I have said a lot of things about people not being willing to teach me to do things so I can do them for myself before. And that point remains valid. I would much rather do things for myself than be a burden on others, and yet, people have repeatedly chosen to do it for me and leave me dependent rather than invest the time in teaching me to do it and save themselves from ever having to do it for me again.

That’s like deciding you would rather change your oil every day for the rest of your life than spend ten minutes going to the store and buying a filter.

But it occurs to me today that I was not the easiest person to teach things either. I’m still not. Partly that is because I have a somewhat panic-prone personality and a very high emotional valence.

For the most part, though, the problem is that my eyes don’t work right. They never have, as far as I can tell. It’s extremely hard for me to focus on small details and I get by in life via gathering information in short glances that get all the information they can before my vision blurs.

I assume I learned to do that at a very early age. But it makes it very hard to learn by watching someone do it, and when it comes to physical skills, that’s pretty much the main way of doing it. I don’t know how many times I have been in the situation where someone is saying “Just do this! *does thing* ” and I reply “But I don’t know how to do that. ” and they say “What do you mean? I just showed you how to do it!” and all I can say is “but I don’t know how to do that thing you just did!” and they get real mad at me.

The missing link, I suppose, is that watching someone do something does not convey the information to me. I am sure it must work great for most people. That’s more or less what our motor mirror neurons are for. But those rely on detailed visual information that I am just not getting.

To me, watching someone do something doesn’t teach me that thing any more than watching the Olympics teaches me how to win gold medals.

What I really need, I now realize, is an explanation. A method. Someone to explain to me what the idea is, what the problems are, and the best way to solve them. Nice, clear, verbal information that I can understand and apply. That might seem quite crazy if what we are talking about is mopping a floor or cleaning a mattress, but that is nevertheless the only way it going to work for me.

And even then…. my poor hand eye coordination and other issues might keep me from actually be able to do what I now know how to do.

I’m basically handicapped in a way I can’t even explain properly to a doctor or optometrist. Sigh.

That’s why all my skills are mental. As long as it can happen 90 percent in my head, I can do it. Like writing. I can do that! Because all I need to be able to do in the real world is type.

Analysis is perfect for me, whatever the subject, because it’s mostly thought. Analytical thought, which I realize is not in everyone’s wheelhouse but I seem to be a natural for it. It feels like it’s a natural extension of my tendency to think deeply about things, as well as the unusually efficient and effective relationship between my left and right brain.

Like I have said before, I can be thinking about something without it being in my consciousness at all. A subject can pass through my conscious mind into deep processing quite easily, and after that, my mind works on it in the background.

That’s both where my insights and the primordial cauldron of my creativity can be found. I feel like there must be another ingredient, though, because everyone has an unconscious mind but not everyone gets the sort of use out of it I do. Maybe it has to do with a particular kind of intelligence that can subconsciously perform a lot of the sort of basic functions of logical deduction that we normally associate with conscious thought, like deduction and causal chains and anomaly detection, on such a deep level that it doesn’t require any conscious thought at all.

That’s certainly how it seems to me, subjectively.

Especially with creative problem solving. It’s like the two halves of the problem, namely where we are and where we are trying to go, exist as physical objects in my mind, and all I have to do is imagine a line connecting the two.

Obviously, it’s a lot more complicated than that, but that’s how it seems to me.

I’ve been watching an anime series about classical music students called Your Lie In April. It really makes that whole world seem like hell.

Not on purpose, of course, and not for everyone. But for me, it seems like a nightmare. All the pressure, the inhuman drive required, the locking kids into this airless, cruel, and violently anti-creative environment, the emphasis on precision over artistic inspiration…. everything about it is toxic to me.

My History of Popular Music prof told us that the music faculty at KPU is locked in energetic discussion over the issue of whether or not the whole conservatory system is worth it, considering what it does to kids and how sterile its aims have become.

If the goal really is precision, then I’d say it’s about bloody time. To me, trying to turn kids into the human equivalent of a player piano is worse than futile, it’s inhuman. And I worry very much about how little the kids themselves have to say about it, and how easily it becomes more about their parents’ ambition and desire for bragging rights over other parents instead of being anything at all about the kids themselves and what is good for them.

I am sure there are kids who love it, and it’s good, then, that it is there for them.

But for others…. it’s got to be a living hell.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here I am at my fave table at my fave White Spot, having survived the experience of making that goddamned video for my History Of Popular Music class.

