The snow stopped and now with temperatures dropping below freezing, all of the plowed and shoveled surfaces are turning from gleaming wet to gleaming ice. Tomorrow’s commute, on foot and wheel, will be interesting. And by interesting I mean sliding and falling and crashing.
And then it will start raining again for the next four months (or back to normal). Is the weather this fall getting to me? Perhaps. Perhaps a little!
I still feel guilty every time I post about the weather. Sure, as climate change begins wreaking havoc on our planet, weather talk becomes somewhat more interesting but ordinary weather, no matter how unpleasant or SAD-making, is still pretty boring as a topic of discussion. I promise this, then–my next post will be about nude volcano hiking.
A month earlier than last winter we got our first snow of the season today. With the temperature just above freezing the snow was wet, heavy and turned into a slushy mess on sidewalks and roads where it wasn’t shoveled or plowed away. For awhile when it was sticking to tree branches it was kind of pretty, though!
Environment Canada ended then resumed the snowfall warning for the Lower Mainland, so who knows if we’ll get more tomorrow. It’s dropping below freezing tonight which means things will be good ‘n icy for the morning commute. People here don’t cope well with the first snow of the season–or, really, just any snow at all. They cope even worse with ice. This is where teleporters would come in really handy.
Here’s a picture of the college at midday with the snow doing its thing. Like I said, it’s kind of pretty but my romance with snow ended after I got my driver’s license and that was…a little while ago.
Yes, it’s early in the month but I can’t shake this horrible sense of blah. It’s getting colder, the threat of snow (followed by still more rain) is in the forecast, winter is weeks away, work is bearing down, everything feels like a big ball of unraveling string or some other dumb metaphor.
So yes, here is December’s amusing cat image, three days into the month. Enjoy!
I remember the 80s for the giant hair and the music for its synthesizer obsession.
A lot of that music was sterile, stuff that sounded like it came from a factory, not actual humans. Sometimes this was even deliberate–witness Gary Numan’s work.
And then there was Wang Chung. They had a big hit in 1986 with the song “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” I hated the song. I found it cloying, insipid, superficial. Most of all, it struck me as indulgent as the band inserted itself as a verb into the lyrics:
Everybody have fun tonight Everybody Wang Chung tonight
I was 22 years old at the time. I was also a humorless twit because this song is great. It’s catchy as all get-out, it has kicking horns, the bridge is soaring, and it’s obvious–especially if you watch the video (don’t do this if you have epilepsy–seriously!)–that the band knew this was nothing more than a fun little confection.
I watch it regularly on YouTube. Or at least listen to it. I’m not epileptic but if I watch the video too closely I find I am suddenly not having fun tonight, I am about to hurl my cookies tonight.
Still, great song and given how utterly inconsequential the subject matter is, I count it as a musical guilty pleasure, one of about a hundred thousand or so that I have (my formative years musically were the 1980s, you see). I may come back and edit this post with more great fluff from the decade that mastered the art of fluff.
For the Remembrance Day long weekend we went to Sidney over on Vancouver Island to partake in Jeff’s mom’s 75th birthday celebration. We had Chinese food for dinner because why not and overall it was a pleasant little trip, even if the ferry ride over was accompanied by the nigh-endless serenading of car alarms blatting from the vehicle decks. The chief steward at one point came on to the PA to announce that the car alarms of every BMW were going off. The vehicle owners had apparently calibrated their alarms to perfectly match the vibrations produced by a large commercial ferry.
After arriving and kibitzing with Jeff’s mom, his sister and their family, we headed into bustling downtown Sidney and spent some time walking along the pier.
Below is a photo of yours truly.
With bonus tiny cloud attached to the side of my head
Some observations:
I have my dad’s right ear and my mom’s left ear. I think this is becoming more pronounced the older I get. It is also a little weird.
Am I developing jowls? I don’t want jowls. I am either ordering or inventing a jowls-prevention kit.
If you look closely you can tell I am freezing my butt off. Because I totally was.
I escaped seagull poop, both on the pier and bombed from above.
People on the pier were catching tiny novelty crabs. They were like finger crabs. Very small is what I’m saying here.
I also liked this sign for the simple way it says you may die:
A sign of diving doom
The motel room was odd in that it was actually cool and we had to turn the heat on (the condo is almost supernaturally warm, staying at 23ºC or higher no matter what the temperature outside is, as if it was constructed atop the endlessly burning fires of hell). The ferry trip back was much quieter, due to either better car alarm control or fewer BMWs.
Overall it was a nice little jaunt. Sidney is one of those towns that manages to pull off quaint without descending completely into either kitsch or self-referential hipster irony.
