Some thoughts on lingo

I am fascinated by how language evolves in these little pockets we put ourselves in. From our jobs, our schools, clubs, and teams emerge phrases that are understandable, on their surface, but have a larger meaning in their usage and structure.

In my current role as a production assistant in a scientific research facility, I've had to learn a new use for many words and phrases and, in some cases, learned the proper pronunciation. I'm looking at you muon. Myou-on, not moo-on. Science has no regard for my Canadian pronunciation of the letter u.

Phrases from my past bubble up sometimes. When I'm in the groove, flowing, the cultures of my past lives hover at the edges. I've worked as a cook for years and as a filmmaker among other professions. I mention those two because they are lousy with unique terminologies and phrases.

A restaurant kitchen operates at a pace that requires a refinement of language that borders on encryption. Everything gets shortened beyond recognition. It's not terribly difficult to learn and it gets practiced daily so it will get drilled into your psyche pretty fast. 

In the kitchen I managed, there was a single printer and between two and five people who needed the info from that printer. Communicating that fell on the first line cook. Their role was to keep organized the rate food would leave the kitchen so they would announce a list of food to prepare at certain intervals. It is utter nonsense to the uninitiated. In their biggest voice they would call, "can I get a c-fett, a parm, an M.R., three dippers and fries, fries for two, a dinner, a lunch, eight subs, and twenty-three." All generally meaningful and common words, but without context they lose all meaning. And without a doubt, you aren't the only one lost. Many a competent cook can't keep all that in their head. They would get halfway through starting all that, realise they didn't memorize it all, and ask to repeat. They would look countingly at all this random food around them and ask for an 'all-day,' my favourite phrase from that life. Can I get an all-day? I'm lost over here, what's your all-day? Shit! I need an all-day! What do you need in the water, all-day?

The first line cook's all-day is everything they are expecting from each station, right now. It has nothing to do with the rest of the day, only this moment. I have to stop myself from using it because I know only a very few people will have even the slightest idea what the hell I'm talking about.

I bring all this up because I've been given an opportunity to produce a film about the lab and facility I work at. My mind slips easily back to filmmaker Pete, and one of my go-to phrases comes quickly to my lips: on the day. I don't know where I first heard it, some crazy weekend shoot in the West End probably. The phrase relates to planning and rehearsal. In the film world, it basically means when the camera is rolling. (Do cameras roll anymore?) On the day is glib, and fits the moment better.

The folks I work with these days are from all over the world, and speak English as a second or third language so take things very literally. I tried to use on the day once and got a funny look and, "I thought we were doing this today?" followed by a tortured explanation of how a film shoot works to a bunch of engineers. Some days we talk a bit too much.

Thanks for reading,
Pete

Vision - The Goddess

     I met the goddess upon a stair in a realm adjacent. She was vague, both someone I thought I knew once and a shimmer at the edge of vision. 

     The many of us, golden, had swept the countryside of summer to line our pockets with its sweet smoke. The scent of it the chaff of what we should have gathered. No matter, we said as the rains set in. We would have each other.

     I look back on those days and see faces. So many faces. Faces I loved or said I did anyway. Faces turned away so I have to gently tap on a shoulder and lean in front of them to see if they are who I remember. I see them in the rust on a leaf, in the raindrops against the window. They watch me from their shadows on the floor. I know now they are an illusion, an artifact of the filter over everything. Yet they stare.

     The actual number of us was lost to antiquity. You see, there were only ever two of us on the stair. What had seemed to be a crowd for so long was merely a single companion. He is to me as I am to the clouds. That is to say, a flood.

     Kerry climbed the stairs with me. Unadorned stone stacked to the sky ahead of us, a surf of pleasant nothing behind us. In the surrounding darkness, star after star lit up in the black. Wander, not fear laughed at the edges of the world and levity carried the day. Kerry and I the pair, the binary.

     In leaving behind the flax of day, we traded in our vast rebellion for a dance. It seemed a promise of treasure, to us. From the outside, from the faces, it must have seemed a blunder. To give up so much in exchange for something so fleeting. To us, it was first a bounty, in the end, empty of value. It was so generous of the universe to free us from the debt of success.

