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

Essay- Freedom at the cost of responsibility

Simply, words are power. Power is never without cost. We pay in responsibility.

Words are the vectors of our ideas and the bedrock of our cultures. They give our economies of thought currency. But those words are not and should not be free. The ultimate power in our world is in words. Where we give literacy willingly, we also expect the holder of such power to pay it respect, and to bear the responsibility of its many uses.

The cost of words is not one of crude barter or expense nor one of equity; it is one of responsibilty. The act of speaking is indeed an action and the choice of words can also trigger a call to action. The power of speaking to enthrall and command, to coerce and mobilize is an act that should have checks.

One should be free to speak one's mind to any who would listen. With that freedom comes a duty to recognise that speech is at every turn an interaction between two or more people. One to speak and one or more to interpret those words. Understand that words do not simply vanish once their meaning has made it across the gap.

We often create structures to protect our most vulnerable. Unfortunately, some of us are deeply susceptible to the power of words. We are easily swayed more by the tone of voice than the actual words. They sound correct and keep with logic. Even the best of us have biased our minds to grasp willingly at the first thing that sounds right. The charm and thrill in a pleasurable sounding voice can reach right past our critical faculties to our base emotions. The glib subvert resistance. I often wonder how much it is our own sensitivities over a speaker's talent that drive us to believe their words. I suppose that would be a matter weighed by each individual.

Even from a young age we are taught that our words should be carefully chosen. Should we find that we have caused harm to someone by our words and behavior, we are corrected. As we grow we find more limits to our freedoms. At work we are bound by the workplace culture to be responsible for our actions and words. While we are still free to speak our minds, so is our workplace free to choose whether to continue associating or not, based entirely on those freely spoken words. Even our public life is limited. We are not free from responsibility should we publicly defame people, or verbally abuse them. We are certainly not free to incite violence or threaten harm.

Our words even bear this responsibility in our private lives. We should not lie to those we love, and we shouldnt abuse with our words.

I would like to believe an idyllic world is possible where we have this true freedom, but sadly that world is fantasy. It would require every single one of us to be capable of an impossible level of personal responsibility.

This is how we win.

In our fight against uniformity we sought for the unique, and ended up just like everyone else. A tattoo from a book was our passionate rebellion. That dirge of a pop song, the throwaway track nine from the debut album turned out to be everyone's secret favourite. Kitschcloth shirts with an embroidered "Gord" became a game of who could out cheese who. No one wins because everyone fights.

What wars we wage over bike lanes and the price of gas. 30-second full-page sponsored content making us out to be thieves and liars. How we rail at our enemy, the pickup truck driving carnivore and his six-pack habit. We, with our solutions of grandeur and our monoculture fuels. An attack right now seems the kind that opens us wide. The thrust will hit heart, but so will the bullet. None will arrive to announce that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

All that remains is our mutually assured destruction. Our battle just wears us all away, our thoughts frozen into stone then eroded by our own righteous storms. Who will be left the spoils of perfect debate: the praise of the choir we so carefully trained?