Things out of Place

     I finally sat down to watch "The Innkeepers" today.  I've been meaning to start watching Ti West's films for a while now and I had planned on starting with "House of the Devil" but this one just came out and I had the house to myself so the timing was perfect.  "The Innkeepers" is a ghost story in case you're not familiar with it, and it scared the shit out of me and I'm wonderfully happy about it.  So this is a post about ghosts.

   
     If, like me, you're an adult and a horror connoisseur, you may share the exhilaration felt when finding a film or a book that actually makes you wish you weren't sitting alone in an empty house at that precise moment.  The hunt for true terror is why we do it.  I shouldn't say true terror because I don't mean real terror, like losing a child or facing imminent murder or anything like that.  Those are real terrors and real fears and sure, people do sometimes seek those things out when watching horror films but as an adult, it's exceptionally hard to experience vicarious horror when watching real life scenarios play out on the screen.  We know it's not real and all we have to do is look away and it's not a part of our reality anymore.  But ghost stories, see, ghost stories hide their strength in the fact that even if you look away, you could just be looking at the ghost standing beside the screen.
   
     I think I need to clarify one thing; I don't believe in ghosts.  I've never seen one and I don't think I ever will but they are still absolutely terrifying to me.  Just the thought of ghosts can get me sweating in no time flat and nothing that exists in real life can spook me quite like ghosts.  After watching "The Innkeepers", I sat there, alone in my house, during the brightness of late morning and admitted to myself that if my dog Napoleon wasn't calmly curled up beside me, I'd have to leave the house just to start feeling safe.  Again, this feeling is what I strive for but seldom hope to achieve when watching a horror film, but I had to wonder why something as completely fictional as a ghost story could get me crapping my pants.  So I went for a walk to think about it.
   
     I started thinking about what ghosts represent.  It's always the idea of something that's more terrifying than the actual thing itself, so what's the idea of a ghost?  To me, a ghost represents the idea of something being out-of-place.  Now, I'm a little OCD.  Not so much, but just enough so that everything in my house has an arbitrarily assigned place and for me to be fully happy with my surroundings, everything has to be in its place.   I think about what scares me and if I where alone in my home and I opened the cupboard where we keep the glasses and found a dinner plate right there, among the glasses... that would freak me out.  I have to admit that even the thought of the plate in there with the glasses kind of makes me shiver, just a little bit.  Granted, that's just me and it's a tad bit crazy but again, it's the representation of something being out of place that hits some primal fight-or-flight nerve in me.

Terrifying.

    As humans, we like to think that we control reality and everything it it and even when we know that's not true, we still like to try.  Having control of your surroundings and knowing where things belong gives us a sense of reassurance that everything is okay.  Something being out of place is a warning that things are not right, someone else has control and we need to be alert to something different impacting our reality.  The scale of how out of place something is is a direct reflection of how alarmed we should be.  If I come home and find a plate in the glass cupboard, I'm alerted to the fact that there could be somebody in my house,or that someone is playing with me, or has early-onset-Alzheimer's.  If I'm in my house alone,and I know I'm alone and I close the pantry door and see the figure of a man walking towards me out of the darkness of the foyer, well, that figure is out-of-place.  It shouldn't be there so I immediately go into fight-or-shit-my-pants mode (probably both) because that figure being out of place sends a warning to my consciousness that someone probably wants to do me harm.  Now, if I where to look up from my computer right now and see my dog sitting on his bed, with a human's head instead of a dog's, then that's an altogether different sort of panic.  Something's definitely out of place and so much so that the fabric of reality itself must be drawn in to question.  This is what ghosts are to me; something so out of place that if you see one, you have to start questioning the very fundamentals of our existence and our perceived reality.
   

Macbeth knows
what I'm talking about.

