Orange Life
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- The Hunter, The Hero & The Witch Doctor
I had the glorious opportunity to live and work for three months in the Okavango Delta area of Botswana, helping to construct lodgings and renovate existing structures in a tourist camp on a lagoon called Xakanaxa (this is a Bushman name, with each 'x' pronounced as a click) within the Moremi Game Reserve. I met, lived with, and worked with some extraordinary people there, who taught me much about everything that makes Africa both great and troubled, but the most interesting person by far was a fellow named Samati.
I first came across Samati while taking part in a village celebration that I had been invited to attend. I don't recall the occasion of the celebration, but I do recall (through a bit of a haze) that we dined on roasted buffalo and drank home-made beer. What I remember most, however, is a big commotion and a subsequent hero's welcome being accorded to a solitary figure walking into one corner of the village from a bush trail. Someone shouted the word "Samati!!" and all the young women in the village immediately left whatever they were doing and ran to greet the approaching man. I'm not sure what I expected, but, when he got close enough, I realized that he certainly didn't look like a rock star, so I couldn't help but wonder just why he was being treated like the Beatles arriving for the first time in America. He was clearly uncomfortable with all the attention, and had a wild look to him, accentuated by a face, neck, and torso liberally adorned with substantial scar tissue.
What with the festivities and all, I never got a chance to properly investigate the matter, but, as it happened, less than a week later, Samati turned up to join my small construction crew at the camp. He was quiet and extremely humble, with very little familiarity with English, and seemed quite fearful of me. As I was only in the beginning stages of learning his language, and he clearly didn't want anything to do with me, any communication with him had to be done through a third party. I soon learned, after asking about him numerous times, that he was extremely uncomfortable talking about himself in any language. If I wanted to understand the mystery of his extreme popularity, I needed to start with accounts of others.
In a nice twist of fate that I appreciate keenly in the midst of our somewhat more cosmetic culture, it turned out that his disfigurement and his popularity with the ladies were intricately related, but in a way that I could never have expected. The story was told to me by several people, with little variation between versions, as follows.
Several years previously, Samati had been employed as guide for big game hunting parties. One nice irony throughout many parts of Africa populated by protected wildlife is that hunting within the rules is not forbidden but actually encouraged. It won't surprise many to know that people of means in the affluent parts of the world will pay a lot of money to go to Africa and hunt for animals that they could never find at home. The fees charged by the governments that allow this are astronomical, with trophy fees up to $10,000, depending on the animal. Whatever one's view on the hunting and killing of animals, there is a huge upside to this practice; these funds are then put directly back into conservation efforts, with the concept that, as hunting is something that people will find a way to do regardless, the sacrifice of one animal for sport enables the survival of considerably more of its kind.
One day, Samati, armed with only a sheath knife, was the lead guide for an American hunting party looking for buffalo. They were tracking a particular buffalo through some fairly dense brush when one of the hunters spotted a large male lion at the edge of a clearing ahead and to the left of the hunting party. According to the story as relayed to me, the hunter was heard to mutter something along the lines of "Screw the buffalo, I'm going to bag me a lion", even though the party was not actually licensed to hunt lion and would have been in violation of national law for doing so. The hunter levelled his gun at the lion, and fired. He missed.
We can only imagine what the lion was thinking as the shot rang out and a bullet whizzed by him, but it's safe to say he wasn't pleased. The lion roared, likely in a mixture of anger and fear, and bolted for the first living thing he saw, which happened to be Samati. The lion reached Samati in practically an instant, leaped on top of him before he'd even had a chance to turn fully around, and started tearing him apart. According to accounts, Samati was pinned by the lion and his left arm was fully inside the lion's jaws and throat, while the lion bit down and tried to tear the limb off.
Samati's reaction to this horrifying situation can only be described as miraculous. With a 200-kg lion crushing his legs and ripping his left arm from its socket, he managed to reach down with his right hand to his belt, unhook the clasp of his knife sheath, and extract his knife. He then ran his fingers up along the lion's rib cage feeling for where its heart should be, and, in one powerful thrust, plunged his knife through a thick layer of muscle between two of the ribs. The lion shuddered for a few moments, then slumped in a heap on top of Samati.
I wish I could end the story there, with Samati's difficult one-year recovery from his wounds and his subsequent rise to local legend. I wish I could say that the worst injustice in the whole affair was that, in disturbingly typical African fashion, the rich white guy who had almost facilitated Samati's death got off with a token fine and a slap on the wrist. Unfortunately, the cruelest irony, at least from my perspective, was yet to come.
Samati was not a complicated man, and though he must have certainly become more complicated after spitting in the face of violent death, it was said by those who knew him that his trademark humility had remained completely intact, and even deepened, in spite of the adoration he now received from everyone in his environment. Unfortunately for Samati's continued well-being, this simplicity, mistaken by the truly stupid as stupidity, was accompanied by a very tangible naïveté.
One day as we were working, a young man came into camp and asked to speak to Samati. As soon as Samati saw him, he became edgy and clearly uncomfortable, even though, judging by the respect this young man received from the others, he was a person of some standing in the community. He and Samati headed off for a half hour or so. Samati returned alone, visibly shaken and muttering under his breath. I asked what was bothering him but he wouldn't speak to me. I urged him to take the rest of the day off, but he wouldn't have it. I did notice that he spoke to a few of his co-workers, often in animated tones, several times during the day, so, when the day's work was done, I asked the guy with the best English, one of Samati's friends, what was bothering the village hero. Was the young guy a doctor? Had someone in his family died? Was he sick? What could have disturbed him so?
Well, according to his friend, he was sick, in a way. As this was right at the beginning of the AIDS scourge in Africa, I immediately feared that Samati had received that dreaded diagnosis. His friend replied, fortunately, that that wasn't it, though the young man who had paid a visit, a simple safari driver by day, was a kind of doctor.
In fact, or at least in perception, he was a witch doctor, and he had come to tell Samati that he had been cursed. As a result, he was compelled by whatever laws governed such curses to become what amounted to a servant of the witch doctor for a specified period of time, so that the curse might be removed. I was frankly incredulous, first that Samati would allow himself to be manipulated in such a way, and secondly that his clearly rational and intelligent friends wouldn't see this charade for what it was; an obvious attempt by the "witch doctor" to bring the local hero under his control, in order to better control others. I was further shocked to learn that this was not the first time Samati had been informed of his cursed status, but the third time. How could this happen? All these guys went to church, and often spoke in glowing terms about Jesus and the Bible. Couldn't they see what was happening here? Well, being the outsider, it became obvious to me in no time at all that my argument was culturally insensitive and lacking proper perspective, so I respectfully requested a meeting with the witch doctor, with the hope that I could convince him to remove "the curse".
