Papa's young philogospher

• Name a BAND (NOT a song, NOT a solo performer) that starts with the letter “D”.
• Please don’t Duck Duck Go one, just use your brain.
• I'll then give you a letter for you to REPOST.

And you can't use Dead & Company, 'cuz I am! (If you've got three + hours, this is a fantastic show!)

A view from the self(ish) perspective

Young Edifice says goodbye to his baby as he prepares to venture out into the plague-emptied streets of Ottawa, afternoon of March 25, 2020.

I feel as if I'm tempting fate to type the following, but here goes ...

Presuming we don't get sick, the semi-lockdown we're experiencing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic has barely touched our lives except for one thing: I am out of work.

Out of work, but not disastrously so. Raven is still on maternity leave, at either 90% or 100% of her salary (I think the latter), and I have learned sufficient frugality from her that I actually have a couple of thousand dollars in the bank — something I was unable to accomplish back the days more than a decade ago when I earned twice what I do now. And it looks as I will be eligible for some sort of government package that will cover my lost income at least until August — which is when our plan had me leaving work to become a full-time dad anyway.

And in a worst-case scenario, if we both somehow lost our jobs, we live in an apartment owned by non-profit housing corporation and so, would be eligible for a rent subsidy until we were back on our feet.

Long story short, I don't think any of us are sick, I want to stay home with my daughter and I might get paid to do so for the next four months, and I now have more time to write and to work on being a publisher — yes, if you're looking for something good to read, click this long link!.

What's not to like?

Not quite eerie ... but close

Photo taken around 14:45 on March 25, 2020, outside a grocery store at the corner of Bank and Somerset Streets in downtown Ottawa

Oh yeah, there's plenty not to like.

On a personal level, we had intended to visit Raven's parents and family in Macau in April but that plan — obviously — is on an indefinite hold.

Much more seriously, people — quite a lot of people in some places — are dying. Many others are seriously ill and still more people are losing their jobs and anxious that they will lose a lot more than that.

And I believe, too, from information derived via The Other Place, that at least one of you has symptoms of Covid-19 and is feeling understandably anxious because of it, so the situation is hitting me on a personal level as well, if at some distance.

Here in Ottawa (see photo above), life goes on but in an eerie sort of half-normal fashion. A lot of stores are closed and the streets — even close to rush hour — have a Sunday feel to them, while queues to get into grocery stores are now the norm. (I also went to the Beer Store yesterday — yes, booze has been deemed an essential service; and rightly so, as the last thing an over-burdened medical system needs is to have its emergency rooms crowded with alcoholics suffering from delerium tremens — and found it nearly empty.)

People are mostly being very good about keeping their "social distance" from one another and seem to be dealing with the situation with consideration and good humour. That said, our just-in-time supply system is having serious problems keeping things like toilet paper in stock, as has been widely noted throughout much of the world. The toiletry section of my local supermarket reminds me of the empty shelves we so often found in Cuba.

And here we are ...

Photo of Young Edifice holding his daughter in what might have been the final snowfall of the season., Tuesday, March 24, 2020.

And so the entire world lives in times more uncertain than ever. A global economy based on suicidal fossil fuels and with a production capacity that far exceeds demand, while the rich hoard an ever-greater percentage of the whole is now being stressed by a deadly new virus that has spread across the world with shocking speed.

I think that most of us, myself definitely included, feel on a gut-level that things will soon (or soonish) go back to normal, and maybe they will.

But will they?

On the one hand, governments in a lot of places are instituting emergency measures that provide them with powers they may be loathe to relinquish, while on the other, many of capitalism's contradictions are ever-harder to paper over.

Can the climate movement become a fully-fledged anti-capitalist movement? I dunno, but I can dream ...

Me, I'm doing my best to hunker down and raise my daughter as if the world is a safe and wonderful place and will only get better. I will dream.

Meanwhile, how are you folks coping with the situation?

Notes on my health, and the state of the Emergency Department at the Ottawa Civic Hospital (also some footie)

Health-wise, 2018 has not been kind to me. To start, following a long evening sitting in a bad chair at my father's, and my first soccer game of the year, following three weeks off (one actual missed game — about which more, perhaps, in another entry — and two bye weeks for Christmas and New Year's eves), I woke up on Monday the 8th in an agony of lower back pain, something with which I have by this point had far too much familiarity. Used to be, my back went out about every 11 years; nowadays, it's more like every two, with a minor episode between the big ones.

I called in sick, then the next day, and the one after that and the one after that. When I called in the next Monday, my boss suggested I just let him know when I was ready to go again.

Good call; I ended up missing a full two weeks of work along with two more soccer games.

(Allow me a digression. We lost the first of those missed games, and a team-mate texted me the following (I quote verbatim).

We needed you today lol our
dé was all messed up

Lost 4-2 I got the two line goals

(Needless to say, I chose and choose to read the lol in a completely non-ironic way. Onwards.)

