The Grumpy Owl

Like any community of malcontents and weirdos, writers have certain quirks in common.  One of these is the trunk. While it might look like someone just sits down and writes a novel, the process is much sloppier than that. Stories are started and abandoned. Some are finished but remain awful. There are pages of notes, half-thoughts, outlines of things that never went anywhere, letters to people one has not seen in twenty years, sometimes letters back from them, decent stories that still need work, things that could not sell, snippets of poetry and prose, rants, ramblings and drugged, up, delusional twitter feeds from some subconscious hellscape.  Every completed novel, the good, bad and the ugly, stands atop a mountain of corpse-words and that mountain is put in the trunk.

It’s probably not a coincidence that a trunk looks like a coffin.

Then again, coffins sometimes look like fish.

My trunk is not actually a trunk at all.  It’s a big old clothes drier that was in my apartment when I got here.  Now it’s packed tight with paper.

While every writer has their trunk, every writer relates differently to it.  Stephen King took parts of his and made it into the Bachman Books.  Naked Lunch was edited together from parts of Burroughs’s trunk.  I seem to recall some poet throwing theirs overboard while at sea.  I never even look in mine.  I have a seperate space for things I can look at.  Those things don’t require anything as large as a trunk.

My trunk terrifies me.

Just sitting here, thinking about it, shrinks my lungs. There’s a lot of very bad writing in that drier.  A lot of very bad writing that I, knowing nothing, once thought was very good writing.  The bad prose is, perhaps, forgivable. The confidence with which I wrote it, not so much. When I was a child I was told that looking directly at the sun would cause blindness. Like Santa Claus, God and dentistry, that turned out to be bullshit. But I know that looking in that trunk would cause a fit of self doubt leading directly to block. That’s how bright my humiliation is.

I never had any natural talent but I can’t even begin to fathom what I was doing with some of that crap.  Thinking most of it was bad enough.  Actually going to the trouble of writing it down and thinking it was good enough to ever be read by anyone? The stark ratio of shit to quality that I produce?  That’s enough to turn one off the whole enterprise.

And I would quit if I could – Santa-God-Dentist knows, I have tried.

But our virtue and our vice often comes from the same thing.  Once I make up my mind about something, I’m willing to see it right through to the bitter end.  When smarter men would give up and stay down, I keep getting up.  Though this is often portrayed as virtue, it’s a dangerous one.  It’s sent me on benders, got me kicked in the face and kept me in relationships much longer than was good for anyone.  I play to extinction.  I know this about myself. It’s not as romantic as it may sound.  I’ve spent the last few years trying to learn failure.

Giving up can be very good for you.

I was a child when I decided to be a fiction writer.  I had no idea what that meant.  I knew it meant writing stories so I dedicated myself to that.  As far as the sort of life writers led, what they did on their spare time or how they made a living, I was completely clueless.  I wasn’t raised around professors, scientists or authors.  Quite a few writers were.  Insofar as I’ve ever been jealous of another person’s upbringing, I’m jealous of that. It might have saved me a great deal of trouble. But I also know this – It would’ve ruined me.

Because, when I started reviewing books and saw what most writers actually do, I knew that wasn’t for me.

Not knowing any of that or having the sense to figure it out and quit while I was ahead, I taught myself how to write. I cannot ever recall getting any advice or anything remotely approximating an education from my school teachers. I was never even taught the formal rules of grammar and punctuation. To this day, I have no idea what they are and navigate by feel. What I did get from these people was encouragement. This was the last thing I needed.

I didn’t even know what books I should be reading. I’d find an author I liked, find out what authors they liked (if I could – this was pre-internet) read those authors and try to find out who they liked and read that.  This was a path that took me from 80s horror to science fiction, to the beats, to the lost generation, back into Victorian novels and French Romanticism, then, eventually, to Homer. I stole everything I could from these folks. Usually breaking it on my way out the back door.

At about age 18 or 19 –I’d already quit school and moved to Toronto- I came into a copy of William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well.”  Although this is a guide to writing non-fiction, it was the first book I’d ever read that imparted sensible advice on building a sentence. It emphasized clarity. From there, it was on to “The Elements of Style.”  This remains my most treasured reference book.  I prefer it to the dictionary and I really like the dictionary. Those two books taught me how to write. They gave me new eyes.

It made me look at my previous work how my first bespoke suit made me look at my previous clothes.

