The ten-thousand leaves that fell simultaneously in my back yard in the two days that will have to pass for autumn now lie unraked beneath a blanket of snow.

September saw two weeks of enthusiasm and energy followed by two weeks of slack after having gotten myself ahead of the game. October sees the increasing urgency of getting shit done.

It occurs to me that the biggest challenge my MA program will provide is in learning how to live this academic life. Until this point I've viewed both work and school as some sort postponement of actual living. So now I'm trying to incorporate a regular sleep cycle, exercise and yes even a social life into my day to day living. The sleep thing screws with the rest to some degree. I don't transition well between sleep and wake, whichever one I'm doing, my body wants to keep it up. Prescriptions used to fix the falling asleep part, did so all through my undergrad. Ten hours of manual labour a day worked even better.

The trick, I think, is going to be in forcing myself up and out the door in the morning. I don't have any morning classes, but if I get to campus I get shit done. And if I get bored of getting shit done before it's time to go home I'll get some exercise at the fitness centre, which will improve my odds of getting to sleep at night. Snow doesn't encourage me to get outside. It should, cuz I need to get the walks shoveled before my landlord gets to work upstairs

As mentioned in my previous post. I recently bought an iPod. My first portable personal digital music device. I went through a number of personal CD players and walkmen before that, so what took me so long to join the iPod revolution?

Well part, but certainly not all, of it is that I genuinely like albums, hard copies, little plastic discs that I can hold in my hand, liner notes and album art included. I've always had the habit of listening to an album in its entirety. I don't buy an album for the singles, I want to hear them in the context of the artist's most recent portfolio. A recently purchased CD deserves better than a passive listen. When I bring it home I pop it in the CD player, open up the liner notes and just look and listen, 100% of my attention focused on the album.

This kind of behaviour is not very compatible with the mp3 experience. Granted, I've been collecting mp3's for years. I was a devotee of Napster, and I love that the bittorrent protocol allows me now to download an artist's entire discography in one step. But if I'm really into an artist, I gotta get me the real deal, a rackable, stackable, holdable, foldable, honest to God physical copy. ( Read more... )

verse of vice: an original


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( lyrics behind the cut )

Couple of tracks I made a while back but never uploaded

My Back Pages: my take on the Dylan song


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Just another word for: an original, describing my state of mind when I moved north four years ago


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If I won the lottery, the first thing I would do is take a nap for like a week. It ain't particularly fun wondering every day if I couldn't have worked another hour or read another chapter before passing out, or thinking of every non-essential expense as a dip into the tuition fund. Maybe I need to lighten up, allow myself some satisfaction for getting as much done as I do, for the BA that now hangs on my wall, but if I put a little more away, get a little more done, I get a little further from the possibility that I've chosen a path that exceeds my biological, psychological or financial capabilities.

::sigh:: and I really oughta stop resenting my friends for having disposable income.....

So, I'm officially addicted to caffeine. I had thought the excesses I've consumed had left me relatively unscathed, that my weekend lethargy was due to my week's work. I don't crave it when I don't have it, no headaches or anything, but after forgetting to fill my thermos this morning I was grumpy and unmotivated until having an energy drink from the corner store after work. Huh, well at least now I know how to get things done on a saturday.

I'm on pace for a 72 hour work week. All day, I have wonderful thoughts but run out of time and energy before I get the chance to record them. If I could get a stenographer to jot down the things that pass through my brain during the odd tedium that occurs thirty feet in the air balancing on eight inches of an I-Beam with nothing to hold on to but the caulking gun in right hand, I'd have the most interesting blog in the world.

Been working out of town again. This time with a Philipino partner. I don't envy the man. He does not ask many questions, seems resigned to not knowing fully what is going on. I am in charge because I am Canadian, I speak English fluently and I have a drivers license. His work is better than mine, though I may edge him on speed. I've worked with him enough that we know how to get along during work hours. I give him enough tasks to keep busy and he works until I say "lunch" or "clean up."

