G-20

(LS: 10-0   Mood: Oddly Detached)

So tempting to just say "gas the shit out of them", isn't it?  Or, if you're charging the ramparts, to cry "police state".  So so tempting to opt for the simple, time-honoured tradition of intellectualized and institutionalized name-calling for the sake of advancing one ideology over another.  Fortunately, I'm not so easily tempted.

The convolution of issues surrounding the G-20 in Toronto - or really, anywhere the leaders of the twenty most prosperous nations on Earth decide to meet - brings out all the emotions, but strangely, very little on the issues.

And those issues - the continued functioning of the global economy, sustaining the environment, distribution of resources to the world's needy, human rights - almost never make the front pages.  Instead, we get the violence.  Indeed, that's all we get.

I'm not sympathetic to violent actions.  The hypocrisy - and comedic irony - of those Starbuck-swilling lefties with their rasta-coloured knitted hats and beat poems donning balaclavas and smashing the windows of the very same Starbucks where they planned their marches is fair game for all to see.  The guerilla tactics of blending into peaceful crowds, rightfully exercising their democratic rights to protest, and then putting on masks and rampaging through the streets before blending back into the crowds, do a great disservice to the causes advocated by the majority of those taking to the streets.

And yet, I'm equally reluctant to lend my support to the elite - the business leaders and political officials who live at the top of the capitalist food chain at altitudes of wealth and prosperity and power that 95% of the world population will never reach, thanks in large part because those already at the top have rigged the system that way - because I will not be a useful idiot. 

Speaking of revolutionaries, that's the term, mistakenly attributed to Vladmir Illyich Lenin, that describes those in the intelligentsia and middle class who speak out against progressive change that would benefit the lower classes, despite themselves being blocked by the very powers they endorse.  It's the Uncle Tom approach to manufacturing the consent of the mainstream population: get a few of "the ordinary Joes" to be your tools, and the rest of the population - seeing someone just like them advocating in support of the bourgeois - will go along with it.

I'm a writer, an artist.  I'm very loathe to align myself with those already in power, for whenever we speak out in support of one side or another, we add our power to whoever is already there.  And those in the upper echelon already have so much... including the ability to take away my freedom, my expression, in the name of "public safety" or whatever self-serving pretext they want to invent.  A quote from V for Vendetta sums it up nicely: "People shouldn't be afraid of their governments.  Governments should be afraid of their people".  If they turn us into a police state, they were always going to turn us into a police state.  At least, if that ever happens, I will be able to say that I didn't contribute my words to helping manufacture my own shackles.

But before you declare that I'm on the side of the window smashers, V was, of course, talking about violent revolution against an actual dictatorship.  Though highly statist and institutionally conservative, Canada has no such regime in place.  For that, we are lucky.

Useful idiots exist for every ideology, and I will not be one of them.  It's just as easy for righties to call the violent protesters "terrorists" and condemn the violence as it is for lefties to assail the suspension of "democracy" in the live zone.  The battle lines are familiar, the banners the same, in this debate as all others that happen daily: the only difference now is that there are actual battles taking place.

  

They need to find another way to discuss these important issues, a method that's far less high profile and likely to attract violence than what we have.  Those who will smash windows have always had that predisposition to do so: the G20 is the best excuse available for them to align themselves with whatever "cause" and throw rocks.  The initial reason to have "summits" was purely for prestige reasons, I think.  It's a world class event, a chance for host nations to pull down their drawers and say "See?  My boner's bigger than 85% of the other countries in the world".  Prestige costs us, though, as evidenced in the destruction and injury happening in the streets of Toronto tonight.  Maybe it's time for a more flaccid approach to ruling the world.  Give them nothing to hit, and they won't show up to throw rocks.

Until then, where do I stand?  After all, we're in extremis to some extent, and in such situations, you're either with or against.  I'm biased, primarily because I know there's at least one police officer friend who's likely fending off bottle-throwing socialist crackheads as I sit in my comfortable apartment an hour away by the lake, but I don't buy that half these guys are serious about their "causes".  The real heroes - the guys and gals who truly love progress - aren't charging the barricades in Toronto tonight, but are actually down on the shores of Louisiana and Alabama;  in sub-Saharan Africa and the Congo; in Haiti and in Chile; in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, becoming the change they want to see in the world.

It's one thing to sit in a posh cafe in the city, sipping lattes and bitching about capitalism and Darfur, quite another to put your money where your mouth is and assuage your "white/straight/male/capitalist/middle class" guilt by going out into the world and making a real difference.  I'm not happy with the rioters, and I hope our police use only the appropriate level of force to ensure they are contained.  Of course, the level of propriety in the police response depends almost entirely on the conduct of the protesters.  After all, it's not like they didn't know what they were going up against beforehand, and the time may come when "gassing the shit out of them" is the best way to keep the peace.  In fact, I believe we've reached that time.

But when this is all done, we need to engage with the existing processes for political and social progress, because the lefties are right on one count: if enough of the middle class populations of the developed world knew the true extent to which corporations and governments have been exploiting them, every nation would have its own version of the destruction of the Bastille. 