I was granted a meeting, and was surprised to learn that the witch doctor spoke better English than anyone in the area, owing to the fact that he had spent the most time in school and had travelled to a number of places. Here we had a comparitively well-educated, well-travelled guy dispensing curses whose only cure was to demonstrate service to him, the conduit to all the dark forces behind the curse. Hmm.
The meeting was civil enough, but I wasn't able to get the curse removed. He listened to me, nodded a lot, and then told me I couldn't understand because I didn't come from his culture and that, in any situation anywhere, human beings took superiority over other human beings wherever they could get it. If you were brave and strong, you used your body; if you were physically weak but smart, you used your mind. People would use whatever attribute they had to take any advantage they could get. With that much, I had to grudgingly agree, and we ended our meeting with at least some level of understanding. I suppose I should at least feel thankful that he didn't put a curse on me.
Now, I'm not saying here that I don't believe in curses, or witch doctors, or at least in the power of the unseen to influence human lives. I have seen, and will write about, some things that come a lot closer than this to the supernatural. I'm pretty sure, though, that this guy was not just a fake, but a clever, malicious control freak, who well understood the political value of having a great, respected man running around like his hunting dog, sniffing for other vulnerable souls to tear out and stomp on. This was a perfect example of a phenomenon I had seen before and have recognized many times since; an intelligent person, schooled in human behaviour, supported by the trust of a community, exploiting that trust and the gaps in understanding existing in that community, for the purpose of personal empowerment. In spite of having some level of understanding of the witch doctor, the whole situation still made me about as angry as anything ever has.
So now and then I go hunting, looking for witch doctors wherever I can find them. When I get one in my sights, I do sometimes pull the trigger, but I always use rubber bullets. For, while chances are good that they've already cursed their share of heroes, chances are even better that, given the opportunity and the tools, I might have done the same.
Wed, 05 Sep 2007 20:49:00 +0000 - Beware of Friends Bearing Messages
What would be really good is if we could spend some face time together. If I already know you, I'd love to see you again. If I don't, I'd like to meet you, and get to know you, and hang out with you, because, if you're here in the first place, we're obviously on the same wavelength. Unfortunately, modern life being what it is, chances are pretty good that, whoever you are, unless you live close by, we'll have to just settle for spending time here. Not that that's a bad thing. The greatest power of the Internet -- the personal, digital printing press, telephone, and living room all rolled into one -- is that it allows us as individuals to spend time with more people at one time and in one life than our ancestors, or even our parents, would have ever believed was possible.
I promise you won't be disappointed if you do allow me to share your time. I think you'll be glad you did. You may even enjoy hearing my stories almost as much as my kids do. You'll enjoy learning about the world as I see it, even if you see it in a completely different way, because, if you let me, I will make you think. If you don't already know me, you're going to get to know me pretty well, even if you don't know what I look like. If you already know me, you're going to get to know me a little better. If you read this and you can see the real me, then chances are that I've also seen some of the real you. If you're reading this, I already consider you as my friend.
I made a choice a number of years ago whose consequences I've been living with ever since. It was a tough choice, a very tough choice, and anyone who has had to make it will understand that, whichever path you choose, it will affect and it can and probably will ruin many parts of your life. In other words, the very existence of the choice is somehow destructive. I made the choice I made then because the parts of my life that would be ruined were all to do with the people I loved, and the benefits of the path I did not choose would fall mostly to me. I'm faced with the same choice again, though it now feels more like a compulsion, but this time I think I can manage the consequences better, being older if not wiser. Either that, or I'm so afraid of being snuffed out like a candle that feel I better take my shot while I still have something to shoot with.
The choice of which I speak did have something to do with becoming a person of some renown. I wrote a book that I was pretty sure would make me very famous, and infamous with many. There is an inherent assumption these days that fame is good, that it is a recognition of accomplishment of qualities that people find noteworthy, but the thing that strikes me about fame, at least from the outside, is that it seems to have been designed as a very clever practical joke, played on those who should have known better but were trusting enough to have bought the basic premise. Many without it covet it like nothing else, as it seems to represent something that every human being craves; to be accepted, on a truly grand scale. Those familiar with it know that it is actually a penalty, a balancer, for those who live their lives by doing what they were really put on this earth to do, for better or worse. It is like a serpent slithering though leaves on the forest floor of Paradise, reminding you that if you want to use this world as your personal playground, as your own earthly kingdom, where riches flow to you simply because you are who you are and you do just what you want to do, then you had better learn to step a little more lightly. You just cannot have it all, and Fame, along with a few siblings like Tragedy and Disease, is there to make sure you remember that. The final poke, what you realize as you feel the poignant prick of its fangs pierce your skin, is that what you really wanted was not just to be accepted but to be understood, and the number of people that actually understand you is no more now than before you were famous.
So, as a result of the choice I made, I went into a kind of hiding, at least from the public, as any living organism might when perceiving a threat to its security, or even survival. I built a Trojan Horse of normalcy around myself, wondering at times if I would ride it all the way to the horizon, never stopping to emerge within any castle along the way to show its inhabitants what I had in that horse with me. After all, when faced with the dilemma of whether to show your true self and thereby change the shape of your life and many of those in it forever, or to voluntarily sacrifice the yearnings of that inner self for the sake of sheltering yourself and those you love from risk, ridicule, and possible harm, isn't it pretty clear which is the moral choice?
This was essentially what my book was about, though I had no idea as I wrote it that the choice of which I wrote fictionally was one that I would face myself upon completion. The problem was that my book was about that same choice as faced by an allegorical Jesus, and my contention was that he made the immoral choice, the wrong choice. If we accept that Jesus was special from a very young age to everyone who knew him, as anyone must be possessed of such wisdom, or even if we take a historical approach that he was special from the time his words became worthy of record and quotation, we must also realize that all those whose lives he touched, all those who surely loved him and were concerned for his welfare, would have been deeply affected by any important decision he made regarding the direction of his life.
Would anyone doubt it was Fame that killed him, the fame that came naturally, inevitably, from people being captivated by his words, and his deeds? We must assume that he knew his own fate, if not by some divine gift of precognition then at least in the way that a person of intelligence knows that to challenge the powers-that-be with certain ideas is to invite certain disaster. If he did know his own fate, and continued to pursue it, what does that say about his sense of responsibility to those who loved, nurtured, and followed him? Wouldn't he be worth more to them alive, teaching them further how to live, or simply sharing more of his time?
The Christian response to that, of course, would be that he had the sins of mankind to die for, for eternity, which would have outweighed any humanistic, earthly considerations of the time, and that his primary responsibility was to God, not his circle of loved ones. I had two problems with this argument. First of all, this did not make any sense to me based on the ways of people. Think of the people in our lives that really make us mad. The guy who blames everyone else for his mistakes, the woman who won't give in even though it's obvious she's wrong, the kid who whines about everything he doesn't have when he should be thankful for everything he has. These people bother us because they will not make sacrifice, and will not accept responsibility. Both personal sacrifice, the ability to accept that you can want but don't need everything, and personal responsibility, the understanding that what you do need has to come from you, are critical for personal growth. Sacrifice brings humility and perspective, two profoundly beneficial qualities for society at large. So why would anyone concerned with the spiritual well-being of humankind make that sacrifice for them? Out of love for them? In my softer moments as a parent, I would certainly prefer to protect my children from ever having to make significant personal sacrifices, but I know in the end that, for them to grow, and learn to accept responsibility for their actions, they must learn not only to make sacrifices but to willingly accept them.
