ed_rex

What have I become or, The Devolution of Young Geoffrey!

There are times when looking oneself in even a metaphorical mirror is a sobering thing indeed.

Jesus, god, two written apologies in eight days! What in the world has happened to Young Edifice? Did I somehow turn into that middle-aged white guy? The one whose idea of conversation is to "share" his opinions about this, that and especially the other thing, whether or not anyone has asked for it.

The first incident I might have just chalked up to social awkwardness born of my long hermatose years in Ottawa. Outside of Raven and family, and my weekly soccer games, I could count most years' social interactions on the fingers of one hand. So I suppose a gaffe or two might be in order.

The other two, though, were the sort of explosions of ego that I have always found appalling in others; hearing them in myself is frankly a little nauseating.

That first incident happened two Sundays ago, after a soccer game (we won, thank you very much) which featured a former team-mate as the opposing captain.

Robyn and I last played together two or three years ago, and our sole contact since has been a LinkedIn "friendship", and three or four email exchanges when I've been looking for a sub for one of my teams.

She is an athletic young woman, and one with whom I enjoyed talking when we played together and, yes, I liked the look of her as well. Had I been single, she was someone I might have pursued, if had she wasn't a vegetarian. (I know. Not as big a deal as politics or religion, but still ...) Whether any of that contributed to my behaviour a week-and-a-half ago I leave to the judgment of the reader; for me, I don't think so, but it's possible.

Anyway. As opposing captains we shook hands before the game and then, as fellow cyclists, afterwards we talked on the way to the bike rack, and rode off together, catching up as acquaintances will do.

And then, when there was a brief lull in the conversation, I leaned into my handlebars and said over my shoulder, "Well, and with that I will bid you adieu!" And I stepped hard on my peddles and pulled away as if I was being chased by the devil himself.

Why? Why ever would I be so rude to someone I liked? As best I can recall, I was worried that I was presuming too much, that she might feel I was pursuing her in some unseemly way. That, despite the fact she seemed for all the world happy to see me and to be enjoying our chat. And when I made my sudden departure, her "Okay," came with a distinctly confused tone of voice.

It's one thing to not be an aggressive prick, Young Edifice, but you are actually allowed to talk with women. You used to do it all the time. Hell, there have been long periods in your life when most of your friends were women!

Another incident came on a return trip from Montreal, when one of my passengers directed me to where he had parked his car. A 1970 Thunderbird, all bright red paint job and obviously one that had been lovably restored.

As, in fact, the pilot explained. And he asked for a few appreciative words about his classic automobile. His crew made the appropriate sounds but what I heard coming from my own mouth appalled me, even as I was unable to stop the words from spilling forth. "Well, if I was one who liked sports cars, I guess I'd like it."

Jesus. God. What a fucking ass. Did anybody, I asked myself, actually ask whether you liked sports cars, Young Edifice!?! Just say, "Nice car," would that be so hard?

Then there was this past Sunday, another soccer game. (We lost that one, and I was filling in as keeper. Ten balls got past me. It took me a while longer to process my behaviour because of that.)

One of my team-mates is a young journalist (since when are national magazine writers allowed to look like they're barely out of high school? When did Young Edifice get to be so old!) and when she arrived we got to talking, almost as if we were carrying on from a chat we'd had the previous game.

Anyway, she told me that she was covering the NAFTA negotiations — and I fucking cut her off.

Cut her off and — again, almost as if I were listening to some asshole who wasn't me, except that, y'know: it was my mouth that was flapping, my voice that was spouting off.

Because spouting off was what I was doing. "I haven't really been paying much attention to the negotiations," I started off by saying. And then, rather than asking her to fill me in — since she was, y'know, paying a lot of attention to the proceedings — I launched into a mini-rant on how I didn't trust Trudeau &ct &ct &ct.

For some strange reason, that kind of killed the "conversation", though I didn't really notice it in the moment, since we spoke at half-time and it was time to get back out onto the field.

And on the field, I let in another four goals (for a grand total of 10 — not my most shining hour as keeper!), so it wasn't until I was home and recovered from the defeat that I replayed my words and voice in my mind and realized what I must have sounded like: That Guy. That middle-aged white guy whose idea of conversation is to opine, to lecture, and god knows, not to listen — especially not to a younger woman even if she is actually involved in the topic at hand.

Yuck.

I wrote both women letters of apology (the pilot? Well, I don't have his email address anyway), and both graciously said it was fine, but I still don't feel like it's fine. I can only hope that I'll be given the chance to behave better in the future.

I don't think I've always been like this, so what happened? When did I turn into That Guy? Will I soon by loudly proclaiming that all modern music — everything made since I turned 20 or so — is crap? God knows, I keep running into men (and they are usually men, no question) who make such statements with no apparent sense of irony, or awareness that they are surely channelling their own parents, who doubtless said the same about the music they now idolize as The Best of All Time.

Please, Lord: I do not want this to be a taste of my future self. Self-monitoring — intense self-monitoring! — must become the order of the day from now until at last I slide from this mortal coil into eternal darkness.

Emmy the Great describes the type (I don't want to become) with a wonderfully acerbic wit.

You say you're looking for the truth,
Like you got rifles in your books,
But up above your parents' roof
I saw no star tonight,
Only the black from whence you came,
And where they'll send you back again,
And no blue plaque will keep your name
From falling out of sight.

And you can wage this war of one,
And I am still the only one
Who will remember you when you are gone.

Clouds so swift, Putin comin' on

But I ain't goin' nowhere ...