But it was not easy. Technology seemed to want my head on a platter last night, to the point where after four hours of work, all I had to show for it was a video of me talking about the subject. And I felt lucky to have THAT.

So I had to get up at 6 am in order to work to turn that into something a bit more interesting.  And after three more hours of work, I had…. something. I would love to have spent more time adding more of my little touches to it, but that was not to be.

At 9:30 am, I rendered the video and started uploading it.

Which ended up taking MORE THAN AN HOUR.

Did I mention that class started at ten? So not only was I super stressed about the project, I was going to be really, really late for class. I couldn’t get the URL for the video until the damed thing was uploaded, and I had to email the URL to my prof before I left, so…

So it was 10:45 when I got there. Stressing like mad all the way. Oh, and I couldn’t find my fancy expensive headphones before I left, opening up the real possibility that I lost them somewhere.

Stress on stress times stress.

But the presentation went well. People liked the video. Liked it a lot more than I do, to be honest. I was embarrassed by it. But only the artist knows the pain of the difference between the art they produced and what they could have done.

So while I won’t fall in love with the piece any time soon, I can at least acknowledge that it was sufficient for its intended purpose.

(—)

Home now. It’s after supper. and I am feeling mellow. Well, as mellow as one can be when you are full of Diet Coke. I think I am developing a habit.

Oh, and now that I am home, I can show you the video I did :

Here, watch the fucking thing.

Boring! The album covers don’t really make listening to me drone on any better. But they were the best that I could do. In a perfect world, I would have started way earlier so I had the time to overcome technical snafus and then get down and concentrate on finding appropriate images for everything I was saying.

That would have made things so much better!

Oh well, what’s done is done. The professor liked it, especially my thanks at the end. I meant every word. The course was super amazing funtime spectacular awesome, with fries on the side. And I am a firm believer in expressing how I feel to people.

And everyone laughed at my silly little record-scratch joke at the beginning, and that pleased me immensely. I love to make people laugh. There is such joy and freedom in laughter. When we laugh, truly laugh, ours hearts are open and our minds alight and for a moment or two, we are happy children again.

Tried to get my thoughts about my protecting my own innocent across to my therapist. I think he got the gist of it. I suppose I don’t really have a clear idea of what I mean either, come to think of it. It’s like I have subconsciously but deliberately blinded myself to things I think are petty, low, and ignoble. I deal with interpersonal competition by ignoring it. If I get enmeshed in it anyhow, I handle myself with all the poise and reserve I can manage, and with the certain knowledge that I am perfectly capable of letting the other person “win” if that seems like the right move for me.

But is all that healthy? To whom am I trying to prove that I’m an angel, above it all, pure and innocent and unsullied by the petty (and lamentable) bickering and scrabbling of daily life?

On the other side of the coin…. do I even have a choice in the matter? And is this one of the reasons I have always kept myself apart? Has my isolation, on some level, stemmed from my desire not to get caught up in the dirty business of life? I have always found myself in the role of objective observer and occasionally even in the role of conflict adjudicator, like my hero Judge Harold T. Stone..

I don’t like taking sides. I don’t like being asked to go against my own judgment. I don’t like getting caught up in things and losing perspective in the heat of the moment. I like to stay outside of things because I can see things more clearly then.

And I am all about the clarity. That’s what my relentless search for the truth is all about. I want to know what is really going on. That’s the only way I know of staying in control of the situation, or at least, my part in it. That’s a basic part of my nature. In the absence of faith and trust, I rely on my magnificent mind to navigate through the world. I observe, analyze, deduce, summarize, and ultimately form a picture of the situation in my mind that I can act upon.

I know that sounds terribly cold. But remember, it is only method. My goals are compassionate.

But you can’t lead a transpersonal life. I’m not an angel, I am a human being, as messy and flawed and fragile and absurd as any other. There will be a point past which I can’t keep myself apart any longer and at that point, I have to be ready to stop “staying out of it” and become a part of things.

It’s what I want most, to be a legitimate part of life, and yet it’s the thing I have avoided the most strenuously throughout my life.

Sooner or later, I am going to want to open up to someone. Let them in. Maybe even let them experience my radioactive core.

I just hope that, when the time comes, I can do it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve been working on my final project for tomorrow, but I have hit a roadblock of confusion and doubt, so I thought I would blog in an attempt to clear my head.

The basic idea of the video is to present a history of anger-based genres of music.

