To thine own self be true

who enjoy what they have.”
-Yiddish Proverb

Repainting all our fences here myself one last time. Good experience calling for a variety of skills. Be prepared to go back the next day for touch-ups: important to have a variety of brush sizes and to use aluminum foil for wrapping used brushes if you plan to reuse them.

This time around, we have squirrel friends using the fences. I put up plant pots on fenceposts at strategic points, discouraging travel and then first painted all the fence tops and crossbeams which they use. Doing this all at once to minimize hassle for the critters. Paint usually dries in a couple of hours. Reverence for Nature 101.

UN reports 50 million persons living in human slavery world-wide in 2021. So much for how far civilization has brought us.

Director Jean-Luc Godard, director of Breathless, Contempt, Pierrot le Fou, and Weekend.

Still the most famous person in the world today (even deceased) being transported in a funeral motorcade.

We are unlikely to see as much attention paid to one person world-wide ever again.

Certainly not to Charles, whose reign shall be much shorter and much less influential and consequential.

–Macbeth

Indeed, 6 people we know have passed this year so far.

in E-Town.

Guy curled up to sleep midday on an outdoor parking stall today.

(Photo taken on the way to the dentist in Old Strathcona.)

“God Save the Queen” one last time.

1952: seems like only yesterday…

At the end of the school day, “God Save the Queen” was played over the intercom. We would dutifully stand and sing the words. This quaint custom continued in Canadian schools till about 1964.

–T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I am oft reminded of this key line in response to street killings and drugged-up crazies with no other higher purpose to their lives. Eliot’s distinction in choice puts everything into perspective: the best and worst of human instincts and behaviors.

Speaking personally, I’ve long lived a life of creating and making interesting, meaningful things out of nothing or the best available resources round me. Each day with the blog, for instance, I create something that is important to me and which I feel is worth communicating.

Some other examples:

Creating a significant Canadian book collection with blog

Creating a display for Remembrance Day to remember my father

Co-creating two significant, very interesting offspring

Creating my own chapbooks

Creating an interesting personal wardrobe

Creating innumerable imaginative stories and fantasies from a young age

Creating bands out of available friends to entertain various crowds and audiences

Creating various performing personas from my teen years on

Creating my own songs and discs of original poems and songs

Creating a 30-year high-school English teaching career to instill an interest in reading, writing, books, movies, music, and literature

Creating interesting vacations and trips for family

Creating over 50 textbooks and guides for junior and senior high English students

Creating a unique audio collection of favorite authors

Creating an interesting, curated Classics Illustrated comic collection

Creating a collection of signed memorabilia by famous performers and writers

Creating and collecting interesting, intriguing details and images that have interested me

Creating readers in my family

Creating relationships with wildlife in my yard

Creating relationships to last a lifetime

Creating relationships with pets

Creating in various media

Creating a successful, focused, serious-minded academic out of a truly weak, distracted student and first year u failures

Creating a grandfatherly equal-playmate persona to/for my grandsons

Creating ‘happenings’ for others going back to high school days

Creating memories of olde for online audiences

Creating special memories for my wife like afternoon tea at the Empress in Victoria

Creating awareness of the arts and significant creators and works online

Creating beauty at home

Creating pathways and connections to increased awareness and consciousness

is enjoying a certain vogue among the ‘loose screws’ on the loose in our midst: to wit, the Saskatchewan knife spree and, yesterday, the random knife attack on a street in North Edmonton.

Writers and poets have long been prescient in their predictions; T.S. Eliot predicted that civilization would end in people killing others in the street.

(Right again, Tom)