Academentia

2005-05-30T10:24:00.000-04:00

Feed your Ego

Why blog?
Why put your thoughts up onto a screen for the entire world to see?

Make yourself intimate with a keyboard and see all the friends that come crawling out of the woodwork. Lonely, deprived, socially terrified losers with tight knots of fear and apprehension twisting in their stomachs.
Maybe someone will appear out of the dark; descending on my isolated world.
Maybe someone will hear the cries that I can't even make audible to myself.
Maybe someone will know the true human creature that perches in my breast.

Stop.
Breathe.
Think.

The world is not here and this will never be the world.
Now take your pasty white ass outside and go to the park, go to the woods, go to the bar - live in humanity and soon that knot will disappear.
soon the apprehension will fade
your tears will be a distant memory of pain
all will be well

2005-03-15T00:41:00.000-05:00

Sometimes cyberspace seems like a lonely place. No matter how far your run to the edges, somehow you find yourself back in the centre of it all again - sort of like the Turkey Point Hotel on a Saturday Night.

2005-03-11T12:25:00.000-05:00

Please don't tell me I've never given you anything
- Temmer

West Coast Motel

Sunshine is blasting through the unwashed window in the bathroom. It’s falling in torrents on the floor faster than the cracked and faded linoleum can drink it in. I’ve got a feeling that time is flowing through me, that nothing ever changes except the furniture; sunshine can do that.
Staring down at my writing – is the page half empty or half filled, I ask the author. Both of course – you can’t have one without the other, I reply. Damn good thing too because there’s more to be written. First a drink through.
The ice is melting fast in my mini-bar freezer. With only one outlet in the room, my choice is two of fridge, fan, television or radio. The fan is a must, day or night. Music keeps me sane. The ice will have to be sacrificed to a greater cause.
Damn, no mix.
To the Complex for relief and sustenance.

I got three steps out of the door and had to come back for shoes. The ancient asphalt outside is bubbling like a primeval tar swamp between me and the lurid draw of quazi-air-conditioned Bliss. Work boots and five bucks more for supplies and I can make it on the second go.

The door of the Complex has a bell attached to it. That bell is the exclusive charming thing about the whole place. The floor has greenish-grey indoor-outdoor industrial-type carpeting. Caked into the carpet’s impermeable surface are leavings of bubble gum, car oil, beach sand, ice cream, faeces, ceiling paint, sealing wax, blueberry pie filling from the time the redneck managers left their six year-old son Wiley with the teenage store clerk while they went to the Thursday night drag races; chew tobacco, gas, French fry smash, melted crayon, oil spill cleaner, moonshine, Windex, shoe polish, coffee, vinegar, more coffee, India ink, WD-40, even more coffee, cream of chicken soup and all sorts of remarkable gunky, gooey, staining, sticky substances that get tracked onto the main thoroughfare in front of a diner slash gas-station slash motel counter. Even sunshine seems to stick to that carpet.

Keep telling the story asshole.

I get chatty when I’m drunk. It’s a strange thing because I’m not normally a very friendly person. Small talk makes me uncomfortable. I’d much rather just be quiet and watch other people writhe in silent agony – awkward and expectant. Sometimes the line between hangover and drunk is heavily blurred by the booze. I chatted up the seventeen-year old gas attendant when I paid for my supplies. It started with the pack of Zig-Zag Whites – slow burning – and went down hill from there. His innocence was as refreshingly painful as jumping into a glacial lake. A candle in the window of a haunted house. I looked up at the clock and it’s red lined magic read eleven:eleven. I smiled, paid and fled, bell clanging charmingly behind my back. The sunshine hit me a heartbeat after the heat. The tag-team tang of Asphalt and Gasoline stung my eyes. I wandered wearily back, working for the words.

