Back home, around mid-spring, people start talking about the state of the ice.

You see, the ocean freezes over in winter. And once the ice is good and thick, people start ice fishing.

In fact, a guy caught two tons of ice one year. But when he tried to cook it, he drowned.

Look, I’m never gonna have kids, my Dad jokes have to go somewhere.

Anyhow, ice fishing is where you drill a hole in the ice and fish through that hole. People built little portable shacks for themselves so they can do this in comfort.

They tend to be around the size of a phone booth. Remember those?

In fact, every winter, a little village of these shacks springs up every year on the ice out behind the Waterfront Mall every year.

See, that way you’re never too far from the liquor store.

Fishing’s too boring to do sober.

Come mid spring, the ice starts to melt, and people start sharing opinions about whether the ice is “safe” any more.

Got to know when it’s time to take the shack home and store it till next winter.

And when people start talking about how the ice pack is breaking up, you know it’s time.

I told you all that to tell you this : I feel like my own personal ice pack is breaking up.

Right now I am still mostly frozen inside. But what was once a rock hard glacier is now large icebergs bumping and jiggling like ice cubes in a cocktail.

And when I give my frozen innards a little nudge to see if it’s time to pull in the shack yet, I can feel my cubes jostling around.

Right now, it only lasts a second before my decades of self-conditioning kick in and I reflexively freeze up again and regain my strapped-down eyes-forward fixity.

But for just a moment, things loosened up.

I get the feeling that, like the ice back home, my thaw will seem to be going incredibly slowly until suddenly it accelerates and comes apart completely in a couple of days.

Sometimes with big loud dramatic cracking sounds I could hear from my home six blocks away from the action.

So right now, it might seem like nothing much has really changed, but I know different. I know that underneath the surface, things are breaking up. The thaw has begun, and some time soon, the cracks will begin to show and then the whole damn system will start falling apart in big wet clumps.

It’s not the sort of thing that can be done intellectually. We’re talking pure emotion born from a terrible thing that happened when I was very young. The intellectual mind can, at best, administrate it.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t guide the process consciously. The secret for me is imagination. I have a powerful imagination and by using it to imagine the ice melting any breaking up and the sun shining on my soul at last, I can make it happen.

I can push myself in that direction. Guide my growth like I am kindly showing myself the way to a better world and, like a plant, I am growing toward the light from that world.

Part of my process of healing will be the complete separation and divorce from my ice so that I fully embrace and accept that my ice is not a part of me, it’s just something that happened to me, and it can all die and go away and I will have lost nothing of value.

And gained an incalculable amount in terms of being truly alive.

And my ice can learn what it’s like to be water again.

More after the break.

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More past blasts

Here’s some more fun videos from my ancient playlists.

This man is so funny it’s like bloody magic :

Plus he’s working the inexhaustible comedy mine that is misheard lyrics.

I’m not sure why misheard lyrics are so reliably hilarious. I guess they hit a sweet spot between error (novel ways to get things wrong are always funny), relatability (we’ve all been there), surprise (root of all comedy), and density (so much funny in so few words).

And part of the density factor is that they use cultural properties that are already in your mind and powerful because of their heavy pop culture weight and, of course, the fact that they are musical because music, like comedy, is magic.

One last thing : it shows just what a master of comedy Peter Kay is that he knows when to stop feeding the misheard lyrics to the audience because now they hear it themselves, without prompting.

Now here’s a VERY deep Canadian comedy cut :

You know it’s a deep cut when the only reason it even still exists to be found is that it got pirated for some bootleg Latino CD label.

I used to have the entire album that track came from. Recorded off the radio. Back when radio stations would play entire albums sometimes.

I won’t claim it was pure comedy gold but I liked it. It had the silly, slightly subversive sense of humour I loved back then.

Now they do stuff like… this.

Finally, here’s a piece from an animator I truly adore :

Not only does FattyDragonite do animations featuring gay furries (hello!), they are extremely well made and, unlike so many other furry things, actually complete, well written, professional, and just plain lovable.

I find it hard to relate to people who feel bound by the rules. I understand them and I strive to make sure I take their needs into account but for me, it’s always been intuitively obvious that the rules are, quite often, optional and can be disregarded when they don’t make sense or are being unnecessarily cumbersome.

That said, I obey most of the rules most of the time because for the most part, they DO make sense, and in fact make it possible for us cranky primates to share this world with one another peacefully.

But I have no sense of the rules as an independent force of authority that must be obeyed. To me, it’s always contingent on my own judgment.

As is everything else.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.