edwards block

I had planned to take one or two classes at SFU this autumn, making some more headway in what may be history’s longest undergraduate program, but as I was unable to get space in any of the classes I desired, I abandoned that plan for the semester.

I like taking courses in the autumn and winter. Doing so helps to keep me socially and intellectually engaged at a time of year when darkness descends on the Pacific Northwest like a cold, wet blanket and tries to drive me into anti-social hibernation, so when SFU didn’t work out I looked around for some non-credit alternatives. What I found was a small, informal drop-in writing class operating out of the Carnegie Centre in the heart of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

I have taken quite a few writing classes in quite a few autumns and – if you’ll excuse the sweeping generalisation – I don’t think it is wholly unreasonable to say that they are often filled with middle-class discontents who feel a strong urge to say something but are fearful of digging deeply enough to find out what that is. I suspect that many of us aren’t in these classes to learn how to write as much as we are there to try get past the crippling fear that discourages us from saying what’s in our hearts. Even if only to say it to ourselves.

I’ll go further, and suggest that evening writing classes are, for many, a form of therapy. We have a lot to feel grateful for. Reasonably good paying jobs, a spouse, children perhaps, a comfortable home. We aren’t overly worried about where the money will come from to pay the rent or the mortgage next month and besides, even if there is a shortage, we have excellent credit. We really don’t have a lot to worry about.

So why is there all this existential angst motivating us sign up for writing classes? Why are we, despite having achieved what most people in the world would consider an enviable level of success, still not satisfied? Many will claim that they simply need a hobby, or to get out of the house while their husbands watch hockey (women make up the majority of writing class participants by a wide margin), or because they simply like language. Most of the time, I think these reasons are bollocks.

Whether we take courses or not, we are all writers. Our lives are filled with narratives, every one of which we helped to write. When we go to the store to buy cigarettes, when we try to get someone into bed, when we pay our telephone bill, when we wonder if we should leave our spouse, when we get on the SkyTrain to go to work, when we spank our kids, and when we sit in that little tan cubicle and pray to every god that can be conjured that Friday doesn’t take too long to arrive, we are writing and playing a role in a narrative of our own creation.

The narratives under which we conduct every moment of our lives are not static, written by someone long ago and that imprison us now. Narratives are fully dynamic. Every single word, thought and action customise our narratives, as if there were continuous streams of invisible energy flowing in and out of them from all directions – building, shaping, steering. If it seems to you that the narratives are fixed and static, it is simply because too many of us have resigned ourselves to static images of narrative. Too many of us have become negligent in our innate responsibilities to dream and to imagine freely. Instead, we lazily re-imagine the same narratives over and over.

We aren’t writing. We’re re-writing. We’re copying down “I will not talk in class” one hundred times because the teacher told us to. One hundred times a second. But we are our own teachers. It’s time to give ourselves new assignments.

If you’re skimming this and thinking that, because it seems to be speaking only to those who have a desire to write, let go of that. Though the inspiration comes from my own experiences with a pen and paper, writing in this context is largely a metaphor.

We are all writers. If you ever open your mouth and utter a word, you are expressing something that you have written in your mind, in your imagination. If you have ever smiled, or frowned at someone, you have expressed something that you have written in your heart.

We are all writing and performing at every moment. Whether we perform using dated, dog-eared old scripts that we helped to write in the distant past, or are in every moment attentively writing fresh, new narratives that evolve with life and vigour, we are making a choice.

What does your narrative look like?

I’m not shy about expressing my disdain for television. I canceled my cable in 1989 and have never regretted it. Not only have I saved a lot of money, I have forced myself to find other, more engaging things to occupy myself. I spend much of my uncommitted time – time that might otherwise have been wasted staring at the flickering blue tube as my arteries atrophy – reading, taking courses, copulating with abandon (and one or two others), writing, getting exercise, and attending intellectually stimulating cultural events. I feel good about this choice. I feel much more engaged in life than I did when I spent (and spent is a good word for it) my discretionary hours being a passive slave to the television.

This is not a popular position. It seems that frequently when I attend a social event, someone will ask “Did you see Glee last night?”, to which I will inevitably respond with something like “No, but by christ, I sure felt it”. Somewhere in the conversation it will be revealed that I don’t watch television. The typical conversant will then congratulate me on my wise choice and tell me how they don’t watch much of it themselves, just the Knowledge Network and a few other educational programs.

Five minutes later, having escaped my dull companionship, they will be engaged in an animated discussion of last season’s Survivor episodes with someone else at the party. Very rarely have I visited someone in their home and found the television tuned to an educational program. More likely, they’re tuned into the Iron Chef.

Perhaps I simply have a great misunderstanding of what people mean when they say “educational”. I suspect that there are quite a few that think that anything that is loosely considered a period piece is of educational value for its historical information. Chances are, however, that if it’s aired during prime time on a mainstream station, the educational value is dubious.

For instance, my housemate recently rented a couple of discs containing episodes from a television show called The Tudors. While normally I would say “Enjoy yourself, I’ll be in the other room reading”, on this occasion I decided to live dangerously and give them a watch. As I predicted, The Tudors is largely rubbish.

