Okay, let's put on those rose-colored gasses

Having some fun with Idealists & Co.

    Okay, let's put on those rose-colored glasses!

It is most pleasing when several of the ideas bouncing around my brain converge on one spot. Doesn't happen often enough, in fact, but this morning I grab a newspaper from atop one of those heaps that should have been tossed into the blue-bag long, long ago.
    It is the Feb 2, 2013 Globe and Mail, and the headline is "HAVE WOMEN SOLVED 'THE PROBLEM WITH NO NAME'? THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE AT 50"
    Perhaps it is justthe incurable smartass in me, but I almost automatically think, what if men solved the problem in 1986, and the women just didn't notice?

You can start anywhere

Popping awake between 4 and 5 a.m. usually before the alarm, is the normal start to my day. This morning there is extra impetus--it's been raining, so I have to check the rain-barrels to make sure they aren't overflowing. Luck is with me, they are barely half-full. But as I grab a few bucketfuls to water the raspberry bushes, a passer-by in the grey pre-dawn startles me with her yelling.
    She is clearly irate at someone and hurling abuse at them, but scouting her from a safe distance (and, I'm hoping, the camouflage of trees and bushes) I see she is alone and has no cell phone to her ear. It's all in her imagination, it seems, barring the unlikelihood of a Bluetooth.
    "Fuck you, niggah!" she rants, first walking one way, then turning back, and turning again. Now I'm also hoping she isn't a hooker and planted by my house, as sometimes happens. But after a few seconds she slowly saunters away, quieter now but still muttering a bit. I pour a few more bucketfuls and head inside.
   In my office, the insane mess, primarily heaps of newspapers. I grab a page from atop a pile, idly curious as to why I kept it...

... the taxi awaits, and so does the rest of this...

And now a few few days later, another quick dip into a news heap. The "Arts and Life" section of the Edmonton Journal, June 20, 2011. Big headline on top: "MuchMusic Video Awards/ Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber rule the night." Ho hum (or is that just the creaky, jaded geezer talking?)
etc

etc

etc.

Oh, and here is another old paper, the National Post, March 27, 2010. Big picture of Bieber on p. 1, with headline: PARSING THE CHARMS OF CANADA'S JUSTIN BIEBER.

Yeah.

Next they will be swaying to his sentence structure. Cheek-by-jowl with this story is a column by Conrad Black on the pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. Probably not news (then or now) but Black defends the church, and employs his usual grand style of discourse, sonorously intoning such weighty words as "apostacize and "belligerency"--neither accepted by my auto-correct for some reason.

Then to the bottom of the front-page, where sits a curious feature on a gentleman suffering from schizophrenia who ends up presiding over a mental hospital. Hm! Maybe the most significant piece of information in the article is that schizophrenia is still something of a mystery ailment, although I'm noting that his paranoid fears about "Chinese agent" nurses sort of match H. L. Mencken's fears that the doctor who treated him for his debilitating stroke in 1948 was actually Joseph Stalin.

Enough to make you wonder about how the brain operates, and exactly how one wonders about the wondering.

GRoM&LA Ch.5 Still unplugging my carbon sink

The situation has only gotten worse...

(and this might be a quickie bulk-dump, if I ever get my act together--wait and see...)

Chapter 1: The scope of the dope on the ropes

Of making books there is no end -- Ecclesiastes

I really don't have time for this. Or maybe I do...
   Entering the basement "office" has become a dreaded routine; the piles of crap, mostly newspapers, clog the place. It is almost impossible to turn around, let alone walk from end of end of its thee linear rooms without gingerly traversing hurdles of newsprint, magazines, books, two storage-hassocks of old LPs...
   Somewhere in my rational brain I have plans to renovate the three rooms, indeed I started the renovations soon after moving into the old bungalow in 1988, ripping out the weird/ancient pulpboard walls with a mind to putting in new drywall. The actual drywall, maybe 18 sheets of it (I could go over and count, but it would be a precarious stretch over two stacks of newspapers in the middle room where computer and I sit), this drywall, incriminatingly dated 1990, leans patiently on the exposed 2X2s along with a few sheets of plywood, making a mockery of my hard belief that I am not just a talker, but a doer. Hey, family stuff overpowered me! (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it).
   Waking this Sunday morning without three or four priority jobs screaming in my ear (although yesterday's lawn-raking of our large yard needs to be completed, and there is only an hour or two until the morning dog-walk) I fire up the old 2005 Dell desktop, determined to write something. The topic is not a problem. I have been primarily a critic since H. L. Mencken blasted through my brain circa 1975, and inspiration is as close as the nearest Atlantic or Globe and Mail. You can see where the problem starts, perhaps...?
   Truth be told, my cognizance of the long-accumulating paper-jam has triggered a sort of initial immune-response, namely that being a clever chap I will not just clean up the mess but kill two birds with one brainstorm by writing a massively popular and profitable bestseller about the clean-up, sort of like that book The Know-It-All, by the guy who reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end, shooting off witty asides regarding this entry or that as he reads them. I'd look up the author's name, but my copy is, naturally, lost somewhere. And I'm still a bit of a conscientious objector to Google.
   Speaking of lost items, the title of my whiz-bang bestseller (many years in the brain-pan) is also lost in this jetsam, although I recollect it as being rather tentative. Its best part, a sarcastic jibe about "how to lower awareness" is of course unforgettable.
   As the computer slowly comes to life, I hit the "Remind me later" button for the 33rd time on the Adobe Flash update (which I fear would be a death-blow, just as the update from AOL 7 to AOL 9 was a near-death experience for our 1998 Dell) my brain is percolating nicely, and I rejig the title as How to Remove Media and Lower Awareness. Good enough for now, until the original title emerges from the paper-drifts....
   But 2+ hours later, I'm overdue for walking the dog, and haven't even tackled an irritating book-review clipping I found atop the heap of newspapers that had to be removed from my typing-chair. Barely time for a quick edit of Chapter 1 here...