Secondly, how could we ever know whether this stated mission, of one person's sacrifice for the good of all humankind, was just a good cover for wanting to become great? Those interested in their legacies and concerned with their own mortality could do worse for an epitaph than "He Saved Everyone For All Eternity." Those possessed with the power of words, the power to persuade, have a huge responsibility to live with, in that they are capable of doing great good, but also great evil. To strive for and achieve worldly greatness is to walk a very fine line between action and intention. Even notions of great altruism and charity can be double-edged; is the self-fulfillment in noble philanthropy related only to the simple joy of helping another person, or is there some part that craves the adoration and respect that "selflessness" will surely invite? Can anyone really know for certain what truly motivates another individual? If you love someone, set them free; isn't that how it's supposed to go? Who would doubt that a charismatic individual can choose to use his words, his power, to manipulate people into doing what he wants? But what does that say about him if he is using that power to control the people he loves? My conclusion was that this could very well have been what Jesus was doing, perhaps consciously, perhaps not, but doing it nonetheless.
Now I'm not so sure there was even a choice. The strength of the compulsion of which I have spoken, the compulsion to represent who you really are, makes me wonder if an attempt to consciously divert a human being's nature is like trying to stop a stream by putting your foot across it. It may flow in another direction, it may change shape or form, but flow it will, to wherever downstream it is bound to go. So, even if there is no choice in the matter, and a person just needs to do what a person needs to do, does this mean that we should hop in someone else's stream and follow the current? There have been plenty of messiahs for humankind, some overtly self-styled, and doomed to obscurity, some still widely followed, but my problem is with the very concept of a person whose motives I can never know, accepting sacrifice and responsibility on my behalf. They do what they do, just a farmer does what a farmer does, but even if it's inevitable, even if there is no choice and they are somehow destined to do so, does the fact that they do that, that they use their message to captivate, to guide, and even to free people from their burdens, mean that we should bow down before the messenger?
My answer to this question is the title of this post, and it is a warning that is even more resonant in the age of the Internet. What makes the Internet and all of our other tools of mass communication so wonderful, providing as they do the ability to reach and even spend time with so many people all at once, also makes them very, very dangerous. These threads of insight transmitted to us though waves and wires allow both the responsible and the irresponsible, the noble and the self-serving, access to our coveted attention. Can you tell them apart? I'm not sure I can. What can set you free can also enslave you, that is no secret, but even the message most liberated from everything you have known before, hides the secrets of the messenger.
Even if that messenger is famous. Even if that messenger is revered. Even if that messenger is your friend.
Trust me. Unlike everyone else, I have only the best intentions.
Sat, 01 Sep 2007 15:11:00 +0000 - Do Children Need Church?
There's no question that, for kids brought up in today's information-saturated, multicultural, media-deluged environment, there's plenty to consider out there about all the differing views on God, from all those different viewpoints. It's equally true that, for parents striving for a moral upbringing that makes kids into good adults, organized religion carries a powerful attraction, even for those parents that don't intellectually or spiritually embrace everything the particular religion chosen may entail. Those to whom I refer, more numerous in my view than is widely assumed, have never had that awakening of faith that true membership in a religious community might seem to require, but involve themselves in a religious community precisely for the perceived benefits that such membership will bring to the family.
Kids have a natural curiosity for everything, and when you combine that with the natural attraction to structured and simplified information that all kids have, you are left with an inquiring young mind that wonders how to process all of the religious information coming in through different cultural channels. Whether it be to answer questions as simple as what the Muslim kids do in the school's prayer room at recess, or as complex as why Jesus managed to come back from the dead but Grandma couldn't, there's a kind of instrinsic pressure on kids to fill the vacuum left by these questions and look for some kind of religious commitment. Add that to pressure consciously applied by those who feel, or are told to feel, the impulse to shine the Light at those dark shadows cast by the unconverted, and you have something almost impossible to resist. The penalty for a lack of commitment is a child's worst nightmare; not belonging.There is also the consideration that presenting a child, or an adult for that matter, with the option not to believe something of a religious nature that s/he has been taught by someone close, is dangerously akin to asking that person not to trust the messenger. Multiply that by the number of people in the child's community, and it becomes foolish for the child not to believe what s/he is told. "What, you're trying to tell me that all of these central figures in my life are lying to me?!?" Every parent knows that being trusted by your children as the most valuable source of information means that they will believe what you tell them, to an almost ridiculous extreme. But what if the message to be imparted may be at odds with your child's community, setting up either you or the community as a source of erroneous information? Neither outcome is particularly desirable, so what's the harm in couching your message in the language of the community? With all these paternal Gods to choose from, telling everyone what to do and how to live, there must surely be something that everyone else knows but I don't. Isn't it just a lot easier on everyone involved to just join a community that has already thought through all these things?
Certainly, belonging in a church can be associated with belonging in a community, and important cultural events, which have incredible positive value to communities, families, and children, are often closely tied with religion. Religion is tied in many cultural communities to celebrations and rituals that give entire groups of people a perspective on all of the most important stuff of life. Examples are mirrored in almost all of the world's major religions and cultures, of prescribed points of reflection on birth, adulthood, marriage, and death. An example for my purposes here that illustrates this intermingling of the religious, the cultural, the traditional, and the moral, is the powerful combination of gravity, responsibility and sense of passage inherent in Bar Mitzvah, ceremonially inseparable from the Jewish religious tradition. It is hard to imagine a more positive, life-affirming set of principles than those which rest on faith, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility. If my religious culture has these types of ceremonies, wouldn't it be irresponsible not hitch myself to that wagon?
I'm passionate about music, and I always found it fascinating that the two most poetically and intellectually musical but searingly cynical minds of the Sixties each turned to God further on down the Path. Bob Dylan & Van Morrison. (Want to start a war with a true child of the Sixties -- say out loud that John Lennon would have been next). Was it resignation, or revelation, that brought these gigantic spirits to bow down to accepted religious metaphors? Whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it was something distinctly positive. I regularly get chills when I hear Dylan sing the final line of "Every Grain of Sand", his soul-searching glare deep into the heart of sprituality and religion, and the soul-baring piece of harmonica that follows.
"I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man, like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand."