Having learned as much as I could on my own, I decided it was time to try attended Humber school for Writers where I had the privilege of being taught for a week by Robert J. Sawyer.  It was the first time that I’d learned anything about writing from another human being and I learned quite a bit.  I learned the names of some things that I had figured out for myself and gained a much better understanding of the rules governing them.  It made quite a bit clear.  He did say, however, that I was “a writer of enormous talent” and I thought of all those late nights and long hours  trying to figure out how a sentence worked and shuddered.  In spite of this, if you -for some damn reason- aspire to be a writer, I’d recommend him highly.  The Humber School for writers, not so much.

My trunk is full of stuff I wrote before knowing any rules and the stuff I wrote while trying to apply them.  While I understood and agreed with the principles, there’s a pretty big gulf between knowing something and being able to do it.  I know how to throw a curve-ball but I sure can’t throw a curve-ball.  Shit, I know how to throw a knuckleball and I probably couldn’t even get one of those out of my hand let alone reach the plate with it.  And most of my trunk is written with the sort of arrogance that one only ever finds in the truly ignorant.

It came easy.  Shit usually does.

Looking at my trunk makes me feel like a pitcher watching a highlight reel of his very worst moments from little league on.  You might be able to say in some cold objective voice: “Look how far you’ve come! You can actually throw a strike now!” You might even be right.  But it’s not a cold objective thing and, holy shit, it is not the sort of thing anyone needs to be thinking about right before they take the mound.  If you look at a pitcher, when things start to go real bad, you can see that movie playing in their eyes.

The greats can battle through that.  They can ignore it.  Everyone else carries it with them and reenacts it.

As far as I go, I find it hard enough to face every blank page and the failure, fuck-ups and embarrassments it represents, without waking up every single day with a drier full of them at the head of my bed.  I’m gonna throw all that old writing out.  If I ever need to mine stories or ideas out of my trunk, I’ve made a  bigger mistake than could ever be found within it.  Because, even worse than the prose is the man who wrote it.  And I’m always going to have to face him.  When things go bad, when I’m stuck and whenever I’m gripped by doubt, I’ll see that man.  i’ll be goddamned if I ever depend on him for anything and I sure don’t need an altar to the bastard.

The mirror is a tombstone that always looks backwards and the mirror is enough.

Tags: memories, the trunk, writing

Purging induces nostalgia.  Stalin must have occasionally sat back, sipped his vodka and thought fondly back on the days when he was Koba.  Perhaps, as he starved millions of Ukrainians, he’d gaze at some laughing picture of Lenin and him, everyone else erased as the current policy demanded, and wonder how he’d gone from a lowlife bankrobber to the highlife Steel Man.  Seems like a lifetime ago, he might have reflected.  Catch another wistful tear in his mustache.  Salt and vodka.  More meat than steel.

Unlike Stalin, I’m clean-shaven but, almost exactly like him, I’m having a purge.

It’s not the first time.  I usually target some specific area of life much in the same manner that he would target ethnicities or geographic regions.   I’d clean out a single room like he’d clean out the North Caucuas, attack and dump a specific thing just as he would go after the Jews during his anti-semitic phase.  This time, however, it’s a general purge.  Everything must go.  Furniture, objects, appliances, art and shoes.  Even books, those sacred cows of my every purge, have been bagged and dumped.  Good bye books.  Go poison someone else’s mind.

Like in my imaginary Stalin, this has created a bit of nostalgia.

Going through all your stuff takes you to rarely visited nooks and crannies to find things you forgot even existed.  The old notebooks, novels and books I once read; the photographs, sketches and birthday cards; the put aside for further use, the kept for fear of offence and the relics of religious, drug frenzies all combine into an image of my past.  It’s a collage of a stranger’s face.

And I should know this stranger.  He’s me.

But I don’t know him.  He’s him.

I’m not sure how much stock you (or I) put in that personality test stuff but like many people I took the tests when I first got the internet.  I always came up as INTP, which is the architect and much of that portrait certainly rang true with myself and the people who knew me.   I only mention it here to segue-way into my next point while lending it a degree of (questionable) authority.

It seems that this type –and myself– will often state their ideas as if they are blunt, incontestable facts with little regard for whether or not anyone understands them.  Many people find this trait off-putting.  Yet the trait does not arise from the belief that my opinions are true.  Nor does it mean that these opinions are rigid objects in spacetime that I just blurted out; sprung fully formed from my head like Athena from the skull of Zeus.  They are open for question and they have been thought about.  I might share my conclusions but almost never show my work.