As far as I can tell, punk was the first rage-oriented music genre. Everything about it expressed rage, bitterness, and frustration with the world. As such, it was the complementary opposite to the hippie music of ten years previous that had emphasized positive messages of togetherness, harmony, and enlightenment.

But that trip ended when all the great musicians of the era started dying from their drug habits, and when a trip like that ends, people crash pretty hard. Disillusionment set in as harsh reality caught up with the dreamers. The hippies retreated and a new generation inherited all the bitterness and rage the hippies themselves could not express.

And so punk emerged as the voice of angry youth rebelling against the broken and nefarious world they were inheriting. And they aimed their anger at the hippies they thought had played at making the world a better place but really just retreated into airy hedonism – strumming their guitars while the world burned.

Punk flared up and burned out fairly rapidly. and those embers lay dormant, only to flare up once again with the emergence of heavy metal in the Eighties. While not as angry as punk, its aggressive and macho image and its screaming, growling guitars, as well as it’s often dark and serious subject matter. tapped into the same feelings of anger and frustration as punk had in the previous decade.

Then came the 90’s, and two separate track of angry music emerged : on the one hand, you had industrial music, which based its sound on brutally mechanistic music contrasted sharply by deeply emotional lyrics screamed into the microphone. This is the music that became punk’s closest successor as the DIY ideals of punk were transformed by the increasing availability of computers into something one or two people could put together in their basement and compete with the sounds of the big labels.

At the same time, rap, which had been dying as a pop music phenomenon, found its flame relit by the emergence of bands like NWA and Public Enemy whose rap tapped into the rage of black inner city residents who had never had their stories told before and were eager to embrace rappers that channeled that rage into their lyrics.

Industrial never had the widespread appeal of gangsta rap, but they still took their share of the newly divided angry white boy market.

Aaaand that’s all I have. I am really questioning my topic and my approach. The voice in my head that knows I don’t have to beat myself senseless and put myself through the shredder on this thing is trying to calm the anxiety and despair that threatens to overcome me, but it’s a very difficult balancing act.

Probably a bad idea to have so much caffeine in my system at this point, come to think of it. How come other people get energy from their caff and I just get anxiety?

So I have no idea what I am going to do. Maybe I will come up with something that is easier to do. Not sure what that might be, but maybe I can think of it if I just calm down enough to get my brain working right. Or I will figure out a way to do this topic that doesn’t seem so hard.

I don’t know why it suddenly seems overwhelming. Chemical fluctuations? Phase of the moon? The fact that I am insane?

And medicated. But still.

Whatever happens, I am sure I will figure out a way through this mess. I am almost tempted to just make a compilation of my own music, but that would be pretty tough to sell as having anything to do with the history of music.

Personal history doesn’t count.

Of course, I wouldn’t be in the mess if I hadn’t waited to the last minute to do this goddamned thing. I did it mostly because I am not good at multitasking and that means I have to do things one by one, and when I am deep into one thing, the other things tend to fade away until I am done.

Like, for instance, my initial plan had been to start work on this thing last night. But I forgot that I would need that night in order to do my History of Canada Since 1867 exam. So I did not ending up working on it last night.

And then today, there was therapy, then picking up my transcript at school, then a nap I hated to take but had to, and then I started work on the thing at around 5 o’clock.

And if this was just one of my silly ass videos like a talker or “interpretive captioning” or something, I would not be freaking out. But this is something that is going to represent me in front of my awesome professor, and the fact that I know she will give me an A just for showing up with something doesn’t make it any better.

In fact, it makes it worse. Because that just makes me want to strive for her approval all the more. I know that’s perverse, but this is neurosis we are talking about here, not rational thought.

I will come up with some way of trimming it down. Maybe I will use on screen text instead of voiceover. It would be kind of lame, but it would make it way easier.

I ruefully mock my previous idea that doing a video (one more ambitious than any I have done before) would be a breeze cause I was so good at video. Even though I have not done a video since last fall and I am way out of practice with the tools.

Who knows. Maybe I will do something else entirely. I will make it through somehow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s easy to have the right responses.

“An earthquake in Peru? Oh those poor people! Our prayers go out to them. ”
“The way women are treated by the Taliban is disgraceful!”
“Of course I support small business. ”

And it’s almost as easy to think you have done your part because you sent some money somewhere. That’s your sacrifice. You sent an amount of money you were totally comfortable parting with and now you feel like you are part of the solution.