     On we trudged, up, towards the narrows. A temple aglow waited for us at the top. As the stair rose higher, it became steeper and thinner. It twisted as it lifted higher. I looked over to see Kerry climbing a separate staircase somewhere n the distance. His reached high into the darkness. Where it led was not for me to know.

     I lost him in there. A face, now quiet among the others. On the bark of a tree or in a cloud. In the embers of the fire staring back at me. Loved, like the rest of the fictions, but indistinct. On I went to meet the goddess.

     The stairs led to a platform above a wide valley carved in gossamer and hung from the Great Arch. Much too precious to harbour life, the valley shone of fundamental frequencies and poured harmonics into the canyon to the north. A photophany glittering on filament and star, the whelm of it seeming to obey no law. No further could I go.

     I stood before the Valley of Light, the Lucent Gown of Mystery, The Lady Herself, Vision.  The landscape dispersed into a fog of memory. She smiled, in the way of statues,  permanent and subtle. She reached for me as I to Her, She with her knowledge, me with my clumsy arms. I could only flail to stay afloat swallowed inside Her eyes.

     We looked out over the vastness. Her eye the rim of a crater open to the universe all above me. I should have been terrified of the beauty, but I was no longer that person. The goddess began to draw and I watched through the circle.

     The night itself swirled under her pen and little wakes were pulled along with each crisp stroke. Each mark she made upon reality rippled against the firmament, waves spreading and running over other waves reflected off the edge of forever. A storm of noise and light rose and crossed the galaxy. Patterns formed in the interference. Shapes and symbols so bright that even the faces in the dark were lit. 

     I could feel her smile from my nest in her vision. She reached out to the stars at the centre of her eye and gently dipped her pen in the centre of the storm. The maelstrom calmed at her touch and the symbols came to a focus. An Antikytheran motion of interlocking rings filled the circle of her eye and imagery ticked about the mesh. It was gibberish. Nonsense of unknowably distant light painted into echoes and approximations of language. Simply, it was my name, written in the stuff of stars.

     We both laughed. Her chuckle a chime at the tempered locus of hope, mine the lorn rasp of the brash. With the conclave ended, She released me back to colour, green, and to the faces in the dew drops on the grass. At my feet, I gazed at the multitude around me. One stood out among the others: a tiny quatrefoil sprout in the lawn staring back at me. I picked it and placed it in the pages of a novel.

Thanks for reading.

Pete

Poem - Desirée's Flood

Discovering ADHD

Hyperfocus

Laser light on gold. 2019

I hope you will forgive me this catharsis today. Time is a meaningless thing to me. It is jumbled. Far and near are neither and my memory is a crashing chaos of shame and elation that often makes little sense. I forget my own history on this planet. This moment is so strong in my mind that the past vanishes. It is important for me to write on this today. To find some pattern in the turbulence and to bring to the light that which is often kept in the darkest place, our hearts.

My story about living with ADHD starts both in my youth and with diagnosing my son when he was in preschool. See, ADHD and I go way back, even though I never really knew it. 

I was one of those who believed that ADHD was a made-up illness, meant to keep kids in their school seats, chemically strapped down to their desks. Despite never having knowingly interacted with someone who was actually diagnosed and medicated, I carried the conclusion that medical research was wrong. Now, I can say with confidence dozens of my peers at school have ADHD. Many of them were very good friends because we were the same.

Sometimes I feel regret or anger at having slipped through the system. I have begun to come to terms with that and will cover that some other time.

I was never a good student in school, at least until I reached adulthood. Most teachers didn't understand me, and I didn't make it easy for them. I have awful emotional skills. I always have and likely always will. Having lived half a life I think I am starting to build some decent skill. Teachers require a certain level of calm to really perform and I almost never had that. I am shocked that I was given the passes I got. My mom recognizes now that school failed me, not the other way around. They should have dug deeper, they should have cared. I carry a lot of shame from this period in my life. There were many lies I told others and myself.