We only find out about the whitewashing and denials, the decisions to choose profits over sustainability and safety, the scams designed to exploit the poor to the benefit of those already living in ridiculous wealth, after the fact.  The sub-prime mortgage scandal and the BP oil spill are two examples.  Imagine if we knew, right now, all of the profiteering schemes being cooked up by unelected, unaccountable corporations that control vast swathes of our lives, property, and natural resources.  The Toronto riots would seem trite in comparison to the global revolution that would transpire. 

We can avoid this, and potentially reduce the intensity of protesters at these summits and other gatherings, by doing one thing: listen to the arguments they are presenting.  This is difficult to do without somehow granting legitimacy to the violent tactics now in use, but part of the problem is that people who are ignored all the time will eventually get your attention, and sometimes in a way that you don't like.  As a collective society, we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring the voices on the fringes crying out for an end to poverty, to justice between men and women, for a cleaner world and an economy that doesn't exploit those who work at the bottom of the economic order. Ignore them long enough, eventually, they will make themselves heard. 

We don't have this problem with those behind the barricades with presidents and prime ministers: they already have the power to turn their opinions into policy.  But will we also allow them to manufacture our consent without question?  I'll let you figure that out for yourself.

Until then, let's hope and pray for the safety of our cops, the liberties and safety of those engaged in legitimate protest, the security of our city, the protection of our democratic freedoms as well as our democratic nation, the welfare of the downtrodden around the globe, and - as cheesy as it sounds - a better tomorrow for all six billion human beings and the world on which they live in this, the second decade of the 21st Century.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Part II

(LS Ratio: 4:6.  Mood: "I feel the earth...move...under mah feet.  I feel the sky tumba-lin down, tumba-lin down....")

Monday morning was the Summer Solstice. I flirted with Wicca and Neopaganism back in my early twenties for about half a year, and while it didn't work out - Jodyism being a far more compelling path - I still like to observe the points in the solar cycle, if only to make myself believe that Planet Earth turns slowly....(say, that's catchy!).

Living at the Burlington waterfront, I also have the major advantage of the Beachway, which lets me watch the sun rise from right on the horizon line of Lake Ontario. 

So Monday morning, I got up really early and got myself out there for 5:30am, around sunrise.  I walked out to a spot on the beach, sat down, meditated until the sun peeked over the horizon - it was real purty - and then got up, dusted myself off, and started back.

And that's when I was attacked by one of these little fuckers.......

I felt the air over my head suddenly whoosh and I heard a sharp chirp.  Given it was still pretty dark out and there was no one else around the path back to Spencer Smith Park, it caught me off guard.  I looked up again, disoriented, only see the red-yellow-black blur coming at me again.  I ducked, but the talons still brushed past my scalp.

I looked up as it flew back into the tree, muttered something like "Dude, okay, I'm going, all right?" before hastening my exit from the scene.  He did not follow me, so I'm assuming he was just defending his nest and I happened to be the only threat in sight at the time. Either that or I woke his red and yellow-tailed ass and he wanted to express his displeasure at not having his full 4.75 hours or whatever the hell birds need for uninterrupted sleep.

I thought, I got attacked by a bird.  This is going to be an interesting week.

Lo and behold, I showed up to work later that morning and barely made it into the lobby when we had to evacuate and wait for the fire department, because someone pulled the alarm.

And, of course, the earth moved yesterday...

Really, this week has, indeed, been anything but routine. 

I never finished the omen entry that I started, but this week's definitely given me some more source material.  There's just this odd atmosphere present, an elevated level of strangeness just about everywhere I go.  Even hanging out with friends last night until about one in the morning seemed...off somehow.  Lots of big picture discussions about life directions, career paths, finding one's calling.... surprisingly unusual for our typical get-togethers.  

I wrote earlier that omens indicating your alignment with your path, and that the point of the analysis isn't primarily what the event or occurrence is, but rather, your relationship to it.  I'll go back to Carlos Castaneda's retelling in A Separate Reality of the headlights following he and Don Juan Matus along that lonely road in Mexico.  What makes the omen, in this case, isn't the empirical reality that they're car headlights, but what the appearance of those headlights in your reality means for what you're dealing with right now.

So what does getting attacked by a bird, two building evacuations, a surreal conversation with old friends on a Wednesday night, and an earthquake mean to me? 

In a very literal sense, I feel it means that the world is changing. 

It's telling me my routine is going to be upended, not in a dramatic way, but enough that things will stop feeling so mediocre. 

It means I may need to move away from fault lines and steer clear of wild animals.

There are other ones, though.  My omens mostly involve crows.  I don't see them every day, even though there's a nest somewhere close to where I live.  When I do see they, they tend to be swooping right in front of my car as I'm on the highway, or perched nearby as I'm walking.  On the surface, their appearances are random, but what you don't see is that they tend to show when I'm feeling energized and in line with what it is I'm looking to get done.  In other words, when I'm on the path.  Dismiss is it as coincidence all you want: to me, the crows are a sign of growth, change, and progress.