Alas, some important and deeply human sentiments are exercised through religious language and imagery. Perhaps none is more noteworthy here than than the sentiment of Gratitude; not that of the simple thanks, but of the deeply humble variety. Gratitude, specifically, for the blessing of avoidance of disease, hunger, violence, intimidation, and all the things that make life for many solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Gratitude is a powerful force, that when channeled appropriately can create or relieve obligation, express profound sincerity, and even determine whether you are the type of person who people like or don't like. The official line, the story we have a need to believe, and the real truth for the truly humble, is that it helps us appreciate what we have and avoid taking it all for granted. Of course that's true, and critically important, but that's a tough one to hold on to, even though we we never doubt its truth. It's so hard to hold on to, in fact, that it bears regular reminding if we want it to be a guiding principle in our lives. With all the things in our lives that could be better, we seem to need constant reminders of all that could be worse. I think that this is one key to power of prayer; a disciplined, ritual way to remind ourselves that what we already have will always be greater than anything we could ever want.
My suspicion is that this noble sentiment is evenly matched by its irrational, evil twin, Existential Guilt. This guilt is only distantly related to the more poignant guilt that comes from having wronged another human being. This guilt is the irritating, creeping feeling of superstition that accompanies living well, and sometimes even living at all. It's the voice inside us anytime we are abruptly and unsympathetically reminded there is more pain and suffering on this earth than we could ever imagine. It is whispered in the eyes of the panhandler, and practically screams from the limbs of the crippled child. Its blank, unyielding gaze challenges us to meet it for more than a few moments, knowing that most of us do not possess the resolve and can only look away. And by showing us how much worse things really could be, it challenges us as well to believe that things could never be so bad for us. This challenge to believe can grow so strong as to become a command, which we follow by doing whatever we can in our power to find something to believe in that will stack the odds in our favour.
From the earnest to the downright ridiculous, our need to be on the correct side of that important eternal wager leads us to think up all kinds of ways to connect the dots into a picture of something that will actually protect us. What if crossing my fingers really does improve my luck? Why wouldn't I make the sign of the cross, or look to the heavens, before stepping outside my door? Is it really that foolish to try these things and believe they work? Don't I have more to lose by tempting Fate than I do if I just try a bunch of things and they don't somehow help me? Whether finger crossing and entreaties to the divine are about just hope, or they really are faith, and whether they are prayer or simply wishing, hardly seems to matter. Just as long as I don't lose what I have.
A true understanding of the comfort that this type of faith could provide came to me one cold and snowy winter night some years ago. I was at the cottage of a friend, and we were out snowshoeing late at night, through a dense forest, in almost complete darkness. Only after we had gone a long way and were far from anywhere did my friend inform me that we had mistakenly wandered into the property of someone who was considered by the locals as extremely dangerous, anitsocial, and almost certainly armed. I shuddered with a fear deeper than the cold, that we were out in the middle of the night in such close proximity to someone so heinous who, my friend also confessed, was occasionally in the habit of exploring his property at unusual hours. Sensing my extensive discomfort, my friend did what I thought was a remarkable thing. In a loud voice, in the dead of night, he bellowed:
"Yay, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me."
I could tell immediately by looking at him that, in the wake of having uttered those words, he was not the least bit afraid.
So, for a family that doesn't go to church, at least not in the traditional sense, does that mean missing out on the opportunity and enrichment that being part of a church community, of any creed, can offer? What can be done to substitute those important cultural, communal, or spiritual rituals and milestones if we do not find ourselves brought up in one of those cultures? Do all these unquestionably positive sentiments and experiences, like feeling thankful for what we have, sharing a sense of belonging with a close community, and feeling protected, really need to be religious in nature? Is it possible to experience them poignantly and embrace them willingly outside the religious establishment? In an attempt to answer that, I feel that I need to put my views on religion in context.
My early rearing was passively religious, but highly moral. In other words, church was something you did on special occasions like Easter and Christmas, but ethics was something you did every day, or at least tried to. There was no strong connection made between being religious and living a moral life. Children, of course, are effortlessly religious, with all that wonder and all those unanswerable questions, so this lightly religious morality was certainly sufficient for me up until I hit adolescence, at which point something that I still cannot define with any certainty compelled me, for a time, to become deeply religious.
The first step was my confirmation in the Anglican church, which I undertook willingly and with great enthusiasm. I was an ambitious young disciple, and I did everthing I could to get to the stage where I would carry the cross to lead in the faithful, an activity which made me at the same time immensely proud (in the eyes of the obviously approving congregation) and a little awkward, always hoping as I did that, as we headed outside for the front doors of the church, none of my school friends were watching, lest they think me uncool.
My second major religious step of adolescence was motivated by equally paradoxical impulses. With a real sense of commitment, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal saviour and was re-baptised in an evangelical church, called Brethren in Christ. I did this both because I felt terribly guilty for my many sins, whatever they could have been for a fourteen-year-old, generally well-behaved suburban kid, and because I thought one of the girls in the church group was really hot.
By nineteen, having intellectually and spiritually examined what exactly it was that connected me to Jesus Christ and His teachings, and having also become significantly less well-behaved, I was cynical, at least about religion, and happily agnostic.
Then, after some inspired globetrotting, the Fates brought me Joseph Campbell, and everything changed. Something inside me had always known that God was about limitless wonder, mystery, and potential, but all of the religious training I had ever received, and any of the thoughts I had formed as a result of that training, had been more concerned with sin, guilt, and redemption. Listening to Joseph Campbell talk in The Power of Myth about the many manifestations of divinity across history and culture, and watching Bill Moyers' eyes light up in time with mine, sparked by the realizations that Campbell's words elicited, became my new favourite church experience, ever. I dove immediately into everything Campbell had written and wanted to talk about it with everyone I knew.
No wonder then, that it seemed fateful that I was sharing almost every step of this journey with a group of people unlike any I had ever known, in a strange and wonderful place called Lothlorien, so named after the haven for travellers in Lord of The Rings, for its mission to act as a place of refuge and refreshment for wandering souls. An entire post, indeed an entire site, is needed to explain the experience that was Lothlorien, but it was there, in a row house in one of London's worst neighbourhoods, where I started to refine my idea of what it meant to be in church.
For what is a church but a community of people gathering to think about and discuss important things that they have little opportunity to address elsewhere in their lives? Greek origins are generally ascribed to the word church, meaning of the Lord, but there is some evidence that it may have actually derived from Celtic dialects that preceded the Greeks. In this reading, the word church comes from circle, owing to the fact that places of worship in Germanic and Celtic early cultures were always circular. This is the definition I prefer, for it implies that anywhere or anytime people gather for the purpose of discussion of certain matters of the spirit can be considered a church.
