User talk:Awoodill

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[edit] High Prairie

is a town that needed us not to ask certain pertinent questions, an anonymous-capitalist covenant that became apparent first in a search for Tofu. The stock-boy gazed through the meat alternative section (pork, riblets, cured beef navel) then disappeared into the Wall of Values to weather the storm, supposedly looking for someone who might know what (not where) Tofu was. Beef was popular, so was dumping garbage bags full of beer bottles at the Bottle Depot from pickup trucks at lunch hour. Humongous trucks. Asian cashiers. Asian women with fat white sugar-daddies. Natives shoplifting and white women calling home on the cell to ask why there's no money in the account (so nice to see the enormous wealth shared so equitably). Fat women in packs or pairs, with kids: blondes once beautiful, but whose figures and faces betray the perennial absence of love. Not fitting in. A generation of Asians with perfect English, feeling lost but fitting in with lonely wives, money-focussed men, rough culture hating us: the young, beautiful and thin. Wage labour-fast food, grocery stor clerks-not questioning and hating and fearing even the look of these young philosophists. "God doesn't believe in Athiests" bumper stickers; meeker Christians in flowered dressed paying for groceries with $100 bills: candy and tropical fruit. A town without the notion of how to feed a professional athlete, birdseed, nitrodex gloves and some mountains to look up at. There's no wolf at my door; there's a prostitute living in our hotel and the appeal of hookers and blow (despite the low opportunity costs) was never lower. I guess I felt pampered sleeping on dirt, food from a trailer, working a clearcut, tent soaked from rain everyday, lowered standards of coffee, lonely in a village of voyeurists with polythene walls. Somewhere up there (summit brass) they think of us as numbers, and besides numbers as headstrong kids willing to burn-out wherever for howeverlong.Not sure when we drew such intense attention to ourselves; pretty sure it was strolling around on drugs. We couldn't ignore the commonplace, their massive SUV, and perhaps we were never loathing them so much as they though, when we looked so dazed we were merely wondering at how a cook, greens, Meg, Gaia, mother, cared so much for us. Asking why we're not content with bringing bigger and better to us; see them lumbering, sauntering into massive trucks, arms swinging or resting on they belly winded. Let's pick up every girl whose man is gone, pack 'em in the Crumby, one on The Body's lap (one on his face) and drive this caravan back to Smithers. We know we're not saving the world; a shirt that shows I'm a stooge of the deforestation industry; planting crops not forests. We know though, that a world that wants this commodity needs someone out there with two strong hands and the legs of a boxer. Listening to Brooklyn raps, reading celebrity magazines and looking for the forgotten beauty in these prairie women. We're still kids, young and stupid, but we know why he's fat, and we know what it means; whiskey-dick, vasoconstriction, shortness of breath, acrid sweat and falling asleep on your unsatisfied body. Leonard Cohen talking to dead singers and mother fucking doom. gone crazy, gotten bored, verbally slapping a good friend in the face at the top of my lungs, laughing, keeping taboo only those soul-destroying worries that people could lose sleep over; hope he didn't get her pregnant at 18; I knew you were going to get hurt long before you ever did. They hate us just to look at us, and we seem (maybe even to each other) like loose cannons, but I bit my tongue at least once a day, a lot more by the end. Everyone for himself and God against us all! (passionately hating the gravy-babies and the futile pride in relative gains) Money, style, bodies, stories, bush crazy, bush eyes, bush mouth, bush (butch?) goggles. Peeing outside, garbage and rotten vegetables outside our motel, hammocks tied to a car everywhere we go.

Having sat with time to kill, two blocks away from my crew coming home, unsure how much of what I write is intelligible to the outside world, before I entered a bus realizing it was my first time away from crew-members since May 4th in Lake Country Ontario, my right hand for the first time in the season able to write on a work day, thinking about the only people I knew changing as they come home to find I am gone.

