December 29th, 2008

The Open Door

Happy almost new year!

I hope everybody had a wonderful holiday.

I spent mine out of the city, up in the Valley in Wolfville. I'd lived there for four years and returning for the holidays was wonderful. I spent it with my ex-girlfriend and dear friend, Ariell and her family.

I think I'll be moving back to that odd little town in a few months time. My days of isolation in the city are coming to an end. --It was a necessary time of solitude, to work and think and research. While I love community and friends and all of that wonderful stuff, the writer in me also thrives on being alone. I didn't feel lonely at all, even though I'd spend days on end without talking to another living soul. I have done this in the past and it always leads to excellent things creatively; it's a sort of gestation period for stories. Thieves & Kings came from many days like this on my own, thinking and planning and sketching away. From the Summer of 2007 until now, it has been a very good period, but lately I've been noticing a sedentary feeling beginning to creep into my life; the sort of slowing down which threatens to become unhealthy. I'd begun to call it, "Mental Rot". I fiddled about with the idea of changing something, but nothing really came of it. But on Christmas Eve, the message came home to me loudly.

The story goes like this. . .

The day before my bus was scheduled to leave town, I was spending my last hour doing some writing, my bags were packed and sitting by the door, ready to go. Then I heard an awful sound. Outside my little apartment I heard some terrible groans. I couldn't understand them. It was either somebody being sick or making love in a very noisy and not very attractive way. It went on for ten minutes or so and then stopped. "That's the city," I thought. And forgot about it, getting back to whatever I was doing.

Then forty minutes later, the clock was telling me, "Get a move on, mister! You don't want to miss the last bus!" So I threw on my coat, picked up my bags, did a last minute check and walked out the door.

Odd. The door just down the hall from mine was standing open with several bags of groceries sitting just outside it, as though somebody had put them down while fumbling for keys and had forgotten about them. The apartment beyond was dark, and something felt wrong. I was feeling the press of time, and knew I only had a few minutes to catch the local city bus which would take me down to the big bus station, but I decided to investigate.

I put my stuff down and knocked on the open door.

"Hello? Is everything all right in there?"

No answer.

I stood at the door, but didn't want to walk into somebody else's apartment.

"Hello? Is anybody there? Are you okay?"

Nothing.

I considered looking for the building super, but time was tight, and I wasn't even sure if the super would be around on Christmas Eve. There were noises of parties going on behind several other doors. I thought, "Perhaps whoever lives here met some friends, and got side tracked. You never know. He might come back any minute."

But that didn't feel right. I remembered the awful groaning noises and a vision of somebody curled up in the washroom flashed across my vision. But I paused, seconds ticking away, and I knew this was one of 'those moments' where you had to risk screwing up your own plans to get involved in somebody else's. I'd already missed yesterday's bus because I'd been behind schedule and had to wait the extra day. This was my very last chance to get out of the city in time, or I'd miss Christmas.

So I made a deal with myself.

"When I get to the bus station, I'll call the building manager and let him know to look in on this apartment. That should be enough. That will only be in ten minutes. I have to run right now!"

So I did, and my bus arrived just as I stepped to the curb. Another few seconds and I would have been stranded. I rode the bus in a bit of a fluster, thinking, "Gosh, I hope whoever that person is, is alright! I hope I'm not screwing this up! Drive faster, Mrs. Bus Driver!"

We got the station and I plunked a quarter into the pay phone and called the operator. (Our building is unlisted for some reason.) She told me she couldn't connect me. I explained the situation, but she said, "Sorry. I don't have a listing I can give out. If you think it's serious, why don't you call the police?"

Hm. I had already built a scenario in my mind where whoever it was had stopped off for drinks on the way home from the grocery store and had come home and passed out after being sick. He'd wake up in a few hours feeling hung over and silly. People in Halifax are pretty hard-core drinkers. The cops would probably not be impressed with my calling about something like that, but I decided to finish what I'd started. "Yes. That's a good idea," I told the operator. "Can you connect me?"

She did, and the phone clicked over to another line. But all I got was a busy signal at the police station. Outside, my bus was getting ready to go.

I waffled a bit and then rationalized it all to myself. "Yeah. Probably just had too much to drink. I have to go!"

And so I went.

