I just got off the phone with my mom. So I have a happy little halo of warmth and affection around me now.
I love hearing her voice, and this time, I told her so. She’s still my favorite person in the entire universe and hearing her voice and getting the news from back home from her always makes me a happy little boy.
Also kind of homesick, but I am quite used to that now.
Still, I wish I had the money to go back home some time this summer. I want to experience Prince Edward Island in the summer again. It’s a time of sun soaked pavement and green everywhere and is pretty much my vision of what happiness looks like as a place since I was a wee little thing.
That’s because not only was I out of school, so was my mother. That’s one of the benefits of having a teacher for a mother. So during the summer, we reverted back to what it was like before my mother went back to work when I was three.
And the family was more relaxed and fun in general. Even my Dad was easier to get along with. And we kids would play outside and we would do things as a family ;like to to Rainbow Valley or go see Anne of Green Gables or go to one of the many provincial and federal parks that PEI has to offer.
Oh, or we would go to Linkletter Beach, one of the many, many beaches on Prince Edward Island and my siblings would go swimming and I would go wading (never did learn how to swim) and then we’d go lie on the beach to dry out, then have to sit on towels for the drive home, where we would dump out the sand from our shoes and our clothes along with the little bits of seaweed we’d picked up swimming.
One of the happiest moments of my life occurred at the beach. Nothing in particular had happened. But the heat from the sand felt very good, and my family was all there, and I was there contently soaking it all in, and everything was wonderful.
The older I get, the more I treasure memories like that. And I think it does me good to remind myself that my childhood wasn’t all bad.
There were good times too.
One thing I have just got to share from back home : apparently, there is a Catholic priest there who was started doing drive by confessions.
Can you believe it? The very words delight me.
He has a little booth set up behind his church and people drive up to the six foot limit and tell him their sins.
But the thing is, they are still six feet apart.
So people have to yell their sins!
When my mother told me that I laughed and laughed. Apparently all the Catholics in the tiny PEI community of Woodstock know each other’s sins now.
Of course, in a community that small, they probably knew each other’s sins anyway.
I picturing someone shouting their confessions and the people behind them in line shouting helpful reminders.
A : (shouting from car) Tell them about telling Chuck to go eff himself at the bar!
B : (shouting from different car) Yeah, that was a good one.
More after the break.
On being the asshole
it has been occurring to me lately that there are times when, just being myself, I become the asshole in the situation.
For good and for bad. Sometimes, the situation needs someone to volunteer to be the asshole who upsets the applecart and makes waves and gets shit done to resolve the problem and make everyone’s lives better.
They are then free to resent you or hate you now that doing so in no way means they might have to solve the problem themselves.
I’ve been that guy. I’ve taken the flak. I’ve fixed things. And more often than not, I have either gotten no thanks or outright hostility.
But I am talking more about the ways I accidentally become the asshole
The inciting incident happened tonight when I was grocery shopping with J&J. I brought up the subject of the recent tussle between the US and Canada over N95 masks.
Basically, Canada ordered 3 million masks from 3M before this whole corona debacle began, and Trump intervened and kept 3M from exporting those masks on the grounds that America needed them more.
I offered my opinion, knowing it would be unpopular : the Americans might be right. They might need them more than us. They have ten times our population and their response has been far, far worse. Those masks might save more lives in their hands than they will in ours.
And Joe and Julian got super mad at me for this. And I stuck to my guns. In doing so, i said a lot of unhelpful things about herd mentality and lynch mobs and being a heretic, which only added fuel to the fire.
And now that I am home and calm and feeling reflective, I have to ask myself what was really going on there.
Nothing I said was anything other than the truth as I see it, and yet I am not so ignorant as to pretend I bore no responsibility for the ensuing shitstorm.
I knew going in that my honest opinion would not be taken well. But I am a creature of principle and i stick to my principles no matter the consequences.
And there can be some pretty heavy consequences, especially when my honest opinion challenges the dominant dogma of the time.
99.9 percent of Canadians are all on board with the “fuck America, these are our masks!” sentiment, and that puts me in a very lonely position as the one person saying that the masks should go wherever they will save the most lives.
To hold such a position publicly is to be trampled by an angry mob. Even if the position I hold is the one history will eventually embrace, like in the case of lynch mobs.
History still does not record the one guy who said “Wait, aren’t black people…. people?”
Still, I think I am now mature enough to take responsibility for the ruckus I create with my opinions instead of clinging to a disingenuous claim of “having no idea” what would happen when I opened my mouth.
Bullshit. I knew and I said it anyway. And I accept that this means I am going to have large numbers of people getting super mad at me from time to time.
And some of those people are going to be people I love and care about. And I owe it to them to think about how I am going to come across when I state my opinion and to try to figure out how to minimize the disruption I cause.
I will still be a person of unwavering principle.
But I don’t have to be a dick about it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.