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 ...

  Cancel or Decouple? Have you been cancelled? I believe we all have in one way or another. We were cancelled by our neighbours. I don’t know why although my wife blames the dogs, particularly Pippa, our female cairn terrier who likes to pee on Gordon’s pristine lawn. They used to like Finian, our male dog, because he would visit them and watch the goldfish in their pond. Then, Finny pooped on the lawn and that was the end of his visits. But they’d still say hello when we’d catch the other’s eye while out gardening, hanging laundry, weeding the stones or whatever. I do that on the street. If someone catches my eye, I say hello whether I know them or not. It must be an old man thing. One day, they just stopped saying hello or acknowledging our existence whatsoever which isn’t easy because there isn’t a fence. (Weird as it may seem, the only line differentiating our property from theirs is a slightly different arrangement of rocks on the ground.) Betty especially has ignored us. Nico...

  After selling our Slave Lake house, we packed our trailer and headed for Invermere hoping to find a new home for our retirement. Not far from Carstairs, a warning light came on our car telling us we need to stop immediately We didn’t stop but we did pull into a campsite in the above town, parked the trailer and drove to the nearest Toyota dealership. There, we were told that the oil pump wasn’t working and they’d have to wait over a week for the part to arrive. Shit. But that’s not the point of my story. The point is that while taking the dogs for a walk at the Carstairs campsite, I was listening to a book called “At the Existentialist Café, Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails.”  Still with me? The point of the café is that it involves hypothetical conversations with people who think about stuff like existentialism. Among the participants, sat Simone de Beauvoir, feminist, author, and sometime lover to Jean Paul Sartre, perhaps the most famous existentialist philosopher. Bu...