I commandeer his cell phone from time to time, because I am the eccentric that refuses to get one of my own, and though my job requires one, my boss sees no need to get me one because everyone else has their own and I almost always work with a partner. I hope Emmanuel understands that he can submit his phone bill to our boss for any expenses I accrue, but I am never quite sure if he comprehends what I say to him. He says, "OK" either way.

Now we hang out in the hotel and restaurants and I don't know how well that is going. I've never worked with anyone before who didn't want to spend part of their daily meal allowance on beer. Most nights, he didn't even want to go to a restaurant for supper, he microwaved himself a bowl of Mr. Noodles and stayed in the hotel room. This is beyond me; he is forgoing what I thought were the most relished perks of out of town work, good meals and alcohol.

Got an e-mail from my graduate advisor on Friday, detailing my summer reading list:

Books
Representations of the Intellectual and
Culture and Imperialism
—Edward Said

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
—Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek

Precarious Life
—Judith Butler

The Human Condition
—Hannah Arendt

Homo Sacer
—Giorgio Agamben

Specters of Marx
—Derrida

White Mythologies
—Robert Young

The Wretched of the Earth
—Frantz Fanon

Decolonising the Mind
—Ngugi wa Thiongo

Essays and selections
"History, Literature, and Geography"
"The World, the Text, and the Critic"
"Traveling Theory"
Introduction to Orientalism
—Edward Said

“The Order of Discourse”
—Michel Foucault

“Can the Subaltern Speak?”
—Gayatri Spivak

“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
—Jacques Derrida

It's far from impossible, but a little daunting for a man working sixty hours a week. I've read some of these before a while back and though I may have osmosed some of the concepts, I don't recall much of what specific content came from where. Time to consult the list of expendable behaviors:

effort intensive meals
sex life (or any attempt at having one)
staying out all night
marijuana
personal hygiene
self-prepared meals
television
guitar playing

Early this morning before the drugs wore off...




Down There By the Train - Tom Waits
Unchained - Johnny Cash

Clap Hands: Making good use of a head cold, I find myself singing Tom Waits songs


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Working this week near my grandpa's old stomping grounds. Caulking a welding and tractor assembly shop on a Hutterite colony. The locals are infinitely curious and friendly. Everytime I turn around there's a man or three in black jackets and straw hats quietly watching me. When I notice them, they'll wave and say something about the weather in their Low German accent. Young women, wearing flower-print dresses, hair pulled back under a small cap, much like my Holdeman Mennonite cousins, occasionally bring out coffee. In the afternoon, boys chase eachother around the jobsite; OH&S would have a fit if they ever came out to these rural sites.

During coffee today a man asked me, "So, are you married?" After I answered, "no" he said, "ask your mother if she would like a goose down quilt. $325 for a king size." If I had said yes, he certainly would have instructed me to ask my wife.

Was within 20 ft of a bald eagle on the way back to the hotel today. Saw lots of bison, a moose and some deer on the way out to Wainwright on monday. I really enjoy this out of town work, it was damn near 0º C today, but with the sun shining on the south side of the chicken barn, reflecting off of the aluminum fan housings and acres of snow covered fields it was pretty damn comfortable at the top of my ladder in jeans and a wife-beater (a-shirt). I'm still fighting an awful cold. I stay up half the night coughing, but I feel alright during the day.

Growing up in California, I learned to hide from the sun, but an Alberta winter can make a sun-worshipper of anybody. Spring is here, and I'm loving it.

One Butch Skill (The Caulking Song): An instant hit at work

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Huh. I've been accepted into the MA program in the UofC English department. I was half expecting/hoping I wouldn't be. Now I have to make some choices. I'm not entirely sure I want to do it, but if I had the money, I know I would. Thing is I don't, and I ain't too anxious to go into debt. If this was a degree in engineering or something else with fairly certain job placement and high pay, sure, I'd take out a loan, but I don't particularly relish the thought of having a relatively useless degree and a big debt hanging over my head. I managed some nine years of undergraduate studies without a loan, and I'd like to keep it up. I'm fairly happy with my job right now, but I don't want to make a life out of it either. I remember reading something about being able to defer admission to the program for a year. With some hard work, careful spending, and a little luck, I could have a pretty good chunk put away by fall 2010, but two years later, I'm still gonna be 29, broke and still needing a PhD topper to make a proper career out of it.

