When I quit blogging, I’ll do it my way

I think it’s a sign of the times when one of the most passionate, committed bloggers out there mentions that Blogging Just Isn’t Fun Anymore.   In saying he’s Closing This Shit Down, another blogger says as he switches to Tumblr: WordPress is so 2006…  Comment fatigue, post burn-out, eyes glazed over as the feedreader spits out another 55 updates…

Have you thought about quitting blogging?  I have.  It’s going to happen sooner or later, so when it does, I want to be prepared.    This is about how I want to end it.  The last post.  The so-long-I’m-outta-here.  Not like some, who simply slink off and let their blogs die. 

When I quit blogging, I’ll do it My Way.  Perhaps I’ll link back to this very post.  So here’s a preview:

And now - the text is clear
And so I face - the final posting.
My friends - have left Facebook
Without a trace, of which I’m certain
I’ve blogged - a blog that’s full
I’ve followed each and every comment
No more. No more of this.
I’ve hit the high - way.

Trackbacks? I’ve had a few,
And linked to things - too dumb to mention
I’ve post’d ’bout - a lot of bull
About a life - of nervous tension.
I planned each post, of course
Each paragraph, each punctuation
But so… so bored to tears,
It’s time to go ‘way.

Yes, there were times - I posted shite
Just like that site, for those that arrrre white
But nonetheless, when I look back
I chewed it well, and spat it out,
I wrote it all, I had a ball,
Writing ev’ry day.

There’s more, but I simply can’t go on…
Take it away Sid:

Six-word memoir

Indie of Indeterminacy fame has asked me to post a photo and six words describing myself.

Here goes:

“Not altogether serious about this world.”

Daring you to try this. It’s not as easy as it looks.

The meme, I mean, not sticking a piggie atop your recently shaved head.

Score one for Toytown Germany

Ever been on a forum for a while and notice that it’s always the same-old, same-old? The same people talking about the same things, usually pointless banter, often turning into infantile squabbles, name-calling, and other crap you thought you’d left behind before high school?

Sometimes, though, you run across a gem of a post. Like this one today on Toytown, a forum for English-speaking expats living in Germany. Seems a few women in Munich had been noticing that in the city’s main central square Marienplatz, they were getting hit on. A lot.

So one member - a good-looking 23-year-old woman who became suspicious after being chatted up three times in two months by German men all in the same small area of town - decided to test things out. Even better, she brought along a fellow forum member to take photos.

Hanging out on the square for a while, sure enough, a guy came up and started to chat her up, followed by his wingman. As the post says, both are members of the Munich Lair, an online club for guys who get together to try to pick up women.

Great stuff. A little investigative reporting, a little story-telling, photos to back it up. Brilliant!

Asking questions of beauty in Paris, city of women

Back in early February after our long weekend in London, I mentioned that we were headed to Paris in the Spring. A commenter who is also a poet pointed out that London is usually seen as a man’s city, Paris a woman’s, and that he was interested in seeing my take on Paris as opposed to London.

In the meantime - a week or so before we left - A Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris was published. Written by the French foreign minister’s speech-writer, it caused a bit of a stir in feminist circles because it points out where to find the city’s most beautiful women according to age, manner of dress, income level, where you might catch a good view up their skirts, where to find the best-looking legs…

That shred of the lingering adolescent in me was tempted to grab a copy as soon as we got there as a bit of a lark, maybe check out a quarter or two to see if any of it had any truth, but I’m glad I didn’t. Around noon on our first day there, I’d already come to the conclusion it must be more joke novelty than guide.

Unless you’re blind or have a fetish for the morbidly obese, it’s impossible to walk more than a block or two in Paris without coming across a woman who is worth much more than a passing glance. It is full of well-dressed, attractive women of every age and race.

So it’s perhaps fitting that a city whose reputation celebrates the ultimate in feminine beauty should be hosting an exhibition entitled Femmes du Monde - The World’s Women.