     As I said, I don't believe in ghosts but I do believe that some people have seen what they take to be ghosts.  People see strange shit all the time, it's the nature of the world we live in.  So what are these people seeing?  I'm of the belief that the human mind is strong enough to imprint extreme fears or hopes into our reality in the form of mirages or hallucinations.  If someone is terrified just enough, the chemical balance of their brain can shift so that they think they are seeing what they fear.  If you had any sort of imagination as a child, you'll know what I'm talking about.  The thing is, as we grow older and reality's concrete nature is drilled into us over decades of mundane life and work, we lose the ability to project imagination onto our field of vision.  But if we had the ability as young children, then there must be some small part of us that has retained the "skill" and it is lying dormant, waiting for the perfect time, a time when we have scared ourselves silly from watching some ghost story, a time after we have been completely indoctrinated in the solidity of our reality to spring back and project an image of fear on the focal point of our mind's eye and appear as the manifestation of something horribly out-of-place.  The figure of a person.  A person who can't be there, but is.  I cant think of anything more frightening.

Thinking about 2012 today. . .

     So it looks like it is 2012.  Right now.  I understand that a great many people can't wait for this year to be over and for a great many reasons, not the least of which being the chance to clutch their bellies and bellow huge waves of laughter toward anyone who actually thought this year meant something.  I was thinking about this today and it made me a little sad, to be honest.
     First and foremost, let's clear the air a bit and get something straight once and for all; 2012 is not, nor has it ever been the prophesied date of the end of the world.  No culture on the planet (save our own) has ever put in writing, glyph or folk tale that this year would bring about the annihilation of mankind.  Surprised?  Don't believe me?  Hey, I understand, and really, it's not like I can just tell you "go look it up" because looking it up will just prove me wrong.  Not because I'm wrong mind you, but because "looking it up" these days can "prove" anyone wrong.  Evolutionists are well aware of this.  Also, I work in television and let me tell you, the people who have the power and the will to speak to the public are rarely (if ever) the ones who know what they're speaking about.  (Your's truly excluded, kindly)
     People think 2012 is a doomsday prophesy because it's what people want to think.  It's easy to think that and it's easy to dismiss it as another relic of primitive man and his superstitions that we are all much too smart to fall for.  2012 has become an easy, soft piece of marketing and ignorance and any serious intellectual reading this is probably doing so against their better judgement.  I'm writing this to say one thing: 2012 is important and it should be taken seriously and everyone needs to forget everything they've heard through media or most books on the subject. (exception: book pictured.  Essentially a doctoral thesis of Mayan glyphs and mythology.  Read it.)   Why?  Why should you give a damn, my dear?  Simply, because the Mayans are dead.  Well, not technically I suppose, they are living in a dispersed state throughout Guatemala and other countries, but their society died  because they killed it, or rather, they let it die.  Their's was a death due to arrogance, a different sort of arrogance than ours, but arrogance none the less.  The reason this matters is because they looked to the sky, the stars, the galactic centre and wished upon it that people would continue to grow, evolve and change into something great and beautiful.  I'm taking some liberties here but the point I'm making is that for the Maya, 2012 marked a shift in human consciousness, an evolution, more succinctly, a revolution of consciousness.  It was a date, far-off and distant.  A date that could hold promise for all mankind, a promise of elevated thinking, solutions to the problems, the struggles of life.  The Maya suffered because they couldn't find a way to feed themselves efficiently.  How heartbroken would they be if they could see the world today, in their sacred year, the year that all people where supposed to see with evolved eyes, a world that chooses not to feed all its people even though it has the means to do so?
     Now, I'm not saying that we've made no advances since the Maya.  Sure we have this wonderful, magical technology that lets us live long, fat, lazy lives.  It's wonderful really.  We have the previously unfathomable ability to become sick and die en-masse solely because of inactivity and eating synthetic food.  What a glorious future we live in.  This is how I know the Mayans could not see into the future, because if they could see us right now, they would have prophesied doomsday.
  I was thinking of my country today.  I realized that I can't think about Canada without two images popping into my head; oil and Harper.  It's a personal fixation, I'm sure, but these two things cause me the fanciful urge  to go back in time and say to the Mayan: "I'm sorry.  There was no awakening of consciousness, no god-like realization of the Universe.  We just kept sucking the planet dry."
     For the first time in my life, I feel like leaving Canada.  Not because I don't like it and not because I think I could do better somewhere else, but because I seemingly don't represent any relevant number of the populace.  I feel like Canada is a drug dealer living in my neighbourhood and he's getting everyone addicted to an unsustainable lifestyle.  I know the comparison has probably been made a thousand times, but it is an apt one;  Canada (or the whole of western society) is Tony Montana.  Do I need to explain the coke/oil metaphor?  Probably not, but I walk around every day, holding that thought in my head and it's hilariously perfect.  Oooh, ooh.  And the Mayans are that Colombian drug lord on the phone in that scene, and they're saying "I told you a long time ago, you @#$^%," etc. etc.  Anyway, you all know how it ends.  Oh,wait . . . do you?  Come to think of it, do any of our leaders know how it ends?  Do they think the oil keeps flowing and technology keeps pumping along, extending our synthetic lives into eternity?
     That's my biggest question to the world right now, and I'll leave it here as this is getting kind of long.
     Where are we going?  Does anyone think about this?  Is there an end to the means?  We are all taught to have goals for ourselves in our own little lives.  They help us achieve things and stay on track.  Ultimately, we know we're going to die so our goals only have to take us to the end of our lives, but it doesn't work the same for entire races of people.  Human kind won't die.  Not for millions, conceivably billions of years, if we do the right things.  Can we think in terms like that?  Can we live our lives conscious of the reality that billions of people after us will have to keep going, walking on the embers of whatever we've destroyed?  It seems to me that as a whole, people are too locked into their own mortality to realize that, in a sense, we are all immortal.  Humans can keep living until the sun explodes if we have the desire to.  Maybe we can't get our heads around it so we live like the world ends once our own, individual life does.  If this continues, then no, human kind won't go on.  Isn't it all just a big waste of time then?  Isn't each generation, each epoch living for themselves just the same as a person spending their entire life on the couch?
     The Mayans didn't live on the couch.  They sacrificed their own lives to give the future a glimpse of what we could become.  They thought in terms of forever and we remember them for it.  But we certainly don't honour them.

