blogging

What should I be thinking about now? How about death and dying, cultural discombobulation, misogyny, evolution, and pain management?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

I told you last post that I would be giving up on my blog. That’s still the case. I’ll likely wrap it up by the end of this month at least in its current format, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped thinking or wanting to write. When my readership fell below fifty views after a post, I decided that maybe it wasn’t worth the hassle of thinking about writing every week. Of course, some people might argue that if I have only one reader that should be enough for me. There’s an argument that can be made both ways. Who knows, things change. 

So, what should I be thinking and writing about now? As I get ever closer to death, it’s hard not to think about death and dying. My sister-in-law who was a couple of years younger than me, died recently. It seems like someone in my immediate circle of friends and family is dying every month. Such is life when one gets to a certain age. Of course, it’s not only older people who die. A forty-nine year old doctor in my Family Clinic died recently of heart failure. However, it’s certainly true that most Canadians, in any case, die at an advanced age. That will be me for sure because I’m already most of the way there.

Lately I’ve been trying to create a metaphor for the dying process. I think I’ve come up with one that makes sense. It’s probably not new to me, either. It’s the image of a wall, maybe a stone wall that can be seen in the distance just beyond a large, open field. In our younger days, the wall is low and hardly visible. We only pay attention to it fleetingly, maybe when we visit someone in the hospital, when we leave a funeral or witness a fatal car crash. Our physical vulnerability is only too obvious at these times. The truth is that we would have a hard time living our lives if we did not ignore the wall most of the time. Some people actually convince themselves that the wall doesn’t even exist and that even if it did, we could walk right through it. The thing is the wall is always there. As we get older the wall gets more visible. It gets bigger, thicker and broader and we begin to see individual stones in it. It begins to draw our attention more frequently. We seem to be getting closer to it and in fact we are.

My wall is clearly visible to me now. It’s so big, I can’t see much beyond it. Earlier in my life I could see mountains on the other side of it. Not anymore. Now, the wall demands my attention. It will not allow me to turn away from it. In a sense it’s a beautiful, solid wall. It’s obvious that much care was taken in its construction spanning the whole evolutionary time on this planet. Everyone has to come to the wall. No one is allowed to pass through it.

The denial of the existence of this wall is the essence of Ernest Becker’s work. My early posts on this blog consist of an exposition of Becker’s work and his contribution to understanding the denial of death. His last book, one that he had no hand in publishing because he was dead, was rightly entitled Escape From Evil. The evil that Becker writes about is death and disease. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the power of denial in our lives because it’s a power that has determined so much of the death and destruction this planet has experienced with Homo sapiens at the centre of it.

Let’s now explore that denial a bit from a different perspective than I would have normally used. First up is how our social world seems to be coming apart at the seams with the war in the Ukraine, growing authoritarian at home and the pandemic that doesn’t seem to want to go away. I’m talking about the discombobulation of our social world and our reactions to it. Later I write about misogyny and evolution with a nod to Aristotle, the consummate misogynist and other philosophers of his time and ilk. But first, discombobulation.

Discombobulated  

This is my drawing of discombobulation. It’s my personal visual statement of my reaction to the Kurt Vonnegut world we live in today.

The word discombobulation is an old word from the 19th Century that shouldn’t be forgotten because it so expresses the sense that not much makes much sense anymore. The world really hasn’t ever made much sense if one considers humanity’s millennia-old legacy of war and brutality combined with a huge dose of goodwill and caring underlying much of human history. It seems as though every generation has to learn this truth on its own never learning from history. I’ve spent my whole adult life in a quest to unravel this discombobulation. I think I have things more or less worked out (with the help of a lot of people now dead who were much smarter than me), but I can’t seem to communicate that to enough other people for my knowledge to make much sense. At least I feel that way sometimes. I may be like the proverbial falling tree in the forest with no one around to hear it fall. What does it matter? Well, it does matter to me. Sometimes I think of my writing as a drop in the bucket of cultural commentary, but it’s still a contribution.

