It was the end of a long day, coming back to Nanaimo from a trip to Winfield. We were on the ferry coming back to Vancouver Island in the line up for food. Gabriel, my girlfriend’s 14 year-old son, had had a rough day. Overstimulated from the vacation and tired from 10 hours on the road, he had nigh reached his breaking point. But he was entertaining himself, watching his reflection in the glass display cases and hopping across the floor as though he were riding a horse.

A lady in line waved Gabriel out of the way, as though she were shooing a fly.

“He has Autism.” said Alexandria. She said it to the room, many of whom were looking on as Gabriel danced across the floor of the Coastal Cafe. The lady absently mumbled an insincere apology, “I didn’t know.”

It was that moment, or maybe a moment later, that something snapped for Gabriel. He fell to the floor. Distressed. Frustrated. Alexandria, exhausted as we all were from the day’s journey, looked at me with tired eyes and asked me to bring the food while she moved Gabriel away in an attempt to diffuse the situation.

Once they had left, the lady looked at the staff and said “He has autism. I feel sorry for the parents.”

If you’ve seen “Scanners”, there’s a famous scene where Michael Ironside blows up a scanner’s head during a duel.

That’s how I felt when this lady talked. A surge of emotion rushed through me, and the Scorpio in me immediately began thinking of retribution. I felt sorry for her children, if she had any, for having such a cold battle-axe of a mother. I felt sorry for the people working on the ferry, that they had to listen to and absorb her bigotry without retort. I felt sorry for the world, for having her in it, and thought of asking her to leap overboard as an act of social Darwinism.

In the end, I made some platitudes about how we were all tired. How any child who had been on the road for an entire day would be equally frustrated. And I took our food and left.

It’s called the high road, and I took it. Because in my heart, I know that Gabriel doesn’t want to be frustrated and upset. Truth be told, Gabriel is one of the most amazing humans I’ve ever known.  Don’t believe me? This is what he did this morning.

This is what he’s like every day.  Fun, full of life and laughter.  He gets frustrated sometimes, because he has a difficult time communicating. Well, so do we all (present company included). But we try, if we want to be good people, we try to develop tools to help us communicate more effectively.  We try, like the Lady of the Exploding Head didn’t, to understand where the other person is coming from. We try to believe that the world can only be made better by effective communication.

As a communicator by trade, I am presented with an incredible opportunity to learn how to listen, to develop my own communication skills, to become more aware of my environment and changes to it.

I’m lucky. Alexandria is a committed, educated parent who has dedicated a significant portion of her life to understanding the autistic spectrum, and spends an equal amount time helping other people understand and cope with the daily challenges. A small part of that is trickling down to me, and I feel blessed. When moments occur between me and Gabriel, where I understand him and he understands me, there’s nothing quite like it.

And like our trip on the long road from Winfield, every turn brings new wonder, new discovery, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

I have cats on the brain.  They pop up everywhere it would seem.

Netspeak is a common language search engine.  If you type a phrase ended with a ?, it shows the most common result.

Given the phrase: “My cat is?” the answers, in order

• An alien (60.8 %)
• A jerk (25.6 %)
• Not {moving; eating; a witch} (13.6 %)

What does it mean?  In my opinion, not enough people saying “My cat is awesome”.

Ebola was my cat.  This is her.

She was notoriously defiant.  I felt that she would have wanted her epitaph to read “I did as I pleased. Nothing more, nothing less.”

She died.  On Friday the 13th, she went to sleep as a result of a lethal injection. Not an execution, an escape. I can only hope someone will love me that much, were I in pain, to allow me to sleep.

As I watched the life drain from her once bright eyes, tears welled in my own.  She had been so brave up til then.  An ulcer had eaten its way through the roof of her mouth.  Unable to eat without discomfort, I remembered that morning, how content she seemed to lie on my chest, the last time I would really look in her eyes and lay with her.

To say she was “just a cat” is like saying that the Mona Lisa was “just a painting”.  She was my family, as much as any family I’ve ever had.  I had her from the moment she was a kitten to the last moment, 15 years later when I carried her still body away in a box.  I will bury her today.