A morning walk in the 'burbs.

Yes, I finally got an iPhone and I'm taking "vintage" pictures just like everyone else.  Everyone does it because it's cool.  So now I'm cool too.
Anyway, let's get on with it.

I took my dog, Napoleon, for a walk this morning and it was cold and the sun was bright and yellow and the air stung as it passed into my lungs and I really enjoyed all of it.  What I enjoy most about taking walks is the solitude and the time to daydream.

This last year I read a book with the goal of developing some coping mechanisms for dealing with life's hard-to-deal-with moments.  The book is called "Quiet Your Mind", written by John Selby and I highly recommend  it for anyone whom, like myself, somehow managed to make it to adulthood without any coping skills.

The book lays down a series of exercises which anyone can do to stop the constant murmur of thoughts and worries from polluting their happiness.  This was a problem I was having, and am still working on.  Now, there's some advice in the book that I was reluctant to accept.  See, when I go for a walk, or when anyone who fancies themselves a writer or a creative person of any sort goes for a walk, bike ride, kayak or whatever, we tend to take advantage of the peace and do some thinking, brainstorming, internal monologuing or what-have-you.  Selby, over there, tells you to turn off any chatty part of your brain while doing any of these activities and just experience the moments as they drift through you and let your physical senses relish in the now without the cumbersome intrusion of conscious thought.  I was against the idea right away because I have some of my best ideas on walks, who doesn't?  Then, this morning I finally understood what Selby was trying to get through to me.

The relinquishment of all thought is not the goal here.  Rather, it is the controlled decision of what thoughts to have and the discernment between beneficial and detrimental thought.  I always find myself, during my walks, pinballing back and forth between Selby's method of physical, open experience and my own brand of neurotic, baseless worry.  This morning was no different but it was a stunningly beautiful morning and so I relinquished all thought as often as I could and had my eyes raised to the point directly ahead of me and focused only on what sound entered my ears and what sights entered my field of vision.  Brain off.

The sun was low over the rooftops ahead, and on the right drew close a roofer's truck blaring "Barbara Ann" from an open door.  Ice crystals flitted across the lone ray of sun rising from the center of my field of view and   "Barbara Ann" decreased in pitch and then rose again as I passed the truck and then faded away behind me.

