full circle.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega.” Revelation 1:8

Alpha

Dedicated to my wife, Cathryn, my children, Cameron, Ian, Aimee, Owen, and my two angels, Hailey Marie and Ian Joshua.

My wife’s mother always said her life could be written as a book.  I have decided to write her story as she is too busy being a good wife and an exceptional mother.  This is her story, our story, and the story of our children, through my eyes.

Omega

Thanks and acknowledgement to my wife, Cathryn, my children, Cameron, Ian, Aimee, Owen, my two angels, Hailey Marie and Ian Joshua, my friend Eyeteaguy (thanks for the kick in the butt to start writing), my friend Friar (Thursday night bitch ‘n stitch sessions, Viking humour, and bonfires), and my friends in “the cloud” who have given me encouragement at my blog, 6 Weeks.

Without all of you, these words would be nothing but whispers in the wind.

–

Image: Monogram of Christ, Museo Pio Cristiano, Vatican, undated.

i am what i am, i am who i am. a guest post by eyeteaguy.

Eyeteaguy and I have known each other for a pretty long time (back to 1992, in fact).  He was moving into the house where I was living in my last year of university.

I remember it well.  I was out on the front porch, drinking beer with a couple of other friends, and here comes this old Subaru wagon.  It backs into the driveway, and out steps Eyeteaguy (though at the time, he was Polisciguy).

I asked him if he needed a hand moving his stuff in, and he said no, so we didn’t help him!  What a bunch of assholes we were…

I think we eventually did give him a hand, because it was a pretty hot day, but he might tell you otherwise…

Yep, he’s a pretty cool guy.  He didn’t care for my music at first, but one day I caught him tapping his foot to a Napalm Death song, and a few years later we went to see a Kyuss concert together.

Best.  Show.  Evar.

(Stoner rock FTW!)

As I said, it was my last year of university.  After my last exam, I bought a case of beer.  Eyeteaguy and I sat in the basement that night and drank 24 pints of beer.

He met his wife to be at my wedding in 1998.  That’s a pretty cool thing, because she is pretty cool and I was happy about that.

I lived beside him for about a year, five years after that, until the job I was in at the time went south in a bad way, and I moved back up to Splat Creek.

I really miss living in the same city as Eyeteaguy.

He’s the reason I started writing my blog, actually.  He said he’d kick my ass if I didn’t start writing… he has really big boots.

And he looks nothing like Popeye.

He gives me shit when I need it, always makes me smile because for some reason he understands what the hell I’m talking about, and I owe him a visit (I’m coming down soon, the GTI needs to stretch its legs a bit).

Some of you may already know him from his blog, or Friar’s blog, or even Kelly’s blog, but for those of you who have not met him, may I present -

Eyeteaguy.

–

I apologize… for nothing. I’m sorry if the way that I am….. bugs you.

And that is the truth. After reading this you should take away two messages.

1. Self help people can’t help you.
2. Accept who you are and stop try to change yourself, because you can’t.

All these self help people are as screwed up as you and me. They are writing to justify themselves, their actions and sometime to line their pockets. Take note, there is nothing wrong with you. Say it with me. “There is nothing wrong with me” Feel better? I do. You know why? Its because you can stop trying to “fix” yourself, “improve” yourself, “fulfill your potential” now. You are who you are, accept it, because you can’t change it. Think you can? Well you can’t, you are like a rubber band. You can stretch for a while, change shape but when you get tired, and you will, you will go back to your original shape. So enjoy your shape. Take what you are and move on. Live life as you are, not as you want to be. You will get further.

I have spent so much energy “growing” myself, “molding” myself. And I am the same. The only difference is that I was miserable because I couldn’t change and felt that I should. Well I can’t and now I don’t want to. So I won’t.

Guess what? I feel better now than after every single self help course I have ever taken or read. You want to know why? Because there is peace in acceptance. This all sounds like self help mumbo jumbo right? Maybe it is but it is also the truth. Accept yourself for who you are because if you don’t NO ONE ELSE WILL!

It is so hard being someone else. And when you stop, or change or quit all those people you deceived will not like you anymore because you caused them a great inconvenience because you made them change their mind about you.

I have friends, good friends. They are good friends because I accept them for who their are. Even their faults…. especially their faults. I do not judge them, I accept them and live my life with them. I do not try to change them because that is harder than changing yourself.