That said, it’s a contribution that will leave many people behind. Admittedly, reading my blog posts requires a modicum of literacy. I don’t speak to a Grade 8 audience. That in itself will limit the influence of my work. My personal intellectual voyage can never be yours, but we must learn from each other otherwise the discombobulation wins. Patently, there are many people (No, I haven’t done a survey although others have) who are incapable of hearing what I have to say because they have been captured by an ideology that is inherently contradictory in itself but still seems to speak to their individual lives somehow. I’m talking about people who deny that we are inherently social and dependent on each other not only in our families and other intimate relationships, but in a collective sense with people we don’t know personally but who, combined, hugely affect the world we live in.*

I’m referring here to people who see taxes and government as an infringement on their freedom, whatever that means. They have no idea themselves what ‘freedom’ means, and it’s almost embarrassing if you dare ask them what they mean by it because their answers are naive to the extreme and essentially childish. In other aspects of their lives they may be competent enough, but when it comes to thinking about their place in the world and their responsibility to others, they just have no idea, except to spout platitudes they have absorbed by watching too much Fox News or have been absorbed by concentrating on their belly buttons for too long. I’m no big fan of much of what government does, but I’m not willing to chuck out the baby with the bathwater either. 

Recently, Carolyn and I listened to a CBC Ideas podcast on The Authoritarian Personality. The people who fit this profile are the people I’m talking about. The Authoritarian Personality is an idea popularized after the Second World War by Theodore Adorno and others to try to explain why people are attracted to fascist leaders. The book is available to be borrowed for free at the Internet Archive but it’s been revived and republished with an introduction by Peter Gordon of the Frankfurt School and is available on Amazon in various formats, including as an eBook, but it ain’t cheap. The book was first published in 1969 but was in writing for some time before that while the research for it was being conducted in California. The book itself and the blazing controversy surrounding it can be seen at the Internet Archive by simply typing in The Authoritarian Personality in the search function and looking around. Some of the reactions to the book are a full example of discombobulation. In fact, I would argue that the book is itself a treatise on cultural discombobulation as are reactions to it. We live in a discombobulated world but there’s nothing new about that.

So, I’m thinking that this post is long enough. I have probably another 5 or 6 thousand words I want to get out of my system at the moment but I think I need to break those up into manageable chunks. Therefore, I’ll leave this post as it is but I’ll carry on writing about the other topics in the title of this post and present them to you as soon as I get them fleshed out with good references, etcetera. Besides, it’s six o’clock in the morning and I’ve been writing since two thirty. Yesterday I went back to the hospital to get back on my chemo regime. The dexamethasone I took yesterday won’t let me sleep anyway, so instead of fretting that I can’t sleep, I might as well write, but enough for tonight…it’s getting light out and the coffee beckons.

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*This is a disparate group of people from grocery store clerks and managers, to cops, to delivery drivers, to municipal workers, librarians, veterinarians, road crews, mechanics, garbage (solid waste) collectors, baristas, Hydro crews, emergency personnel of all kinds, Hospital workers including medical doctors, nurses, technicians, etcetera. I mean anyone you come into contact with on a daily basis and who provides you with a service you depend on. Just think about it. You are massively dependent on others, even people in China and other Asian countries who make your T-shirts, jeans, phones and computers for you, and on the people who work on the planes and boats that get those products to you. How can anyone deny that? But they do because to recognize this fact they would have to accept that their individualism is contingent and not absolute. We are not free to do whatever we want. Let’s just get over that silly notion. I used to challenge my students to unplug their homes, and I mean in every way: cut off water, electricity, the internet, waste collection, everything. Do that for a few days and then let’s discuss how independent and ‘free’ you are.

Blog Down!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 5 Comments

So, in the next couple of days I’ll make a final decision but as it stands, I’ll be shutting down this blog in the next month. I may shift my attention to another blog I have, a free one, but I have yet to determine that too.

Thanks to those of you who have been loyal readers over the past few years.

All the best,

Roger

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 8 Comments

# 87. The Last Post in a Series.

Last Friday morning, we (Carolyn and I) had a meeting with my oncology consultant, Dr. Nicol Macpherson, at the BC Cancer Agency in Victoria. We meet with the oncologist in Victoria maybe three times a year. The rest of the time we have a local GP who specializes in cancer treatment. Our local GP oncologist is Dr. Bakshi. We’re quite happy with the service we get from the BCCA and from the local staff of nurses and Dr. Bakshi at the Cancer Care Centre at the Comox Valley Hospital. The meeting with Dr. Macpherson this morning was especially eventful. 