I’ve lived in the West Coast Motel for the better or worse part of some days, depending on how you look at it. Time stretches out before me like the blank lines in my Spiral notebook – waiting to be filled. I am filled with emptiness – a barren vessel like the cracked, moss-grown swimming-pool behind the low, ram-shackle excuse for a drive-in motel, that I call home. The mangled trunks of three long-dead trees stand grudgingly erect in the grass enclosure between the round-about driveway and the road. Redneck art. They wait patiently for a highway crew to come remove their obscene corpses.
Screamers. The pool is filled with sunshine.

Every time I move to a new place I adopt a different drink. At the West Coast Motel my erstwhile time-wasting concoction is equal parts necessity and convenience. Jack Daniels and Orange. It was, and is, all I have. The bourbon cut strongly through the bitter chemical taste of Kool-Aid that a handful of sugar packets did little to improve. That was Tuesday.

By Wednesday afternoon, the heat was weighing down like the hind teats on the redneck managers’ ancient she-hound Dolores. The bitch, and she is, hasn’t pupped in near a decade but her tell-tale saggy nipple-sacks drag in the dust as she waddlestalks between shade patches in the July glare. I woke up enveloped in damp. The salty sheets smelled faintly of whiskey that had mingled so pleasantly with my body fluids the night before. Those cowardly fluids, afraid of a little hardship, fled in the night while I slept, abandoning me in my time of need. My hangover conspired with the oppressive heat to thwart any plans I may or may not have had for the day. I knew the best way to avoid pain was to move and think as little as possible. Fortunately, enjoyment of daytime television is inversely proportional to the amount of brain power available. Bob Barker and his lovely ladies came over for a rousing afternoon – sprawled and drinking luke-warm water through a straw. That was yesterday.

I found myself this morning, more wet than usual from an overturned glass; in the same clothes I’ve been in for almost a week; still sprawled in front of the television which was broadcasting a spunky spandex-clad couple doing aerobics to an out-of-date tecnho-pop version of an 80’s hair band tune. Glass Tiger eat your heart out.
That was about noon.
Perhaps another drink would be in order. The ice isn’t getting colder.

Orange: the package of orange drink crystals I bought at the Complex must be referring to the colour of the liquid it produces. The flavour surely has no relation to any citrus fruits I’ve ever tasted. Thank God Jack Daniels neutralizes any other would-be taste-bud stimulants it encounters. Jack Daniels tastes like sunshine.

I should probably get on with it. This is today, now, the time I’m living in. July – fucking hot. A broken, battered, used, sullied, congealed motel room on a butt-fuck nowhere highway on the outskirts of an even more backward, backwater small town. The sunshine is the same here as anywhere else though; so is the booze. I came here to get rid of some things, demons mostly. Everyone has demons: old, young, poor, rich, fanatic, moderate, protagonist, antagonizer, mediator and medium. Some people are just more in touch with their inner expletives than others.

I was shining a flashlight around the dark attic recesses of my psyche one afternoon when I came across a box of inclinations I’d put aside for other pursuits – drugs, sex and ambitious exploits, mostly. It was a couple of hours post-coitus and the euphoric achievements of my previous night had worn off. I was stoned and sitting in sultry yellow light on the back lawn of my parents’ house, thinking to myself that life seemed to be going nowhere – slowly. The drugs were getting in the way of my ambition but I had no care to do anything about it. I couldn’t go forward. I was stuck in the present; sunshine bouncing off the tops of my thighs and running down the insides of my legs. When the world exterior refuses to give you any help, the best place to look for an answer is in your own psyche. I found darkness there, the shades of childhood nightmares, the pitch of the things that went bump in the night, the shadows of the forested depths of summertime.

Do you know the taste of water that’s been warmed by the sun? The sunshine seeps in and the sweetness of it rests on your tongue. The Tupperware pitcher that held the water must have soaked up a thousand gallons of sweet kool-aide into its durable brown plastic. Perhaps that’s where the sunshine got it’s inspiration. Sugar and sunshine are so close to one another that the trees can barely tell them apart.

