Balance

Dull, dull, dull, inside and outside.  I need a tonic.  I heard on the CBC radio this morning that the amount of active vitamin D in any given tablet can vary a great deal.  Maybe I’ve been taking my daily dose from a bottle of weak pills lately.  Or maybe it’s the lingering cold I have.  At any rate, I’m going to write this out of my system, move forward, put it behind me, get on with my life and mobilize every other cliché I can think of behind an effort to pull myself up by my bootstraps.   Here’s a picture Jay sent me recently that is his and now my ‘go to’ photo for bad mornings:

And here’s one of my nephew Matti’s baby, Burke Boyce.  It will now be my shot for good mornings:

In an effort to maintain a balanced tone, I will now present a high point from the last 10 days.  On Friday evening I volunteered as an usher at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre for the ‘Travelin’ Slam Poetry’ show.  It was great.  I was so ill at ease at the beginning that if I hadn’t been an usher, I wouldn’t have stayed in the theatre.  Poets, alone on stage, baring their creations to strangers, how could they do it?  But they were poets, very good ones, and they did it.  The main one was Brendan McLeod from the Vancouver arts collective ‘The Fugitives.’  He’s 33 and quite plain looking, short brown hair, blue jeans and an untuckedin dark shirt, but a gifted MC and poet.  The other 3 were about his age or younger.  Each was unique looking and a genuine poet.  One was a very tall, thin, wired First Nations man, one a round, flouncy-skirted Bahamian-Canadian woman from Montreal and the last, perhaps the shyest of them all, seemed to have a background in heavy metal and video games.  He never took his cap off, but he really ‘gave her’ at times.  They did bare their souls, but within minutes I was completely at ease.  They were used to doing what they were doing, good at it and full of energy.  The format, with judges from the audience and lots of booing and cheering was invigorating.  Brendan led and they all participated in the final set; the audience chanted the chorus and the whole atmosphere was exhilarating.

One of the expressions that has been buzzing around the CBC radio and tv this week is, ‘the aging tsunami.’  Once that network gets its teeth into an idea, it holds on like a terrier and shakes the blood out of it.  I like the CBC, it’s the only radio station I listen to but they do go on and self promote.  At any rate, they make it seem as if our generation has had quite a ride, coming in with the ‘baby boom’ and going out on an ‘aging tsunami.’  I wonder about how much debris we’ll leave behind us to wash up on the shores of the world.

On Tuesday evening, walking home from my class at the library, I saw The Big Dipper and across from it, Orion, both brilliant in the black sky.  That was a joy.