This became a huge problem in high school. I make jokes that I studied high school at the local fast food joint. My family and friends know the place. I was practically furniture there. I owe my crossword solving skills to cigarettes, plastic furniture, and weak coffee. My high school was pretty big and growing out of a pretty rough background. What is now a home for the 1% was once a backwoods working-class village with all the mindset that comes with it. Boys were grease monkey chain-smokers and girls were loud fashion victim rebels. The teachers I met at that school were worn of their care. I don't blame them. Eventually, they kicked me out, though I was already far gone by then.

The story of how I came back will have to wait for another time. In short, I was able to finish high school at a later date and explore my creativity at post-secondary art school. I would like to fast forward about twenty years to my son, nine today, but four at the time of his diagnosis.

He was a hard to handle little guy. He is the sort to do what he wants to do, not what anyone suggests he do. This didn't work well with his preschool. We frequently had to pick him up and take him home because his behaviour was too much for the educators. As this progressed, the preschool really stepped up. They have access to counselling and psychiatry and they sent my little one for an assessment.

They have some clever tests for such young people that I cannot describe, never having personally witnessed one. The results came back that our boy was gifted in some way, and that he should see a pediatrician about possible ADHD. I was surprised the same test couldn't detect his awful eyesight we discovered a few years later.

I seem to recall that it took some time to get an appointment for the pediatrician. She had read his evaluation beforehand and asked us a few questions about him. Each one was like a stab. She was describing me as a kid, not just my son. The fears, the outbursts, symptoms I knew too well. I left that appointment a different person. A person who knew he and his boy had ADHD.

A few little words made a lifetime suddenly make sense. I've always known I was different from a lot of people. Other people have known I am different. Some could get past the less desirable aspects to love me. Even I got past some of those aspects to find people to love.

Thanks for reading.

Pete

A meditation

The next time you have a moment to yourself, close your eyes. Take a few long slow breaths. Let the world melt away from its tight grip on your heart. Just breathe.

Imagine you are standing at the side of a long road that stretches as far as you can see in either direction. You know this road well. Every step of your life has been taken on this road. Even now, at the side of the road, you know that every step you have yet to take will be on this road.

There are signposts along the road. Some are large, familiar billboards and some are tiny, like little flowers that mark each step you have taken. The ones close to you are easy to read. Off in the distance, some are faded and worn, or so small that you cannot quite read what they say. In the other direction, they are the same. Close to you, you can see what is up ahead with clarity. Farther up the road the signs are indistinct.

As you take another breath and your heart pumps relief through your body, the hills and valleys around you seem to breathe along with you. There are other landmarks that come into view. Far off mountains that fill you with hope; a beautiful lake lined with your most precious moments. You recall a small house on the roadside that always seems to be there when you need rest.

There are people out there on the road. Some stand next to the signs, some are waiting patiently for you to resume your journey. Some are climbing into a bag that you carry with you wherever you go.

Take another long, slow breath. Stay awhile. I have something to teach you about this road.

I can hear you, dear reader, thinking what could you possibly teach me about my own road that snakes through my heart and mind, and contains my world? Well, dearest, stay and find out.

We deal in metaphor. This road is not excluded from that deal. It isn't just a description of your journey through it. It is you. It is your body, spread out from horizon to horizon, from then to when. As you travel down this road, so does your past and future. Here, just outside that unrelenting time and space, you can move to any point on this road you like. You just have to think about it. Do you remember?

You have always been doing this. Every moment of your life is painted with the colours of your many places in time. Each decision a promise to the past and future.  You see, dear reader, this road is not some map or chronicle, it is a living thing. You can change it all. Remember? Your future has always been talking to you as you have been talking to your past.

Your voice is such an instrument of this place that it can be heard whenever you go. It sings of the twisting highway in the hills and it is the cry heard in the storm, always. It tells the stories in pain and relief, it sculpts the land to fit the road and yet it is the land, giving way for your road.

I can see you, this meandering road, and I can see the myriad you upon this road. I can hear you now calling out to your future on this road. I can hear others out there calling too. Be still for a moment and listen. Not for who is loudest, or who is in pain, just listen. Listen for the harmonies and overtones. Listen for the unison in that choir of you. Now listen to what they are singing about. It's you, isn't it? All your songs, clear as that road on a Sunday morning. If you can still breathe, please do so now.