It's no secret that the profusion of this type of gathering, under whatever auspices, tells us that there is a deep need for whatever it is that the circle brings. Why would we feel this need? Well, it can be quite uncomfortable to speak about whom you have wronged, or bad habits you can't break, or unconditional love, within one's own family or community. The issue, of course, is that those you have wronged, or those affected by your bad habits, or those for whom you feel but cannot always properly express love, are usually within that family or community. So, whether it's forgiveness you're looking for, the understanding that precedes and allows forgiveness, or just a way to measure by comparison with others that you're not so bad after all, that objective third party, whether human or divine, is often the one who knows what you need. To quote another great singer-songwriter who can swing in a couplet from cynical to spiritual, Graham Parker sums this up nicely in It Shook Me:
"Some believe in a Heaven up above, with a God that forgives all with his great love,
Well, I'll forgive you if you forgive me, hey, and who needs a third party anyway?"
So if there is any truth in this, and God doesn't have to be about gratitude, or guilt, or paternity, then just what is God about? And if God isn't about morality and forgiveness and protection and understanding, and above all Love, then what instills the heartbeat of our existence with its rhythm, and how can that rhythm run through our lives to ensure all the best for those most dear to us?
God, of course, is about all these things and much more. But to know God is to know that the Sabbath isn't about Sunday, but rather about the time to consider all that our pragmatic lives prevent us from considering, within a group of people for whom those matters are of life-affirming importance. To be on the path to understanding, and to being understood, is to make a conscious effort to take time to address these questions whenever they arise, both for ourselves and for those around us. To impart gratitude is to act in ways that will remind those in our own gathered circles of the joy of simply being alive, actions which have more resonance than any whispered reminder repeated out of duty or habit. And to love and be loved, the most serene blanket of peace, protection and comfort in which we can ever be enfolded, is to leave oneself unashamedly open to the most mundane of circumstances, safe in the knowledge that some, but not all, will bring the most personal of shared moments.
Mon, 09 Jul 2007 19:47:00 +0000 - How Easy Is It To Just Say No?
Anyone who has had any kind of an experimental life has wrestled with the question of what to tell your kids when they ask about all those experimental things and whether or not you did them. There's no question that you don't want your kids to make certain mistakes you made in your life, but you're not sure that some of those experiments were even mistakes. Are some truths against their best interests, or should you be held to the same high standard of truth that you demand from them?
One's familiarity with altered states is a particularly tricky one. The official line is a pretty simple one to toe; not only is the use of many associated substances actually illegal but it also has left a trail of well-documented, discarded lives across our popular culture. This is an important argument, and one to be presented to children, but it is not the whole story. It leaves out one very important fact, that is avoided by nearly every parent and educator afraid to leave choices to those who will be most affected by them. That fact? Substance use can make people feel very good, and it can help them go remarkable places and do remarkable things.
The example that comes foremost to mind is what I call Stoner TV, one of the best nights of storytelling through television that is currently available to the more heliotropic organisms among us. Anyone who has explored any kind of altered state of consciousness can squint easily through the numerous barely veiled references to the finer side of substance use. Stoner TV is clearly a set of productions strongly influenced by innumerable illegalities, but, in the current march of popular culture toward all that was once taboo to the masses, it is a trip that is now out there for everyone to scrutinize. Perhaps our first clue from HBO should have been Tony Soprano taking peyote in the Vegas desert in the run-up to the extraordinary finale, but if The Sopranos was the ultimate study of our visceral earthly relationships, the trio of John From Cincinnati, Entourage in Colombia, and Flight of the Conchords must be the inevitable metaphysical extension.
Depending on your history, this may or may not be news to you, but, for the uninitiated, let's look at some of the elements of just the pilots of these shows for a moment. We have, in no particular order, Pablo Escobar, surfing, levitation, a brain-dead child, a healing bird, an idiot savant, getting to plan a bunch of explosions, an argument against why the girl our boy scored at a party didn't get it on with our boy knowing his best friend and her ex was in the room, the world's most annoying, loyal, and yet strangely magnetic music groupie, reflections on celebrity, and, my personal favourite, the sights, smells, sounds, and social norms around the taking of dumps.
Decent people of the world, there is bad news in the wind. You know all those bad substances around and all those bad people who ingest them? Since pretty much the beginning of your time, you've been giving them an awful lot of your attention, letting them make your toys and put songs on your lips. Now, you are even giving them your hard-earned money by letting them pretty much dictate the flow of much of your leisure time, and, in the ultimate no-no for decent folks, you're letting them influence your children. The world, surely, has gone to pot. And the kicker, that has always protected one of the biggest little secrets of history? If you haven't been there, you'll never get it, and therefore, if knowledge really is power, you'll never be able to defeat it.
For these substances, for some, are the fruit offered by an almost irresistably attractive Muse, who invites the perpetually smitten into herself for pleasures so memorable that they would consider giving up all of life's responsibilities just to experience, or even remember with any degree of accuracy, the sweetness and intensity of sensation wrought by those pleasures. When the high produces the most profound, impacted moments of creativity and clarity, and the most direct, visceral experience of all that makes up this world, what a dilemma it must be if, like our artists, troubadours, and storytellers, the effective communication of those points of insight enables you to live life in a way that only very few will ever know? What if, further, the quality of the lives of thousands or more depend on your being able to taste that fruit, not only to bite into that original apple of temptation but to share its sweetness with those you want to reach?
Certainly, the bitten Apple we share with the Muse is, in many respects, the enemy of what we are taught to think is serious work, as we are led by the hand around a path that leads all the way back to our natural primitive selves, whose preferred state is to do just as we please. Imagine a world with everyone running around doing what they pleased! Could we have ever built the things we now enjoy so much we can hardly live without?
The happy accident of these individuals, though, and everyone with the potential to become like those individuals, against all the odds that govern the laws of probability and physics, is that, in this time of our collective development, everything for a significant group of us comes provided; not only in access to the most captivating invitations of the Muse, but to all the wonderful toys and props that allow us to tell stories of where we have been taken and what we have been allowed to see. With tools like these wielded by our idle hands but active minds, it shouldn't surprise anyone that something very special is happening on our screens, speakers, and stages.
John From Cincinnati is just an example, but it is a good one. The score alone (calling it a soundtrack would be like calling wisdom intelligence), is music university. Add to that storytelling that looks without flinching deep into the eyes of the human creature, and you have proof positive that the creators of this show understand something at once truly wonderful and very, very dangerous; how to spellbind, and therefore how to transmit the song of the Muse and instill into anyone lucky or unlucky enough to be really listening that precious feeling of being understood. John is Jesus and John is the Muse, the one who can see straight through the secrets and all the layers into the soul of the person and the heart of the matter. What he sees there, what he allows us to see there, is The Truth. While The Truth may well set us free, those who bring it to us, who really let us understand it, can also use it to enslave us, whether they actually intend to or not. How's that for mind control, all you decent folks? What if John and his ilk take over from Jesus?