[edit] Sleeping outside a midnight customs office with a funny sort of plan

Many thanks for getting me to the website outlining where to sleep in the Vancouver airport. The US departure terminal is a great hall where this tired traveler was not disturbed, except when I was ambushed by an apparently chipper guy who was sleeping nearby, when I stirred at 2:30. This placid, lucid, soft-spoken (Vancouver) Island resident had planted, then spent a lot of time collecting cones in five gallon pails... could make $400 a day, except when he ran a crew, then he made $4000 in 13 days before retiring... ended up buying reffers at auctions in Alberta for BC's second biggest seedling transport company. (reffer is slang for refrigerated transport-truck trailers where seedlings are housed between the nursery and being planted)

And if that guy seemed open, I spent the last 3 hours of my flight flush against a Beijing real estate agent as we madly illustrated our thoughts. Her English was very weak, her daughters' a touch better, and there were many parles around me as she slowly communicated her plan for me. In 6 months I could learn the language and be selling real estate to North Americans in China (it was her first time here, to discuss that prospect in Toronto). Either this was her design, or I was to marry one of her only-slightly-unappealing daughters: the one on the other side of me who fidgeted for 4 entire hours. A Canadian mineral engineer had just stayed with them for 6 months and learned the language, left with this Toronto meeting arranged, but no arranged marriage. The whole thing ended fishily, with an enthusiastic conversation in mandarin, which I think could be described as "Fidgety, it's obvious you want to jump him."

Seemed weird, until I learned tomorrow morning Chen Yen and cone-collector will be selling off China and Mexico to North American buyers, and my sorry ass will still be planting trees.

[edit] New Years 2007

On my run tonight I saw an ambulance at an old folks home, looked up to see Venus pulsating in the night sky.

I have been reading a sort of linguistic history that discusses the planets, muses, humours, never anything low brow. Venereal used to mean carefree sexuality. Like martial or jovial, it denoted a connection between a person and a god. The person is enthusiastic, coming from entheos, to be possessed. Anyway, venereal had a slightly positive connotation, until the diseases caught up to it. It was usually used to describe sailors, whose risk or paternity, or accountable paternity, are, it appears to me, marginal.

I wonder if we missed a similar, more recent venereal spirit. We were all born a little too late to experience the ascent of Queen which occurred in a historical moment before the AIDS epidemic. Was homosexuality more appealing then? No prophylactic barriers, no paternity suits. There, a generation after the sexual revolution a relationship without children, without unequal genders, without one partner undergoing hormone therapy to thwart conception. Of course the environment wasn't genuinely friendly, but homosexuals could answer the typical cat-call, as Erie Indiana put it, "How can we live like this?" And in a moment, the diseases caught up with it, and venereal freedom was washed away. We grew up in an era when the Indiana's question was "How can we die like this?" Each time it was asked it begged eternal, religious and moral questions.

Which brings me from Venus, back to the ambulance. Now, I don't know that someone died, but I certainly hope one did. I hope a very old one got away, and in getting out of that fee-taking prison, escapes pain, hollow Christmas wishes, failing ability and the criminal nursing home procedure of replaying a videotape of last years New Years celebration (so the ball can drop at 9pm and no extra night staff need be paid). Now, I don't care if you're sympathetic; I don't have any grand plans to open a euthanasiac hunt (knowing that Paul McCartney could bankrupt this nation if we did).

The way I see it, people are only really living when they're powerful and alert to that power. The elderly on extended stay, the many past wit's end, are not articulate enough to persuade, powerful enough to demand or productive enough to withhold. Life is ostensibly sacred, but that's premised on the assumption of self-awareness, at least. Avoiding the sad face of senility and the presumable yellow-bellied greed of business, we so often ignore this in favour of knowledge of a few people celebrating life in old age (but those who, metaphorically, can wipe their own ass). Facing the issue of longevity really requires asking whether life, confused, cajoled and merely tolerated for an accountable stipend can be accepted for any reason other then our personal fear of the abyss. The staff is paid to wish you a Merry Christmas until the decorations come off the windows and ball drops on another 2006.