“fresh fuckin Champaign powder”

2004-12-10T17:31:00.000-05:00

Vacating Plans & Other Delights

Hey all,

Okay, So i haven't gotten all of Tijuana up yet. I'm a slaker, give me a break. Exams are almost done. I have one tonight, and one tomorrow and then I'm going to get intensely intoxicated... at McMullan's if anyone else out there cares.
Right, so the real reason for this post is to let everyone know what's up for Christmas break. I'm finished class tomorrow night (that would be Saturday, yes). Then I'm hopping on a plane to Mexico on Tuesday morning, really really really early. It's a ten hour flight to Cancun then a four hour bus ride to Merida, then another hour to Celestun and Playa Maya. I won't have internet access there because apparently the guy in Celestun didn't pay his bills so the next closest place to get access is Merida... 70km away. I am, however, going to be making a little trek to Honduras. If I get kidnapped by Honduran rebels, don't expect to hear from me for a while. I'm back home for New Years (the 27th is when I fly back). So you can all look forward to a wonderfully sunny, tanned and tequila-sated Rebecca in 2005. Good luck with all your exams and whatnot.

Cheers!
R

2004-11-18T01:54:00.000-05:00

Tijuana has temporarily been taken offline for some cleaning up. It will be back, I'm not promising when, but I have a lot of work to do so that might mean soon (read: high procrastination level)

-R

2004-11-18T01:53:00.000-05:00

2004-10-22T13:53:00.000-04:00

Alright,

In the next couple of days, while procrastinating, I'll post all my Tijuana Chronicles for your reading pleasure. Hope you get as much of a kick out of these adventures as I did.

Cheers,
R

2004-06-14T18:23:00.000-04:00

Keeping the Kitchen Clean

It's kind of like trying to empty the Pacific with a bucket - difficult at best.

Beyond work, and my 'projects' (which will remain anonymous until finished) I've been getting out quite a bit, but not in the regular sense that I usually mean 'getting out'. I've been to the bar only about a handful of times, all of which have been funness. We went bowling with some locals the other night, Laura and I. Apparently Laura hadn't bowled before, she did pretty well. Unfortunately for Jennifer, I got all the bowling skills on the Temmer side and she was left with very little (it's true JK). I bowled 183 and won the pot, which payed for my night and Laura's. Happiness is (or was, rather). I went for a drink at the Lodge last night, which turned into five - only the first one was bought by me. I played pool with some random drunk locals, same old - same old. Most of my off time is spent at the beach, surfing and chilling. We also go for a stupid number of hikes on the Wild Pacific Trail and elsewhere. Peter has become my personal soccer coach and we practice quite a bit; he's starting a bit of a team in September and I'm hoping to be the star player ;). Tomorrow we're going camping at Della Falls. I'm not exactly sure how this is going to happen, but it is. Some guy with a boat is going to take us to the trail head, and then we're going to hike 16km, and then we'll camp. Since the days are like 17 hours long at this point, we should have lots of time to get lost.

On another note, I'm hoping to get some shifts in at the fish plant while I'm here. There's no point in not experiencing the life that most people in town live. Crappy fish plant job in season, UI in the winter. That's how most of the population survives. It's pretty laid back to say the least.

Also, as one last tidbit before I go - Ucluelet and Tofino have a weekly newspaper called the Westerly. In the Westerly there is a section called the 'Coastal Beat' written by RCMP Constables Glen Breckon and Dave Lawton. It's pithy yet serious, with the most consistantly cheesy collection of headings I have ever found (RCMP humour, no doubt). Sometimes the boys even give personal, quazi-anonymous (initials only) shout-outs to perpetrators they haven't yet caught, adding 'it's just a matter of time'. Here's my favourite bit from this week:

Falling-down-drunk-day?