Sometimes, it seems, not even to myself.

Looking through my old stuff, finding things I had forgot, I am faced with all that work.  All those ideas that led me down false avenues, all those notions I could have done without, all those mistakes made and all of shit that I put myself through pursuing things that either never existed and/or would not be worth having if they did.   It’s funny that such a thing would make me nostalgic.  I’ve never been happier in my own skin or my situation than I am today and yet, looking back, I feel a sort of need to return.  Like the the past is buried but has a ghost that shows up every once in a while for a couple of hours –as per ghost union regulations– and shakes its chains.  I want to go back, not to live there but to exorcise it.

I often feel alienated from my past.  Indeed, most of my life has been a series of rebellions against my own history.  Was a weakling, became a bully.  Lived in a village, moved to the city.  Loved drinking and quit.  So looking back is a funhouse mirror.  I can sort of see myself but mainly its distortions.  Like all of history, it was written by the victor.

Or will be.

Like I sometimes do on this blog when I feel the need to write something out of me, I’m tentatively thinking of doing a theme week.  If you haven’t endured one of these before, they sometimes last a week, sometimes much less and there’s no schedule to them.  They can be even more self indulgent and personal than normal.  To be honest, I don’t know why I call them theme weeks nor do I know why I even do them.  They seem like a good idea to start and never end feeling that way.  Every time I finish one I tell myself never again and yet here we are.

What can I say – It is what it it is.  For the next week, some of it will be as it was.

Tags: nostalgia

Just found my baby book while cleaning.  Here’s some of Mother’s notes:

“Ryan was an extremely good-natured little fellow – crying only when he was hungry.  He enjoyed travel; new places and faces and lots of attention.  Ryan had a winning smile for everyone and was a true little “charmer.” By six weeks, he was sleeping soundly thru’ the night and often he would awake with a smile to wish me good morning! Ryan was a BIG baby and at the age of 3 months was wearing some of his new outfits sized to fit 12-18 month old babies!!”

I have no idea what happened either.

Tags: baby, baby book, Ryan Oakley

I’ve been feeling strangely restless of late and last night, at about 2 am, I asked the wife if she intended to be awake until dawn.  Like me, she’s a night owl and usually goes to bed shortly before the sun comes out.  ”What time is dawn?” she asked.   I checked the weather network and found that the sun rose at 6:28.  Having informed her of this, I was pleased to learn that she would be awake.

“Let’s go to the park,” I said.  ”And look at birds.”

She found this idea agreeable and grabbed her camera.  We both wore pink, which garnered immediate compliments from cyclists.  For both of us!  This is quite odd as it’s usually my plumage that attracts notice while I tend to reduce the people beside me to invisibility.  ”Try to upstage me again,” I said to my dear wife, “and I will cut you.”

Taking my comment as a challenge rather than a warning, she pulled her switchblade and lunged towards my throat. Using the akido I learned in previous relationships, I disarmed her.  Our struggle brought us close together and our fight quickly escalated into passionate lovemaking on the sidewalk outside of the mini-mall.  This garnered no compliments from anyone.  It did attract the notice of the police.  Decoying them with the box of Timbits we keep for such purposes, we escaped into the park.

It was a shockingly beautiful morning.  So beautiful, that I had threaten to cut it too.

Pictures with captions after the jump.  None have been manipulated in any way.

(more…)

Tags: bespoke, dandy, high park, park, pink suit, Ryan Oakley, walk

A picture of me last winter, maybe the winter before. I’m not sure.

Taken by ShoMerde.

Tags: Ryan Oakley, shomerde

Tags: Alexyss K. Tylor, common bitch, vagina power

I wrote a guest editorial for Auxiliary Magazine.  You can download the pdf here.  I did not write my bio and I’m not taking any responsibility for that.

Auxiliary is an alternative fashion, music and lifestyle magazine - available online and in print– and I was asked to do something that related to alt culture.  I don’t really know what alt culture is or where I fit into it.  Am I an alternative?  I doubt it.  I did drop out of high-school instead of riding the office train to retirement at sixty five but, far as I can tell, I never had alternative to being myself.  Most of the important decisions I made turned out to be irreversible before I knew they were important.  I suspect most people are in the same boat.