Or if that’s too much for you (after all, what do YOU get out of it?), you can just make the enormous sacrifice of buying a different brand. Oh see, I am better than you because I drink fair-trade coffee, I recycle everything, and I even show up at pro-niceness events now and then! What a small (no really, small) price to pay for a sense of smug superiority to all those ignorant fools who are choosing to be part of the problem.

Cheap at twice the price.

And don’t get me wrong. All of that stuff helps. There’s a lot of power in consumer choice and charitable donation.

But don’t go around thinking you have made a sacrifice, because you haven’t. All you made was a purchase. You spent or donated whatever you felt you could afford at that time in order to get that feeling of being part of the solution, one of the good people, and whaddaya know, you got it.

Here’s the thing, though. Charity is more than a consumer choice. Charity involves real sacrifice. And real sacrifice is not comfortable, easy, or pleasant. Real sacrifice means giving something up. Real sacrifice involves getting less of what you want. Real sacrifice means spending things other than money in order to get things done.

Real sacrifice hurts.

But liberalism today is in the endless search for the painless sacrifice. Oh, don’t worry, you won’t have to do anything you don’t totally enjoy. You can help by doing exactly what you like to do! Like fancy meals? Go to a liberal dinner! Like mountain biking? Bike for the Cure! Like listening to rousing speeches that make you feel good about yourself? Come to a rally!

We have done everything we possibly can to make sure you get the most self-satisfaction out of the least possible sacrifice!

And of course, you can always throw another coat of paint onto your veneer of caring by saying “Well I could have done something else. ”

“I could have stayed home and cooked for myself instead of going to that dinner!” But would you have? Aren’t you going to that dinner because it’s something you enjoy more than just sitting at home watching TV and catching up on Facebook?

“I could have worked in my wood shop instead of Biking For The Cure!” And if that had been your real preference… you would have. But you didn’t. You did exactly what you wanted to do with your weekend. Can you really say that if it had not been for the event, you would not be out mountain biking this weekend?

“I could have stayed home instead of going to that rally! And I had to go all the way downtown to attend it!”. Sure. And you should be very proud of the small inconvenience you were willing to endure in order to attend an event that you thoroughly enjoyed and came away from feeling fantastic.

In fact, it says something about modern society that we give such great meaning to such minor sacrifices. Is the bar really so low that a couple of hours of our free time seems like such a huge contribution?

Imagine if making a difference actually involved doing things. And not fun things either. Dirty, difficult, unglamorous, unsexy, ugly things that involve a lot of toil and strain and effort and working all day long with no reward except the opportunity to do it again the next day.

You know, the kind of work poor people do.

In fact, if you look into your mind right now, you will hear the voice of your middle class upbringing saying “But…. but people like me don’t do that kind of work! We plan! We supervise! We work in offices and do things like programming or business or law! Here’s my money, just don’t make me do that!”.

And it’s not just that most people would prefer not to do grunt work or hard labour.

It’s that you think that you are the kind of person who should not have to do it. That doing it would be far more than an unpleasant physical experience for you. It would be something a lot more like dying, because to do that kind of thing would mean truly sacrificing something : status.

And human being react to loss of status like it’s a fate worse than death.

After all, if you are doing the same work as poor uneducated people, someone might think you’re poor just like them. And that’s not the deal, right? The deal is that you are the kind of middle class person who is better than the other kind of middle class people because you are the kind that cares – really cares – about the plight of the poor.

If there is even the slightest chance of actually joining them and being seen by your fellow liberals just like you look at the poor right now, then the deal is off.

So the liberal world bends over backwards to make sure being a liberal is easy and fun. And as long as all you really care about is feeling better than other people along with your friends, that’s fine.

But if you want to actually solve problems, you have to be willing to do a lot more than just those things you feel “comfortable” doing. Things that involve real sacrifice in the form of doing things you really don’t enjoy at all, things which scare you, things you’re not sure you’re good at, things that are way outside your comfort zone.

Things like being willing to confront evil head on, instead of just whining about it in your ideological enclaves where you are sure not to be contradicted. Where when you say something with the right political scent, people nod and say “mmmm.”

Things like doing what you are told without question or complaint. That means being willing to sacrifice some of your precious individuality in order to support the causes you claim to believe in.

Things like going to where working class people with whom you have nothing in common live and try to see the world from their point of view. Actually use your supposed open-mindedness

Above all, you have to be willing to change.