Then there's also the Music Oracle.  Songs have meaning, not always in the lyrics, either, but it's an exercise my friend Stephanie told me about.  If you're in the car or elsewhere, and you have something you're working to figure out in your head, you'll start noticing that the very next song that comes on has a message relevant to your situation.  If a song's following you - and not necessarily a Top 40 song that you can hear everywhere - then stop and listen for the lyrics, or even just the feeling it generates inside your mind, and see what it says about your biggest challenge to date.

The spooky feeling's still in the air as I finish this, though.  All I can do is keep writing, keep patching up this gash on my leg from baseball, keep everything chugging along, and see where it takes me.

Strange thing is, I think I have an inkling of what I'd like to do, but I'll chill for a bit.  The work week still has 24 hours to go.  God knows what's going to happen next....   

Unnameable Randoms - June 22nd, 2010

Karma Project Update

I've got the basis of my little project just about finished, and you should see the first posting on the Karma's Agent page on JQLA very shortly.  Separately, on Facebook, I've already gotten a handful of people to be the first collaborators on this project, although the widget idea may be kinda lame, so anyone who wants to participate, leave a comment.  That'll be the best thing for now.  Further updates as I learn more about this whole Blogspot system...

Oh, and why, given my LOST obsession, haven't I called this thing the KARMA Initiative?  For starters, that's been done to death both by indy rock bands in the UK and mysterious social networking sites.  And also...c'mon guys, I'm not that much of a cliché....

Ethnicity, Jodyist Sacrilege, and Power Relationships  

So, here's the thing.  You can't tell by my writing, but I'm not Caucasian.  I'm actually of Indo Trinidadian descent, and technically Trinidadian by birth.  But Mom and Dad moved us to Canada when I was a wee toddler, so out of all of my cousins, I've been in Canada the longest.  I've got Canadian seniority. 

A derogatory term that summarizes how many in my family viewed me was "coconut": brown on the outside, white on the inside.  It used to piss me off - to paraphase Carlton Banks, "being brown isn't what I'm trying to be, it's what I am" - but I think, after nearly three decades living in where I have, I'm ready to take pride in that statement, as politically incorrect as it may be in some circles.  I'm a skinny white Canadian nerd trapped in the increasingly svelt body of an Indo-Trinidadian. 

That's not to say Trinidad means nothing to me, but as I've said for years, my roots are secure, and my focus has always been on growing my branches.  And unlike Croatians or Serbians, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Pakistanis, or most Africans, my nation of birth has done pretty well for itself overall in recent history, so there isn't that anxiety of "having to support the motherland" thing through one crisis or another that keeps many would-be Canadians hyphenated.

I'm not Trinidadian-Canadian, because I was never Trinidadian.  I'm Canadian.  Thank you kindly!

Matters of ethnicity have been coming up lately, though.  My ex was Anglo-Canadian, ethnically, and the idea that we were an "interracial" couple didn't really matter in the community where we grew up, not until we went to university where, suddenly, "race" was all we talked about in English class.  I almost wonder if the universities would do a better job of faciliating good relations between different peoples by simply not always reminding us of how different we actually are from each other.  But I digress.

It's been coming up because I've recently expressed that I have no interest in women of my own ethnicity or skin colour.  And as I noted, I already have a clear idea who the person will be.  Yet many in my family have offered - in a good manner, nothing pushy - their opinion that I should be free to explore, well, other brown girls. That's a problem, because the only woman of Indian descent that I've ever been seriously infatuated with isn't exactly playing in my league.  Sorry, brown ladies: as lovely as you might be,  I know myself, and I generally don't find women of my own race attractive.  It's just how I am. 

(And yes, notwithstanding the candidate selection process thing I mentioned before, odds are if you're an attractive ginger with blue eyes, you'll get my attention.  Or if you look exactly like Aishwarya.  And a special mention for Zoe Saldana, because, well....daaaamn......). 

Plus, women of my own skin colour tend to be Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, or that crazy brand of West Indian Christianity, all of which practically own your life.  In other words, if it works out, one of us is going to have to convert, and given that Jodyism is a fringe path with only one adherent and no proselythizing requirement - well, directly, anyway: I'll never go door knocking - it's gonna be me.  I will never abandon my spiritual freedom for a girl.  As Miyagi-san says in Karate Kid II, "never put passion above principle.  Even if you win, you lose."

There's also this old school idea that some of my relatives have that I'm supposed to be a dominant partner in my relationship. As they say in Ebonics, Jody don't play dat.  You give me a submissive partner who's going to do everything for me, you'd better believe I will exploit the crap out of that arrangement.  She'll be working a job, cooking dinner, cleaning my bathroom, fixing the dryer, giving me shoulder rubs,  and children.

Thing is, that's not a relationship, that's servitude, even if I'm benefitting, because I have a lazy streak in me that, make no mistake, will win out if I know someone else is always going to do it for me.

No, I want someone who'll do some of those things voluntarily, but who will also be sure to tell me to eff off when I'm becoming a demanding ponce. 

Again: equal and complementary powers.  That's what Jody's next, hopefully last, relationship is going to demonstrate in action.

Je dis, hey, qu'est ce qui se passe ici?