I knew that I was doing well with the chemotherapy and monoclonal antibody treatments I am getting. I started my current regime in mid-February of this year and the progress I made in a month was nothing short of stunning. We keep an eye on my frequent lab tests by logging into an Island Health website called MyHealth. On that site I get to see all the results of my lab tests, imaging results, and upcoming appointments. Obviously, we need to know what we’re looking at when we check out my blood serum profile including my paraprotein and Kappa Free Light Chain numbers which are of particular interest in my case. After some research and consultation, we now have a grip on what the lab results mean for my myeloma activity although the information is always incomplete and must be interpreted fully by someone who has better access than we do to the numbers. That someone is Dr. Macpherson in Victoria although Dr. Bakshi must also have access to my numbers, and my GP is probably copied on all the documentation coming from the hospital here and from Victoria. Now for the fun part:

So, Macpherson told us this past Friday morning that there is no trace of myeloma protein in my blood at the moment. No trace at all. He expects that that will be the case for the foreseeable future, years probably. 

We have been hoping for this result, but we had a bit of a setback late last year and early this year so we were doubtful that the zero myeloma protein in my blood would be an ongoing condition. It now appears that it is. The next few weeks will give us a definitive answer, but the situation looks very good. I have to keep reminding myself that myeloma is incurable but treatable. At the moment I’m in full remission. Inevitably the myeloma will make a comeback. We don’t know when, and that’s the frustrating part of this narrative. Still, we are in a good place right now and probably for some time to come. 

The situation with my cancer being resolved for the time being, I’ve had to rethink the focus of this blog. I have published well over four hundred posts but only eighty-seven addressing explicitly my experience with myeloma. Given the current situation I’ve decided to close the series of posts dedicated to myeloma and open up the blog for other topics and commentaries on current affairs, life and death. I started this blog in 2012, the year I retired. That’s quite some time. Maybe I’ll aim for a thousand posts. There’s no purpose in doing so but I can set up an arbitrary goal if I want. Whatever. 

Sometimes I’m tempted to shut the thing down completely but then I get the itch to write a commentary about current affairs, to get something off my chest, or just to post pictures of the beauty that surrounds me on our property here in Cumberland. We’re approaching the summer solstice. This time of year often brings unsettled weather and exponential growth in the garden which actually needs more heat and sun to ripen fruit and get the lilies to bloom. The lilies are coming up now, slowly, but soon they will colour the garden with splashes of red, yellow, orange, and white. The rhododendrons are still in bloom, at least some of them, but the dogwood and the wisteria have pretty much shed their blossoms and are moving on to create more branch and leaf structure. The weather prognosticators are suggesting that a warm, sunny trend is on the menu for next week. If that happens, we will again be able to sit out by the pond or on the deck next to the water feature there, drink tea and read. We will eat out on the deck again in warm comfort. 

Life is the weirdest thing, and I don’t mean just as it applies to humans. It seems a little perverse to me, actually. The whole thing does. The birth, growth, maturation, and then decay seem to be a waste of experience and a slap in the face to beauty which it prepares to annihilate in a short time in the last quarter of life. It celebrates renewal but only on the destruction of what went before. The death of one generation means life for the next one. For us humans the process of life is particularly insulting in that it promotes the growth and accumulation of knowledge, of piles of household goods, and property in general just as it prepares to shut it all down and make fodder out of it. Of what use is that? None that I can surmise. But, in any case, let’s not glorify usefulness. 

The concepts of use and purpose don’t apply to life or they apply completely to it. Death is necessary as a base for life. No death, no life. So, ultimately the purpose of death is to act as a basis for life. Life, in the spring, likes nothing more than a pile of shit or manure to drive new growth along. That may be true, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. My death is not far off. According to the statistics, I have maybe five more years before I reach the average length of life in Canada for males. Given the success we’re having with chemotherapy and monoclonal antibodies I could just reach the average lifespan. Eventually, myeloma may well kill me, but whatever, something has to do the deed. I need to die, we all do, to make room for future life. Bring it on.

A picture containing tree, plant, flower, arranged Description automatically generated
A nice picture of white, red, and orange lilies to end with.