There’s no eulogy that seems appropriate.  There’s a lot of emotion to work through on this.  So I will write. I will paint. I will honour her memory in all the ways I can. It’s the least I can do.

I’m a musician.  Maybe.  I mean, I play some musical instruments and I own some music production gear.  None of it’s top-of-the-line, but it’s all good enough to play around with in the attic-slash-studio space I’ve created for myself.

I’m a bass player if you ask me, (I just got an Epiphone Thunderbird) but I also play other stuff.  I have a drum machine that I call ‘The Doctor” (it’s a Boss DR-770), a cheap guitar that does me well for some thick, distorted palm-muting, a Hawaiian lapstick and other various and sundry musical items.

And I have an idea.  I think, beyond the gear, that’s what you need.  An interesting idea.

It’s not a unique idea, I’ve heard it done in a few different ways.  Kind of a metal, classical fusion.  Apocalyptica did it.  Metallica did it by playing with an orchestra.  Hanzel und Gretyl did it by using a sampling of Handel’s Messiah.

But I like it, and I want to do it.  So for my first experiment, I’ve chosen part 1 of the seven part movement “The Planets”  by English composer Gustav Holst.  This particular movement is titled “Mars, the Bringer of War” .  You can listen to it here on Musopen.

Try and imagine some thick distortion, fast and heavy drums and dark bass lines.  That’s what I’m hoping it’ll sound like when I’m finished.

I got my new laptop today.  A Lenovo Thinkpad x201.

I’m not plugged in, and I have about 9 hours of battery life.  That really excites me.  My Sony POS has about 10 minutes of life on a good day

On the downside, this post was much longer about 5 minutes ago – but apparently you have to reconnect to the network every few minutes in Starbucks, so I lost about 100 words.  My latte is almost done and the music here sucks ass, so I’m going to go to Costco.  We’re making bacon jam again today.  Muaaaaahhhh.

Incidentally, I’ve decided to try and change the name of my computer from “Deep Thought” to “The Darkness”.  More details on that later.

This is going to be a *short post.  I’m in Vancouver again (third time this year), getting ready for a meeting in Gastown.  If all goes well, it could mean something really spectacular.

I fly back (to Nanaimo) this afternoon.  My girlfriend’s sister is visiting for a few days, and she’s brought us a custom made squidly tea cozy.  I’m really f’in excited for it.

And yes, tea cozies are totally manly.

*I’ve had issues with short posting before.  I’m trying to get over it, because I think it’s better to post something brief than to post nothing at all for weeks at a time.  Because stuff is still happening.

That’s all really, though there’s an underlying horror story about my dealings with Lenovo’s support department. I won’t get into it.

What?  You really want to know?  Fine, I’ll tell you.

They (UPS/Lenovo) don’t ship to PO boxes (which I have, for other reasons that will be made clear in future posts) and despite several attempts to verify my address (which I changed at my bank, whom I love, because they’re great), the Lenovo team would not agree that my bank had updated the info, or that I had contacted my bank.  So (in classic fashion, because I love being told I’m in the wrong) I started yelling and asking for managers.  The manager suggested a three way call with my bank (which was painful, as the Lenovo rep fumbled through the auto-attendant options), where things worked out fine, (meaning, I was right and they – Lenovo – were wrong) and they were able to verify my address (after which, the Lenovo rep proceeded to waste more of my time and argue with the bank about who’s fault it was that verification hadn’t happened sooner).  Really, I think they (Lenovo Support, not my bank) are just incompetent.  And don’t tell me it’s hard, I ran a call center once upon a time.  It’s not that hard.

Anyway I recently bought a Lenovo X201 ThinkPad, because my current laptop (a bottom of the line Sony Vaio) doesn’t make me happy.  It needs to be plugged in all the time, it’s slow and I just get mad at it.  I’ll probably donate it to my studio upstairs, or destroy it spectacularly, but it’s the reason I don’t blog so much lately.

Oh yeah, and I was moving and working on some all-consuming stuff.  That’s all done now, and there’s lots of stuff waiting in the wings of my brain to be dusted off and placed on display.

Just not today, today I’m going to eat a whole bunch of food and watch a triple feature of Legend, Labyrinth and the Dark Crystal with my co-habitant girlfriend.