Not really sure what to write, cognizant that people only listen to me because I dress well and determined to give the public what they want, I wrote an editorial comparing alt culture to the dandy. Seemed apt.  And, if not, at least it’s some bullshit I can stand behind.  Or in front of.  I do have a book to promote, ya know.

I don’t read many magazines but Auxiliary seems decent, which is a shame.  I prefer indecent publications like American Conservative or anything else that includes splayed vaginas like Pat Buchanan.  But Auxiliary lacks nudity and remains suspiciously quiet on the state of the American family and illegal immigration.

I suspect “alt” is just a codeword for secret homosexual, communist Illuminati agenda.

Aside from myself, you’ll find a lot of pictures.  If, for some reason you prefer reading to gawking at (clothed!?) goth girls, there’s Clint Catalyst, Nina Flowers, industrial band Android Lust and Andy Deane as well as an interview with Michael Swaim of little known humor site Cracked.com.

Anyway, go have a look.  Enjoy or don’t.  I’m not going to tell you how to live your fucking life.

Tags: alt culture, auxiliary magazine, editorial, grumpy owl, Ryan Oakley

“Last, but not least, the man who probably better than anyone else understands the psychology of the Attentäter is M. Hamon, the author of the brilliant work Une Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel, who has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:

“The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of Anarchist, whose mentality is the aggregate of common psychic characteristics. Every Anarchist partakes sufficiently of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate him from other men. The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,–opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,–endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.”

To the above characteristics, says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanour, frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and courage beyond compare.”

–Emma Goldman; The Psychology of Political Violence

Tags: anarchism, aranrchy, emma goldman, the psychology of political violence

Is this man a mother?

Mothers Against Drunk Driving is at it again: Come August, if you are below 22, you will need a zero alcohol blood level to drive a car.

It’s unreasonable but not unexpected.  This is one of the very worst charities in existence.

MADD was founded by a decent woman with decent intentions.  Candy Lightner, whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver, set to work raising awareness about the issue and passing legislation about it.  She quit the organization in 1985, feeling that MADD had been hijacked and saying that the group had “ become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned … I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”   This is a distinction that MADD seems incapable of making.

They recklessly inflate their statistics.  Notice that they talk about ‘alcohol related accidents.’  This is any accident that can be related to alcohol in any way.  Did you have a beer at lunch and a sober person ran a red light and crashed into you?  Did your passenger have a blood alcohol level higher than zero?  Was an empty beer can found in your car even though you had no alcohol in your system? According to MADD, these are alcohol related accidents.

Even for statistics, it’s corrupt.   I have not looked at the numbers for car crashes involving people below the age of 22 but I imagine that there are more accidents  in general -not just “alcohol related- than in older drivers.  Hence the insurance costs.

As far as fundraising goes, MADD just received a D (a scale from A to F ) from the watchdog organization, The American Institute of Philanthropy.  This was caused by its poor spending practices and lack of victim support.

“The AIP says while most charities spend $35 to to raise $100. MADD has spent nearly double that amount. It also says in recent years they have spent $30 million on salaries, leaving just one third of its budget for victim services.”

The American Beverage Institute (a restaurant trade organization)  agrees, saying that, in 2008 MADD spent almost $30 million on salaries, leaving just a third of its budget, or $15 million, for charitable work and victim services.  They add that:

“Ten to fifteen years ago, Mothers Against Drunk Driving really did shift their focus away from hardcore drunk drivers and targeting them, getting them off the road and policies that did that and going after social drinking of all kinds. They need to shift back, go back to basics.”

And they probably would get back to basics if they could.  Problem is, they’ve already achieved every single legislative goal they started with and quite a few that drove their founder straight into the arms of the liquor lobby.  Yet they’re still making laws.  No wonder.  They make a lot of money from doing so.

Now, while one should believe The American Institute of Philanthropy, one could sensibly point out that the American Beverage Institute has a vested interest in badmouthing MADD.  But if one is concerned with vested interests, they might also consider the one that MADD has.  They too are a multi-million dollar organization.  One that has a male CEO.  For those of you unfamiliar with biology, it is possible for a male to be against drunk driving but impossible for him to be a mother.  This matters because so much of MADD’s cache is based on “motherhood.”  Would you expect a group called Canadian Fathers for Change to be headed by an American woman?