I spent several days up in the Valley, and Ariell drove me home yesterday in her fancy new car. Everything was right with the world. The next morning, (today), I awoke to the sound of movers working outside my door. I stuck my head out to see what was up, and sure enough, the apartment just down the hall from me had been emptied out. Nothing was left but a few odd bits and pieces, and those little indentations in the carpet where bed posts had once stood. There was a lone worker cleaning things up.

"What happened?" I asked him, already knowing, feeling sick my belly. He put down his wash rag and sighed deeply.

"The guy who lived here died," he said simply.

Damn.

Apparently the fellow had died of a heart attack on Christmas Eve. He'd been 65 years old, and I guess the walk through the city and the three story stair well had been that last straw for his heart. He was probably dead by the time I'd knocked on his door. It had just been his time. But it left me feeling angsty and thoughtful.

In the year and a half I've lived in this building, I'd never met the man. Didn't know his name. The apartment he'd been living in was very small; just a bachelor, much like mine. He'd died alone in the washroom, and I'd heard it all happen and I'd known exactly what was going on but had ignored my instincts.

While I was in the valley, a woman I know, the proprietor of the Indian restaurant was at the same Christmas party I'd spent the evening at. (A very friendly affair, with kids running around, and several people from town enjoying dinner and silly party games. I played, "Twister" for the first time with a bunch of my friends old and young, while lovely people laughed and grinned.) V.J. told me, "I heard you were thinking of moving back to the Valley. I have a perfect room for you in my house! It's a whole studio apartment on the top floor. Very big. Very warm. I could rent it to you for a very reasonable amount. I'd be very happy to have you living with us!"

I went around to look at it, and it's an old house, but dry and free of mold. On my very favorite street in the whole town. Summer street. --When I first moved to Wolfville back in 2003, I remember walking along Summer street thinking, "Oh boy! I love this street! There's lots of students living here. It's so alive! There are so many trees and flowers and so much life!" --It was then that I'd first formed the idea for Stardrop; a girl from far away moving to a small town to live and work and have adventures. Ashelle was born on that street. And now I was being offered a chance to live there in a big attic studio apartment in the very heart of a bustling town filled with amazing people. My days of solitude would be very much over.

Still, I was hesitant, of course. I don't like moving, and I am very comfortable in Halifax. But alone, and disconnected, feeing myself beginning to pass from a healthy state of reflection and isolation and into the doldrums of decay which come when a time in life has passed from what it was meant to be and into a rut. But still. . , I was comfortable.

Then, looking around the dead man's apartment, seeing how similar it was to my own, thinking of how he had died on his own, disconnected without friends or family.

That cut it.

I'm moving.

I give my four months notice on January 1st, and a new chapter of my life will begin! I hope it is fruitful and bright and that it will allow me to bring even better work to the world.

--I am sorry to bring you a downer story like this, but moments like these are part of life and I think they are worth sharing.

Cheers, and love to you all! Try to do something special on New Year's Eve, with friends or family or both. --If it is right for you, of course. But really, the important thing is to know where you are supposed to be and BE there.

-Mark Oakley
December 29th, 2008
Halifax, Nova Scotia

July 2, 2008

I've always been a sucker for a good radio drama. . . There have been a couple of really good productions I can think of; a handful of books-on-tape read by accomplished voice performers. So with this in mind, I decided that I might as well write some scripts and put together my own little radio drama series. . . Only to discover that such projects are rather more complex than one might imagine.

--Not impossible by any means, but I learned that it is very easy to do it poorly, and a poor radio drama is a shockingly disruptive thing to listen to. --If a voice actor cannot pull off an excellent performance then there's nothing, nothing at all to distract the listener. I was hoping to read for one of the parts, and realized that professional speaking is a big deal. --I'd lined up a number of willing voice actors, but I found myself unwilling to advance for fear of not getting it done right. (I know! It's a terrible reason for not trying, but it did make me stress somewhat.) Still, I learned quite a bit in the process and would like very much to make another attempt at some point when I am feeling more certain of myself.

Anyway, I was also left holding some really nifty audio gear. --A very cute and effective digital sound recorder. By way of testing it, I brought it with me to Acadia University for a talk I was asked to give at one of their graduate English courses. Now, due to the fact that I was rather new to using the device, I wound up pointing it in the wrong direction, but you can still hear my voice clearly enough. Future items posted here will be much more clear. Please treat this as the experiment it is.

Cheers!