I wish someone had told me 10 years ago that an education was not necessarily a path to a profitable career, that you can't just chase what sounds like fun to you and expect someone to pay you to do it. I guess I was exceeding expectations by going to college at all, and I mightn't have listened to anyone anyway, but I just wonder why no one ever tried to point me in a more practical direction.

i just finished watching question period in our canadian parliament. apparently the most effective way to criticize the governing Conservatives, is to contrast their statements and policies to those of barack obama. prime minister harper and leader of the opposition ignatieff mocked eachother for their strategic photo opps and ad space associating themselves with the popular president. apparently parliamentarians agree, there's no one among their ranks capable of leading, so their best bet is to latch on to someone canadians like, the american president.

Work this week has been a tour of small town Alberta. I'm enjoying it actually. I'm pretty fond of this corner of the globe and it's nice to get out and see it. In California I could drive in any direction and be sure to find a road and a new way home. Out here, it don't take long for potholed pavement to turn to gravel to turn to no road at all. Yesterday at dawn I was looking out into a snow covered field south of Camrose, occupied only by a pumpjack and a silver fox. Today I was in Longview where the rockies loom tall in the west. Just east a foothill once bore the name of the town written white quartz rocks, but some joker turned the L to a B. Longview or Bongview, coincidentally, is the current home of Ian Tyson. Between there and home is the Big Rock, a glacial erratic. No picture can do justice to 15,000 tonnes of quartzite sitting on flat, flat prairie.

Reflections on an Empty bottle: an original

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wrote this a while ago, then for a while didn't like it. Recently decided it was alright, so I put it to music. Not at all an expression of how I've been feeling lately.

Blow Lonely, Run High (Tyson Dub): slightly reworked


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So I haven't felt nauseous in a few days; I'm cautiously optimistic. I may have a natural predisposition for insomnia w/o drugs, but sans "depression" I can get by on relatively little sleep.

If one searches for tips on dealing with anti-depressant withdrawal, the most frequently encountered suggestion is "take a dose of the drug." Well, duh. But that sort of defeats the purpose. The medical experts suggest tapering off to prevent any occurrence of withdrawal symptoms. Well yah, I moved from 150 mg venlafaxine daily to nothing in 37.5 mg (the smallest available dosage) steps over a period of approximately 8 months.

Still, I've been in a state of perpetual nausea for a week. I had my last dose a week and a half-ago. The withdrawal took a couple days to kick in and last thursday and friday were the worst, but since then I have noted only qualitative, not quantitative differences in the symptoms. I still feel just as nauseous, but it's a slightly different sensation.

I've taken to treating myself with four approximately 1/4 gram joints (cannabis) a day. (I'm estimating here, based on being on pace for going through a 1/4 oz bag in just over a week.) These are relatively small compared to a recreational dose, which can be up to a gram per spliff. This keeps me feeling relatively baseline, though I am definitely aware when it's about time for another joint.

To legally get medical marijuana, I would have to see a specialist relevant to my condition, in other words a psychiatrist. The paperwork would be extensive, I would be at the mercy of the personal views of medical professionals, I may well be over the symptoms before I got legal permission to possess the drug, and I might still have to buy the substance off of the street.

To get the prescription that caused my condition, I simply walked into a doctor's office, told him I had been on venlafaxine in the states and was prescribed the exact dosage I asked for. From waiting room to pharmacy counter I probably had my drugs in less than an hour.

According to Mayo Clinic psychiatrist Daniel Hall-Flavin, M.D.

It's important to note that adjustment doesn't mean addiction. Antidepressants aren't considered addictive substances. Addiction represents harmful, long-term chemical changes in the brain. These changes can lead to tolerance, physical dependence and uncontrollable cravings. Withdrawal from an addictive substance is a very different phenomenon from withdrawal from antidepressants — which are simply drugs designed to restore normal chemical balance in the brain