And that’s something the comfortable liberals of the world just won’t do.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So you know the boring academic paper I posted yesterday?

Well, it turns out it isn’t due till next week. I thought it was due today, April 4, but it isn’t due till April 11. D’oh! Oh well, as sudden developments go, it’s a pretty benign one. Just means I have another week to work on it.

For example, I still have to add a bibliography. Whoopee.

This week is more or less the last week of class, AFAIK. After this, there’s only exams. I think I have exams in Canadian History (a take home one, which is rad), Ethics, and History of Popular Music.

I am not worried about them. I don’t sweat exams. I usually can do fairly well on them without even having to study. I will do a small amount of studying for these ones. Read over the notes and the texts to refresh my mind. But for the most part, as usual, I will just wing it.

It will be an emotional week for me. I know this going on. I like my profs, I have enjoyed my classes, it will be tough letting them go. And no amount of joy at being free of the academic noose can change that.

It annoys me that the transcript business is complicating things on the VFS front. Goddamn administrivia. I would be way more relaxed right now if I knew that Patrick at VFS had all the things he needed to push my application through. But I am going to have to deal with the messy and increasingly absurd world of paper record-keeping.

I am trying to work up the ambition to leave for school half an hour early so I can go to the Student Association office and see about getting the damned thing. Once I have it, I am seriously considering delivering it to Patrick in person. It would save me days of fretting about it getting to him by mail and give me en excuse to show my face on campus and look around a little.

Sounds better than leaving it up to Canada Post.

But first I have to actually get the damned thing. Good thing I just figured out (after the fourth time reading this web page, d’oh) that I can do the request via email. Then I will pick it up at school when it is ready.

At least, I hope that’s how it goes down.

Tomorrow night, I have my final test in Linguistics. I don’t think there’s an exam. Which is a godsend. I am struggling hard just to keep up with the week by week stuff. Having to remember all or even half of it at the same time would damn near kill me.

And there is no final exam in Creative Writing. I will have to submit my portfolio before too long, but that’s no big deal. All I have to do is concatenate some existing files into one PDF and write three fourteen line poems. Big deal. Poetry comes easily to me.

Oh, plus I have to do 4 writing prompts in lieu of the process journal I just couldn’t do. Also no big deal.

(—)

Back from school now.

I wasn’t the only one who thought that essay was due today. There was another girl, one I rather like because she seems as bright and brittle and perpetually confused as me. I told her that now she has another week to do it. She said “Oh, no, I am not going back to that thing. ”

Fair enough. To be honest, I doubt I will go back to it either. I should. I should sit down and fine tune the thing till it hums like a violin string. I know that I am perfectly capable of doing it.

But I don’t wanna. And I know I can get away with not doing it. So I probably won’t.

I have been thinking a lot today about the difference between what I know I should do versus what I know I can get away with. I think the question illustrates an axis of my personality issues. I can get away with a lot of things. I’m clever, I have a lot of natural ability, I can bullshit my way through things.

And that is, largely speaking, what I have done in my life. I didn’t think of it as “getting away with things” most of the time. It was just how things worked in my personal reality. If I had thought about it at all, the “Jagoff” me, voice sounding ever so pleased at its own cleverness, would have said “Hey, why work harder than you have to?”.

Well, for one, because there are a lot of things that don’t come easy to you and you might want stuff that requires some of those things some day.

Admittedly, I still have my dreams of an easy life. Like my hero Quentin Crisp. He’s my hero not just because he was openly gay before it was safe and not just because he was extremely witty, but because he had a life where all he had to do was be driven from one place where all he had to do was be entertaining and pleasant to another.

Oh, and produce the occasional book.

That seems like the perfect life to me. I know that I can charm a crowd and I know that I could be an entertaining speaker without too much effort. And I can write.

Writing in the very personal and biographical mode he used would be a bit hard for me. I would have trouble writing about my own life because my own life is very dull. I mean, I have done very little but the Axis of Depression…. read, play video games, and hang out online – for 20 years.

But I have a lot of anecdotes. Maybe those would do.

Next Canadian History class, I have to bring my big book of History articles AND, and I quote, “whatever you use to write”.

Well I am not lugging my PC there! I guess the tablet will have to do.

Hope I can find my good Bluetooth keyboard, because virtual keyboards suck.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

As part of the homework for my History of Popular Music class, I was supposed to go to a live event, take notes, and then write a little blurb about it for class.