Well, the good news is that no matter how powerful the substance, the most one can ever hope to accomplish under its influence is to spark creativity, but never to sustain it. To invite a girl out on a date bears no guarantee whatsoever that she will give you her heart. That takes work, time, and real understanding, and, even though your success may be partially measured in moments, it is not only the sparkling moments of chemistry that will determine the quality of the relationship. The same is true with courting the Muse. You may be able to get her to appear, agree to take you places, and perhaps even sleep with you, but she won't stay with you if you've turned into a beast by morning.
All this then to say that just saying no is not going to be quite as simple as memorizing by rote a personal three-word mantra. There are some very provocative ideas and powerful subjects that narcotics allow people to explore. If our children are not encouraged to explore every corner of this wonderful land of the make-believe, the deliciously bizarre, and the impossibly mysterious that exists within daily reality, with their natural, pre-adult curiosity and creativity that preclude the need for and even the want of artificially altered states, then won't they be at least somewhat justified in doing what they can to find other entry points into that world?
After all, it's quite a world.
Mon, 02 Jul 2007 07:21:00 +0000 - Quality Time
Days don't get much better than today, filled as it was with the simple pleasure of doing simple things. Setting is, of course, important to energize the space in which simple pleasures can occur, and so it doesn't hurt that it was in my backyard, and it was hot, sunny, and spent by the pool with my three phenomenal kids. Sound too entitled? I've done some hard time, I've earned it. Sound mundane? Read below and answer me this question; are these the most trivial things, or are they the most important? Aren't they the stuff of life?
These are the things I did today:- Got my 6-year-old son, who is as scared of water as I was when I was a kid, into the deep end, without his "security blanket" floating ring. Watching his glowing response to the fanatical applause of all onlookers, even from those who had teased him about the ring minutes before, was the parental equivalent of a kid at Christmas about to open a big, wrapped present.
- Figured out together with my 9-year-old younger daughter what she was really, really good at doing, and then came to the mutual realization which career might possibly let her do what she loves and what she's best at. We were talking while pool frolicking how to important it was to do something with your life that makes you happy, and shortly after, I brought out the laptop on which I write this for some wireless fun at poolside. Before reading through this page, I asked her to explain the meaning of the word 'coincidence' to my six-year-old son, as he didn't know what it meant. She gave him an example; here is what she said. "Suppose that you move into a new house in a new neigbourhood, and you find out that the people living next door have the same last name, and they've named their son the exact same first name and middle name, and therefore have the exact same name as you." Anyone familiar with the successful imparting of any type of knowledge knows that there is no better way to teach than by example, so, of course, he got it, and we proceeded to go through every coincidence on the page in detail. I was even proud of their conclusion; that most of these things didn't really happen, but if they did, in the unlikely event that they aren't made up, then there is a higher mind messing with us, perhaps the reptilians (see item #7). Imagine how proud I was when my daughter even found some holes in the stories, including the one about the reptilians, or at least she came up with some unanswered questions that I would have certainly liked to know. Journalistic note: it's amazing what having a smart ten-year-old read your stories can do for your writing.
- As part of this Internet surfing safari, I answered questions from my two younger kids about, among other things 1. what happens in the precise moment of and in the moments after a human embryo is created 2. whether this guy (item #5) really had a chance at succeeding where Jesus, Mohammed, etc. had failed (ie. an earthly kingdom) 3. what gross things my oldest daughter might have to do in movies if she ever became the actress she wants to be, and, last but not least 4. whether or not I'd eat someone if I were stuck in a lifeboat with a few other people and, if so, who I'd eat.
- Helped my 12-year-old older daughter invent a new pool game, the simultaneous triple cannonball, wherein the three of us, upon a count of three, leapt into the air and tried to hit the water at the same time with cannonball dives, also making sure that we sunk right to the bottom still balled up, like true cannonballs would.
- Had the equivalent of a snowball fight in June with my son, using ice cubes that hadn't yet melted from the cooler used to house last night's party drinks.
And whoever said there were more important things to do in the world than spending simple time? When you can take pleasure in working on your free throws into the swimming pool basketball hoop, when you can sort out all the knots and roll up the extension cord and actually have fun with it, or you can take enough time to appreciate how well your tomatoes are growing, isn't that somewhere close to peace of mind, the pool that holds those still mental waters of nirvana?
Being at peace in the moment shouldn't be only for children.
Mon, 18 Jun 2007 03:28:00 +0000 - Antennae Into Our Hidden Minds
When I had a group of English As A Second Language students in my Canadian language school, and I knew the group could handle the content, I used to pose a question that, upon collective reflection, was always certain to provoke a collective shaking of heads in wonder. The reason? This was not just about language; it was about the potential of the human brain.
Anyone who has tried to learn to speak another language by placing himself or herself in an immersion experience will recognize an interesting phenomenon, often experienced but seldom noticed. This situation occurs when you've been in the host environment for a certain period of time and have been passively exposed to the deluge of a foreign language hour after hour, day after day. At some point, you will begin to have dreams during sleep in which one, or sometimes even all, of the characters in your dream is a native speaker of the host language, speaking in the host language that you're trying so heroically to learn. So, for example, if you're studying Spanish in Mexico, and you've been there for a few months, you will eventually dream of a Mexican as s/he exists in waking life, speaking the language (Spanish) s/he uses in waking life.
This may seem natural enough, but some thought into the mechanics of it takes you into another realm. I have asked a simple question to almost everyone I have met who has reported experiencing this phenomenon. For explanation purposes, I'll continue with the example of studying Spanish in Mexico.
"In your dreams, was that Mexican speaking Spanish the way s/he usually does, or was s/he speaking it the way you do (ie. accented, bad grammar, etc.)?"
The answer was almost always the same.
"Of course the Mexican was speaking Spanish perfectly; s/he is a native speaker!"
So, my next question?
"Was that Mexican in your dream repeating what s/he may have said to you before, or spontaneously producing language?"
After some thought, it usually came out that the Spanish from that dream Mexican was indeed being produced spontaneously, or at the very least copied and pasted in a coherent way, and not just regurgitated from what the learner had heard during waking life.
Take a moment to consider that. How is it possible that someone struggling with a foreign language, quite far from using it competently, can conjure up completely within the limits of his/her own mind a character who not only speaks the language well but natively?
Does that not suggest that somewhere within that learner's mind, there exists not only the potential but the actual ability to understand and speak the language fluently?
And forget about just language...what does that say about the ability of the mind in free flow, outside of altered states, to access and intelligently process that kind of information? Of what else might that mind be capable? And, most importantly of all, how on earth can our waking minds tune into that kind of processing power?
I am a person who has explored many peaks and valleys in the landscape of dreams, from night terrors as a child to rising from my bed, as a young adult, in the middle of the night, getting dressed, going outside and starting my car before learning that I was dreaming. There were many incidents durng which Morpheus used me as a vessel for amusement, but one dream incident above all convinced me of the power of my own hidden mind, if I could ever learn to control it.