August 22nd, 2008,

There's a lot of excellent thinking emerging these days. Many threads of awareness which are spotted throughout the vast internet. I've done a lot of reading over the past decade, (both on paper and screen), into many areas, most of them the sorts of things few of the people around me found to be particularly interesting. Studying politics and history on one's own time isn't exactly a typical sport, but it is a source of fascination for me. (My upcoming book, The Seventh Expert, through Annick Press is an example of this fascination, specifically all things medieval.)

Anyway, over the past five or six years, I've noticed that a large number of documentarians have jumped into this same ocean of emerging thought and have grasped hold of some handful of the many threads. The threads are all woven into a whole cloth, but it is a cloth is so large that one finds it difficult to examine with care more than a few parts of it at a time. I have, (being me), tried to look at the whole thing, and so I've spent hundreds of hours reading and pondering, but this results by necessity in a generalist's view. Others, however, those whose energies drive them to make documentaries, are the sorts of people who are so fascinated by a small handful of aspects that they are able to create very precise images to share. --Yet a documentary, while it is a wonderful device, remains simple. A documentary can lay out powerful patterns and fill them with enough researched details to create a succinct picture of the film-maker's mind, but it is only one picture, and often it will contain bits of flawed logic in spots which are hard to catch because once you are visiting the mind of the film-maker, all views within are by nature, internally consistent. And so it is important upon emerging from the world of a documentary to double-check and compare the ideas which have been shared with you. This should be seen as a challenge rather than a problem; it's just the way stories all are. But the stories themselves remain valuable, because while there may be flaws, the larger patterns are often fairly complete or in need only of some adjustment or gaps filled in. They are tools through which one can start to build their own knowledge of the world, and the exploration into the huge realm of human history and the new ideas which have been growing of late is an adventure!

Anyway. . . Every now and again, I'll find a documentary which does a particularly efficient or inspired job of putting together its share of threads into a coherent story. I'd like to share a couple of the ones which stand out in my mind. --Of course, many of the readers who enjoy my work, I have found, tend to be very aware people, and so I recognize that I may be sharing old ideas with them, but still. . . It's not like I'm printing this stuff on expensive paper. The digital medium has wide and plentiful acreage. The following film is the third part of a series called, "Zeitgeist". Very cool stuff. I'll post the first part another time. (The middle part I didn't care for, but that's simply the result of my own explorations. You are of course invited to make your own.)

Cheers, and enjoy!

August 4th, 2008,

Well, here's something new! --Many of you have probably seen plenty of 9-11 stuff, and are also probably quite tired of it. This one is really neat, though. --A group of pilots requested the flight data recorder info for the various planes on that fateful day through the U.S. FIOA, and put it through their own comparative analysis, contrasting it with the findings of the official 9-11 Report. Their work is both very sharp and very revealing. --I've seen a lot of this kind of material and usually there are several mushy spots, so it's nice to see some clean thinking. I do have a couple of reservations with some of their conclusions, but they have nothing to do with the major points offered. See what you think.

For more information on this video and the group which made it, visit, pilotsfor911truth.org

July 15th, 2008,

This is one of my favorite (very) short little animations. Alan Watts is one of those modern day philosophers who I place in the same general category as Joseph Campbell and Ray Bradbury. Enjoy!

July 2nd, 2008

"Where do you get your ideas?"

I've been asked this many times, and while many writers find the question understandably peculiar, I find it peculiar in a way which I really enjoy tackling because the answer is never quite the same. It's sort of an exploration of one's own mind, and I've always found this a fascinating exercise, usually because there always seems to be something new and interesting going on up there. --Often it involves a series of questions I am trying to find answers for, and when not doing that, my mental energy is spent following up on all the other little items in the world which fascinate me. There has always been a great host of them, and when the internet came along, that great host expanded dramatically. While much of what my mind produces is cobbled together from many different areas and thus takes a fair bit of effort to share with the world, every now and then I come across a diamond in the rough which I can simply hold up and say, "Hey! Check it out! A diamond!"

Well, having spent so many years with a website which I felt was sorely under-exploited for all its potential to communicate, I promised myself that when I performed my next massive overhaul, I would find some way to make a platform for those various items which have little or nothing to do with my comics, but everything to do with what fascinates and intrigues me. (--Which I suppose is directly and inextricably linked to everything I do in comics.)

So to start off with, I thought the first post I'd make in this area should be something appropriate to the whole subject of communication. This little gem is all about using the media to its fullest extent for all the right reasons. Ladies and gentlemen, --the gallant Bill Moyers offers a rousing keynote address at the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform. . .