I've started advanced level French classes to keep me employed at my current posting.  It involves a bit of work on my own time, but I have no idea how intense it's going to be. So, unless I have something I really need to get off my chest in blog format and the words are just there, the flow of updates is going to be lighter than before.  My priorities for the next month will be the MS - I crossed 100,000 words on Saturday! - my fitness and exercise, baseball, French courses, and the Karma project, along with the one or two nights out that I'll be hanging with friends. 

Oh, and more Unnameable Randoms....those are easier than Aaron's Mom....et bien sur, pourquoi pas?

Have a nice day!

Unnameable Randoms - June 9 2010

(Ooh! They've changed the appearance of my posting screen. Good times!)

I previously had a post entitled "RGB Inkblots" for my user-friendly, bullet-point entries. Naturally, I tried to come up with a far better name, but after much deliberation, five cups of java, and many-a hair pulled from my scalp, I decided that my randoms were just...un-nameable.

So I went with that.

Blog Promotion: Girl and Guitar

 This was featured in Blogspot's "Blogs of Note" on my dashboard.  I love personal reflection blogs with that edge of chautauqua to them, designed to tell real stories that are relevant and educational.  The Girl has got a wonderful writing style, tells an excellent story, and I'm quite confident she's going to get what she wants out of life because she's already happy and proud of what she does, even if the rest of us sit in judgement. She's a Bachelor of Science grad awaiting her law school application results, with big dreams of becoming a country star, and is currently employed at a Hooters out west (haven't quite figured out which city yet, but I'm guessing it's in the Midwest somewhere).  She's intelligent, eloquent, and some of the shit that happens there is not all what you'd expect from Hooters.  Check it out today!

A Note on Quarter-Life Guys and Relationships

   In the interests of fairness after my last big entry, here's a few notes about how men in quarter-life are similarly damaged when it comes to relationships.  As my good buddy Michael pointed out after reading that entry, it's unfair to say that many twentysomething women are "relationship-retarded" when I'd say most twentysomething guys are just plain retarded.  

   Perhaps it comes from my lack of having too too many close male friends in high school, but I did notice that the ones I did befriend tended to be more functional - including one who's married with a cute little daughter now living the dream in his own house about two hours away from here: if you're reading, Matt, hollah - and I stayed away from the dudes who, well, tended to spend their time engaging in pan fights (see the picture above and tell me that isn't happening somewhere right now). 

   And when I went to Mac, I tended to befriend, well, men of exceptional character, class, and quality who put the "fun" in "functional" and who, for the most part, will be my buddies for life.  As such, at the risk of sounding elitist, most of the men I've gotten to know in my age group have tended to be a cut above, and thus, not representative of 83% of the quarter life male population.

    I haven't mentioned it in the blog yet, but the reason I list myself as an "author" is because I have, indeed, written a book, called QLO: The Quarter Life Opportunity, that discusses the so-called "quarter-life crisis".  Mind you, I'm not promoting it actively because I have to input a third (and final) edition at some point in the future, because my current fiction manuscript is my main project, and because, well, the book interviews several people in my life, one of whom is my ex, and there's some editing to be done. 

   But another big reason is that I've learned much more about quarter-life - the time between graduation and one's mid-thirties - in the past six months than I think I have since I first wrote the book in 2008, and I'm still learning.

   And a big lesson is that guys really are almost a full decade behind in maturity than girls in so many respects, outside of relationship concerns.  Like, we really are the dudes in that Simpsons episode.  And having been a single guy spending most of my time with guy friends, I can say.....it's pretty damned awesome!   Can't really describe it: you'd have to be a guy doing dumb guy stuff to understand.  There's just so many opportunities for random crazy guy stuff that you sometimes wonder why you need women at all.

  Yet we do, and the thing I've found with most guys is that we fail at the fundamentals of expressing ourselves, especially if you're a typical "boys and their toys" type of dude who's all into his cars, his choppers, his computers and home theatre system, his Wii, his gym membership, his football game, etc..  Women kinda become an accessory to all that, and even when you fall in love and have those feelings for a girl, it's tough for many guys to just acknowledge that this person in front of them isn't, in fact, just another one of their appliances.

 (Hence, why I think many guys tend to ignore you when we're watching TV.  That, and because you tend to pick the bottom of the ninth inning in a tied game to talk about the relationship.  C'mon ladies, we don't interrupt your reruns of Sex and the City to discuss last night's Jays game...although that would presume we gave you the remote control in the first place....muhahaha!!!)

  And of course, there's that whole "machismo" thing.  I think that makes more guys turn into douchebags in the eyes of perfectly good quarter-life women than anything.  And it ruins potentially life-long relationships.

  I've said it before, but I feel I've got far more guts than the most heavily-built alpha male douchebag bouncer type of guy, because I can express my feelings, be vulnerable, and compromise from time to time.  I think women are still naturally attracted to those alpha qualities - money (provider), physical prowess (sex appeal, protection), and charm - but that's just the initial stage.  When the lovey-dovey infatuation of the relationship ends, what they're looking for - or should be - is character: that is, qualities such as ambition, ethics, consistency, compassion, fun, and the like.  Note that these are all qualities that you have to demonstrate, that guys in particular bad at expressing, and yet don't feel they have to express because, well, it's not "manly". 

