Planes, my experience tells me, are bad for people. Not the elevation to impossible heights, not being moved from one place to an unwalkably far away one. No, it’s the darned air in those things that utterly vanquishes me.

I don’t know if it’s that they don’t circulate it enough, or people are just poxy, but the last few times I’ve made trans-Atlantic flights, I’ve wound up losing my first few days in Canada to a cold. I drag myself to work, then drag my carcass home (my friend Lisa‘s home) to collapse and sleep like Tutankhamen.

This time I want it to be different. I’ve got my ginseng, vitamin C, and echinacea, and I’m dosing myself in advance. Do you have a favourite preventative? Please tell me!

Yeah, I’m writing a novel about climate change, and I’m flying overseas. The irony is not lost on me. I’ve bought carbon credits, but I know that’s lame. I’m not sure how to do this one.

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I don’t want anything for Christmas. I don’t know who said it, but this expression sums up my feeling: “I want for nothing. I need nothing. I am complete.”

No malls, no trying to buy everyone the same amount, no $CDN bargains. I want to come back lighter, uplifted even, not heavier.

I’ve got a lot of great people in my life, and that’s what I’ll be celebrating in a thing-less way at the end of this year. If you’re reading this, thanks for being part of my tribe.

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I feel impossibly sleepy. It’s 4 in the afternon and the light is growing dim.

This morning I had a dream that I had a pet mouse or vole or something like that — just a little scrap of fur skittering around. I loved it. Then I woke up, and… no vole. I miss my vole.

I had an appointment with my dentist this morning. Once more, she waved me out of her office, because there’s nothing wrong with my teeth. She did warn me, though, that my gums had receded in places because I was obviously brushing too hard.

I guess my first clue should have been when my toothbrush snapped this morning.

Oh, wicked! The game design program at George Brown College has created a Half-Life:2 mod based on the downtown core of Toronto.

I’ve just installed this thing, and I can’t wait to go blow people up on the subway. If you’ve been on the TTC, you know the urge.

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Buy Nothing Day is upon us — today in the US and Canada, tomorrow here in The Rest of the World. Coincidentally, I’ve just started reading What Would Jesus Buy? Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse by Reverend Billy.

I’ve been reading about Reverend Billy for a while. He’s a (non-religious) performance artist who stages anti-consumerist “revival” demonstrations in American chain stores, and I expected this book to be a clever, consciousness-raising joke about consumerism. What I wasn’t expecting was prose so good it’s poetry. There, right in the first chapter, was a ‘sermon’ that echoed exactly the theme of my book — “eros versus telos”. Only the Reverend phrased it as “Love is the force that knows that life will survive if life is loved.”

You see, Life on this Earth isn’t separate from any social justice struggle. It’s too late in the game to separate these things. Issues will not be isolated from each other when the Earth is extinguished. When you look into the eyes of the person standing next to you and realize that this is the last breath you yourself will be taking because the world has, in fact, JUST ENDED, then all these issues are one. In that last gasp all the progressive Issues are simply Love, and all the advertisements are simply Love mocked to death.

— What Would Jesus Buy, by Reverend Billy

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I awoke this morning feeling much-renewed after a weekend spent alternating between shivers and sweats. All the aches were gone, and I lay in bed for a while revelling in feeling normal. I looked forward to jumping out of bed, getting washed, getting back out into the world of the living, and doing my work. Most of all… I wanted an omelette!

I’ll chalk the latter up to my weekly call with my folks, in which my father often gives a description of whatever great meal he’s tackling next (he’s a wonderful cook). His verbal portrait of Saturday’s breakfast — particularly as it was contrasted with my usual breakfast of nothing at all — stuck in my head. So today, with my appetite returned, I wanted my omelette!

After an hour of walking around town, and with noon approaching, it was clear I wasn’t going to get it. So I settled for the closest approximation and went to Snax, a little hole-in-the-wall place tucked behind Princes Street, bought two morning rolls with fried eggs in them, and ate them as I walked across the North Bridge.

Eating these rolls is tricky, because there’s always one bite that makes the yolk burst out the side of the thing. I forgot about that with the first one and got a mess all over my left hand, but with the second roll I slowed down and ate it while leaning on the stone wall outside the Scotsman Hotel, looking out over Princes Street Gardens, where the Christmas market is being built again. I managed a controlled detonation on the second sandwich.

(I’m realising as I write this that I’m falling into the trap I recently pointed out to a writer-friend: using lots of specific place-names that won’t mean anything to anyone who hasn’t been to the place I’m talking about.)

I dropped byWord Power Bookshop to re-stock them with my book, and spent the afternoon doing my weekly planning in a couple of local cafes. Even though the world through the windows was grey and rainy, I was very happy to see it from that perspective.

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Whee! That was fun, and the gang turned a bunch of complexity into a good, straightforward plan. I’ve decided to take the game to Toronto with me and use it to explain to the team there how the plan works.
My friends are brilliant.

No, not “Thermonuclear War” (though this might cover that).
I’ve been asked to re-write Strategic Coach’s emergency procedures, but when I started working on the job I realised that… they don’t make sense. The logistics are fine on paper, but it’s easy to see how they just wouldn’t work in reality. But I can’t get my head around what would work instead. (And I have a personal rule that I won’t go back to my client with an objection unless I have an alternative to present.)
So what I’ve done is turned it into a board-game, and I’m inviting you, if you’re in the area, to come over to my place on Friday evening for some nibbles and to play the “Emergency!” game with me, to try to figure out how to get everyone out of the building while also achieving certain objectives.
Want to play? If you do, drop me an e-mail!

The city of Edinburgh’s recycling program has grown and improved dramatically in the past two years. Suddenly we have kerbside recycling and lots of large wheelie-bins close-by. It’s got to the point that the Weasel and I only throw out one carrier bag of rubbish a week between us. (In fact, he points out that while the rest of the UK is scoring really badly in terms of landfill, Scotland is beating all its recycling targets. Wahey! Oh, but we’re still only recycling 28% of the waste we produce, where other countries are reaching rates of 70% or more.)

So we’ve got a ways to go yet. For instance, I’d like to recycle an old piece of electronics equipment. I live where it says “Old Town” on the map. Let’s see where I’d have to go… Ah. Yeah. To one of those numbered points out on the edges of the map. So this means using a car… to do recycling.

Anyone want a scanner that only works on its side?

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So I went to this gig tonight… and halfway through someone from The Skinny asked me if I would write a review of it. Ack!

But this is what I do: I write. Two hundred words — pah! I cough and it’s 500 words. So I’m doing that before bed.

It’s been quiet all year, nothing but me, alone, head-down in my novel, now… a deluge! In conversation after the event, a month-long programme of reading events for February got dreamed up around me, and I’m one of the organisers. Huh? Okay!

I keep bumping into arts-people I know here lately, a conspicuous number of them all within days, and there’s something tangible in the space between us, like we could make manifest anything we wanted to. Teaching people how to write or make books, finding opportunities to perform, and just connecting with other creative minds — this is the fun stuff. I’ve been planting seeds here for a long time, and even though it’s winter, it feels like spring.

This duo, Contrabajo, played tonight. They were funky beyond measure, and obviously having a lot of fun:
http://www.myspace.com/contrabajoband

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