The artist Titouan Lamazou spent six years collecting photographs of women in some of the most remote recesses of the planet, using those photos as a basis for portraiture in pencil, charcoal, pastel and watercolour.

Like the life-sized photo of a Mongolian woman sitting in her yurt, the images tempt you to step in and learn more about who they are, what their lives are like, where they’ve come from and where they’re going. A Sao Paolo garbage-picker who became a fashion model, a lone female UN soldier on an African peacekeeping mission, an Australian Aboriginal artist, refugees, factory workers, strippers, prostitutes… All are given equal weight with not a whiff of judgment on their choices or maudlin pity of their circumstances.

Saving the best for last, the exhibition hall terminates at where the concepts of idealised feminine beauty, freedom of choice and the market collide: our mania for plastic surgery and the phenomenon of the Real Doll - made-to-order life-sized male masturbation aides which sell for $8,000 US apiece. If you’ve never heard of the Real Doll, I suggest you click on that link.

On one side, a collection of photos of about 20 women - some pre- and post-op - from Calí, Colombia, the South American capital of surgical silicone.

On the other, a wall-sized photograph of the inside of Real Doll’s factory, their lifeless, spread-legged, open-mouthed female effigies suspended on a curving track along the ceiling like so much quartered beef at a slaughterhouse.

The best for last because the questions are almost screaming at you: Is the Real Doll the pinnacle of beauty that every woman should strive for no matter what the cost and no matter what the risk to her health? Or are the silicone breasts, suctioned hips and trimmed-back labia these women carry around the ideal for Real Doll? Which is the model for which?

This photo doesn’t do the room justice and is actually a little blurry because I took it furtively. But if you’re headed to Paris and would like to see the exhibition in person, it is in the Musée de l’Homme just a stone’s throw across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Due to popular demand it has been extended several times.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Place des Vosges, Paris

We walked from our hotel near the Gare de l’Est through the streets of Paris to the Marais, which is where what’s left of the old Jewish quarter can be found. It was the Pentecost holiday Monday so not many shops were open, but we didn’t care. We were winding our way to find the school where K had worked as a teaching assistant at Lycée Victor Hugo 27 years ago.

A quick snap of her in front and we were on our way again, this time to Place des Vosges, one of her favourite hangouts during the year she stayed here.

We’d just turned a corner when we stumbled upon this scene: two police cars blocking the road, a half-dozen cops standing around, one holding a grumpy homeless man they’d handcuffed moments before. By the crumpled mass of soiled sleeping bags and dirty blankets, you could tell they’d used the grand covered sidewalk of the south side as a place to crash, and I guess they’d gotten into such a fight upon waking that someone called the police.

That’s not what I found interesting, though. It’s what was happening across the street in the park.

A whole row of kids on a school outing, or maybe in the park at recess, checking out the cops busting the bums.

They were gawking at the scene for a good five minutes before a teacher came along and shooed them away.

This is what we enjoyed most about Paris. Just being there, taking our time and taking it in.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Paris sunset

Paris. Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 2045.

It was a wonderful trip.

More later.

Whatever happened to that floaty feeling?

You know you’re reading a great book when all of a sudden you’ll want to reach out through the pages to the author and say: YES! I know what you mean! That’s happened to me!

The passage I was reading is from What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt and it deals with a father talking to his 11-year-old son before he goes to bed. They’ve just been to a baseball game.

“You know Dad, I’m always thinking about how many people there are in the world. I was thinking about it between innings at the game, and I got this funny feeling, you know, how everybody is thinking thoughts at the same time, billions of thoughts.

“…And then I got this weird idea about how all those different people see what they see just a little different from everybody else.”

“You mean that every person has a different way of seeing the world?”

“No, Dad, I mean really and truly. I mean that because we were sitting where we were sitting tonight, we saw a game that was a little different from those guys with the beer next to us. It was the same game, but I could’ve noticed something those guys didn’t. And then I thought, if I was sitting over there, I’d see something else. And not just the game. I mean they saw me and I saw them, but I didn’t see myself and they didn’t see themselves. Do you get what I mean?”

