Category Archives: Commentary

Hearts of Darkness

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For the first time in a long time, I clicked on an Instagram story of a friend. It was a video of a Kid Carson podcast who, from what I’ve been able to glean, is trying to be the Canadian Joe Rogan. Carson used to be a radio guy here in the Great White North until he went on a pro “freedumb convoy” conspiracy rant on-air and was (quite justifiably, in my opinion) fired.

Anyway, in this video of his podcast, Kid goes on about how all 190-something nations part of the World Health Organization (WHO) are going to vote to give the organization “limitless power” over how countries deal with pandemics. Don’t forget, dear listener, that the WHO is funded by none other than… Bill Gates! Jesus Christ on a cracker, I watched about 3 minutes of this 6-minute video and my head almost exploded.

As for my friend who posted it, at least some members of their family have been sucked down the FOX News rabbit hole, so I shouldn’t be surprised that they’ve gone and jumped in to see what all the fuss was about. I wanted to reach out to this person and try to talk sense into them, but I know it won’t work. They will have some fallacious argument or unprovable rationalization at the ready; parroting some talking point from a big-mouthed, right-wing batshit nutjob.

I was disappointed and sad. My friend is such a kind and loving person, as is their entire family, but they’re spewing this conspiracy bullshit like sprinkles on a sundae – and it’s dangerous.

Distraught and upset, I reached out to my dear friend and world-renowned skeptic, Gordon Bonnet (check out his blog, Skeptophilia. It’s what’s for breakfast). I said to him, “I have this nagging feeling that we’re witnessing the fall of civilization.”

Gordon, unfortunately, has experience with people who’ve gone off the deep end and I was hoping he’d have some insight on how to navigate these waters. At the very least I knew he’d empathize with my situation. His suggestion was to leave them be. Hard as it is to admit, sometimes the only play is to walk away. This is fine on a small scale, but the slow goose step towards a fascist hellscape continues seemingly unabated. What the hell can we do about that? We have to do something, right? Left unchecked, those incapable of reason and critical thought will steamroll right into the vault and rob the rest of us blind.

Stephen King once said, “The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short.” The problem is they can do a hell of a lot of damage in a very quick amount of time. Just look at what happened with just four years of the tangerine shitgibbon in the White House. In the snap of a finger, the United States is on the cusp of rolling back reproductive rights that have been in place for two generations.

So what is there to do?

I have no idea, to be honest. This macro-scale stuff is beyond complicated (practically, not conceptually) but on the micro-scale taking Gordon’s suggestion and letting go is a good start – and that’s what this post is. Letting go. There’s an old saying, “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it is yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.”

I hope these friends come back, I truly do, but they’re going to have to do it on their own.

~ Andrew

Related Reading:

(Almost) Always Working

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Being a writer is an odd sort of existence. You come up with these wild (hopefully original) ideas and slap tens of thousands of different combinations of the same 26 letters onto the page and bring them to life.

Katie Oldham famously wrote about the experience of consuming these ideas:

Creating the most effective hallucinatory experience takes a lot of effort. You need to know what you’re doing. You need to have a solid grasp of the rules and conformances – so you can break them properly. You need to be dedicated, not just to the execution element of the craft, but to the whole universe of storytelling. I will also argue it’s not enough to have merely existed, you need to have experienced something in life, either first-hand or vicariously through others. That’s not to say that young, inexperienced people can’t write engaging or even transformative stories, but I’ll assert that they are in the minority. Hell, the list of those who can is short enough as it is even if you don’t impose any life-experience criteria.

There’s also an expression out there, and I’m not sure who to attribute it to, but it goes like this:

Writers are readers.

I’ll take the quote a step further and say:

Writers are conscientious consumers of storytelling in all its forms.

Yes, books are storytelling but so are:

  • graphic novels,
  • and screen productions (large and small, self-made or professional),
  • and live theatre,
  • and webcomics or cartoons,
  • and graphic novels,
  • and magic,
  • and stand-up comedy,
  • and poetry,
  • and spoken (or signed) word,
  • and cave drawings,
  • and all the visual arts,
  • and music.