"Right now, Senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia. [long pause] That's a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I'm not going to make." — General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., Chair Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 22, 2016.

Really people, you need to get a fucking grip!

Yes, rumour has it that LiveJournal's servers have (finally) been moved to Russia. (Click here for a relatively dispassionate over-view.) I suspect it's even true. But I am downright embarrassed by the number of you otherwise intelligent people who seem to have bought, hook line and proverbial sinker, the American establishment's Putin is the next Hitler meme.

I mean, dear god, this is all just (a very small) part of the demonization of a traditional enemy by a faction in the United States that has just lost power to another faction. Why exactly the former (until recently fronted by Hillary Clinton) had as the centrepiece of its foreign policy an intention to risk war with the world's second most powerful nuclear state baffles, but that's what her no-fly policy in Libya amounted to.

Don't believe me? Maybe you'll believe the fucking Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

This isn't, I hasten to add, either an endorsement of the fascistic US President-elect, or of Russia's autocratic (at best) strongman, but rather a reminder that both official sides of the American establishemt are lying to you, and have been lying to you about anything that matters, pretty much full-time for a long time.

Are Russian intelligence services going to spy on your LiveJournal posts? No doubt, especially if you post in Russian. And, no doubt, they've been doing it for a while. If you believe the Russians "hacked the US election" (as I know at least some of you do), then you can't possibly logically think they paid attention to US laws and left LJ posts sacrosanct because the servers were outside Russia's borders?

I mean, can you?

Well, maybe you can. #Election2016 turned an awful lot of liberals into melon-heads (no offence intended towards actual melons), at least when it comes to US and international politics, especially when it comes to matters of war and peace.

Anyway, to make a long story short: although I'm happy to have DreamWidth as a back-up — and have used it as my primary posting platform for some years now; and in fact just paid for another year's membership — I'm not leaving LJ any time soon.

As my daddy told back in the infancy of teh interwebs, "Never put in an email [or anywhere else online] anything you wouldn't be willing to see on the front page of The New York Times.

Move to DreamWidth if you want (and I'll happily grant you access there/here, if you still want me around after this rant), but if you think your privacy is significantly more secure there than it is on LJ, you are — to be polite about it — living in a fucking DreamWorld.

That's it. Here, have a video from one of the best song-writers and musicians of our age.

1.0: Finding the culture-verse in an FM radio receiver

1.1: The kids today

Driving home yesterday, I did something I almost never do: being bored with CBC Radio and the Montreal AM sports station blathering on about something not hockey, I chanced upon a commercial music station and decided to give it a listen.

94.7 FM it was, "Montreal's Hit Music Channel".

What struck me first was that this station really plays pop hits, not just hits of a particular genre. 94.7 FM ain't a rock station, nor a pop station nor even a hip-hop station. It is all of the above, if I dare to judge by that hour and some minutes of exposure. The only thing missing was country (which has really been subsumed into rock anyway; Hank Williams wouldn't recognize today's "country" if it crooned at his 24 hours straight. But I digress).

The kids today, it seems, don't limit themselves to one particular style of noise music, but are in fact one hell of a lot more catholic in their tastes that the radio of my era would have suggested.

And good on them; I guess the internet is good for something after all, eh?

1.2: Disco laughs last

That said, and though the technical merits of the music on offer were bloody slick, there was a sameness at the back of just about everything I heard, a monotonous back-beat that reminded me of the "sound" in the 80s when even really good drummers did their damnest to immitate drum machines.

Driving just about all the music I heard last night was a descendant of disco's throbbing dance-hall backbeat. I'm not saying there is nothing to distinguish between the pop songs and the rap tunes and the rock-and-roll on offer, but all three had clearly been infected by that which so many of us loudly said "sucked" way back in the day.

I guess people like to dance ...

1.3: The decline of Anglo Montréal (and the rise of a bilingual urban polity)

As you might have noticed above, 94.7 is an English-language radio station. Not so the ads. Like many of my Montréal-based passengers, the ads on 94.7 presume the audience is bilingual. At a guess, I'd say maybe a third of those I heard were in French, and French only.

Which is pretty god damned cool, when you think about it.

And which, as I alluded to above, matches my observation of the younger cohort among my Montréal-based crews. Those people, Anglo and Franco alike, are bilingual down to their genes, switching between languages while they talk without any hesitation, nor even, any apparent self-consciousness. Whatever works in the moment.

Dunno if the phenomenon will survive over the long term, but in the short one, it is a beautiful thing to witness.

* * *

2.0: Speaking ill of the dead

To completely change the subject, those of you who give a damn already know that Elisabeth Sladen — yes, Doctor Who's Sarah Jane Smith — dies nearly two years ago now.

What you might not know is that she wrote (or rather, she told her story to a hack) a memoir shortly before the cancer got her.

Fool that I am, I dared to hope that Lis Sladen might be even half as interesting as Sarah Jane was. Not quite. Elisabeth Sladen: the autobiography is really only going to be of interest to those who knew her work with the Third and Fourth Doctors, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. That's what most of the book covers, but only superficially.

Anyway, my full review lives here and my intro to that piece is over here.

3.0 Music, music, (new) music!

Finally, for those of you who've slogged all the way through my meanderings, a reward. Gin Wigmore is a young(ish) Kiwi who has knocked my proverbial socks off like no one since Emmy the Great came to my cognizance maybe a half-year or so back.

Anyway, without further ado ... Sweet Hell with Gin Wigmore!