“I know just what you mean. I’ve thought about it a lot, Matt. The place where I am is missing from my view. It’s like that for everybody. We don’t see ourselves in the picture, do we? It’s kind of a hole.”

“And then when I put that together with people thinking their zillions of thoughts - right now they’re out there thinking and thinking - I get this floaty feeling.”

This floaty feeling.

Yes! I gripped both sides of the book and shook it, as if doing so would somehow get the message across to the writer that I used to get that too.

Sometimes at night after lights were out, sometimes all alone in the forest, I could almost will it to happen. I didn’t even have to have my eyes closed. All I had to do was think of the world and everything that’s in it, every detail and that again on the moon, and the planets, and our galaxy and the clusters of galaxies beyond, and the outer reaches of the universe and all the dust motes in the infinity of space, and ask myself this: what if, instead of all this, there were nothing? What if right now, there were abolutely nothing? What if there were absolutely nothing at all, what if there never had been anything at all, and could there ever be nothing at all, and what if by defining this nothing as something, there were actually something anyway?

And while thinking this, I’d get this floaty feeling as if my body were drifting along in a current I couldn’t control. Sometimes it was accompanied by sounds, like rushing water or wind, other times it was like a piece of music, a string passage perhaps. Exactly what, I can’t recall, I just remember having the feeling.

I told some people about it over the years, but very few said they knew what I meant or had experienced it themselves.

Many years later, a girlfriend - a new-agey type who believed in chakras and energy fields and mysticism - said I was astral travelling, and that I was having an out-of-body experience.

Then again, she also spun tales of being on a mafia hit-list because she’d given the RCMP information that led to their busting a long-running heroin-smuggling operation out of Bangkok into Canada in the late 1980s and that’s why she had to leave Vancouver and go live in Montreal… Yeah right…

I hadn’t thought about it for ages before coming across that passage this morning, because by the time I was 13, I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d try to will it, I’d try to make that feeling come back, but it’s gone.

What was it? What killed it in me, and could I ever get it back again?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: Taking that book to Paris. See you in 10 days or so.

Into the ghosts of 1968

I’ve never been one to hit the streets with enough guts and grit to throw paving stones and firebombs, overturn cars and land in jail for a night or two.

Not a rebel, about the only thing I ever did to resist the deep-channel path my parents had laid out before me - of course you’ll go on to university - was to say Fuck It one day in Spring 1980, use the money I’d earned over the Winter to buy a backpack, a ticket to London, Let’s Go Europe and a Eurail pass, putting off for the second year in a row a university program I had no interest in continuing.

Arriving home a year later to begin a different program, I soon got restless again and started looking for a way to get back to Europe. Since I was now majoring in French, it made sense to go to France to learn it there for a year.

By the time I arrived in Grenoble in 1982, the flame and fury of the May 1968 Paris riots were already ancient history. Landing in the wrong place at the wrong time, this is about all the mischief in France I ever got up to:

When my wife and I get to Paris in a few days for a week of revisiting old friends, old haunts and old memories, it will be tempting to wander down a street or two which 40 years before was barricaded with burning cars and strewn with debris, but I doubt we’ll actually do so.

Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Chicago, Paris, Prague: I started paying attention to the news in 1968 after taking over my brother’s Vancouver Sun paper route. I was amazed to learn how the world outside our quiet, isolated little burg dug out of a corner of a still-undiscovered fjord on the West Coast of Canada could be roiling in such chaos, but I was only eight years old and too young to grasp much of anything, especially why the world was going through what it was.

Just an object of derision to my brothers’ friends, one of whom pointed and laughed at me from the back of a car one day and said: he still thinks his prick’s just for pissing!

Vive la révolution? Vive l’amour!

I can’t wait. Did I mention it’s going to be just the two of us?

© 2008 lettershometoyou