At 5:30 am Ucluelet RCMP arrested a male for being drunk in public after he was reported lying on the side of Port Albion Road near Hwy 4. Later in the day a female was arrested at Peninsula and Bay lyng face down in a driveway. Later that night a young man was discovered vomiting in a car on Cypress Road. Full moon moonshine.

Every week there is at least one report of someone found lying drunk near the road, or on it. That's Ukee :)

Peace out,
Becks

2004-06-03T02:48:00.000-04:00

Hey guys.
We're going surfing tonight at Florencia under the full moon. Should be good times. The board is great. I finally have a job - housekeeping at the Princess.

More later
R

2004-05-19T03:02:00.000-04:00

The Left Coast

Contrary to the odds given, The Incognito Decorating Van made it across the country and over the Great Divide. Ucluelet is as beautiful as Saskatchewan is flat. Yes, they have rainforest and big trees here, but somehow it's much like Port Dover - dirty fishermen and all. All things being equal, it also has its own version of the Norfolk Tavern - The Ucluelet Lodge. Looks like the Norfolk, smells like the Norfolk, gets unruly clientel just like the Norfolk. Only the fact that it's on the edge of the Pacific Ocean keeps it from actually being the Norfolk. And speaking of which, whoever the fuck decided to call it that must never have seen it let alone been surfing in it. Yes, I went surfing - it was exciting and salty. Not as much ass kicking as I'd expected but I'm sure that will change. It may seem as though all my time here has been spent in leisure; that would be an almost entirely accurate assumption. No jobs yet for Laura and I which means my days begin at the crack of noon and are spent with equal parts hackey sack and reading. We also had a rather exciting adventure taking the van down an old logging road to Kennedy Lake to camp for a night. More later when I'm less tired and cranky (perhaps after I retire?).g
Take it easy,
R

2004-04-30T11:43:00.000-04:00

Goodbye Tijuana

This is my last official blog from Windsor: The Tijuana of Canada. I must say I'm a bit sad to be leaving - the city has really grown on me. Windsor is the biggest small town I've ever been to, but I will admit that it's easier to be kind to a place in hindsight than it is when you're trudging towards the Detroit River and the wind coming off the water is enough to knock you over in pre-morning-coffee mode at 8am. I will genuinely miss the Kildare House though and if you ever get the chance to come down this way, it's the corner of Kildare Rd and Wyandotte St in the middle of old Walkerville (east of Ouellette).

Enough of that. I probably won't be posting much in the next couple of weeks since I'll be driving across the country with Pete and Laura in the Incognito Decorating Van. I'm also not sure what the Internet situation will be in Ucluelet but posting will start irregularly again when I'm back online. Have a good summer for those I won't see, and for those I will - one word for y'all ... Random.

- Becks

2004-04-29T17:13:00.000-04:00

Repost of a diary I put up on Daily Kos

There's a really great storyline I've been following in the Globe & Mail, one of Canada's national dailies. It seems there is a bit of the old back and forth going on between The Globe's television reporter John Doyle and Fox News's very own Bill O'Reilly over Doyle's comments about the network. The issue arose in the first place because currently the CRTC, the Canadian broadcasting regulatory body, is reviewing an application to allow Fox News to be carried by Canadian cable providers - a previous application was rejected. It's gotten blown out of proportion a bit but it's a good laugh none-the-less. You may have read the Word for Word column in last Sunday's NY Times When a Canadian Insults Fox News, Them's [Expletive] Fighting Words which gives a pretty good summary of the situation up until the 25th and includes some excellent letters from Fox News viewers. There have been some updates since then, however.