Deeply you gather in the air. It is so full of music you can hardly believe it is healthy. But yet it nourishes you. How slow your heart beats along with it. It's so soothing to hear this song of breath and beat, so soothing to just listen to this song of you.

Now, dearest, take one last long look at this road from your vantage just at the roadside. Take one more breath here outside of time and space. Now step back onto that road and open your eyes.

Thank you for reading.

Pete.

Tips - Write it down!

Far too often we hear the phrase write it down. Write everything down, just sit down and write, no matter how bad, get it outside your head. How often do we have a great idea, and it just walks away like it never knew us? Yeah, all the freaking time.

So it's advice time again. Keep a notebook handy, so useful for a million different things. I used to keep a sketch book. They were often as full of drawings as fragments of poems, shopping lists, strange phrases from questionable states of consciousness. Mad, messy notebooks. They are great repositories that can help clear your head so you can work.

These days everyone has a phone or two in their pocket. Great if you want something small and super useful for keeping notes. I used to use mine to keep notes and then email them to myself for later editing or archiving. It was a good system. It gave me an emergency backup in case of a disk failure. In fact, Gift of Ravens was written almost entirely on a Blackberry Curve during breaks and downtime at work. I would write a bit, then press send at the end of a break and have a nice little package to look over later.

These days I use Google Keep. Now I don't have to save or email, everything is cross platform and instantly available. Having access to Docs is also super useful, but I do find editing on a phone super tedious. Not that typing on a tiny phone keyboard is satisfying. Lets call it tolerable, necessary.

Anyway, what inspired this post is sort brainstorming ideas for short stories I recalled a few way old ideas from my film days. I think both of them were verbal pitches over beer kind of ideas. You know, stuff I should have wrote down and never did.

I had recalled one story, lets call it Heart Attack for now. At least I think its that one. It could easily have been another idea we can call Werewolf.

Heart Attack was an idea for a music video, inspired by a vision I had when walking into a huge mall. It is a surreal exploration of the experience of dying. I can't say much more about it other than I had thought it would make a good adaptation for a short story instead of a music video. Well, me being the most smartest person ever, I failed to write. it. down.

Fuck.

My brain started doing its little dance trying to recall what I was thinking about twenty minutes ago and ADHD came over to play pranks on me and here we are. No story idea but struggling to remember one.

In that furious scrambling of brains I recalled another pitch from way back. This one a more traditional monster movie about a werewolf. Again I have to play the secrecy card not for fear the idea will get stolen, more so I don't lose the passion to tell the story. I knew it wasn't the right one but it sort of struck me as an ah-ha moment. It was both another idea for an adaptation for a short story, and also the idea you are reading right now.

So there you go. Write that shit down or lose it forever. Use whatever you like, apps, notebooks, stacks of paper, napkins, whatever, just put it on paper.

Now I'm off to take my own advice.

Thanks for reading,

Pete

Rant - Umbrellas are a plague upon humanity

I am going to try this one again. A thought I have been chewing on for an age or two.

Umbrellas are a plague upon humanity. A small shelter for the timid and the terminally selfish. The cover a breach of the invisible personal space we are all allotted.

They are a burden that could free one arm that would be better used in a gesture that says, "please, you go first." instead it's gaudy bubble is a desperate insult to civility and taste.

Awful colours abound in the Rain City, an array with the colour sense of a newborn. A pack of dogs is better behaved than a dozen commuters out in the rain, each shouldering a barely effective shield against good sense.

Imagine, if you will, a dull grey morning. That dismal Monday that follows a gloomy weekend spent pacing the house, periodic stops at the windows to watch the rivulets run down the plate glass. Well now you're out in it, out in the crashing hiss of wet rubber on rain-glossed blacktop. Your feet are cold already from the sidewalk that looks like a scale model of Manitoba or Minnesota. Thousands of puddles just a few millimeters deeper than the worn soles of your well travelled shoes. Each step splashes a small amount into the leather uppers and the chill worms its way to bone, one little toe at a time.

