Whoa boy. A new year.

So I just got back from Toronto. I'd gone for a short visit, seeing family and friends over the holidays.

Wow.

They took my pocket knife. Rats. --The airport security people, I mean. Foolishly, I'd forgotten to pack it in the luggage destined for the cargo belly of the plane rather than keep it in that little, otherwise worthless, change pocket all jeans come equipped with. In these, "Post 9-11 Days," a key-chain knife smaller than my little finger, (a cute Gerber I'd been using a couple of times almost every day for all manner of little jobs where fingernails just aren't good enough), is considered a weapon. Silly. Honestly, any one of my pens or mechanical pencils would be more dangerous if used improperly.

And then, on the flight back home again, they discovered a miniature screw-driver set which had lain forgotten in the deep recesses of my carry-on backpack. (Call me a boy scout, but I just don't feel comfortable unless I am carrying a few small tools while travelling.) Despite the fact that this item caused no problems on the first trip out, it was deemed frightful enough little more than a week later on the return flight to warrant pulling me out of the line and demanding that I dispose of the offending article. --Man, I've flown with stuff like that, -and worse- dozens of times and I've never once hijacked a plane by threatening to dismantle it from the inside out.) I found myself racing the flight boarding clock to paste together a makeshift envelope from bristol board sketch paper and masking tape in order to mail the miniature screwdriver back to myself. Annoyed, I half contemplated getting back at the world of corporate conglomerates by not putting any postage on the envelope so that it would return to my home address with unpayable postage due. I thought better of it, though. Canada Post isn't the one auctioning off blocks of seized pocket knives and portable computers on Ebay.

Yes, this is small-fry stuff. Yes, I know the ever-so rational arguments offered by the Powers That Be, and Yes, damn it, if I'd been thinking ahead, I could easily have avoided these minor difficulties. But, darn it all! It still bugs me! When is everybody going to realize that the Talking Heads on TV are liars and that this whole endless terrorist threat is a big, fat, made-up & helped-along sham scripted right from the pages of Orwell's 1984? I thought everybody was supposed to have read that book back in high school. Where 'enemy' bombs fell upon the denizens of 'Oceana' courtesy of its own government, where fear equals control, and where my pocket screw-driver set is suddenly cause for suspicion.

"But we need to take every possible precaution, sir."

I know. Of course they do. What else can they do? I can't imagine being a security officer working scanning detail at an airport these days. What a lousy job! The weight of the world, and all that. . . All they can do is be more thorough; more paranoid. But really, it's not even up to them.

I'd be happier if a little more of the new, harsh scrutiny these days was directed at other quarters. --Like at the various people who began making millions upon millions of dollars following the Enron mis-direction/9-11 scandal. Far too many such people hold sway in international and domestic policy. War is hell, but if you happen to be born into the right families and hold the right job titles, it's also a great way to trick endless gobs of cash out of the public purse. The public purse, never forget! They taught us in school that, "War is good for the economy!"

What a load of bull.

War is rotton for the economy. Building a hydroelectric dam is good for the economy. It gives back. It is an investment in society. But building planes and trucks and bombs to be sent away and blown up in a foriegn land isn't any sort of investment at all. --Not unless you are trying to exploit and expand the borders of an Empire, which as history has always, always shown us, is one of the most tyranical and bloody forms of 'investment' ever. And again, who profits but those inbred few at the top of the food chain? Indeed. The only people who get rich during a war are those who happen to be in a position to skim the cream from the top of 84 billion dollar Iraqi 're-construction' deals. Everybody else must go without, live on scraps and food stamps and scrape to buy those patriotic war bonds to help pay for more planes and trucks and bombs, all destined for the burning rubbish heap that the Middle East is rapidly becoming. What a perfect model of the consumerist society; Efficiency at its peak! New Stuff, forcibly paid for and quickly destroyed without the annoying bother of it having to last for any appreciable length of time. It takes fear and craft to make ordinary people willing to buy into such a lunatic scheme. To make people give huge sums of their earnings over to corporate and government pirates who assure them that if only they give and give and give, then and only then will the fear go away. Will the 'terrorists' finally be stopped.