The chronology as far as I could find:

First we have Billy O's bit on The Factor in The Most Rediculous Item of the Day on Thursday 22nd about the Globe's 'far left' stances and Doyle in general. Then Doyle comes back with Curling, Canadian Tire and other Commie plots. Bill rachets up the anti-Canadian angle another notch with Canada is Harbouring American Military Deserters... in his Talking Points Memo on the 28th. Also yesterday morning, the Globe let Rod Love, a former chief of staff for Alberta's illustrious Premier, weigh in with his opinion of the CRTC (the Canadian Radio- television and Telecommunications Commission that is reviewing a Canadian cable provider's application to allow Fox News to be broadcast in Canada): Canadians shouldn't be denied Fox News. Today's Doyle article features his picture along with that of O'Reilly on the front page of the Globe's review section in And the Laugh was still there.

In his latest post today, Crunch Time for Canada, Bill takes time to mention a host of Canada's sins but I was a little suprised that he left out the gay marriage issue - I guess the list spanning the harbouring of terrorists through the quasi-leaglization of heroin was long enough (the city of Vancouver has started a controversial outreach program, setting up safe injection sites where junkies can come to shoot up as well as get access to medical help). He also calls for a boycott on Canadian products if the country agrees to the asylum claims of two deserting military officers. Just like our stance on the Iraq war, however, this really can't be more than symbolic. Taken from the website of the Canadian embassy in the United States:

US-Canada: The World's Largest Trading Relationship

United States-Canada Trade Flows Add up to $1.2 Billion Per Day (2001 figures)

Canada Buys Nearly a Quarter of All U.S. Exports of Goods

The United States Has Sold More Goods to Canada Than to Any Other Country in Each of the Last 56 Years

More Than Half of All U.S. Automotive Exports Go to Canada

Canada Is the United States' Leading Foreign Source of Energy

All I have to say to you Mr. O'Reilly is 'bring it on'.

-R

[Thu May 4, 17:28 EDT]
There's More

Heather Mallick's wonderous encounter with the Foxy Man himself in My Fox trot with Bill O'Reilly

As well, Mr. Ibbitson has filled us in a little on the situation with the two American deserters, why they have applied for refugee status in Canada and why they won't get it Put down cross border cudgels

2004-04-28T16:17:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I'm driving home on Sunday night tired as hell, through fog, then rain then the West 401 wind and after I get through what prove to be the most inclement parts, I decide to kick back, throw on the cruise control, have a smoke and surf the radio. Usually a pretty good prospect on a Sunday night - that's when all the good blues shows out of Detroit are on. Seek lands me on CBC Radio One, which happens to be Sunday Night Showcase, a program that broadcasts plays written for the stage or for radio. My luck, however, I get stuck with some sheer screwiness. The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi by Larry Tremblay. I was completely mesmerized by this disturbing monologue that imposes English vocabulary on French sentence structures. The actor (Dennis O'Connor who played the part at the Factory Theatre in Toronto in January) had an emotional dynamic range that was unreal. The plot is darkly Quebecois, detailng the reminicences of Gaston Talbot, a francophone, predictably from Chicoutimi, who hasn't spoken in 40 years but suddenly feels the need to share his story with the audience after he has a deeply Freudian dream that is all in English. The real story seems to be about the death of one of his childhood friends during a homoerotic role-playing game. At times it would get a little too creepy for me, and I'd turn away, only to be drawn back by my curiosity of what would come next; the inevitable phrase being "it couldn't POSSIBLY get any more disturbed than this". It did. Perhaps they'll air it again some day and I'll be able to listen to it in context. That was definitely the best part - that I was high as a kite and had absolutely no idea what this was or what it was supposed to be about. I had to look it up on the CBC website to find out what it actually was. All I had to go on was sheer creepiness and the fact that the CBC very rarely lets a girl down.
Random

2004-04-28T13:51:00.000-04:00

Little Peter

Who in god's name thought hmmmm, you know what taste hasn't been explored enough - "peat bog". Irish Whiskey tastes like burning tires. I would also like to take a moment to thank said Irish Whiskey for a few things this afternoon including, but not limited to - throwing up on the bathroom floor at a fancy-pants restaurant; subsequently smelling like vomit for the rest of the day and hoping people around the office will have the good grace not to mention it; getting back from a lunch of lettuce with some grated carrot, red cabbage and a bit of dressing (fancy-pants menu dubbing it "tossed greens"), I found that the triscuits I'd packed for lunch in my sorry state this morning were soggy, as was the cheese, and the peanut butter sandwich. Perhaps it's better if I don't put food into my body right now anyhow.