Its like playing poker. You get all the cards you want except one. So use your “power of positive thinking” to “realize the card it wants to be”. Does the card change? Nope. Play it, trade it. Win or lose with it. Its a fun game and if you are not having fun stop playing.

So just accept who you are, accept the others around you, stop trying to change yourself and everything around you and just live. Peace will descend upon you as long as you stop judging yourself.

Now piss off and go do something you enjoy. I won’t judge you for it.

–

There it is.

symptom of the universe.

The man went on the vacation of a lifetime, following a gut feeling.  A feeling that he belonged somewhere else, far away from the land of his birth.

When he got there, he felt like he was at home.  The feeling was beyond these words.

Home.

Belonging.

Two weeks passed quickly, and he was back to the quiet mountain town, working at the pride of the 1950’s.  He told everyone that he knew all about his experiences, and while they listened and seemed interested, the man knew two things.

One, that they would never understand how he felt – because they would never go to the land of the long white cloud – and two, they all thought he was crazy.

Time passed, almost a year and a half.  Late winter.

The man had a dream, on a Sunday night, and when he woke to shower before heading off to the workplace that paid tribute to Frederick Winslow Taylor, he recalled the dream.

The feeling was back.

In the dream, the man was visiting a college campus.  In the dream, he was first driving and then walking around the grounds, into the buildings, and the feeling was there.  The man felt that he had either been there, or was supposed to go there for some reason.

The man spent a good part of that Monday looking at college web sites around the world.  He knew, from the feeling and from the look of the terrain, that the college was located somewhere far away from where he lived.  It was lush, green, there were hills.

He looked at the West Coast of Canada and the USA.  But it was farther away than that.

It was here.

He found a picture with buildings that looked almost exactly like those in his dream.

In the land where he belonged.

Then.

Saturday evening, at the end of that week, the man was watching some trance videos on YouTube.  The man does that when he feels disconnected from the world, because in that quiet mountain town, people listen to both kinds of music – country, and western.

The man pictures himself driving into the night, listening to the trance music, under the city lights, as he is going someplace *exciting*.

Then the man clicked on this link.

The picture that accompanied the video was immediately recognizable to him.  The feeling washed over him again.

The man had seen this landscape, from almost this exact vantage point, except he had seen it during the daytime, while on a long walk, standing on an overpass.  The man likes to walk around cities.  He can see so much more that way.

While he was watching the videos, the man’s wife was watching a movie.  She told the man afterward that the plot in many ways paralleled the life they are living now, working at mundane jobs and wanting to be somewhere else.

The man thought about all of these things, about reading the signs.

And he resolved himself to work ever harder to recapture that feeling.

The symptom of the universe.

The feeling of being home.  Where he belongs.

–

Symptom Of The Universe is a song by Black Sabbath, about a person’s journey through life.  The picture above is the B-side of the 7″ single, and the runes read, “Rokk and roll madman Ozzy Osbourne”.

what are you living for?

Each of us will have a different answer – the thing is, make sure that it is truly important to you.

If it is something as stupid as money, keep looking.

Eyeteaguy asked me the other day if everything was okay because I hadn’t blogged for a while, and I replied that things couldn’t be better!  I’ve just been busy with a lot of really important stuff, stuff that all comes back around to what I’m living for.

See that picture?

I live for this.

I “punished” Eyeteaguy today by making him cry (the big baby!) with an article I read on the NYT Freakonomics blog.  To save you clicking the link, I’ve pasted in the text.

Steven D. Levitt writes:

I’m reading a biography about Buckminster Fuller written by Lloyd Steven Sieden.

Fuller had a 4-year-old daughter Alexandra who caught the 1918 flu, later got meningitis, and finally was afflicted by polio. Though frail, she managed to survive all these illnesses until the age of 4. It was the fall, and Fuller headed off from New York to Boston by train to attend the Harvard-Yale football game. Fuller walked with his daughter and wife, using a cane both because canes were in fashion and he had suffered a knee injury playing football earlier in life.

As Sieden writes:

Before he got on the train, little Alexandra looked up and asked, “Daddy, will you bring me a cane?” Bucky [Fuller’s nickname] promised he would bring back the souvenir as he set off for an enjoyable day of football and friends.

Harvard won that day, and Bucky spent most of his time lost in drink, camaraderie, and parties, forgetting his troubles as well as his family on Long Island. When he arrived in Pennsylvania Station in New York the following afternoon, Bucky telephoned Anne [his wife] who could barely speak. She told him that Alexandra had suffered a relapse and was in a coma. Stunned, Bucky caught the next train to Long Island. Arriving home, he found Alexandra still unconscious and a doctor doing all he could to save her life.