Well, I have a better way to make the fear go away: Start by turning off the television for a few days. Gather your brain back into your own power. This isn't the same as putting your head in the sand. Not at all! There's nothing wrong with saying "No!" to the greedy shadow whispering day after day into your subconscious. There's a reason invading armies take over the broadcasting facilities upon entering a fallen nation. Heck, the Western public hasn't really owned their own mass media for decades now. Anybody with friends working in journalism will tell you that news is sanitized and watered-down and censored into candy-coated fluff, often with creepy political leanings. --There are numerous other ways, far more effective ways to keep yourself informed. Chief among them is, of course, this new thing we call the internet. --And anybody who derides and refuses to explore the internet because it is "unreliable" is simply being lazy. The internet is no more or less reliable than any other source of information created by humans, except that it allows one to seek and cross-examine, ask questions and debate with near endless facility.

And so, while waiting for my flight I wanted to talk about this stuff with somebody. Unfortunately, airports are not particularly good places for conversation, and so instead I stomped off to the airport book store and there stood and read most of Michael Moore's, "Dude, Where's my Country."

Moore must have been tearing his hair out. He didn't go anywhere nearly as far as he could have. The line he is treading is razor thin. These days, if you talk openly about even a portion of what is going on in the world, nobody will buy your book let alone publish it. But then, I suppose one of the things Orwell also warned us about was the propensity of a populace to find contentment in looking the other way while the ugly stuff goes down.

Okay. Complaining over. . .

So I landed at the sprawling Toronto airport and pulled out the list of names and numbers I'd compiled. Friends who had offered me couches to sleep on during my stay, you understand.

One by one, I dialed numbers to say, "Hi! I'm in town! Can I come over?"

And one by one the answer was, "Oh Wow! Mark. . . You certainly can if you want, and we'd love to have you, but right now, *cough*, we're sick as dogs with the Flu!"

Ah. Not so good.

Several quarters later and in a semi-state of rising trepidation, I finally reached a number on my list where the person who answered wasn't coughing.

"Hi, Mom. . ? Guess who."

I've not stayed in the same building as my mother, let alone spent any real time with her, in nearly a decade. It turned out to be a really cool thing! In truth, I'd not properly visited with either of my parents in years. I'm one of those, "Left Home Running and Never Looked Back," guys. It took all my friends getting sick at the exact same time to reverse this effect. So with all my plans and 'penciled-in' names entirely thrown askew, my holiday season went all free-form and improv. So completely unintentionally, I found myself at my mother's and saw my brother and my little niece who I've seen all of three times since she was born. --I'm an Uncle to a 4 year-old kid who plays with dolls and cars; she re-taught me how to play 'pretend'. Man! I'd totally forgotten! --The game where you unfold this long, make-it-up-as-you-go story about whatever you can imagine and act it out using toys. Way more fun than video games! I wore the knees of my jeans thin crawling around the floor and we had a ton of fun. The blue Hot Wheels car with a pair of paper air-plane wings taped to it was may favorite piece. Hers was a fairy princess doll who could throw magic. My niece seems to have inherited the Oakley imagination.

Eventually, everybody on my list got past the point of being infectious and I had a series of wonderful dinners, brunches, visits and late nights with a whole collection of friends and family members scattered far and wide around the city. I poured endless two-dollar coins into the local transit system, and a couple of nights, after the subway had closed down, found myself shivering on cold street corners waiting for all-night buses thinking, "Hm. I really didn't picture myself playing this miserable game again!" Although, strangely, I must admit that one of my favorite things in life is to snuggle into a nice warm bus seat at three-thirty A.M. Nothing is as toasty warm and comforting as finally boarding a winter bus in the darkest hours of the night to be spirited home.