For everyone involved,  MADD is a money making scheme.  They should have no place in forming the laws of this country.  That the media gives them respect, air time and acts as if MADD are serving the interests of the people, when they are simply serving the interests of a small, greedy and puritan group while taking advantage of their mostly well-intentioned but hopelessly naive donors, never fails to amaze me.   Then again, MADD does buy a lot of advertising.

Tags: canada, charity, chuck hurley, corrupt, drunk driving, law, madd, prohibition, zero alcohol

To impress a selection of war criminals, our government recently spent a small fortune on an artificial lake and some wooden deck chairs.  Since the wife and I are not war criminals (yet) we were not allowed anywhere near this costly display.  So we decided to accept the next best thing: A trip to the Muskokas.

We were surprised to discover that real lakes and chairs are much larger than their fake counterparts.

Size is relative.

The trip was partly a much needed vacation and a chance for my wife to spend some time with my family so that she might ally with them against me.

(more…)

As I take people like Oscar Wilde, Cicero and Friedrich Reck-Malleczenwen as my models of political dissent, I think it’s important to remember that even in horrible times, especially then, beauty, dignity and basic human decency are of paramount importance.  Although they are the first things to become improbable, you must never allow your better parts to become impossible.  So, as counterpoint to the barbarity of the weekend, I’m collecting some images of myself in some nice bloody suits.  Because this is an image heavy post, there’s a jump.  So, if you want to see more, jump!

(more…)

Tags: anarcho-dandyism, dandarchism, dandy, G20, style, toronto

It’s Canada Day and I usually like to mark the occasion with some flag vandalism, a rant against the nation state in general and this one in particular, and then spend the next six months sifting through a selection of insults, threats and various other comments.  I’m not in the mood this year.

Usually, my Canada Day post is a visceral  reaction to the idiotic, nationalistic exceptionalism that most Canadians feel.  They think this country is so much better, so much more free and so much more egalitarian than any other place on earth. Just like people do on any other place on earth.

This year, in Toronto at least, where white folks got a tiny taste of how Canada treats so many other people both here and abroad, not many people are feeling like that.

They want to.  I can sense this.  And I’m not one to kick my enemy when he’s down.  Not unless he’s trying to get back up.

So let me just slip one to the ribs here.

I’ll be attending today’s protest to have an independent inquiry into the events of the weekend (hopefully by Amnesty International) and I fully expect to hear the protesters singing the national anthem.  It’s not a practice I’m ever comfortable with but now, after that nation spent a drunken weekend chasing people about with sticks and on a day when our taxes are being raised, it now seems especially ludicrous to gather together and sing its praises.  But people will.

They want their rudely shattered delusion back in place.
These post-summit protests are an exercise in reassurance.  Many seem to feel heartbroken about the events of the weekend.  They feel like their boyfriend has broken up with them and now they don’t know what to do.  Mainly, they want everything back to normal.  This urge for a return to status quo is called reactionaryism.  They’re not terribly concerned that it was the status quo that created this situation in the first place.  They simply think: If you just stop drinking, everything can be like it was before! They want the police chief to resign.  A scapegoat.

As if any other police chef on the the planet would have handled things differently.

I can’t really blame them.  Change and loneliness is a frightening situation, especially for those who are dependent on the state for their livelihood.  The people are much like a battered housewife.  They want the husband to stop beating them, desire a return to a happier time and, lacking any self-esteem, are now eager to believe any Sunday morning apology they might get.  Yet it’s a dysfunctional relationship.  We saw an expression of that dysfunction –not its cause– over the weekend.  Our hubby, the state, might promise to quit drinking but can we believe him?  Has he earned our belief?

I don’t believe he has.

And yet, while I will not condemn black bloc tactics as their violence is nothing when measured against that of nations, I cannot ever endorse anyone ever purposely breaking something they cannot rebuild.  If you cannot install a window, you have no business breaking one.  Smashing is the easiest and most meaningless aspect of anarchism.  If we are ever going to leave the state behind, we must do the hard work and form better systems.  We must make ourselves less dependent on it so that we can leave.  Conflict will then arise, to be sure, but it will be on our home turf, not theirs, and we will have something to protect.  We need to be independent.

The first step, I suppose, is admitting that you have a problem.

That you might be suffering from a carefully cultivated Stockholm Syndrome.

I know the bulk of this city will accept the flowers and apology, then talk itself back into the lie, probably within the month, but I also know that some of you won’t.  I would urge those ones not to turn to the smashing of things but to the building of them.  We are hostages and breaking the dishes, while satisfying in the short-term, will accomplish nothing.  We need an escape plan and place to go to.  That is where we need to direct our energy.  Not towards politics but towards removing them from our lives.