  Dudes, being an unsentimental meathead is fine when it's just us in a room watching hockey with a couple of bottles of Keiths, but if you're with your wives and girlfriends, that shit ain't gonna fly, son.  If you adore her, if you're thrilled just to be around her, if you wake up every morning and go about your own life feeling happy and grateful that she's in it, well, fucking tell her.  Or, better yet, show her.

   Be authentic to yourself and don't give a rats' ass if being snuggly or cute makes you look like a wimp in front of the guys.  (At the very least, you know you're getting some later, and that it's special, because it's with her and not some random chick the other guys are gonna try to pick up at the bar for a one-nighter). 

  So yeah, twentysomething ladies, quarter-life guys have their issues, too, just like you do.  It ain't just you.  And I'm really curious, what other dumbass things do you think we do that turns you off? 

  This took longer than I wanted it to, so that's it for now.  Coming up in the next entry: the girl of my dreams.....

  Until then, heed these words of Tumblr wisdom:

Incident, Part II

***
(LS Ratio: 4:6 Mood: Well, I guess 4,000 words is 4,000 words, whether it went in the novel or not)

We need to talk.

I started reading The Art of Conversation by Catherine Blyth back in January, and I haven't picked it up since the 27th of that month. But she led it off with an amazing essay that discusses just how much we are losing the art of discourse, of exchanging ideas.

It's just the sheer communication of what's in your head that we need to have for a healthy society, if even just to purge issues from our individual systems. That's what blogs are good at: it's the freest and most public form of therapy out there.

But there's a risk there for the bloggers, a big one, especially in personal reflection journals like this one in which the authors choose to let anyone in the world with access to the web read them. Especially if those same authors are hoping that one of those readers may be the ones they've been searching and waiting for their whole lives.

I asked in Part I of this blog, how long can one remain damaged by the events that happen to them?

Certain things stay with you. Deaths, divorces, affairs, injuries, battles, embarassments: these all qualify. And they define you, send you off on life tangents that you never expected, or necessarily wanted.

I suppose it's your choice to mitigate the damage as best you can, especially as far as indifidelity and divorce is concerned. I've now met three people in my experience - all in their fifties and sixties, mind you - who went through similar things that I went through and who, even as long as thirty years afterwards are still suffering from the fallout.

Of course, I chose differently. And journalling is a great way to work things out.

But now that you've put it out there, you've represented yourself in a certain way. And for some potential mates, that's the biggest turnoff you can have. Too often, damage stops being something that you experience, and starts being something that's completely in the eye of the beholder. And that's just plain unfair.

My second question: if you find someone you're interested in pursuing, how much do you allow their baggage to determine whether or not they're worth pursuing?

Unwritten fear (well, until now): My twin soul finds me, the perfect person for me that I'm just over the moon about, but she breaks it off as soon as she finds out I'm divorced. Despite the fact I really do feel good the vast majority of the time and that I am demonstrably awesome, she finds out I've been single for six months, or reads my blog history and finds out this has been my main area of focus for most entries, and though the writings were authentic at the time I put fingers to keyboard, and even though she understands that yesterday's reality isn't necessarily today's, she decides to break it off and look for someone undamaged. Only because that's what the "rules" say to do.

Marry Him?

This is what many women in my age range do, according to Lori Gottlieb, author of Marry Him (thanks again for that book, Julius!). She sat down with three groups of single women for informal discussions. First group was in their twenties, second in their thirties to forties, and third in their fifties.

A few random findings, which I may have noted before, came out of Gottlieb's discussions, and I've also thrown in some forum material I've read on my own time that correspond to her findings:

- Women in their twenties are, by and large, relationship-retarded. When it comes to what to expect in mates, they're still prancing about in some kind of GQ, postfeminist dreamland. Men are to be funny, but not "too funny" (that makes them goofballs and not very attractive); very successful, own their own houses by 25, have high paying jobs, but not be addicted to work; be buff, but not a meathead; have twenty inch penises when flaccid, but not think with them; be "handsome", but not "magazine handsome"; must "be taller than me when I'm in heels", etc.. One girl even dumped her guy after three dates because, despite the great rapport they had, "he hasn't seen Casablanca. My ideal man would have already seen Casablanca".

- Women in their thirties to forties, meanwhile, have become more realistic, but are still caught in a consumer mentality. Worse than that, if they haven't already been married or divorced by now, they are getting desperate because these are their last prime childbearing years and they're looking for validation, finding themselves in vicious cycles of bad relationships in which they get progressively more and more bitter. In Gottlieb's group, they are pining over the guys they had dated in their twenties, but dumped for the same superficial reasons listed above. They've realized the qualities they initially overlooked in those "shy guys" or the "beta males" that didn't attract them a decade ago - expressions of emotional vulnerability, willingness to just let someone else lead, be poorer, but doing something that you love - are now the qualities that they're desperate to find in single men in their age group. When Gottlieb asked her thirty-to-fortysomething focus group where those guys were now, the collective response: "they're all married".*

(*Okay, fair point: not every girl in quarter-life will be an idiot and overlook perfectly good men, meaning that, from a strictly statistical basis alone, the odds are good that the type of girl I'm attracted to will also have the foresight to see what an awesome lifemate I and other guys like me would actually be. And unlike some other women, they wouldn't allow one bad summer to ruin things forever).