One little problem. I am totally not ready for a live concert yet. My social anxiety/agoraphobia precludes it. I explained this to my prof, and she said I could watch a concert online instead. I checked Netflix and found a movie called Neil Young : Journeys and watched it.

It starts with something I absolutely love : Neil Young in a beat up old car, driving, and with us in the passenger seat. Instantly, I am clicked right in. By shooting the footage that way, the movie creates a feeling of comfort and unforced familiarity by putting us in a position nearly every Canadian has been in.

Especially me, as I don’t drive.

And I find it especially charming that Neil is doing the driving. That’s not something you see a lot of musical legends doing. But that’s one of the things I like about him. He’s not interested in all that fancy Hollywood crap. Throughout the film, even on stage, he’s just some Canadian guy. It makes him easy to identify with.

In my case, it helps that he reminds me of my Uncle Sonny.

Interspersed with the songs, for the rest of the movie, we have segments done in this style.

Starting at the place he was born. The first thing he says there is “This is Omeemee^[1], a town in North Ontario…. ” and my mind instantly screamed “With dream-comfort memories to spare??”

So he drives us through Omeemee, and points out various places from his childhood. They look pretty much like places from any small Canadian town, including the one I come from. The church. The school. The hall where all kinds of events, from weddings to concerts to the school play, are held.

Then on to Pickering, where his family moved when he was pretty young. There, he and his brother talk about their family home that burned down.

While in Pickering, he tells us of a “friend” called, get this, Goof Williamson. I doubt that’s what it says on the man’s birth certificate, but I knew lots of people like that growing up. Their nickname is their real name (my brother used to be friends with Toothpick and Freeway) because, for whatever reason (Catholicism), there’s a lot of people with the same damned name around.

This “friend” convinced young, naive, trusting Neil to try to eat road tar by saying “it tastes bad at first, but if you keep going, it tastes just like chocolate!”.

Oh, and at one point, Neil refers to Canada geese as “honkers”, which I find completely adorable.

And so on and so on, until they get to the famous Massey Hall, where the concert takes place.

The concert pieces are a bit of a mixed bag for me, because I know a bunch of Neil Young song but not nearly all of them. How could I? He’s written so many! And I found myself wondering what that must be like. To have a huge repertoire of music that is all your own creation. It is a hard thing for me to truly wrap my brain around.

I mean, as a writer, I might one day have a bookcase shelf full of books, but I won’t be expected to be able to recite them night after night.

I also wonder what it must be like to be able to make a capacity crowd erupt in joy and applause just by strumming the opening chords to one of your songs. It must be one of those things that make you feel powerful and humble at the same time. It’s very immediate proof of how you have touched people’s lives with your music.

What a rare privilege! Such responsibility…. and love.

The fact that I don’t know 3/4 of the songs means that the concert functions as a bit of a Neil Young primer for me. I didn’t hear any songs I immediately wanted to add to my collection. But it was a wonderful overview of his ouvre, and I gained a new respect for him as a songwriter.

The concert is from 2011, so Neil is quite old in it. 66, to be precise. Luckily, one of the only benefits of a face like his is that as you age, you just become craggier and more wratched looking. You still look like the same person, only… more so.

But you can tell his age by how much effort he has to put in to sing. It’s kind of like watching someone play an old pedal pipe organ that has a lot of leaks. It takes so much effort just to get the sound out.

As a result, he sort of looks like he is in pain for the whole concert. For any other performer, that might be a problem. But for him, it just means his face finally matches his singing style.

Okay, okay, I will stop with the Neil Young jokes. I kid because I love. Also, he’s a Canadian national treasure, and that makes me, as a Canadian, uncomfortable.

Oh, I almost forgot the most extraordinary thing about the concert : there’s no band. None. It’s just Neil, a harmonica, a piano, an electric organ, and his guitar.

How many musicians could do that? Accompany themselves on every song with a variety of instruments? No band needed? And he’s such a mesmerizing performer with such beautiful songs that you don’t even notice. His songs don’t need a lot of instruments playing in order to sound good.

And you can tell he is proficient in all those instruments by the offhanded, easy, almost causal way he plays them. It almost looks like he can just tell his hands to play the accompaniment and then concentrate on singing. Or better yet….. the meaning of what he is singing.

I respect (and envy) that very much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

This popped into my head on the bus ride home.

Oh, fair warning. This is satire. But it’s not funny.