I’ve never been more willing to believe that I’m just having a long, fantastically elaborate (and horrible) dream than I have this past month.
On the one hand I am (morbidly) curious to see what happens. On the other, I expect nothing less than complete disaster, which dampens the curiosity by a factor of about a billion.
It’s like the entire world is getting a lump of coal for Christmas. And I’ve been good this year! Mostly!
The best thing about November was the day it hit 18ºC thanks to the Pineapple Express. I was not expecting t-shirt weather this month.
I also resumed running, so that was good.
Almost everything else sucked, to various degrees. I’m not even going to attempt a list, it would just be sad and depressing. Instead, I will blow a loud raspberry at November 2016 and hope that December is better.
As I’ve noted already November 2016 has been a month of disappointments and general awfulness. This blog has been hit by inactivity on both ends–the author (me) has been flailing about and not writing and even the few souls who randomly arrive on the site completely checked out on November 25th as seen in the site stats below:
The gap you see means there were no visitors on that day. Not that this site has been hugely busy on other days, as the same chart shows. The taller bars represent 15-17 unique visitors. I tried calculating what percentage of the world’s population that is (currently over 7.46 billion and climbing) but let me just tell you: it’s a pretty small number.
I’ve also changed the header of the site to include an actual image of my mug (passed through a Prisma filter). Further changes are to come as I prepare for the bold, brash year to come that is 2017, the year when we all snap awake and laugh with relief when we all realize 2016 was just a crazy dream!
Also, I went to Metrotown today, not really considering that this is Black Friday weekend or whatever you want to call it. The usual madness of the mall was magnified about five times. I’d ask what was I thinking but I was clearly not thinking at all. But worming my way through the crowds before I decided escape was the only sane course of action did push me toward my daily step goal. See? Lemonade from lemons. I’m such a glass-half-full kinda guy.
What a strange and terrible month November has been. It feels like huge things have gone horribly wrong and a bunch of the little things have fallen apart, too. After the first six days it has been a struggle to write anything–my NaNo novel, this blog, thoughts on a napkin, anything. I feel not just uninspired but kind of depressed. Not in the clinical sense, just blah and unmotivated, a pervading sense of “Meh, what does it matter, the world sucks” overriding everything. And it does. The world is full of stupid, ignorant people. I have long suspected this but as the years passed and I grew older and gained more experience and perspective, I shed my cynicism and chose to believe that people are fundamentally good, that they are decent and do the right thing (most of the time).
I no longer believe this.
People are fickle, prone to acting on often irrational emotion, are easily swayed to act against their own interests and are generally not interested in logic, rationality or anything that might disrupt their world view, however absurd or unrealistic it might be. It is the veneer of civilization (which is going to be sorely tested in the next decade or two) that holds everything together, but that veneer is thin and, I think, on the verge of peeling away, with dire consequences.
If you think we are removed from our savage, primitive past, consider what has happened in the last century, the wars, the acts of terrorism, the millions upon millions of people killed. And what were they killed for? Not believing the right ideas. Living on the wrong chunk of land. Nonsense. We fight and kill over nothing worthwhile because we can do no better.
We see people like Trump elected president–an ignorant, bullying, racist, sexist and entirely unfit individual for the office–because we can do no better.
The best we can hope for is that our species somehow survives itself long enough to evolve well past where we are now. Climate change–and remember, Americans just elected a man who thinks it’s a hoax–will force us to face reality, not the preferred bubble so many prefer to see as reality, but the actual, horrible truth.
But we won’t pull together, we will tear apart. We will devolve to our worst selves, incapable of adapting to the massive changes to come. We will do this because we prefer ignorance to reality, because in the end we’d rather help ourselves than help others.
I wish I didn’t believe this because it means the only thing that makes sense to write any more is post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction. And while I love a good post-apocalyptic dystopian story, I’d prefer to write whimsical, funny things, stuff that is slight but entertaining in its own way. But it’s been challenging this month. The news is just so relentlessly awful (the real news–the fake news is even worse).
But if the choice is to despair or hold onto hope, however slim, I have to go for the latter. Who knows, maybe there really is some benevolent alien race waiting to swoop in and harvest save us. Or we’ll figure out cold fusion and lick global warming at the same time. Or a comet will sweep past Earth and the dust in its tail will boost everyone’s intelligence exponentially. “You’re playing 3D chess again? The challenge only starts when you move to 4D chess.”
And flying cars for everyone.
I conclude with two promises to myself: the first is to write something every day. On this blog, in a story, on a napkin. But somewhere. And every day. The second is to retain that thin hope, to stave off pessimism.