It’s no secret that I’m essentially apolitical, or maybe it is a secret.  Is a secret a secret if the reason for the secrecy isn’t intentional obfuscation, but an overall lack of interest from anyone who would otherwise know my secret?  I don’t know.  The point is, I just don’t care about politics.

Without too much detail or digression, I’ve recently stepped into the world of liberal politics.  It reminds me of my youth and walking dairy farms with my dad – the memory trigger being other unpleasant things I’ve stepped in.

It’s interesting.  Sitting there among boomer liberals.  Not caring.  And it leads me to think about the many dialects that we speak that aren’t defined as such.

Political discourse is a dialect.  One has to understand the language of percentages, property taxes and possess a certain patience for the tireless rhetoric that gets pooped from the mouths of the ruling class of babies.  I just don’t understand it and have no patience to learn it I suppose.

As a webhead, (no, I’m not Spiderman), I’m all too familiar with translating the language of “teh intertubes” into things regular schmucks can understand.  Acronyms like HTML, PHP, and WWW that have no context outside of their importance to the internet might as well be Cyrillic.  I feel empathy for the noobs when they feel overwhelmed and stupid.

“You’re not stupid,”  I say  “learning the internet is like learning another language.  You could no more learn the internet in two days than you could learn Russian in two days.”

It’s not entirely true of course.  The internet isn’t that hard to learn because the builders and developers have dumbed it down enough that anyone can find what they need, but people are inherently lazy and don’t like looking for stuff.  And the language, well, it’s still English (or Russian, or Mandarin, or French, or Plautdietsch), but it’s a lot of work to type queries (those are questions, in the context of search) into a search engine (like Google) and crawl through the seemingly endless (ok, two) results to find an answer.

So I can hardly be blamed if my dealings with non-web people leave me feeling a little caustic.  I can’t be accountable for the volumes of vitrious bile spewing forth, page after page, venting my frustrations about the lack of effort to understand, well, anything really.

Segue to CBC radio.  Interview with the family member of a schizophrenic man convicted of murder.  Man (brother or father, I don’t remember and it’s not relevant) says:

There’s just not much awareness.  Not a lot of information is available.  It’s not like mental health is part of our educative upbringing, and until it is – people will remain in the dark with a lack of understanding.

It’s at this point that I’m certain the world deserves my venom and vitriol.  The fact that this moron is standing there, in 2011, suggesting that “There’s a lack of awareness because we’re not taught about it.” is proof that we’re ready for the big meteor.

Want to know more about mental health?  Ask a GD question.  Pick up the phone and call someone.  Better yet, type “I want to learn about mental health” into a search engine.

The gist is this.  Look it up, you lazy assholes.  It’s what I do, every day.  My head is no library of Alexandria (she’s very smart and has a good memory), I type things into Google and it tells me the fucking answer.

Guess what, BBs?  Your lore and wisdom carries no value to me, and you can’t wow me with stories of days gone by. Everybody except the boomers hates the boomers or at least carries a soft grudge towards what you’ve done to the rest of us.  You’re disconnected and out of place in this reality, but you don’t seem to realize it.  Call this your five-minute-warning to catch up or forever be forgotten as little more than a ruinous blight, an aging swarm of locusts devouring all the generations that follow you.

Right now, the silver lining to your silver haired hegemony is that you’re all going to die soon.   It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is.  I’m done being libelous.

It’s not gibberish, rather, it’s the language of my people.

I say “my people” only in the colloquial sense of course, in that I am descended from Mennonites who emigrated from Russia, Poland and Germany on both sides of my family.  I don’t practice the Mennonite tenets of faith (or any tenets for that matter) but I have a passive interest in the language, mostly in the context of Mennonite culinary traditions in which I am very actively interested.  That language is Plautdietsch.

Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German, was originally a Low Prussian variety of East Low German, with Dutch influence, that developed in the 16th and 17th Century in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia, today Polish territory. The word is etymologically cognate with Plattdeutsch, or Low German. Plaut is the same word as German platt or Dutch plat, meaning ‘Low’, but the name Dietsch = Dutch Diets, meaning ‘ordinary language, language of the people’

Source:  plaudietsch.ca

Understanding the language allows me to connect with the recipes and culinary traditions on a deeper level.  When I call it Verenikja instead of perogies, there’s something extra that goes into it.  Cabbage rolls are Holuptchi, fruit soup is Pluma Mous (or Moos).  My grandmother used to make Zwieback, (twice baked bread – the cracker kind, not the double bun kind), but never in my life had I heard of bubbaht until last night.

Bubbaht is a sweet, pudding like stuffing for chicken or turkey.  A simple cake batter of eggs, milk, flour, sugar and vanilla is mixed with a double dose of raisins and stuffed into a turkey before baking.  The savoury drippings mix with the sweet cake to create a delightful alternative to traditional dressing.

Since I’m engaging in some Mennonite cooking this week (I made a batch of 64 cabbage rolls with the help of a sweet girl I’ve been lucky enough to connect with), and no doubt turkeys are on sale (it’s just after Christmas), I’m going to take a chance and try making some Wurscht Bubbaht.

Basically, I’ll make the traditional Bubbaht (as above), but instead of raisins I’ll use some Mennonite sausage (the aforementioned Wurscht) that came from a portion of piggy I purchased earlier this year. I can’t wait to stand next to the oven and inhale the sweet drippings as they mingle with the baking sausage and cakey pudding.

Frankly, I’m salivating just thinking about it.  How about you?

Of note, I’m not sure what Bubbaht means – a preliminary Google search turned up mostly results for the Bruce Campbell film “Bubba Ho Tep”, which I’ve seen and love as I love Bruce and everything he does.   If anyone can tell me, please do.  Alternatively, I may just call this recipe Bubba Ho Turkey…

Napoleon Hill (October 26, 1883 – November 8, 1970) was an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature.

I think it’s also fair to say that Napoleon Hill is a pioneer in the concept of rhyming advice.

I’ve often wondered why the self-help/motivational speaker gurus of the world favour rhymes as a device to transmit their message.  Perhaps it’s because the types of people who read self-help books are the same folks who favour the repetitive (and inane) pop melodies by acts like the Black Eyed Peas (who rhyme “let’s take it off” with “mazeltov”, managing to mock judaism and lower the collective intelligence of the human race in one fell swoop.  It would be like writing a song where I rhyme Jesus with Please Us in a lascivious way… don’t think I couldn’t either, but I won’t – because it would be wrong).

Before my current life as a small ‘b’ blogger I spent a significant amount of time doing high-octane direct sales.  I trained masses of (not-so) eager minions in the subtle ways of manipulation and hard selling.  I lived Glengarry, Glen Ross and Wall Street every day of my hollow life and I learned from “The Pope” the power of PMA (That’s Positive Mental Attitude, these guys favour alliteration as much as they do rhyming).

As it is with most sales people, the “wisdom” they pass on is essentially regurgitated rhetoric from one or a few of any number of sales gurus. My first was a fellow named Zig Ziglar.  Hilary Hinton “Zig” Ziglar is an American author and motivational speaker who coined the phrase, “It’s not your aptitude but your attitude that determines your altitude in life.”

Meaning aside, (I’d think it to be fairly obvious), it was that initial exposure to rhyming advice and my subsequent fall from sales grace that poisoned me to the whole idea.

That was a long time ago.  Another life.  One that came recklessly crashing back into my reality about two weeks ago when I read a quote from (obviously) a motivational speaker on a friend’s Facebook status.  I traced the quote back to Napoleon Hill (the fellow above) who, on his website has the following saying nestled among his 17 Scrolls of Success.

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.

People eat this up like shortbread at Christmas, apparently never getting to the questions that prevent me from succumbing to the intrinsic wisdom of the motivational prophets.  Questions like, “Yes, but what if in my mind I conceive that I have superpowers and can fly?  A lot of people die that way, and a lot of people that believe everything they conceive are locked up in asylums, but I guess you’re not speaking about them.  Or visible minorities, or people in third-world countries.”

Having said that, millions of people read the classic works of Napoleon Hill and I could count the number of readers I get on one hand.   Maybe I should try rhyming more?