It was a simple moment but one that filled me with a great positive wonder.  It felt so filmic, so literary, the sort of moment you bask in if it's on screen or in a book but it wasn't, it is life right now.  I knew right away that if I had been enraptured in one of my regular day-dreamy thought cycles I would have missed the moment entirely.  So that's what it took to get me to understand the benefit of Selby's technique and how keeping a clear mind and remaining physically open to your surroundings can lead to more inspiration and more to life than walking around in a critical mode or lost in supposedly creative thinking.

So now that I'm part of the smartphone crowd, I at least have this moment to remind me of what there is to miss if I (heaven forbid) find myself walking, nose down, eyes planted in that glossy little screen, thinking how great life is because I have a neat phone.

Wodans-day

"Pappy, what day is it today?"
"Today is Wednesday."
"Pappy, what does Wensdey mean?"

I love these questions.  I hear most parents speak of dreading the really interesting questions, the really inquisitive ones, the "why is the sky blue", or "where do babies come from" questions that few adults give the proper amount of headspace anymore.  These questions are pure, mysterious and complex and most of the time we avoid thinking about them because they're just to damn difficult (read: fun) to answer.  Sure we "know" where babies come from, but do we?  It's like asking "How does life exist?", we know the physiology of it but that's not what your kid wants to know, you see.  Children have an innate ability to look for the absolute truth in all things. They want to get to the bottom of everything, they want the hard answers even if they don't possess the foundational knowledge to understand them.  The hard answers provoke curiosity and feed the desire to find out more.

Today my 3-year-old son asked me the above question about Wednesday and I couldn't have been more happy.  I explained to him first, about Norwegian mythology, that their god's name is Odin, Wotan, or Wodan and how the Norwegians gave him a day; Wodan's-day, which we now call Wednesday.  This is overly simplified of course, but enough to blow his little mind.  Now, the point is not that he remembers all the details I told him, or even any of them.  The point is that he retains a sense that there are deep answers to any question he may ask, not just simply "because that's the way it is" which is a stab-in-the neck to any burgeoning creative thinker.

It's funny amazing how a toddler can wrench an adult out of his or her daily thinking patterns and place them on a much more open and creative track.  After explaining the Wednesday thing I got to thinking about the whole ritual of our weekly days and the role that ritual still plays in our lives as humans of the future.

Isn't it true that we, now, are more immersed in daily ritual than ever before?  Sure, I think most people would agree to that.  But would they also agree that our current rituals are of a negative charge, leading us blindly onto the back of a meat-truck? I don't know.  Start thinking about the role ritual played in creating mankind's culture, society and communities.  Think about the fact that ritual used to be a thing which brought people together, allowed them to interact, share, and develop a culture whilst promoting longevity, learning and togetherness.  Our days of the week are named after events which were times of celebration, of communal sharing of the hunt, harvest, sacrament or feast.  Ritual was a grand thing and it was sacred, saved for the times when bonding was most needed, for survival.

Today our lives are overrun with ritualistic behaviour and we don't pay any attention to it.  What's worse, our modern rituals don't serve to bing people together, not in any meaningful sense.  Our rituals are creating and cementing a culture of individualism and rift.  How many societies do you think could survive on a diet of isolation and fear?  I suppose we'll find out soon enough.

Let's take the example of the Tim Horton's or Starbucks morning ritual that seems to be so popular with folks these days.  It's pure ritualistic behaviour because firstly, it makes no sense from a logistical standpoint.  Anyone could make coffee just as well or better from their homes and for much less money.  So then it must be the need for ritualized social interaction right?  well this is odd to because people don't interact in any positive way in the coffee line-up.  Is that snake-like caravan of vehicles in the Timmie's drive-through a positive morning experience?  Face it, you'd be much happier if you walked in to your caffeine-fix-joint of choice and found you where the only one in line.  Wouldn't you?  So if the social part of the ritual is forced, unwanted, then what does that mean?

I'm trailing-off a bit here, so I'll leave with a final thought.
We need to be aware of all the things we do in a day.  We have to take our consciousness back and refuse to   be individualized to the point of impotence.  Take the recent revolutions in Egypt and Yemen, or the consistent million-plus demonstrations in South America, could we stand together like that here?  In out current state of social separation and distrust of our peers?  I think not.  Do our rituals hold us together or do they serve to inflate the value our own, individual lives?  If we continue to value the one over the whole we can be manipulated into oblivion because each one of us believes we are too important to die for our culture, our society, our future.  It is certain that we will die.  The future of our children however, is what hangs in the balance.

meh . . .