(SCENE : An interview room in a prison. Seated opposite one another are RICK PETRIE, a mild mannered middle class middle management type, and ROSCO “ROCK” TELLURIDE, a tall, thickly muscled prisoner. )

PETRIE (P) : First off, I want to thank you for agreeing to talk with me. I have said some pretty hateful things about you in the media, and I pretty much expected you to tell me to go to hell. But I had to task. My faith compels me to work towards forgiveness, and I thought talking to you, one human being to another, would help me along that path. So I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

TELLURIDE (T) : Time is the one luxury the government affords us detainees in great abundance, Mister Petrie. I am happy to share some of it with you.

P : Good….. good. Now, the first question I want to ask is…. what was going through your mind the night you shot my wife?

T : When I what now?

P : When you shot my wife. Shot her dead. Dead before she even hit the ground. What were you thinking that night?

T : Are you referring to the incident where the jackbooted thugs of the federal government stormed into my private residence, threw me to the ground and cuffed me in front of my innocent and God-fearing family, then dragged me off like a common criminal in front of a neighborhood full of my peers, all to punish me for exercising my Second Amendment rights?

P : Um…. yeah…. I guess. The night they arrested you. For shooting my wife…. earlier that day.

T : How could I forget the night when the heavy hand of reached out to silence me for being a true patriot and standing up for my constitutional rights?

P : That’s not…. listen, you admit you killed my wife, right?

T : I may have discharged my lawfully acquired and owned firearm in her direction.

P : May have? The cops have video of you doing it! From three different angles! You definitely shot my wife!

T : If you say so, then I believe you. I have no specific recollection of the event. It was, after all, a long time ago.

P : But…. but you remember murdering my wife, right?

T : Murder is just another liberal buzzword used to deny law-abiding Americans their freedom, Mister Petrie. All I did was exercise my right to bear firearms.

P : And I fully support that right. I’ve been an NRA member all my life. But that right doesn’t give you the right to kill my wife! It doesn’t give you the right to murder?

T : Is that so? Where in the Second Amendment does it say that? Surely you are not one of those gun-hating liberals who thinks we get to pick and choose what parts of the Constitution we obey. The Constitution is a perfect document, Mister Petrie. Or are you saying the Founding Fathers made a mistake?

P : Well, no, of course not. But surely they didn’t mean….

T : There you go, thinking you know the minds of the greatest and wisest men ever known. Men who create America, the greatest country there has ever been and will ever be. You are just like all those activist judges who think it’s their job to decide what the Constitution says this week. Their only job is to follow the Constitution, and there is nothing in the Constitution that says I can’t shoot people.

P : But what about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?

T : That’s just the preamble. The courts are clear on that. The preamble doesn’t count.

P : Oh, so now you listen to the courts?

T : Of course! I am, after all, a law-abiding citizen.

P : But you broke the law when you killed my wife!

T : It is no crime to defy an unjust law, Mister Petrie. That’s what I told the judge who imprisoned me here just because my opinions aren’t “politically correct”. And after all, doesn’t the tree of liberty need to be watered with blood now and then in order to stay healthy and strong?

P : But that’s supposed to be your own blood!

T : Tell that to the heroes of the American Revolution. They were not afraid to shed the blood of the British in order to shed the chains of tyranny.

P : But all you did was kill my wife?

T : I disagree. You are, of course, entitled to your own opinion.

P : This isn’t a matter of opinion. You killed my wife! It’s a fact!

T : That’s what you liberals always say when someone dares to disagree with your socialist dogma. You liberals think you have the monopoly on truth just because you twist people’s words and make them mean whatever you want. I, for one, am not fooled.

P : Things are true whether or not you believe them!

T : I totally agree. No matter what you or I believe, I didn’t kill your wife for wearing a Jesus pin.

P : What’s wrong with wearing a Jesus pin? Don’t you love Jesus?

T : That dirty socialist hippie? Of course not. All he did was go around telling people about sharing and loving and tolerance with all his unemployed hippie friends. Going and talking about how people should be selling everything and giving it to the poor…. that’s redistribution of wealth! Talk like that has no place in a good Christian nation like the United States of America.

(P gets up angrily)

P : I’ve had all I can take of this bullshit! You killed my wife, you bastard, and I look forward to seeing you rot in hell for what you did!

T : That might happen sooner than you think.

(SFX : Walls of room ignite like paper when a lit match is applied, revealing that they are, in fact, in Hell. )

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.