I was heading to bed one night in a bit of a foul mood, because I had the kind of heavy head and scratchy throat that I knew would mean that I'd be coming down with a nasty cold by morning. I don't know about you, but, to me, one of the worst parts about getting sick is that moment when you know it's going to happen and it's still all ahead of you. The being sick, I can handle. The knowing I'm going to be sick, that's part I hate.
Anyway, I fell into the kind of in-again out-again sleep that I'm very much used to and spent most of the night in that state, tossing and turning. Just before morning, however, I fell into a different kind of sleep, the kind that makes you sweat as if you'd been bathed in the water of your dreams. I had a dream then that, laying there in my bed, sleeping, I felt with my tongue a hair in my mouth, that I badly needed to dislodge. With my fingers pinched, I reached deep into my mouth with my hand and was able to locate the end of the hair and clasp it with my fingers. As I began to pull the hair out of my mouth, I realized that the hair was in fact quite long, stretching all the way down into my throat. I pulled the first part of the hair out of my mouth and then brought in my second hand to continue pulling it out, as if my hands were gripping a rope and I were pulling a bucket out of a deep well.
I pulled and pulled for what seemed like forever, a ball of hair accumulating in my right hand as I gathered more and more of the hair coming out from deep in my throat. Finally, I felt not only the single strand of hair but an entire ball of hair coming up through my throat, rasping against the sensitive skin as it came and making me gag as it passed into my mouth. As the huge ball of hair was expelled into my hand, I remember feeling an enormous sense of relief, perhaps even pleasure. A few moments later, I woke up, soaked in the sweat of a healing sleep, and my sore throat was gone.
It is said that we use only a small portion of our brains during our daily waking lives, and it is known that we organically process only a very small percentage of the information in our environments (how many radio waves or atoms have you seen lately?). Yet we also receive tantalizing signals from time to time, through antennae that we possess but do not know how to control. What if we could teach ourselves to tune into those broadcasts, to process at least a little more of that all thrashing, ennobling information that is everywhere around us all the time?
This is a question that is very important to me, and is one whose importance to others I hope I can demonstrate. Please stay tuned.
Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:09:00 +0000 - The Birds & The Bees Revisited
Every father is unsure about when and how to breach the subject with his daughter of the ins and outs (!) of the world of sex. Many Dads are quite happy to leave this to Mom, which is okay in part, but really, who knows the male animal like us males? What follows is a primer for breaching the difficult subject, based, of course, on experience, and the belief that the more our daughters REALLY know about sex, and the male view of sex, the better decisions they will make and the better their sexual relationships, and probably overall relationships, will be.
This does not cover STDs, pregnancy, and protection, which are, of course, extremely important, and tend to be extensively covered at school, usually in a way that would try to scare kids away from the whole experience. That's the thing about school; it teaches us what we need to know to make careers but not about how to live our lives. In fact, this particular journal entry was conceived (sorry!) primarily as a counterpoint to that whole approach, important though the "don'ts" side of the equation certainly is. My focus here was to concentrate on the "dos". And yes, I do know that the world is not made up of two kinds of people and that appearances and even initial patterns of behaviour are not always a true reflection of the person beneath. The most instructive thing I can say in defence of this is that I myself have been both types of boy in decidedly different circumstances.
I have no qualifications other than experience, but I think my kids have a pretty good read on the whole thing. Having been a teacher, I also know that asking the right questions teaches more than having the right answers, so you'll notice that the questions as phrased below are specific, to test real understanding, instead of the general "Do you understand what I've said so far", which is a terribly passive way to approach such an important subject as human sexuality. Perhaps the analogy offered below is overly simplistic, but I've learned that there are few types of verbal communication more powerful than the combination of a well-constructed analogy and a relevant example. A great thing about talking about difficult topics by analogies (mine below is watching movies), is that difficult questions can come back to you using the language of the analogy, which makes them a lot easier to answer! I think the advice below can be applied to avoid heterosexual bias, with a few changes in terminology, but I confess that I haven't tried doing so.
The Image Lovers & The Movie Lovers
Sex is about using your body to express your feelings. It is not much more than touching that feels good. Some parts of your body are more sensitive to touch than other parts, and it feels nice to be touched there. These parts are different in different people. Part of the fun of sex is in discovering where those parts are. In the same way that any kind of touch, like a hug, is much better when both people involved want to do it, sex itself is much much better when both people involved want it to happen. Just as when you see someone in your family or one of your friends and you both know that you want to hug each other, there are some people that you will be with, when you will know that you both want to kiss each other, or touch each other in other ways. There is no right or wrong way to do it, and no specific set of actions or time frame; in fact, it is a little different, and sometimes a lot different, every time. It will be much better if you just go where it takes you, and not try to direct it to what someone might have told to do. Liken it to watching a movie you really like; enjoy it as if it will never end, and hope that, when it does end, it has a good ending that you'll remember. The touching is always supposed to feel good; when something doesn’t feel good, you should stop and do something else. And just like going out to watch a movie, you want to choose your company carefully; mostly only people with whom you enjoy spending your time will be good partners.
Think of how many people now that you really enjoy spending time with; now how many of them are boys?
Although of course there are as many types of boys as there are boys, you will, broadly speaking, meet two types of boys, . There will be one type of boy whose primary goal it is, after he has met you, to have some kind of sex with you. Quite often, he will say whatever he has to say, do whatever he has to do, to accomplish his goal. For him, sex is for him and about him, and what he wants. This type of boy is like someone who wants to watch enough of a cool movie just to get the idea of the story, either because he can't be bothered to watch the whole thing or even just so he can tell his friends he saw it. So, he may rent the movie, watch the last scene, and then believe he knows what it's about, or say that he has seen it. Let's call this type of boy the Image Lover. The boy's image of himself, or his friends' image of him, is what he really enjoys.
Do you know any boys like that?
Then, there will be the type of boy whose primary goal it is to get to know you, who will do anything and say anything he has to do or say, to spend time with you and find out more about you and what you like. For him, sex, if and when it happens, will be about both of you, and about when both of you are ready. Viewed as a movie, he wants a good ending as well, but, like you, he knows that, the better he understands the rest of the film, and the more he understands and enjoys every scene, the more he'll enjoy the overall movie and the ending. Chances are also very good that he'll want to watch it again after it's finished. Let’s call this type of boy the Movie Lover.
Do you know any boys like that?
Which type of boys do you think are easier to find?
It is not always going to be easy to tell these two types of boys apart. Until you know him, you will often mistake one for the other, but the thing with sex, as with watching movies, is that it will be a lot better the first time, and most other times, if you learn to tell which boys are which. The Movie Lover will often take longer to get to the ending, or even to start watching the movie, because he knows that the ending is just one part, one good part, of the movie, that will happen after you have already enjoyed lots of other scenes. If you're not enjoying it, you always have the opportunity to put the movie on pause, for as long as you want, until you want to go back to watching it. You can also leave it altogether, especially if you start to suspect that you really have an Image Lover. That's another way that sex is similar to watching a movie; if you're not enjoying the movie, you certainly won't enjoy the ending. If you do choose an Image Lover, the movie is all in the ending, which he of course will not appreciate after the movie is finished. It is not a disaster to have this experience with the type of boy you don't want, but it's generally true that you'll enjoy the first experience more, and all similar experiences to come, if you choose your company well for the first one.