Be a Blogger They Said!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

I don’t know how many times I sat down with my computer with the intention of writing this blog post. It’s frustrating no end. I write a few words then my brain just clams up not even allowing a single word license to start a sentence.

I guess after over five hundred blog posts, I can legitimately call myself a blogger. However, right now I’m feeling that my blogging mojo is taking a bit of a vacation. The last time I wrote anything on this blog was on April 11th, 2021. It was always my objective to produce a blog post a week. I was particularly successful in that after my myeloma diagnosis in October, 2019. Lately my resolve has been ground down by the utter tedium of my biweekly Daratumumab infusions and the overwhelming fatigue that are side effects of chemo meds. I can blame my chemo meds for my lack of productivity. I think that’s legitimate. But it’s frustrating none the less. Well, I can’t write worth a damn but I can sleep, that’s for sure.

Sleep! Wow, do I ever get a lot of sleep. It’s not unusual for me to sleep for 12 hours, say from 8 PM until 7 AM. Moreover, I’ll often nap sitting in my chair or even crash in bed for an hour or two during the day. Take today for example. I slept soundly last night with just one pee stop, then woke up again around six o’clock needing to pee I thought but no, I didn’t pee. I went right back to sleep and woke up at 8:28, two minutes before my med alarm. I usually get up by 7:30 at the latest, but not this morning. I actually woke up with a start, confused by the dream I had just had, a dream with my bedroom appearing as a recurring elements.

Over the past few days I’ve dreamt every night, and I’ve been able to recall my dreams. They always start with me in bed in the bedroom, confused by the room, where it is, and how to get out of it. I didn’t have a weird dream last night, but the night before, I dreamed that I woke up but it was so dark, I had no idea where I was. So, what to do? Slowly I got out of bed feeling around for a wall. I felt around tentatively for some time before I touched a wall and started off to the right feeling for something, anything familiar. I found nothing for some time then I felt what could have been the closet doors. I’d gone too far! So I backed down the wall feeling carefully for the door. Finally I found the door and opened it! And found myself just outside the bedroom by the washroom. That’s when I woke up, I think. On another night I dreamed that I was sleeping in the bedroom but that I had to wake up to go pee. This time I found the door easily enough, went out to have a pee, then leaving the bathroom I quickly realized that I was not in our house and that this place was totally unfamiliar to me. I immediately thought “Alice in Wonderland.” And that was about it just as I woke up, thankfully in my own bed and in my own bedroom.

The thing is that in these recurring dreams over the past week or so, I always woke up feeling trapped in a sense, at least trapped in the sense that I couldn’t find a way out of the bedroom, or if I found my way out of the bedroom, it wasn’t always in a familiar place.

Of course I immediately tried a little self diagnosis. The feeling of being trapped or unable to find a familiar place I felt might be analogous to the way I feel sometimes about my cancer. It’s a dark place with nothing familiar about it. Carolyn came to that conclusion too as she observed me going in and out of the hospital, taking chemo meds and being exhausted all the time. She psychoanalyzed me and came to these conclusions maybe even before I did!

The cancer I have is obviously unfamiliar ground, but it’s just a preliminary to death and dying. Even in my waking life I feel trapped by my cancer. There’s no way out of it. Or rather there’s just one way out of it because it is incurable. The way I see it, when I die I fall into a box with no past, no present, and no future. It’s a place, really, where even I don’t exist. I is a character that is only relevant in life and has no reality in death. Dying, then, is a process of the I fading away into nothingness.

This is enough for today. I’ve been sweating buckets just getting these few words out. I’ll try to get another post out in a week. I hope that by then I don’t still have a plug in the part of my brain that writes!

And Now For Something Completely Different: A Little Fiction.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Owen Bishop waited at the bus stop. He had arrived here after a long and twisted trip through various obscure parts of the Midwest and later, the states of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. He hitchhiked every where. On his last leg, the reefer transport truck driven by Ralph Swinden had picked him up in New Jersey and now dropped him off at this bus stop close to the Newport Bridge. Ralph would go on to meet a ship in Portland, Maine to pick up a load of fish to unload in Chicago. But first, he had to unload cabbage in Middletown.  

