To thine own self be true

is not a place…it’s a feeling.

Big human-nature words covering a lot of what is bigger, deeper, and more intense than simple physical desires. To a large degree, you can get to know what someone is really like from their yearnings. Which is definitely way more significant than vain, limited earnings, which is, ultimately not where It’s really at.

a cold snap over ON/Eastern Canada is over “Canada”, ignoring that AB and SK are also in Canada.

This ON egocentrism has long been around. When I grew up in Winnipeg in the ’50s and ’60s, I used to think that the city was, geographically, in the center of Canada. And so I was quite surprised to hear, in recent decades, that ON was ‘Central Canada’.

No, I still don’t believe that T.O. is the center of Canada on any significant level. I believe my eyes and not the T.O. media hijacking of physical truth.

63-year-old Suzanne Vega, whom I once went to see in 2010 at Arden Theatre, is touring the U.K. currently. She did a Carson McCullers project and those songs are on her 2016 album. She has remained one of the most interesting female singer-songwriter-performers since the 1980s.

de Montaigne.

It’s been quite the 10+ year trip, personally speaking, this blog.

Montaigne’s Essais offered the best model of what I wanted to write beyond my poetry, fiction, and nonfictional prose. I set out in 2012, originally to record my thoughts and, indeed, if you go back to that first year, you’ll find many essays about ‘big’, general topics and themes, which arose for me, initially, in my high-school English teaching and my textbook editing and writing, and morphed into this blog as overviews and what Marshall McLuhan called “probes”.

(I am, incidentally, under no illusions that there are readers who’ve ‘dropped by’ and found what I’m doing to be as vain and frivolous as Montaigne said at the outset about his own essays.)

For me, this consciousness blog has brought much unexpected personal clarity, meaning, and purpose–all from the desire to make a record of my ephemeral thoughts and interests. I confess I did want to philosophize a bit along the way though maybe some didacticism did creep in here and there. (You do have to remember, context-wise, that I was a teacher and lecturer for 40 years!)

Overall, like Montaigne, who had also retired to write in his tower, I wanted to write in the sanctorum of my study once I had stopped public appearances at teacher conventions and doing textbooks around 2010. I wanted to write about what came to me on a given day, cobbling together the myriad blog entries that subsequently unfolded very naturally.

These, then, are my essais–my Montaigne-inspired musings, attempts, tries, learnings, experiences, memories, summations, ‘test flights’: these loosely-woven-together reflections on personal consciousness.

I have long pondered, like Montaigne, life in the moment, life en passant, life recollected, autobiographically, in effect. Like him, I have gone off in all directions recording trivia, family stuff, stories from the media, and completely imagined topics as in the large batches of poetry hither and yon.

And the result has been that I have found a surfeit, an unlimited amount of wide-ranging subject matter and much that I have come to accept about life and human nature in the pleasurable process. 

I must conclude, though, that the this project has brought me much satisfaction in sharing and connecting with friends. And, if there was something I was restlessly questing to do when “Tothineownselfbetrue.ca” began, it has been more than adequately satisfied and today I am very much at peace.

Amazing effects!
We used to have a poodle and when you would crack an orange in the downstairs kitchen, she would immediately come running from upstairs as the molecules released would be immediately detected by the dog’s extraordinary nose.
Always the same pattern.
Start to peel the orange, next you’d hear some commotion upstairs and dog feet hitting the floor, and a rapid descent to arrive at wherever you were standing. 10 seconds or less!
I figure the oranges were highly addictive (part of 1 is more than enough for a dog at a time).

Hard drug decriminalization will make everything worse.
I don’t recommend a visit to downtown Vancouver.

January 22, 1967, Philharmonic Hall, New York, from their legendary North American tour.

Three albums in the can including the beautiful Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme.

They’d already had their first big hits on the top 40:
Sound of Silence
Homeward Bound
I Am a Rock
The Dangling Conversation
A Hazy Shade of Winter.

Paul Simon had established himself as a poetic songwriter and one of the top 2 writers of ’60s commercial folk-rock.

In this ‘naked’, well-recorded duo concert, you hear Simon shuffling between 6 and 12-string guitars often inserting unconventional, jazzy chords. And his shifts between singing melody and unique lower harmonies.

Garfunkle stands out with a truly amazing range of dramatically-high, shifting harmonies, periodically joining Simon on reinforced melody at strategic points.

The track listings include all those wonderful extra album cuts that, outstandingly, stand on their own and frequently create their own dazzling affects, e.g., “Syncopated time” vocalized in “Dangling”, their favorite song at the time.

If you want the best of early and mid S &G, this is The Album to check out and play over and over again. Intimate, folky audio pleasures unlimited guaranteed.

Bobby Hull, The Golden Jet, 84.

setting up everything in late November, then enjoying it till late January-early February. Outdoors, we periodically continue to use the front lights with snowman and the backyard deer lights into February-March.

Inside the house, we leave up the beautifully decorated, olde (3 decades) artificial tree (by our artsy daughter) till the end of January-start of February. We spend many a December and January afternoon tea in the living room along with Christmas or classical music (currently listening to Chopin), and sometimes, after supper, retire, initially to the same room to unwind and look at the lights. For two months of the year we have a colorful, indoor retreat from winter. The psychological and spiritual benefits cannot be undervalued.

(In the background, my parents’ old chair, my mother’s knitted throw, a squirrel pillow from our son, and a portrait of my parents.)