It’s Christmas Eve sometime in the distant past, and I’m in a ski cabin in the Kootenays that my roommate Todd and I rented with the last of our summer tree planting money. With both of our families in remote places, we decided to “get away from it all” this year. At this point in… Read more »
Alone for the night, while my wife and daughter are away visiting family, I accept a friend’s offer of a free ticket to the opera. In the foyer, where the crowd mills about waiting to be ushered into the theatre, there’s a line-up for last-minute cappuccinos and wine. There’s a young woman with spiky purple… Read more »
Hard to have faith in people sometimes. Back in grade twelve when I was pumping gas at the Esso station, we used to have a big sign at the back of the toilet, printed on cardboard in red block-capitals outlined in black: Do Not Flush Paper Towels. Every day one of us workers had to… Read more »
As a child my birthday and Christmas wish lists were filled with chemistry sets, ant farms, microscopes and telescopes. I loved field trips to the swamp behind my elementary school to fill plastic baggies with plant samples and jam jars with microbe-infested water, and the subsequent hours spent in biology labs huddled over glass slides… Read more »
I was listening to the radio a few days ago when I heard an officer of the U.S. Marine Corps discussing the military assault that was about to take place on the Iraqi rebel stronghold at Fallujah. He talked about U.S. military superiority and about unleashing an “unprecedented level of violence” upon the “terrorists”. But… Read more »
Aaaah, at last the sweeping November rains and biting November winds have once again arrived, and I’m lucky enough to have a good old fashioned head and chest cold. It’s one of those perfect sicknesses–the kind where you have enough drippiness and achiness, and just the right amount of fever, to keep your loved ones… Read more »
Every year I wear a poppy pinned to my jacket. When he was a child, my father would hide under a big wooden kitchen table while his stepfather, probably moved by demons he could never comprehend, mercilessly kicked at him with work-boots and tried to thrash him with the buckle of his belt. When he… Read more »
When I was six years old the thing with the open sores and the razor sharp teeth lived in the shadows at the back of my closet. At night, unable to sleep but too afraid to open my eyes, I would lie in bed and listening to it rustling about, waiting for an opportunity when… Read more »
It’s dusk at Grandview Park, the heart of Vancouver’s bohemian Commercial Drive neighbourhood, and the mummers are beginning to gather. Beside the usual vampires, mummies, wizards and catsuits, there are towering stilt-legged ravens, bicycle-riding dinosaurs, a bizarre snowy white creature with the wings of angel and the head of a wasp, and a huge assortment… Read more »
As we all know, the human being is composed of body and spirit. In our society, we have a tendency to compartmentalize the world in order to make it more comprehensible. We tend to see these elements as somehow separate, even mutually exclusive. The idea, however, that spirit and body are inextricably fused, and that… Read more »