2004-04-27T16:39:00.000-04:00

Everything in Moderation, Including Moderation Itself and not Forgetting Sarcasm

Today is Tuesday, April 27th, 2004. The weather is SNOWING!

The devil is in the details: conviction-enrapt preacher vs. acidic bitch.

Firstly, we have our good Newfie friend Rex Murphy who has some interesting comments on the environmental movement. To some, this may look like green-bashing coupled with Catholic-slamming in a wonderful melange of similie and contradiction (how anyone could even think to compare the noble greens to the backward, misogynistic practices of the Vatican). I am not some, however, and I would like to thank Rex for his insight. For a long time I've had similar thoughts as these but the way he connects the dots is splendiferous. I drew a parallel for Jeff yesterday, between the compost altars and tithing money to the Church. These are usually relatively good things, composting diverts large volumes of waste from landfills and is a more productive use of the material; some of the money tithed to the church goes to feed the poor. It's not a water-tight example but it'll do. My request: please do not use one good act as an excuse for moral superiority. Just because you throw your coffee grounds on the houseplants does not excuse the fact that you keep your abode at sub-zero temperatures in the summertime; working at a food bank once a week does not give you licence to screw your neighbour's wife.

Life's a gamble, roll the dice - but please refrain from sticking your dick in holes that don't want to be filled.

Rex's article is in homage to the wonderful day of celebration that activists everywhere get off to - Earth Day. I like the earth, and nature, and all that as much as the next person with long hair and comfortable shoes (not of the six-hole Doc variety, mind you). More and more, though, we're letting armchair activists dictate environmental policy and it's akin to letting a bunch of tenth grade science students design and build a space station. This whole DDT thing (Bring Back DDT: Eco-Imperialism is killing African Children) for example. Rachel Carson wrote a book, outlining what she saw was becoming a problem in the United States - namely the overuse of chemical pesticides that, oddly enough, were not just exterminating the things we wanted to kill but other things we didn't want to as well. Carson had a good point, perhaps we were unnecessarily jeopardizing the health of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems by using crop dusters to apply DDT over vast stretches of land. The practice was deemed inadvisable and, predictably in a situation with so much PR, within a decade the world had rallied together and banned such a horrid, nasty and dangerous chemical. Did we really need to effectively restrict ALL the applications of this chemical? Perhaps, perhaps not. Should the west be allowed to dictate what chemicals are used in other nations "for their own good"? What's the lesser of two evils - having your child die of malaria at the age of five, or of cancer at the age of forty? Having brain damage from juvenile malnourishment or from feotal exposure to lead through dietary necessity? Would you want someone else making these decisions for you? Would you want to visit the Sweet Valley Station?

Remember pre-school? Better than I remember highschool.

I would also like to point out the recent controversy with the seals. Yes Canada is still hunting those darling big-eyed pups with the adorably soft coats; we call them COATS for a reason so don't even get me started.

2004-04-26T11:57:00.000-04:00

Today is officially my last Office Monday. Oh Monday - the day the bus always comes early. Usually I play hackey-sac while I'm waiting for the bus, cause really, what else is there to do? There are these three sisters, the oldest one's probably eleven, who wait for the school bus outside their parents' corner store. This morning, instead of their usual game of jump rope, the precious little angels were tossing about nothing less than a brand-spankin' new red:black:yellow striped hackey-sac. Something about making a difference in the life of a child being the most valuable legacy of all - I think this means that I get to bow out of the whole procreating deal now. Excellent.

Time 'Till Departure - 6.5 days (and counting)

2004-04-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

Here goes nothin'