As you trudge the side streets through the first leg of your dismal commute you find a little spring in your step. The quiet of the dawn is bearable on your own. You're a little wet and cold but you know the bus will be warm once you board. You'll be able to open your coat to breathe a little, and you could shed the soggy hat for a time. Just as you're getting a rhythm going the bus stop arrives like a fucked up painting by a serial killer when he was younger. Colours all over the place, faces all staring and mindless, a black background that clearly still shouts in some dank cell somewhere while doctors take brain samples in exchange for chemical passivity.

The queue for the express to downtown. You will not find a more vacuous and selfish crowd anywhere save on a Friday evening at the local Kale 'n Sale Gourmet Food outlet at 4th and Arbutus. The snoot is palpable above the patter of rain falling.

Dozens of those blasted articulated portable roofs all jammed up on the walkway. And you have to go stand right next to one. Well you park your sorry desk jockey hunch behind one particularly awful floral pattern. No sooner than you stop and resign yourself to your place in life another savage parks his clear with 90's neon splashes of colour cacophonic circle of disrespect right behind you. Already leaning back from the massive spike on Floral the Fidgeter's weapon waggling in your face your new friend Clear Killjoy is dripping sleet down your neck.

Beset on all sides by these eye-poking demons of polyvinyl and gnarled steel, your disparate mind searches for something to occupy it, to quell the fear. But you are having none of it. You start to do the math. You can see twenty of the beasts. Each with at least eight tiny and radially arrayed for maximum carnage pokers, and one I've spike on top, presumably for stabbing a fellow once you've knocked his eyes out. That's all you can see, there is no telling how many more are lurking just out of sight. There are certainly a couple in the bus shelter. Yes, a favourite den of those pricks.

Before you can mutter The Oath of the Shattered Raincover and banish all those foul dumpster-bound umbrellas to their fate, the great yellow brick of a bus pulls up with a sputter. The doors of its great belly open and spew out the miserable cargo. Predictably, the mass each shudder as they step into the drizzle and as if by reflex and insult more of the gaudy circles flash into existence. Pop, pop, pop, the awful tattoo plays as the people march. The virulent spray of well aged and mildewy rain assaults the queue. The line of people begins to shuffle towards the front of the bus. As more of the things puff into existence, ahead as many fold away to a horrifying dimension where no one has eyes to have poked out.

Have you ever heard the saying that you shouldn't learn how sausage is made? Well, I can tell you that it is very much like walking among two lines of people who are each at the handle of an atrocious device surely designed more to injure than protect. The octagonal, the yellow, the huge, the louvered, all an engineered grinder to beat you to a paste, then inject you all sopping wet into a bulk transport where you will be cooked up and served up in a cubicle to your boss. He will chew you out for something. It ain't pretty.

Out of the corner of your eye you spot a kindred spirit. Battered by the jagged mob she looks pleadingly at you, sky and the cast off dregs of other peoples' rain dripping down her face like tears. She may never make it work today, the state she is in. She staggers along, inching towards you, carried along by the machine. Together you two could change all this. You could build a store that sells really good rain coats and nice hats. You could put a new face on the people. A face that smiles and nods, says sorry once in while. You could do away with all these anti-social gizmos. The crowd ebbs and surges along the platform and she is almost in speaking distance. You can almost hear her struggling breath against the squeak and rustle of nylon, the clink of thin metal. You take a breath to say hello when a great flap of pink fills the universe and sprays an age of water all over your face.

Choking, you stagger out of the queue. You stumble away sputtering and wiping at your face. Litres of water come away as you swipe at the noxious liquid. You spasm with coughing and struggle to draw a clear breath. So much water. Your arms thrash about in instinct, trying to swim up to safety.

You manage a ragged couple of gasps and gather yourself. Shake your head to clear the buzzing and straighten your coat. You take a step toward the door of the bus. As your eyes finally blink away the blur drizzle the bus, sated by it's latest meal, barks and closes the door.

The rain slashes over the pavement almost pushing the bus along. Resigned to your fate your shoulders slump even further, they can barely hold up your bag any longer. Alone in the darkness you take a few weary steps to the pole that marks the bus stop.

Thanks for reading,
Pete