- Women in their fifties and sixties, finally, are the most experienced, and if they're still single, they have completely foregone physical requirements as the primary consideration and now look solely at personality and spirit. Then again, as someone in a Globe article recently pointed out, we can't delude ourselves into thinking that that "sixty is the new forty" because, well, "wrinkly sex isn't all that appealing". Either that, or they've just plain given up and resigned themselves to living their retirement years without romance.

This is a huge digression from "damage" and "baggage", I know, but the one common factor is that the older you get, the less likely you're going to care about a potential mates' "incidents". Unless they're letting it negatively impact their daily tasks such that you're forced to deal with it everyday, or the psychological effects are such that they're still in major therapy of some kind, there's no reason why we should avoid perfectly functional, generally happy, well-balanced, modestly handsome and successful human beings as romantic partners, just because of what they've been through.

And yet, too many 27 to 31 year old women - the potential mates in my desired age range - continue to do just that to 27 to 31 year old men.

What To Consider With Divorced Twentysomething Guys

So let's talk about my "incident", my quote-unquote "damage": being divorced. For many of the women I'm attracted to, my being "divorced" may as well be a scarlet letter. No matter what, they'll feel I'm a used car, and this bothers me, not gonna lie, because I'm a real catch, and I'm not the only one.

There's a whole book called How to Get Divorced by 30 that's all about "starter-marriages". Apparently, that's what I had, even if it didn't start that way. This is apparently a new thing that people are doing: getting married as early as 23 years old, having the princess wedding, living together until 28 or 29, and then splitting, often for the worst fucking reasons you can imagine. ("He won't stop watching TV". "She nags all the time". "He plays too much golf.").

But that's not what I intended. It's not what a lot of guys in my boat - 29 and divorced - wanted. And yes, some divorced guys do deserve to be divorced: they're abusive, non-functional, manipulative, cheaters, or worse. I know that if I was on my game last summer, I'd still be married, though I didn't deserve how it happened to me.

But what should also occur to 27 to 31 year old women meeting a divorced guy like me is the following.

If he's divorced, it means that, once upon a time, at least one girl thought he was special enough to lock down for life. That means there's more to him than what you might be seeing. Get to know him better: you'll be delighted at what you find.

If he's divorced, it means that he made his share of mistakes, but once upon a time, he wanted to be with one girl for life. That means he's got something to his character that, if you're not looking for it now, you're going to regret not taking hold of it when you're fortysomething and lonely. Because it means that if he's into you, he'll be into you for the long run.

If he's divorced, it means that he learned the hard way the importance of knowing what he really wants versus what he doesn't want. No matter how dense or how much of a meathead the man, the percentage of men in the male population who are so learning-impaired that they make the same mistakes twice is smaller than what you'd like to believe. That means that if he's into you, you really are what he wants.

If he's divorced, he is one half of the equation of why it went wrong, but he's only half. That means you can't completely blame him or put the whole blame on his shoulders. It doesn't necessarily mean he's not good at maintaining relatoinships: it may, in fact, mean that some other girl simply didn't see the value in him that you do. Don't punish him for her blindness.

If he's divorced, he's experienced doing the "husbandly" things, like making you laugh, taking care of you when you're sick, or walking your five imaginary dogs*. You definitely want that.

(*yes, I used a Mosbyism)

And finally, if he's divorced, he's had a life experience that, like it or not, have given him more depth, more clarity, more maturity, and - though you can't see it - has made him more likely to be passionate, caring, romantic, nurturing, funny, and life-affirming than what you'd find in someone who's never been there, never took the risk, never fell in love, and never learned.

In short, the divorced quarter life man may very well have had to go through hell to become the man of your dreams. The very least you can do is let him take you to coffee.

The Bottom Line


I guess this is still one more way of purging the last obstacles to success from my system. And yes, I know women will have their own complaints about quarter-life men, but that's for you to discuss from your experience if you want. This is mine.

It's important I write this out and share this with you, because despite what I've been through, I still believe in soul mates, and there is that realization that the One is going to meet me and be with me no matter what my baggage is. Simply put, if destiny has that in store for us, then the baggage and damage won't be obstacles.

And this isn't just me: I know too many good men in my age group out there who haven't been snapped up by women with the foresight to see that they are, in fact, all they've wanted.

I'll say that again: guys like me are, in fact, what you've always wanted.

Quarter-life ladies, consider this food for thought, because as long as you don't see our value, we all lose, and lose huge.

That's it for now. Long entry I know: if you've made it this far, props.

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Incident, Part I

(LS Ratio: 4:6. Mood: Seriously, don't ask...)

I was reading a bunch of random blogs about the bad things that happen to people. Bad shit happens to everyone, but not everyone writes about them, so it's always educational to see how people react to life's random incidents.

That got me thinking: how long can one remain damaged by events?