Recently, George Stroumboulopoulos (“Strombo”) interviewed the surviving members of Rush, Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee, on his “House of Strombo” show (you can watch the full YouTube interview at the end of this post). This segment early in the discussion really resonated with me.

Strombo: “Rush could have played 20 different genres. What were the things that you were being exposed to that led you to figure out that this is the way you wanted to be?”

Lifeson: “Listening to other things like Joni Mitchell, listening to the crafting of songs and what works and what doesn’t work and what really stands out in a song, and the pacing, and all of those things about the structure of a song, you learn about that through listening. You… maybe are not directly influenced by the music itself, but how it’s constructed and how it works… becomes the important thing, I think, and you carry that on forever.”

I extend the philosophy of Lifeson’s influencing experiences to my everyday existence. Sure, there are times when I just shut off my brain and enjoy various art forms for the sake of enjoying them, appreciating art for art’s sake, but more often than not I’m examining, as Alex said, “how it’s constructed and how it works”.

I pay attention to how whatever I’m consuming makes me feel and then I start thinking about whatever it is that’s making me feel the way I’m feeling. Naturally, if it involves words of any kind I examine the writing first, but what I’m really doing is looking for the fundamental elements of the story that are triggering the emotion, regardless of the positiveness or negativeness of it.

Ultimately, I’m constantly asking myself, “Why does the story make me feel the way I feel?” and when I sit down at the computer to write, I do my darndest to take those pieces, those elements of structure and construction, and craft the story I want to tell. In that sense, I’m (almost) always working, a concept that Misters Lifeson and Lee have understood since they strummed their first chords together more than fifty years ago.

I got no time for livin’
Yes, I’m workin’ all the time

– Workign Man. Songwriters: Alex Lifeson / Geddy Lee

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that everyone who creates should consume with the same analytical intent. It’s perfectly fine for anyone to enjoy art for art’s sake 100% of the time. However, if you’re a writer, if you’re a storyteller, I would encourage you to look beyond your chosen medium, see what makes it tick, and bring some of that into what you do.

At the very least, you’ll have a better understanding and appreciation for whatever it is you’ve experienced, and who knows, in the process, you might create a more engaging or transformative story of your own.

Check out Alex Lifeson’s new musical project, Envy Of None. It’s a departure from the musical stylings of Rush, but something any music lover will appreciate (Maiah Wynne’s vocals are so haunting and trippy you’ll find yourself immersed in the music). https://envyofnone.com/

Alex Lifeson, Strombo, and Geddy Lee



To The Woman In The Orange Shorts, I’m Sorry

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Way back in the day I used to get up early and go to the gym. I got there around 06:30 so I could work out for an hour, shower, and get to work by 08:00. The gym at that time was always dead. Literally just a front desk person, me, and this badass woman (more about that later) about my age who always wore orange athletic shorts when she worked out.

She and I seemed to do our circuit in reverse order so she was always on the other side of the room or opposite me depending on where the equipment was. To this point, we hadn’t even said so much as “Good morning” to each other and it had been several weeks.

One day, I was doing an inclined squat and my back went out. I was literally being crushed by the weight and could barely speak. I mustered a weak, “Help!” and she ran over and hoisted the bar off me like it was a toothpick with marshmallows on the ends. She helped me up and got me into the changeroom. I said, “Thanks,” and she said, “No problem. Hope you’re okay,” and that was that.

Fast forward a couple of months later when I return to the gym. She waved at me when I got there and gave me the “thumbs up + shoulder shrug” sign language. I shot her back either a double thumbs up or finger guns, I don’t remember, and mouthed, “Thank you!” (I also did it in ASL because that’s one of the few words I know).

About a week later I started drinking protein shakes. I liked them, but there was a downside. They gave me terrible gas. I mean, windows down while driving in the dead of winter terrible. It was bad.

Anyway, one day I’m on the peck deck and Orange Shorts Wonder Woman was right across from me on the reverse-Thighmaster machine. I had just upped my weight and was trying to squeeze in one last rep, which I did, but I also squeezed out a very long but very silent (thank the gods) fart.