 . . . that's what day 3 was.  Total meh.  Low energy, didn't feel like doing anything, had to stay in the house, (well, chose to stay in the hose due to the thick smoke enveloping our entire city).  They say day three can be the worst and if that's true then bring on the next seven days baby!  Really, it wasn't that bad, though I did come closer than ever to quitting this thing. 

It seems that the evenings are the hardest to get through.  It could be because I'm so used to sitting at home at night, snacking and drinking, or it could e because I'm not doing enough with my time at home.  I sort of look forward to going back to work just so I'll have something to do during the most tempting hours. 

So far, day 4 seems much better and I'm happy with myself for not throwing in the towel yesterday.  My energy is back.  I'd even say that I have more energy than I do when eating solid food.  I read that this happens but it's really hard to believe until it happens to you. 

Soon the workweek will be over and that means the sultry-intoxicating smell of BBQs wafting through the air.  I think the weekend may be tough, though I haven't yet craved a beer.  This is out of character for me as I normally crave beer continuously throughout the day.  I'm quite happy with this development as one of my goals in completing this cleanse is to rid myself of the last vestiges of the young-adulthood alcoholism that most Canadians seem to share.

Day 2

So I'm supposed to keep track of my energy level throughout this whole thing as a record of how my body responds.  I'd have to say that my energy on day one was about a 8.5 or 9 out of 10.  Day two was almost as surprising and I would rate my energy at around 7.5 or 8 for the low-points of the day.  It's really shocking that I feel as good as I do considering I haven't eaten anything in two days.

Ugh, sorry for the boring prose here but I don't really feel like writing right now and I'm forcing myself . . . but hey, this is all about making positive changes and to be quite honest, I think it's gonna take more strength and will power to add to this blog for ten days than it's going to be to not consume any solid food.  Mmm, solid food. 

I don't have any cravings for meat just yet.  I don't want a burger, steak or pizza at all, though I find myself cooking with more passion. (I cook for my wife daily, it's something I love doing)  I'm cooking relatively healthy stuff like locally-grown organic produce and fresh-water fish so these dishes really start me salivating.  I think what I want most right now is a big skillet of sauteed beans and mushrooms.

Not that I'm craving too hard though. 

So these two days have been great.  I feel awesome and I have ample energy, even more so than usual.  But I hear day 3 can be rough . . .

Time to purge, baby.

In an effort to become a super-human being and live forever, I've started "The Master Cleanse" today.

Ok, well I don't really want to live forever, nor do I believe this cleanse will result in my becoming a super-human but I haven't written for quite some time and I have a predilection towards the fantastic whenever I start pounding away on a keyboard.  Alright, so this is day one, the beginning of day one and the first of what will hopefully be ten straight, uninhibited, strong and willful days of this apparently amazing cleanse laid-out in succinct form by Tom Woloshyn in his fabulous book, pictured above.

At this point I'm like . . . three-and-a-half hours in so really, anything could happen but I'm quite positive that I can make it to the end of this thing. If this is the same body which propelled me thought all the decidedly less-honourable marathons of drugs, alcohol and forced wakefulness I put myself through during those wasteful university years, then, (barring the discovery of any supreme damage I may have done myself) I know this body can take it and will rise up at the end rejuvenated. 

My mind however, is another tale indeed.  By far the weakest of my organs is the one that apparently lounges like a  dazed garden slug in the scalding beams of direct sunlight in the caverns of my skull.  Most times I curse my feeble mind and its seeming inability to cope with life effortlessly as everyone else seems to manage.  This time though, I only ask that it stay with me and keep focused company of my other parts and most importantly, my loved ones whom have to bear me while I take this latest whim out for a spin.  If I can maintain my sanity throughout, and even learn a thing or two, then this will have been a worthy venture indeed.

Well, I'm thirsty now.  And it's a good thing too because I can't really be hungry.

Out.