“Have a nice day, Owen,” shouted Ralph as Owen dropped to the ground from the passenger seat of the truck. 

“Do you think Auschwitz was intelligent?” Channeling Kurt Vonnegut he yelled this at Ralph as the truck pulled away. They had been having an increasingly acrimonious conversation as they went along about how intelligent the human species really was. Owen argued that we were stupid as anything and that cats and dogs were smarter than us. Ralph was a strong believer in the superior intelligence of man. (Ralph never used the term ‘human species’, he always used ‘man’. Ralph was like that.) Owen was getting more and more exasperated with Ralph having called him a silly man earlier on the trip. Ralph actually didn’t deserve that. He just wasn’t too bright. 

Owen was tired and hungry but compelled to be here. He had no idea why. The reason would be news to him. He glanced furtively at the sky. The bus he was to catch was late.  He hated waiting for a bus, especially when the stakes were so high. Right! Now he remembered! He needed to get to Newport now!

It turns out he needed to catch a spaceship to Mars and it was taking off from a secret base in Newport and it wouldn’t wait for him. But he didn’t know that just yet.

Well, truth be told, none of the above has any basis in reality. Owen was not at a bus stop somewhere near Newport, Rhode Island. He had not been in Ralph Swinden’s transport truck, and he was not waiting for a spaceship to Mars to pick him up. But that’s just me saying that.

Actually, he was in a basement suite in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Main Street and 30thAvenue. He would, of course, end up on Mars, but that’s a whole other story. That’s coming up. 

But first, some bitter truth about me. I am Owen Bishop’s brother and chronically bitter. I am (and was) supposed to look after him after our parents both died in a plane crash a few years ago while on their way to Puerto Vallarta for a “much needed vacation”. They hated each other so I could never figure out why they would want to vacation together, probably because taunting each other was so much fun. 

I can distinctly remember my mother saying to me: “Now, you know you have to look after Owen. You’re the strong one. Owen is twelve years old now but as you know he can barely tie his shoelaces before breaking down in sobs.” She said: “We are sort of fond of you son, but don’t let us down or we will quickly cease being fond of you. Get it? We need to be able to count on you to look after Owen if we are ever to relax!” 

Well, I let them down. Of course, with them being dead, that meant diddly-squat. It would have meant diddley-squat in any case. 

Owen went completely nuts when he was told by the police officer who came to our door on the evening of June 14th, 1994 to tell us our parents were dead. He never recovered. I expect he blamed himself for their deaths. My mother would have found a way to blame me. She was crazy like that. I felt nothing but relief at the news of the demise of our parents. Such a relief! 

I never did like Owen but I felt sorry for him in a way. He never did figure out that our parents were total nut jobs, completely insane. I figured that out early on. They started working on me when I was just a baby. They did the same to Owen but he never figured it out. 

This is how my parents worked: I’d be sitting in the living room on the couch reading a book. My mother who always sat in an overstuffed chair in front of the TV just finishing up her fourth glass of scotch. She’d say to me: “Come here kid. Take my glass into the kitchen and get your father to fill it up for me will ya.” So, I would. I’d take the glass into the kitchen and tell my father who was also finishing up his fourth glass of scotch that my mother wanted a refill.  He always sat at the table watching a small TV which sat on a shelf close to the fridge. My father and mother never watched TV in the same room. 

I’d bring him my mother’s empty scotch glass and tell him that she asked that he fill it. Well, there was no way he would ever do that. She knew that and I knew that. So, as predictably as ever, he told me to get lost. On that cue, I’d go back to the living room to report back to my mother. 

She’s be waiting for me, ready. She’d tell me something like this: “I never told you to bring my glass into the kitchen to your loser of a father to fill. Bring me the goddamn bottle of scotch!” So, I’d go back into the kitchen where they kept the scotch in a cupboard across from the fridge so it would be handy when it was time to put ice in it. 

I’d reach for the bottle and my father would yell at me: “DON’T YOU TOUCH THAT BOTTLE! If your mother wants a drink she can come get it herself.” So, I’d go back into the living room and tell my mother what my father had said, but she already knew what he had said because she could hear everything that was said in the kitchen from the living room. 

“I never told you to get me that bottle. Are you crazy? I’ll get the damn thing myself!”

