Word Prisms

Numbers are everywhere Twenty years ago When I looked at my watch All I saw were two hands And 12 numbers Now, I see a number for my heart rate Another for the number of steps I’ve taken And another for number of floors climbed If I press the down button, I get the date and the watch’s battery level Another, my body’s battery level (Whatever the fuck that is) I press the button again, I get a number for my stress level Another, the elevation Then, my intensity minutes Then, calories burned Then, my sleep score Followed the numbers for the time of sunrise and sunset I could add more numbers calibrated by my watch But I chose not. And that’s just a tiny portion of my life calibrated by numbers. I have a wrist cuff to test my blood pressure On the BC Services Account Card app on my phone I can access more numbers; Glucose, hemoglobin, sodium, creatinine (whatever the fuck that is) And lipids BC hydro tells me my kilowatts per hour for the previous day And the days before that. I have numb...

  Mercy, not really a concept that I’ve considered lately especially in this age of transactional negotiations where “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Yet, that’s what I was thinking after watching the movie “Small Things Like These” starring Cillian Murphy based on a book by Claire Keagan. Bill Furlong lives in the small Irish town of New Ross in 1985, husband, father of five daughters, owner of a coal delivery business.    One delivery takes Bill to a Magdalene Laundry run by Catholic nuns. The convent provides food and shelter to pregnant women, victims of abuse, orphans and abandoned girls and nonconformists.  In return for this “kindness”, they wash, iron, and fold clothes plus sew, clean, and cook.    It’s early morning when Bill arrives. He walks through geese grazing in the yard to a woodshed. He opens the lock and the hoists a heavy bag of coal on his shoulder and dumps it in the shed. Upon completion, he r...

  I was watching an episode of the series “Industry” where the owner of a massive chateau thanks his dinner guests for the memories that he will always attach “to this house.” And I thought of Los Angeles and all the houses destroyed by the fire and the memories lost and the Slave Lake fire I lived through in 2011 and all the memories lost in it and, the fact that, no matter how rich or poor or in between the individual may be, those are memories lost.   We didn’t lose house the house we were living a the time but our previous house burnt to the ground; the house in which we had spent 14 years raising our eldest child from age 2 to 16 year-of-age, our middle child from 6 months to 14 and our youngest, for whom the house had been his only home until age 11. There was nothing left, not even the basement that had been constructed of wood.   Our first house  ! And the apple tree that we’d planted and buried our first dog beneath, that was gone. And the firepit ...