How do you think you can tell an Image Lover from a Movie Lover?
Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:04:00 +0000 - Orange Life So Far
Can you see the real me?
My kids have a really cool little electronic toy called 20 Questions. You think of a person, place, or thing, and it asks you a series of twenty yes or no questions in order to guess what you're thinking of. It is uncannily accurate and can guess almost anything within the twenty-question limit. So, working from the assumption that, when properly chosen, one can figure out just about anything with twenty well-chosen questions, I provide below twenty answers, to the question above. They are not in any order, except the order I thought of them while writing this post. Each point will be expounded in more detail eventually in this journal.
One important thing; I am a father who believes that parents have to earn the trust of their children by being truthful with them, and so it's worth noting that, even though there's some pretty heavy stuff in here, one of the most important criteria for all information in this journal is that it must be fit for reading by my own children.
1. The job I enjoyed most in my life was as a camping safari tour guide in Kenya, sharing the wonders of nature's balance, and experiencing nature's finest, with tourists, journalists and lost souls. On one of the safaris, I witnessed an extremely rare occurrence, a double kill; we watched two cheetahs first kill a gazelle and then, while they were eating, make up their minds to go for something bigger, at which time they chased down and killed a wildebeest.
2. Long before Sasha Baron Cohen came along, some time in the early 90's, I had a fringe theatre act called the "Crazy Canuck", in which, for paying groups of tourists to London, England, I posed as a regular commuter in the London Underground but did very strange things in the presence of fellow commuters, one of which caused me to be picked up by the police and told never to perform again.
3. I have founded, developed, ran, and sold a unique English As A Second Language school for students from many different countries. I developed a course based on a set of idiomatic expressions with grammatical overtones that I called Conversationals, teaching students phrases that noone else ever taught them anywhere, chosen so that they could express their opinions that way they did in their native languages. According to reports from students and teachers alike, classrooms were often "captivated and spellbound". If only I had been as captivated with actually learning how to run a business properly.
4. I wrote a 1200-page novel over the course of 6 years, and, after developing a small following among early readers of the manuscript, I destroyed all copies of the manuscript, which I now refer to as my six-year Mandala, a concept brought to popular attention as an ornate work of sand art that Tibetan monks meticulously create and then destroy immediately upon completion. The title of the book was "Storydancer".
5. I was once told while busking in Ikebukuro Station in Tokyo that I had the "greatest white soul singing voice" the listener, who, granted, was quite drunk, had ever heard. In the next breath, I was told that my guitar playing was so bad that I should put down the guitar and never pick it up again. I now settle for a gig as the lead singer (no guitar!) of a classic rock covers band.
6. I have worn an article of orange clothing somewhere on my person every day for the last fifteen years. To my knowledge, none of this orange clothing was ever purchased by me; all pieces were gifted to me.
7. While in university, I resigned in disgust from the executive of a conservative political party and formed my own protest political party, called Tommy Flannagan's Pathological Liars (named after an 80's Saturday Night Live character), to run in the university model parliament elections and, after winning almost 25% of the seats and enduring a public tirade from the Conservative leader for "making a mockery of the event", formed another party the following year called the Great Thinkers of All Time, resulting in similar electoral success and even more subversive delight.
8. Attempts on my life have been made over the years by two elephants, one crocodile, one black mamba snake, salmonella, malaria, two soldiers with AK-47s, a land-mined stretch of road, and cancer. As far as I can tell, each has been unsuccessful.
9. My wife and I met in Japan, got engaged in Ireland, were married in Australia, and live in Canada. We have three children, whose names mean "Happiness", "Autumn" and "Illumination".
10. I speak five languages with varying degrees of fluency. One is spoken by only 1 million people in the world. Here is a sample. "O ntumedisetse ho ba lelapa la haho tle."
11. I became quasi-famous in Japan when a tv news crew covering an event caught me on tape doing an imitation of a famous beer commercial in a rural Japanese dialect.
12. I have a large, heart-shaped mole, on my chest, directly over my heart.
13. I received what I was told might have been the highest mark in the history of a certain university political philosophy course (97%) on a term essay, riddled with typographical errors, on which most of my classmates had spent months but that I had written entirely in an early morning session a few hours before it was due. The funny thing was that I had written it as a joke, as I completely disagreed with everything I had written, but the prof marking it took it completely seriously!
14. Someone wrote and recorded a song about me, and I can say with relative certainty that it is the only song ever written to contain the lyrical phrase "euphoric inculcation".
15. After experiencing something of an epiphany watching Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a sunset and a subsequent fireworks display through light-refracting glasses on a hilltop overlooking the Glastonbury music festival, I decided to stop eating meat, sell off all of my earthly possessions and wander barefoot around India. This plan fell through about a week later when, after visiting several pawn shops in London, I learned that funds received from the sale of my earthly possessions wouldn't even get me across the English Channel.
16. Shortly after September 11, 2001, I started a film production company with a partner whom I came across quite by chance. He was a brilliant New Joysey Jew, from Tony Soprano's neighbourhood, but with a Masters in Cross Cultural Education from Harvard and a whole bunch of connections from 20 years working in the Hollywood entertainment business. I raised a whole bunch of money from some of my closest friends and sold my two businesses for peanuts, and we used the funds to develop a billion-dollar log line for a completely new kind of film, but he wouldn't present to any of his connections, one of them Jeffrey Katzenburg's Canadian right hand, until it was perfect. Unfortunately, before it had a chance to get perfect, I received an e-mail from him saying that he had been diagnosed with cancer and his wife had left him, all in the same week, and he proceeded to disappear off the face of the earth, leaving me saddled with visceral debts to those who had believed in our idea.
17. I learned how to drink vodka and lose at chess from a pre-glasnost Soviet tank commander and his crew on the Trans-Siberian railway, a two-week train ride from Budapest to Beijing.
18. While hitch-hiking in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, I was picked up by a member of the Yakusa (the Japanese mafia). For those who know the Yakusa, he did have the punch perm and missing pinkie finger that many lower-level soldiers have. We hit it off right away, and he proceeded to take me to some of his favourite places, including a stalactite cave, in which were built many little memorial altars. We built one together to commemorate the great day we were having.
19. I am known by everyone who has eaten a meal with me for having an appetite of epic proportions. It doesn't hurt that my metabolism has always been so fast that it already has the appetizers digested before dessert has arrived.
20. I have a new business partner now, and we're working on an Internet application that will help change the way people find, share, and listen to music.
Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:23:00 +0000