So, she’d get up, stagger into the kitchen, find something handy to throw at my father, get the scotch and stagger back into the living room. My father always had at least six bottles of scotch stashed here and there in the house along with the one in the cupboard across from the fridge. He hated my mother but he did appreciate her taste in whisky. He would have fought my mother tooth and nail if he had thought for one minute that the bottle she was taking into the living room was the last one in the house. 

I figured out soon enough that my mother and father were both completely nuts. I never argued with them. That would have been pointless. I shrugged my shoulders a lot and ducked when they got close to me to avoid a backhand to the head. 

Owen on the other hand argued with them, cried, pounded the floor with his fists and eventually refused to leave his room. Poor Owen. He never got it. Out of body experiences were how Owen lived most of his life with my parents. He told me that when he was ten years old. I can’t really blame him for withdrawing like that after what he went through as a little kid. It was tough to get him grounded though. Really tough. 

Vancouver is a nice city. Owen and I first came here as patients at the Hollyhock Hospital in New Westminster, another city close to Vancouver on the north shore of the Fraser River. The Hollyhock Hospital specialized in treating people with addictions and mental illnesses using LSD among other drugs. It’s been closed for some time now. We both stayed there for about six months until our money ran out. I can’t say that either one of us improved much because of our stay at the hospital but we did realize that Canada was a pretty good place to live and we loved the Westcoast. We’ve lived in Vancouver now for twenty years. We live in a clean, spacious two bedroom basement suite in a nice house next to a church. The rent is reasonable. Nobody bothers us. It’s all very civilized. I say we’velived in Vancouver for twenty years, but I really mean me. Owen is alive alright and he’s here in body, but he’s mostly catatonic now and spends most of his time in astral travelling. At least that’s what he calls it. He has rare moments of semi-lucidity during which we can talk about these things. I don’t like him much, but he’s all I’ve got. 


MEH…

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

I can’t seem to write anything very serious right now. I’ve been researching democracy and capitalism for some time, reading like crazy, and I’ve come to a number of conclusions that I need to write about, but, it’s just not coming together for me right now. It will soon enough, but right now I have to entertain myself with something a little lighter.

Usually I write my blog posts in one go. I’ll research a topic for a while or one will drop itself into my lap…top (he,he) and I’ll sit down and write. Carolyn knows when I’ve been bitten by the writing bug because I go silent and withdrawn and my full attention is on the keyboard. When she tries to talk to me, I have to keep asking “What, Pardon me?” Then, she sometimes gets impatient. I can understand that. Problem is, I’m busy and concentrating on writing sentences, whole sentences that make sense. It doesn’t always happen, but I do make an effort.

I just finished writing an essay about Kurt Vonnegut and riding a ferry to Vancouver. It’s a two thousand word non-fiction piece. I’ve probably spent 40 hours on it all told. That’s an outrageous amount of time for me to spend on any writing project these days, since I’ve been retired from the work-a-day grind. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this essay yet, but I’ll decide soon. if you don’t see it posted here it’s because I’ve done something else with it.

I’ve read many of Kurt Vonnegut’s books. I’m re-reading Hocus Pocus right now then I’ll pick up Breakfast of Champions and read that again for the third or fourth time. The guy is fucking hilarious even if his novels are always tinged with at least a modicum of sorrow. Galapagos is one of my favourite novels of his. The premise of that book is that the human race has been infected with a virus or something that prevents reproduction so that the fate of humanity is sealed within a few decades. The only survivors are on the Galapagos Islands where they were safe from infection and a million years hence they look a lot like seals and live in the sea. It’s a fun read and I wouldn’t be at all too upset if the premise of this book became a reality. We as a species are right out of control.

So, what’s the connection between Vonnegut and riding the ferry to Vancouver? Well, ferry passengers often embody in a microcosm aa lot that is absurd about human life. Vonnegut would have a field day riding the ferry although I expect he might stay in his vehicle or take a plane instead of ever getting on a ferry.

I find ferry passengers highly entertaining most of the time. Sometimes I just find them annoying. Sometimes, I draw them, like these guys:

Mostly I don’t, because it’s hard to be discreet when I’m drawing. I have to look closely at my subjects at times and if they figure out what I’m doing, it could get embarrassing. It may be, of course, that they would be delighted and offer to buy my little drawings of them but then again, probably not. They’d probably just want me to give it to them and I’m not into that so much anymore. Oh, I do give away a lot of my drawings and prints, but not in the wintertime. Don’t ask me why.