At the same time that my back decided to treat me to another round of I dare you to get out of bed without screaming, just try it!, another, perhaps more serious, health issue blossomed suddenly into crisis after what was, in retrospect, a pretty long and gradual gestation period.

Briefly, for some time — maybe as many as two or three months, I've been finding it increasingly difficult — and uncomfortable — to pee. My once-powerful, Niagara-like flow was coming more and more often to resemble the final stretches of the modern Colorado River: slow and inconstant. And suddenly, also painful.

Finally moved to action, I called my GP's office and, using the magic words, It really hurts when I pee, managed to get an appointment on the day of the call, the 11th of January. There I produced a clean urine sample. The Good Doctor prescribed an ultrasound and blood tests, telling me she thought I probably had a bladder infection, adding that she also hoped that was the issue.

That was a Thursday. I duly made an appointment for the ultrasound at a nearby clinic, despite the fact the appointment was eight days away, just this past Friday, the 19th.

Come that day, the clinic called me and left a message saying there was no technician available and, er, my appointment was cancelled. Would I please call them back, etc etc.

Thing is, by this point, the discomfort-verging-on-pain had become fucking agony. I was peeing every hour and a half — or rather, I was trying to pee. Forced to sit rather than stand, so that I need not fear should my mighty efforts to void my bladder also sent issue from my nether region, despite the pain I usually managed to get only a fitful dribble to come out.

Feeling kind of desperate I called the clinic back. They could give me an appointment only the following Thursday. I booked it, but started calling others, and found a place (The Bruyere, south of the Byward Market) that could see me next Tuesday. I took it and hoped I could hold on (as it were) til then.

Come Saturday, I decided I couldn't hold on. The quantity of urine I was able to pass was less than ever, while the amount of pain was entering into agony territory.

I marched myself off to the Ottawa Civic's Emergency Department, arriving around 14:30.

The waiting room in the Civic's Emergency Department is pretty small, seats for maybe 30 or 40 people, I'd guess. There were about a dozen people there when I stepped up to the triage nurse's station. There they took my OHIP card and told me to take a seat and wait to be called.

I settled in for what I thought would be a long while, but I heard my name no more than five or 10 minutes later. The Triage nurse took my particulars and sent me into another waiting area — this one frankly just a hallway lined with chairs — with a samble container for a urine sample. That took about three tries to fill only half-way, but I was told it was enough when I finally saw a doctor.

Finally was a couple of hours after I'd arrived at the hospital. The doctor was a young woman (you know you're getting old when doctors are probably young enough to be your daughter. Le sigh ...) who gave no sign of being rushed. She asked questions and answered them, and took note when I mentioned that the triage nurse had made a mistake: I was suffering from pain in the tip of my penis when I pee, not "abdominal" pain! She took an ultrasound of my abdomen and she even made the rectal probe of my prostate reasonably comfortable.

And then it was back into the waiting hall.

The second ultrasound came around 17:30, and the CT scan, complete with intravenous administration of some kind of dye took place around 19:15 and I was back in the main waiting area at around 21:00. Then another two hours or so to await my results. To wit, a probably bladder infection, no sign of enlarged prostate, but a slightly thickened bladder. At 23:20, I left the hospital with a couple of antibiotics swalled and prescriptions for a two-week course of same, and a 30 day course of Tamsulosin, a muscle relaxant meant to make it easier for me to pee.

All that, for an out-of-pocket cost of about nine hours of my time and $0.00 out-of-pocket. (Filling the prescriptions, on the other hand, did cost me, though happily not a lot.)

Raven declared, "Finally, after 9 hours!!" via text, but I wrote back, "I'm not complaining. No appointment, two ultrasounds and a CT scan, all for 'free', for everyone who needs it."

And indeed, that more included another ultrasound this week, and will include follow-ups with my GP, and then, well, who knows. But I suppose as I carry on growing improbably older, I'll have need of more, not less, medicare.

All in all, I was pretty impressed by what I found at the Civic. Yes, having patients wait in a hallway is far from ideal, sign of austerity, no doubt, but still a functioning system.

Pray we organize to keep it that way.

Finally, despite the fact that I missed two weeks of work, all credit to Raven! Despite earning barely more than the new minimum provincial wage and despite having just put two new pairs of glasses (one for driving/cycling &ct, the other a pair of bifocals for reading and computer work; and glass lenses, damnit, no more god damned plastic!), I am still in a position that will see me pay of the credit card before I carry any interest. Thanks to her lessons, the missed work and the extra expenses are drag, but not a problem, never mind a disaster.

Pics, of course, to come when the new specs are delivered. This coming week, I hope!

Thanks for bearing with me. If you read this far, you deserve a little break.

Many years ago (I was a teenager, so we're talking circa 35 years godhelpme), I was hanging at a house-party, drinkin', probably tokin', and wandering about talking to this, that, and the other person.