Tags: canada day day, G20, toronto

A wonderful Saturday afternoon in the park wrecked by impertinent civil servants.

In all the hub-bub about burning police cars and smashed up Tim Hortons, we’ve missed something rather important: Our police officers are impolite.  Forget enforcing the rule of law, many of these “gentlemen” do not even subscribe to the rules of manners.

Just today, I was in Queen’s Park with the wife and there was rather a lot of these fellows.  Apparently, they wanted us to leave.  I have no idea why as they never gave me a reason.  Instead of approaching us like reasonable adults and offering us an umbrella (it was raining – serve and protect)  they charged towards us, banging shields and beating the snot out of whomever they could find.  I have not seen behavior of that order since my Nan was healthy.  To top things off, they kept riding about on their horses, never thinking to bring a pony for the children.

They hogged the horses, allowing no one else to ride or even stroke these magnificent beasts.

Had they bothered to find out, they might have discovered that my wife was new to this country and they were giving her a rather bad impression of it.  When I had my photo taken with them, only one responded to my request that they say cheese.  The others were a real bunch of sourpusses.

From what I’ve heard, they’ve spent much of the weekend acting like this.  They’ve built fences all over town, tore up all sorts of trees, closed down the subway system and then tried to blame all of this on “anarchists.”  I’d like to know when exactly we started allowing anarchists to run our public transport.  Or the police for that matter.

Trying to understand the sudden shift in police attitude towards me. Did I offend them? Are they racist? Just what is their problem?

And I hate to accuse the police of racism when they have so much reason to hate every race in this city, but I feel I must.  For yesterday, I walked around the security fences with a white girl (Danielle from Final Fashion) and the police acted like decent human beings.  They smiled, said hello and good day, answered me when I asked them how they were doing and were altogether pleasant.  But today, when I went to the park with my black wife, they completely ignored me and then came chasing after the pair of us with shields and truncheons.  If that’s not racist, I don’t know what is.

If a waiter acted that way, the man would be sacked.

The amusing thing about all this is how deeply the police object to their being any weapons at a protest.  I recall a protest their union held a while ago where a bunch of them showed up wearing guns at City Hall and none of them even faced job discipline.  Considering that, it seems indecent to object to sticks or whatever these people carry to fight men with guns.  And they also dislike masks but almost every officer of the law I saw today wore one.  They also carried more bondage equipment than one of the G20 delegate’s whores.

It's not always easy to keep smiling when people are acting badly but it is quite rude to point out their poor manners. You must assume they know no better.

Really, the police and black bloc should find a nice little thunderdome where they can fight all this out with the same weapons.  If they cannot agree on a proper duel, they could at least settle this dispute with a softball game.  That way, the rest of us could go about our business like the peaceful, more or less decent folks we are.  Uninterrupted by the elite, their cops or any window breaking.

And while I long ago gave up on people like this holding to the rule of law, is it too much to hope that they hold to the rule of manners?  Or can we really expect worse behavior from our police than we can a child at the dinner table?  If that’s the case, perhaps we should get them their own little table.  Until they grow up.

Tags: anarcho-dandyism, dandarchism, G20, toronto

Tags: fake lake, G20, toronto

A lot of installing and working takes it out of a man.

It looks like my desktop is on its last legs.  This, of course, has happened a few times.  In the past, I’ve replaced it with another desktop but this time I just couldn’t see the point.  I’m not some sort of professional graphics guy and laptops are plenty powerful for the sort of text-based shit I do.  So I decided to clear up some space and get a laptop.

This is my first new monitor in years and years.  I’m happily surprised but I’m not going to bore you with all of my “Oh Golly!” and “WHERE THE FUCK IS THE COMMA KEY?” type stuff.   I’m just going to mention that the layout of this site will change a bit.  I assume that most of you folks aren’t using a four year old monitor like I was.  (What can I tell you: My tailor gets my extra cash.) So I’m sure that my site has looked quite different to you than it has to me.  Umm, sorry about that.

I’m trying to fix that up and make things a bit prettier around here.  If you’re having any problems  or have any feedback, feel free to contact me, comment or whatever.  I can’t promise to listen as I’m mainly concerned with making it look good to me but I will try to be civil.