When I landed my job with the government, it really was the last missing brick in the wall of my life. I mean, it's awesome pay, it's in a great office with a great staff, it's a job that I can psychologically leave when I close up shop for the day, and most importantly - for the time - it's a Monday to Friday, nine-to-fiver-type position, meaning for the first time ever in my life, I had full evenings and weekends freed up to do whatever. I could be normal and get my social life back: cottage trips in the summer, weekend getaways to New York or Montreal with the parents or the wife. Date nights, long evening walks, patios. Amazing, simply amazing.

And two weeks into the new job, my wife tells me she wants to separate.

Two months into the new job, I find out the underlying reason behind that is that she was cheating on me with a friend since July. And she didn't tell me: I had to catch her lying to me.

And around the same time, I find out that some of my friends - more than I had originally thought, as I've recently learned - had known about it well before I caught it, and had chosen to say nothing to me. Even those this technically makes them party to the adultery, and thus partly responsible for the damage I had to endure, I've let them off the hook, but take note, I have a long memory (pirates: ye be warned).

And so, just I'd found the last remaining brick, another one fell out, and here I am again, searching.

As damaging events go, this one would have killed many people, it almost killed me: if not for intervention from my friends and family, it would have. And despite having made the most of it, in fact, having done remarkably well by many professional and personal accounts of people in my life, there's a new wrinkle to this business.

For the past three days, I've started having nightmares. Nothing too monstrous, not the stuff of Dean Koontz novels, but dreams where I'm bothered enough to wake up in a sweat. Once, I woke up punching the air.

For instance, I dreamed, two nights ago, that my ex's grandparents, long deceased, all showed up at my family's house. It was Christmas, and they were staying with us for some reason. Now, in waking life, I never met them: they passed not long before my ex and I started dating in high school.

But I've seen pictures, and I had heard a story from my ex that someone in our wedding party - I know who, but I won't say, given the sensitive nature of this topic - who had been present at our ceremony at Webster's Falls had seen all four of them standing around us as we exchanged our vows. No pun intended: the idea that they were there for their granddaughter haunted me, much the same as I wonder if my own grandfathers were around.

Back to the dream. My ex's paternal grandfather handed me a long-stemmed red rose in a box as a Christmas "gift", and it was the oddest thing you could imagine, oddest feeling.

Then my ex showed up with her new boyfriend, who was dressed in the same tux he wore as part of our wedding party - as one of the bride's honour attendants - and started to make out with her in front of me. I knew in the dream mindset that this was a calculated move to piss me off, so I promptly approached him to separate his head from his shoulders. And though I was punching as strongly as I could, I could not hurt him. He just stood there, and I felt so damned helpless, I woke up swinging at air.

Afterwards, I lay there and just interpreted the shit out of what I just seen. (FYI, I tend to be more Jungian than Freudian: Niles Crane, I've got your back, buddy).

What's really significant about the rose, though, is after I woke up and mulled on the dream, it was obvious to me that I had the choice to either take the rose or try to beat the living snot out of my backstabbing former friend.

And, in real life, I'm pretty confident I could disassemble him with the speed and efficiency of a Formula One pit crew member. I have moderate training in taekwondo, and I have been practicing. Truth be told, I haven't ruled out taking advantage of such an opportunity, were it to present itself. A significant part of me honestly craves it. And I am a master of manifestation in my life, I could make this happen if I really wanted to.....but then, that's part of the problem, isn't it?



Revenge is such a primal urge, caveman justice. I've had at least one friend suggest that maybe a fistfight, no holds barred, no consequence, no charges, is what we need to sort this out like men, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. Maybe it's what I need: after all, this asshole already has my woman.

But she was never mine to possess. Women aren't possessions, but I suspect any man worth his testicles will always have that part of him that views them as such, no matter how enlightened or progressive he may otherwise be. For me to pretend to be any different would make me a hypocrite of the highest order: this is how I authentically feel in this moment. And authenticity is everything.

And the other problem with that fistfight solution: I would make sure it got out of hand. I would make it a point to escalate this: as Tom Cruise said in Tropic Thunder, "I'm talking scorched earth, motherfucker".

Because Caveman Jody maintains that he took someone I was in love with for half my life: that's not something that one simple fistfight is going to remedy, and anyone who honestly thinks as much must have a Texas-sized mental block when it comes to the dynamics of romantic love.

And if that were to happen, I would lose everything I have left, which is quite a lot. Meaning that it's not going to happen. Not a chance in hell.

Now, I have been doing a pretty good job facing these issues down, and the differences I've seen in the other blogs between the emo people - of which I'm still one, though I'm getting it out - still stuck in a rut and the ones who are genuinely growing as individuals is that they are willing to not bury their problems, even if it means metaphorically setting themselves on fire, Buddhist-monk style, just for a little while to, as Robin Williams says, "make you deal with your shit".

That's what these dreams are doing. This is the last bit of baggage left from the affair. I've been avoiding accepting this, have avoided even looking at it, but that's a form of suppression in itself. And now that it's in blog form, it's out there. Consider it purged.

So, I'm hereby drafting the following memo:

Dear Subconscious,

I get it. Message received. You can stop the nightmares now and let me sleep my normal nightly 6.5 hours where I'm a Viking or on a road trip down east or flying through the air on my own awesomeness.