It burned.

I thought I damaged my ass.

I expected to see a scorch mark on the seat when I stood up.

And then it hit her.

I’ve never seen someone’s face contort as I did hers, and that’s saying something when you go to the gym and see muscleheads trying to bench press the equivalent of a Prius.

Woman in hat with a disgusted look on her face
https://pixabay.com/photos/portrait-woman-girl-model-face-5470420/

She didn’t even finish her set. She just covered her nose with the sweaty towel she used to wipe the machines and left.

I never saw her again.

If there’s one thing I know it’s that the internet can find anybody, so if you’re out there, really strong woman in the orange shorts who worked out early in the morning at the Goodlife Fitness on Columbia Street in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada sometime around 2000 or 2001, please reach out so I can properly apologize for my rancid ass ruining your gym experience, possibly forever.

The Only Way Georgia Republicans Can Win The Runoffs

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You may have heard by now that on November 3rd there was an election in the United States. It was a hotly contested affair in which Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, won the popular vote by over 7 million and in the count that actually matters when determining the winner, they won the Electoral College by a count of 306 to 232 over the incumbent Donald Trump and his Vice President, Mike Pence. Or did they?

2020 Election Results

In the weeks since the election, President Trump and members of the Republican party have launched more than 50 lawsuits contesting the results of the election. Unfortunately for them, it’s not going very well, with only one of the cases going their way. They allege that the fraud was rampant but concealed so well as to be undetectable. Indeed, one of the lawsuits that was dismissed (with Trump & Co. planning to appeal) alleges that in the state of Georgia voting machines allowed Democratic officials to add votes for Biden.

Now, because of the Electoral College, Georgia’s votes alone won’t overturn the election, but if they can prove there was fraud at the hands of the Democrats and the voting machines they used, it would open up a veritable pandora’s box and potentially change the outcome. On the downside, they’re having a hard time proving their case. On the upside, there’s an opportunity in January for them to blow it wide open. You see, in addition to voting for their President, Americans also voted for members of Congress, including much of the Senate, and two of those races were too close to call and were sent to a runoff election.

Why is this important? It is because if the Democrats win both contests then they will control the Senate (with VP Harris casting the deciding vote). If they lose one or both then Republicans keep control of the Senate and will maintain their grip on power even without someone in the White House. With one lawsuit already filed and ready for appeal regarding the results in Georgia, these two runoff elections provide the perfect chance for Republicans to prove voter fraud.

But how?

This is where it gets interesting. Remember how votes just “appeared” for Biden in Georgia? This was done with an undetectable hack to the voting machines to switch them over from imperial measurement (i.e. American) to metric. The voting machine company has one of their head offices in Canada and Canada uses the metric system. When they send a machine to the U.S., the programmers make a small programmatic change, akin to flipping a switch, so it works properly in America, and someone in Georgia figured out how to flip it back.

Elections are often called races and this nomenclature invokes images of distances, like a running event. Well, in the metric system it takes 1.6 kilometers to make up a mile so when an American voting machine is set to metric, with the right hack it will set one of the two options, Democrat or Republican, to count for 1.6 times more. This is what Georgia Democrats did in the general election and this is what they’re going to do in the runoffs.

So what can Georgia Republicans do?

The answer is: NOT VOTE.

I know it seems counterintuitive, but it’s the only way. Because those voting machines were used in states where Trump won it’s really hard to prove that certain machines were tampered with while others weren’t. If it wasn’t for a record number of Republicans voting in Georgia the fraud would have been as apparent as the nose on your face but the razor-thin margin made it look close. So close that all the fraudulent votes were undetectable.

In order to bring this malfeasance to light, the only way is for Georgia Republicans to stay home and not vote in the runoffs on January 5. This way, when the margin of victory for the Democrats exceeds the total number of votes actually cast, the proof will be irrefutable. When the Supreme Court sees this evidence and calculates the difference to be exactly a factor of 1.6, not only will those two Senate seats go to Republicans, so too will the presidency.

Game, set, and match.