At some point I opened a closed door, poked my head into a room lit only with a single candle. I'd heard music and been curious.

Inside, cross-legged on my friend Adam's futon, was Matt. Matt was a musician, a guitarist. In fact, he was the guitarist at my very small high school. In a way. He could play anything and sound like anyone.

You wanted Jimmy Hendrix? Matt could do Jimmy, note for fucking note. Or Jerry Garcia. Or Jimmy Page.

You get the idea.

I didn't really much like Matt. I didn't dislike him, but he always struck me as a poseur, as someone who was forever showing off his skills, instead of inhabiting them.

But that night (or morning), I opened that door and caught him unawares. And he stayed unawares. He didn't hear the door open, didn't know I was listening.

He was playing only for himself.

And he was fantastic. Just a young man really getting into his acoustic guitar and grooving. I don't know how long I listened, but it was long enough for a couple of my friends to notice me, half in and half out of the hallway and they too stopped when they heard the magic. The joy.

And yeah, I know these guys (presumably) knew there was a camera on them, but that's the feeling I get from this lovely piece of music.

Enjoy.

"I'm really a very lucky person." — Benita Hart

There's no getting around it: my mother is dying. Not of any specific disease, but of that monstrous universal, life.

As she puts it, "my spine is crumbling" and her new(er) artificial knee rattles around, causing her intense pain on very little activity. She isn't quite housebound yet, but it's a near thing. She's basically given up on cooking because standing at the stove and bending or reaching for things in the cupboards hurts.

I rather suspect that, on some level, pretty much everything hurts her, at least a little.

And yet, "I'll consider myself lucky," she said to me the other day when I was up to Sudbury for a visit, "if I have another five good — productive — years left. Really lucky if I get ten."

And yet, even if she doesn't get those five years beyond her current 81 — if she died tomorrow — I think it would be safe to say that she died happy.

My first full day in Sudbury, Tuesday, I took her out to run some errands. Well, two. A stop at a medical supply store to return one assistive device and to purchase another — some sort of portable chair-seat tilter to help the infirm stand up and a long bench to assist in getting in and out of the bath-tub, respectively. Then off to the grocery store, which (for her) meant getting out of the car right at the entrance, hobbling inside and taking a seat on a motorized shopping cart I was pleasantly surprised to see are provided for the handicapped customers.

And then to home, that was it. But the next day, she was forced to spend almost entirely in bed. She'd woken with her knee seized up and needing powerful pain-killers for the rest of the day. (On the plus side, I was gratified that she marathoned the excellent Sally Wainright mini-series, Happy Valley, despite that programs bleak and sometimes brutal content.)

Every time I see her, she's smaller and more fragile and this trip made that which I've understood intellectually for a long time viscerally clear: this visit could easily turn out to be my last visit with her; the next email or phone call could be it.

And yet, this terminal stage of her life, with its pain, loss of energy and focus, sees my mother happier than I think I have ever known her to be.

Although many (perhaps most) of her old friends left Sudbury over a relatively short time, she has managed to cultivate a new (and mostly younger) group of friends, including a special friendship with a much younger man (well, he's in his early 60s, I think) that isn't quite romantic but shares a lot of characteristics of a romance. He is also the man who drove her to Ottawa to visit Raven and I last year). And a renewed sense of professional purpose through her weekly gig on CBC Radio, which brings in welcome money and certain amount of local celebrity, which she is enjoying every bit as much as she ought to.

She isn't in denial about death's proximity, nor is the old atheist scared of it (No heroic measures! she says, and she means it), but she plans to keep on living just as long as there is joy to found in it. When the pain or the disability comes to outweigh the joy, then, she says, she will be happy to let go.

At the risk of sounding sappy, me old mum's attitude towards life (and death) is frankly inspiring. (And the fact that 81 is only 31 years away from where I am now is frankly sobering. It's been nearly a month since I turned 50 and those 24 days went awfully god damned fast. That's sobering, too.)

Speaking of my birthday, I'll leave you with a brief video Raven took after we returned from birthday weekend of skating and snow-shoeing in Montebello, Quebec, at left.

New Year's Eve was delicious (if you're in Ottawa and like Indian food, the Golden India on McArthur is the best I've had in Ottawa. And they're not kidding about the dishes labelled extra hot) but otherwise quiet.

Some issues that need dealing with on the home front put a bit of a damper on our celebrations (and have taken up way too much of our time and energy), but we both can look back on 2012 as a pretty good year. And we're looking forward to the next being even better.

Happy new year, Gentle Readers. Though there is much wrong with this old world of ours — or rather, with what we are doing to it (and to each other) — there is a great deal of beauty and courage also.

All of which is to say, any summing up is going to have to wait (if I can get around to it at all). So I'll just leave you with a video. Remember when Neil Young was great? That's right, it was 2012.