Because I'd rather have the rose than bloody knuckles, dong ma? I choose the rose. There's no ambiguity there. Mmmm...kay?

KTHXBYE,

Jody
There, that should take care of that.

But now that I've put it out there, there's a new risk, one shared by every one of the bloggers I've read so far. Especially the ones looking for the same missing brick in their wall of life as I am. Stay tuned...




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Jorge Garcia has a....Jedi Moment...

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Leave it to me to wait until the end of the series to not only find what is possibly the greatest cast-member blog on Blogspot from LOST, but to find the two entries in which Jorge Garcia realizes that he used the Law of Attraction to end up on the cast of the show.*

Here they are: Write It Down...and be specific.

Way ahead of you, dude.

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(*even if he doesn't call it that by name....a jar of DHARMA-Initiative Ranch Composite by any other name would smell as sweet....)

Something Wicked This Way Comes...Part I

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(LS Ratio: 4:10. Mood: Sleepy)

Anthropologist-turned-brujo Carlos Castaneda, in A Separate Reality, writes of an instance in which he and his mentor, Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus, are on their way to a house where a group of Don Juan's associates will be seeking out Mescalito, the spirit figure accessible only through consumption of peyote. The road in Sonora, Mexico, that they drive at night rises and falls over a series of hillsides. Cresting one of those rises, Castaneda looks back and sees two lights, which he initially perceives to be a car that's been following them for some time.

"Not so," says Don Juan (paraphrasing here, of course). "The lights are Death. Death follows us, all the time, and it may catch us." Castaneda, at the time, was unclear on his teacher's meaning: Don Juan never spoke in metaphors. To him, the world was literally filled with deities and spirits, demons and angels, so whenever he spoke of them, they were as real as anything in our daily experience. To Castaneda, they were just car headlights.

Was Death really following Castaneda and Don Juan on that hot, dry desert night in Sonora? Conjecture still follows the late Castaneda, a former anthropologist who "went native" with the Yaqui, as to whether or not he'd just invented Juan Matus and Don Gennaro for narrative purposes.

Then again, I recently read a great quote - can't remember it now, can't find it now, either - that says that it's frightening to think of what's actually possible in the world, so we choose to believe that many of those things that scare us can't exist. I believe Don Juan existed. And I can say that if it were me in that car, I would have likely given the Yaqui sorcerer the benefit of the doubt. A death omen is a death omen. Keep driving. Don't stop.

I believe in what late Holographic Universe author Michael Talbot called "a participatory universe", in which the boundaries we in the West believe separate the human mind from the human experience do not exist, and are themselves constructs that we can dismantle at will. That's what all that "physicists' blackboard" stuff was about in my past few entries.

Physicists share a number of things in common with shamans: taking themselves out of the world to redefine and study, in their own way, what is possible in that world, and returning to find that the world has, in fact, grown from their studies. Working on oneself, by oneself, ends up redefining our perceptions and feelings, and both serve to re-shape the outside world after their own images.



I've been experiencing omens. We all do, but most of us dismiss them as coincidences, if we notice them at all. Then again, the Law of Attraction presumes a participatory reality, meaning that your mind and emotions influence external events. This is where the process loses many would-be believers: after all, thoughts can't make things happen in reality, right?

I've heard almost all the arguments and "explanations" for how these supposedly supernatural, meaningful synchroncities can all be either accounted for as psychological tricks of the mind or by explanable empirical phenomenon. And all of them miss the point. By light years.

The one that concerns me here, for this purpose of this post, is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which, LOA skeptics assert, accounts for the meaningful synchronicities that occur whenever we are looking for something in particular (i.e. why, if you're shopping for a particular Corvette, you start seeing Corvettes or Corvette references everywhere in your daily experience.)

(Strangely enough, in Googling the term Baader-Meinhof for this link, I found a definition on 1000 Awesome Things, a website and book I only first heard about yesterday on French-language Radio Canada as I drove into work. Spooky.)

That's the trick, though: it may be all in your subjective experience, but that's the only thing that matters, isn't it?

After all, you don't subject your daily experience to empirical testing: you just live your day. The Law of Attraction, the Path of the Beam, are not about what the happenings are, but about what they mean to you. And yet, others experience omens of their own, making this a distinctly transpersonal phenomenon.

Is there the possibility that this stuff is "real", in that the results can be eventually measured by scientific instruments? I'd like to think so, considering that other forces previously dismissed by the leading thinkers of the day as "mystical" - notably electromagnetism, speaking of attraction - are now powering our cities and iPods.

Anyone who kept an open mind back then is now thought of as a pioneer, since time and study proved there was quantifiable evidence of these phenomena. In their own times, without that evidence, others thought they were off their collective gourd, much the same way that we dismiss today's psychics and parapsychologists, alien abductees, and believers in life after death. Faith was and remains the key word. And wouldn't it be nice to be ahead of the game?

So yeah, I believe in omens, same way I believe in gravity, electricity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and all the other energies that make up our daily lives in the first half of the 21st Century A.D.

What omens have I been getting lately? Stay tuned....