It’s certainly true that a lot of ferry passengers are hugely entertaining, and mostly not deliberately, I fear. Invariably, there are people who are outrageously dressed, at least from my perspective, and there are others who are just plain silly like young people full of themselves and too self-absorbed to care about how their behaviour is affecting others on the boat.

Given enough time, I could write little stories about every single passenger aboard any ship on any trip just based on their appearance and demeanour. I could then weave those stories into a collage of silly speculation about what ferry travellers are up to when they’re not on the boat.

For example, the guy in the second picture above was checking out his cel phone. He was on that thing for a long time. I have no idea what he was looking at, maybe it was porn, maybe he was checking his dating site, maybe he was just surfing Facebook. Who knows. I didn’t ask him. I drew him instead. He never looked up so I was in no danger of him finding out that I was drawing him. His double chin really stood out! Mine does too when I look down like that. I wish he would have had a call from somebody while he was looking at his phone. I can make up a lot of stuff about somebody by overhearing conversations. I love eavesdropping. It’s just part of what makes me a social scientist.

So, enough of this silliness for today. I’ll get downright serious soon enough and then you’ll learn a thing or two!

So, where to from here?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Well, it’s January 1st, 2019. It’s late in the afternoon here. It’s broken cloud overhead and about 4˚C. This morning Carolyn and I went for a longish walk of about 5.3k on a lovely forest trail that used to be a railway bed. It runs between Cumberland and Royston. The trains that ran on the tracks mostly carried coal but there was also a passenger train that used the tracks now and again, even into the 1950s. Now, the trail is wide and flat as you would expect from a decommissioned rail bed. Ideal walking for me. Carolyn, on the other hand, walks as fast as a demon even though she’s 66 years old. I can barely keep up with her, but she indulges me and slows down, which for her is tough, I know. We miss our old walking companion, Wilco, aka Mr. Sniffy the Brittany spaniel. He died in July last year so now we can only walk with his memory. But I digress.

Last week I decided that I would continue blogging on any number of topics including the ones Jack Minard suggested: capitalism, democracy, liberalism, etc. However, I’ve also decided to write a sketch of how my intellectual development unfolded from as far back as I can remember. I spent a lot of time in universities and colleges during my lifetime and my ideas and viewpoints changed significantly and frequently as I read and had to incorporate my readings into what I had already read and studied. Teaching had a huge impact on how I approached subjects of study, what attracted my attention intellectually and practically in terms of pedagogy. One reason is that when I started teaching at SFU and Douglas College in the mid -70s the colleges in BC were quite new and begging for instructors. At SFU I was a teaching assistant and worked for a number of profs. At Douglas I was the instructor for introductory sociology courses but I also got to teach a History of Québec course. I had no experience teaching history, so it was a steep learning curve for me, but well worth it. I learned so much. That drew me into a greater interest in Canadian history and the study of indigenous cultures, although at SFU I worked with Noel Dyck and he was instrumental in getting me interested in colonialism and what he calls coercive tutelage. But enough of that for now. The ‘sketch’ may become a kind of autobiography, but for now, I’m not calling it that.

In terms of the topics Jack suggested I’ve got a 5000 word blog post sitting here in draft form that I need to finish up but I may also break it up into smaller, more accessible chunks. In working on this post I’ve done a lot of reading, pulling books off of my shelves but also from the shelves of the internet archives and the Gutenberg project. I seem to be a little out of control. The post seems to want to grow exponentially. Well, I’ve got a lot to say…ask any of my former students. That means I have a lot to write about too.

Here’s a taste of where I’m going with democracy. It’s a quotation from a nondescript political science monograph that I have called Democracy in the United States, Second Edition, by William H. Riker (1965): …”democracy” is frequently used in the contemporary world without justification either in logic or in observation. It has, that is, become a stock and abused slogan in the vocabulary of propagandists for almost every system of government.’

Yes, indeed. In the next few weeks I’ll try to tease out some of the real from the propaganda, some of the essential from the silly.