Bucky could only sit near her bed looking on helplessly as the doctors and nurses continued their work well into the night. Eventually, the situation calmed down, but Alexandra’s condition did not improve. Then, in the early hours before dawn, she opened her eyes and smiled up at Bucky. As he bent close to his daughter, Bucky heard her tiny voice ask, “Daddy, did you bring me my cane?”

Fuller could only turn away in shame and agony. In the furor of drinking and celebrating, he had forgotten his daughter’s simple request. Following her question, Alexandra closed her eyes for the last time and died in her father’s arms a few hours later. Bucky never forgave himself for that incident, which, even in the last years of his life, would bring tears of remorse to his eyes.

Of course, not everyone has children – but we have family, we have friends.  We can lose them at any time, as many of us know.

People are important.  Don’t let them down.

The work that you do is important, too – mostly because it is important to *someone*, to a person – maybe it makes someone happy, or maybe by doing that work you can make your own life better, and thereby enrich someone else’s life.

So I work towards doing something that makes me happier, so I can bring that happiness home.  It is a lot easier to smile for your family when your day doesn’t suck.

It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you live for something.

Because, if you don’t live for something, you’ll die for nothing.

Let’s go.

the cynic.

Tonight I sit in the comfy chair (Confess!  Confess!  Confess!) with a nice glass of red wine and a fire by my side.

I want to talk with you about a word, and tonight’s word is cynic.

A cynical person is often seen as a skeptic or a pessimist, and I have been called a cynic on many occasions, both professionally and personally.

I am proud to have been called a cynic on each of those occasions.

That’s right.

Proud.

For you see, there is more to the word.

If we have a look at the history of the word cynic, we see that the Cynics were a group of philosophers from ancient Greece.

One of the greatest influences on the Cynic school was Socrates, who was known to profess a disdain for general opinion.  Perhaps this is from where the modern connotation of the word springs, disdain for general opinion.

Is there anything wrong with having disdain for general opinion?

Is there anything wrong with thinking differently, with challenging the status quo, with taking the road less traveled?

I guess that is for each of us to decide.

But I’ll say one thing, I am glad that there are those who have chosen and choose to think, speak and act differently, because if they had not and did not, I believe the world would be quite different now.

We would likely be under a different flag.  Living under oppression.

Why do some people choose to be this way?  What is it that drives them?

I think many of them follow the fundamental principles of Cynicism:

1. The goal of life is happiness which is to live in agreement with Nature.
2. Happiness depends on being self-sufficient, and a master of mental attitude.
3. Self-sufficiency is achieved by living a life of Virtue.
4. The road to virtue is to free oneself from any influence such as wealth, fame, or power, which have no value in Nature.
5. Suffering is caused by false judgments of value, which cause negative emotions and a vicious character.

I cannot say that I am currently doing each and every one of these things, but as I was reading the words, I thought to myself that I am, consciously or unconsciously, striving to move in this direction where possible.

And as I read more than a few of the “A-list cool-kid productivity and self-actualization bloggers” today, it seems to me that quite a few of them are also doing this.

It does not seem like such a bad way to live, really.

Perhaps if more of us were cynics, we would not be experiencing this “financial crisis“, which was made possible by the legions of sheeple controlled by the wolves.

The more I read, the more I come to think that there is nothing new under the sun.

(Ecclesiastes 1:9-14 NIV) What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. {10} Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. {11} There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow. {12} I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. {13} I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! {14} I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

I never knew that this was from the Bible.  This is the power of thinking, of questioning, of learning.  Now I can share this knowledge with others.

Anyway, if you have a look at the five fundamental principles of Cynicism and then put a modern flavour to them:

Point number 1 – environmentalism.
Point number 2 – choosing self-employment, and using positive visualization to help achieve this.
Point number 3 – staying true to yourself.
Point number 4 – do what you love, and the money will follow.
Point number 5 – do something that creates true value.

These are my own interpretations of course, and I know you may have other thoughts on this.  That is okay.  In fact, it is great if you don’t agree with me.  I am counting on it.

Individual thought patterns.

The world’s future depends on it.

The great things that we have were achieved not by greed, not by doing what everyone else was doing, but by doing the right thing, and by belief in one’s self.

We know how to do this.  There is nothing new under the sun.  We have strayed too far perhaps, and it is time to return.

I am a cynic.

And I am damned proud to say that.