Greg, who put me up, (er, put up with me), for most of my time in Toronto, spent most of his time toiling on a comic book proposal which he barely finished by the New Year dead-line. Right before I was readying to fly back to Nova Scotia, Greg finished his project and was finally able to spend some time properly goofing off with me. We didn't get to do that comics jam thing we'd been hoping for, but we did get to talk about life and eat pizza and drink tea and go out to see the big Lord of the Rings spectacular. (Which it was.)

I also dropped in back at the old house where I used to live in order to pick up a mountain of mail from my ex-land lord. (The only people I'd not given a forwarding address to was the government tax office.) After the I Box company audit a year ago, I was so entirely fed up with taxes and forms and moronic red-tape hassles that I was happy to just walk away from it all, which I did. Heck, I moved away and didn't tell Revenue Canada. But I picked all those loose threads up again in the nick of time, it seems. (My M'Oak-sense was tingling, actually.) As it turns out, I was maybe two weeks away from the local authorities being contacted and my assets being seized. Sheesh. I called the handy 800 number printed on their threat letter and averted a minor crisis. Heh. When you need something from the government, it's always a long, long wait and more often than not, an automated message machine you'll reach at the other end. But, boy, when it comes to the government wanting your money. . ! Well I'll tell you, that phone picks up after two rings and you get a real human voice first thing. Considering the rank unfairness of it all, (and I'm not just calling it unfair because it happened to me), I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of letting the government have all the guns. "If you think it's unfair, you can object by filling out more forms and registering for another audit." Oh yes! I want to extend the pain! After the first mind-numbingly confusing and heart-wrenching trip through the tax meat grinder, I was ready to sign just about anything in order simply to make it end.

In other news, a few days ago Canada's brand-new Prime Minister, (who managed to become the leader of Canada without actually being voted into office, and whose family kept its old-money millions safely tucked away in a snappy offshore tax-evasion scheme for which they certainly haven't gone through any audits to speak of!), gave all the top members of parliament raises so that they're each now earning six figure salaries. Hooray! Thanks guys! And here I am borrowing money to pay back-taxes I shouldn't even owe. That was my boxing day. But don't get me wrong. . . This didn't spoil my mood. No. In fact, I'd dealt with all the feelings and thoughts and plans of action regarding this issue many months earlier. I'd just happened to have left the actual letter with the grim audit results unopened at my old house and moved away. In finally dealing with it I found myself pleased to have averted legal (if amoral) action. Better poor than jailed, I always say! (Or was that also a line from Orwell. . ?)

And the Uptown Theater is gone. . !

Holy smokes! I walked past the darn thing thinking, "Where the heck is the Uptown Theater? I've not been gone that long, have I?" Well apparently I just don't watch enough news. (The down-side of having no television is that some things you find out two weeks after the fact as opposed to the day of. I DO have to give television news that credit; sensationalist but otherwise non-vital stories move at the speed of light!) The last great cinema in Toronto was demolished a few weeks ago to make way for condominiums on prime city property. --And they made a real mess of it, too. They pulled out a supporting beam, and the whole place crashed down in a very un-planned way, killing some students in the adjacent building. It was a disaster on many levels. What a shame. I really loved that theater.

Christine at Bakka-Phoenix Science Fiction Books a few blocks down filled me in on the details when I stopped in to say, "Hi!". --Actually, that was one of those unexpected meetings. I'd totally forgotten about Bakka until I was standing beside it. So I walked in off the street and she did this great double take before running around from behind the counter to hug me. "I thought you were in Nova Scotia!" All in all, as it turned out, it was the many unplanned get-togethers and stand-around-talkings which were most entertaining.

Oh, but it's good to be back home again in my new apartment! I can feel myself de-compressing. My mood lightening. My drafting board beckoning. . .

Cheers to you all, and may you have a happy and productive 2004!

-Mark

Jan 2nd, 2004
Wolfville, Nova Scotia