of-age along with mentors. These people inspire and significantly influence our education and futures beyond present learnings.

is hard to take. Many adults lack perspectives on their own problems contrasted with those of suffering kids and animals.

“You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.”
–Henry Drummond

“See it big, and keep it simple.”
–Wilferd A. Peterson

“One is content if one can find happiness in simple pleasures.”
–Thomas Malloy

“In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.”
–Charles Lindbergh

“The great and glorious masterpiece of humanity is to know how to live with a purpose.”
–Montaigne

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
–Lin Yutang

The simplest things are often the truest.
–Richard Bach

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.
–Albert Einstein

If one’s life is simple, contentment will come.
–Dalai Lama (saw him once in Calgary)

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
–Frank Lloyd Wright

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
–Albert Camus

Forever is composed of nows.
–Emily Dickinson

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
–Albert Camus

Come forth into the light of things, let Nature be your teacher.
–William Wordsworth

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
–Henri Matisse

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
–George Eliot

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
–Camille Pissarro

Happiness resides not in possessions and not in gold; the feeling of happiness dwells in the soul.
–Democritus

There is enchantment right in front of you, waiting for you to notice.
–Janet Luhrs

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
–John Ruskin

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
–Franz Kafka

You cannot perceive beauty but with a serene mind.
–Henry David Thoreau

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
–Charles Mingus

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson–author of “In Memoriam” (1850), the greatest dedication/memorial poem and greatest poem about friendship beyond death)

the long-predicted Zombie Apocalypse came to pass with few whimpers and much caving in, and there is now some question as to how many unaddicted individualistic Real People remain.

I see the zombies everywhere when I leave home–fiddling with their phones on their laps or brazenly talking on phones while driving their vehicles (despite AB’s distracted driving bylaws) and talking on phones and texting in every public place imaginable.

These lonely, bored ex-humans cannot stand to have one second of thinking for themselves and do not want to think, period. These soulless types are afraid to be left alone by themselves, to be alone in themselves, and to think at all. They have sold out to non-stop technological distraction. It is The Machine that dominates and rules their lives, not they themselves (self-illusion/delusion).

These people are ‘not really there’ in the natural present moment, the natural here-and-now. They do not control their own lives and kid themselves that they are the great masters of technology in their lives. Furthermore, the sleepers lack depth, sincerity, interest, substance, deeper values, and meaningful, purposeful lives. They are as dumb, shallow and machine-ish as their ‘smart’phones. They are largely divorced from Nature, too.

No, the Apocalypse arrived in the 2010s and there were relatively few voices that said “No”, who put up any resistance, who didn’t cave in, or have enough autonomy to resist zombie slavery. The great Average today is very low, ill-informed, dumbed-down, mentally limited with little knowledge of any major consequential value. These folks generally chose the easy, lazy, slavish ramp off the so-called Information Highway that started the new millennium. And they are confidently blissful about their mindless limitedness and sleep unconsciously thru the troubles and problems of their society and the world at large. They are, in reality, Tennyson’s modern “Lotus-eaters”, especially in Canada now that ‘soma’ (pot) is readily available thanks to a major lapse in uplifting values and social moral irresponsibility toward society on the part of stupid, selfish, greedy Trudeau.