Let’s start with the casting. Now, there was no photography in the 14^th century, of course, so portraiture of the period must be relied upon. Imagine that you’re the king of England and you commission an artist to paint your portrait. Chances are that the artist, if he doesn’t wish to be drawn and quartered, is going to lean toward depicting you in the most flattering possible way while maintaining a reasonable amount of reality. Think about the profile pictures on a web dating site. Do you think any of them don’t post the most appealing of their available photos (however unflattering)?

With that in mind, here an image that is a pretty typical depiction of Henry VIII:

The artist has depicted a relatively beefy fellow, bearded, and with enough forehead visible beneath his hat to suggest that perhaps some degree of balding is the case. His skin does not look at all wrinkly, suggesting some degree of youth.

Now look at this promotional poster for The Tudors, bearing an image of the actor who portrays Henry:

I find it rather unlikely that any evidence exists that Henry VIII bore any resemblance to a 21^st century designer-underwear model. Yes, Henry became king when he was just 18 years old, but the events described in The Tudors occur much later, when Henry is somewhere around 30, and older, a time at which he was probably already well on his way to beefy.

The dialogue in the show may be vaguely entertaining to someone talking on the phone, reading e-mail and distractedly clipping his toenails while viewing the show, but if one actually contemplates the words being spoken, it’s all a lot of fluffy nothing, a recitation of simplistic phrases that try to sound appropriate for the period but that actually communicate little of substance. To make matters worse, characters frequently use phrases that sound distinctly modern, despite their attempts to speak them in a sort of Shakespearian style.

While I’m no scholar of English royal history, the program is clearly loaded with intentional historical inaccuracies, intentional in the interests of being more entertaining and appealing to the audience most desirable to advertisers: the young, presumably. How else to account for the non-stop sex? This band of pious catholics does more humping than 1^st century Roman nobility. There is probably some accuracy to the promiscuity, but really – did they never do anything but dance, drink and screw without any pretense of Catholic artifice?

The key component, the primary tool for entertainment in The Tudors, is tits and ass. There are more female nipple shots in the first episode than can be found on the average adult website. And it’s a wonder the actor playing Henry isn’t off on long-term disability for repetitive strain injury for all the times he’s been photographed pulling his shirt over his head, not to mention playing canopy-bed Twister with nubile young (and possibly airbrushed) actresses with ample, highly visible bosoms.

No, I don’t think I’ll be enjoying more of this rot. There are countless better ways to occupy my brain cells, and I think I’ll keep seeking them out.

For much of my adult life, I have been living in apartments in what is sometimes referred to as the most densely populated square mile in North America, Vancouver’s West End. I’m somewhat sceptical of this claim, as it sounds a bit like chamber of commerce spin, not to mention that we northern North Americans tend to overlook Mexico as a part of our continent too, surely an area of population concentration of note. Nonetheless, the West End is an area of significant population density.

Density of this sort is an easy thing not to notice when you live in an economically privileged and relatively homogeneous form of it, however. Inside our boxes in the sky it is possible to feel a greater sense of privacy than in a house on a 33 foot lot in the suburbs. Despite having several hundred people within rock-throwing distance, you may never see or hear most of them. Even the other windows of other apartments, and the people behind them, are often distant enough to offer a sense of anonymity.

In my case, I also had the benefit of living right next door to one of Canada’s largest, and possibly wildest, urban parks, Stanley Park. It was like having a 1,000 acre backyard. Yes, I had to share it with others, but some sections, at some times of the day or week, you can have almost to yourself, especially when it’s not summer and the average Vancouverite won’t drag his ass away from the television or out of her car in case it rains. Have they never heard of raincoats?

Beaver Lake, in Stanley Park

I love the park, especially when it’s raining. When I lived beside it, I used to put on a raincoat, hiking boots and a Tilley hat, load my backpack with snacks, a thermos of tea, and head out at 7:00am with a pair of binoculars. The trails are beautifully peaceful during a misty rain, the park is loaded with life, and if you sit still for a bit, it will often reveal itself. I once saw a family of river otters cross the trail from the forest into Beaver Lake while I was sitting on my favourite bench.

Another favourite local escape is Wreck Beach, another park on the periphery of the city. Wreck is not the place to go for solitude if it’s sunny and warm, but it is still a great respite, nonetheless. Wreck has different sections, featuring slightly different demographics, though there is a certain amount of blending of and acceptance of “cultures” in all areas. Often on hot summer days I head for the main beach, the only place really suitable for swimming and, conveniently, where there exists an open market for every beach necessity imaginable, including empanadas and magic mushrooms, both of which I highly recommend.

Later in the day, however, I often head to the southern end of the beach, predominantly populated by queer men, where I can enjoy the sunset in relative peace. Sometimes it has the ambiance of an outdoor bathhouse, without the disco, but most of the crowd starts to disperse shortly after 4pm, which means it is pretty calm and quiet until the sun sets, which at this time of year isn’t until after 9pm.

Wreck Beach at dusk

Unfortunately, the presence of an offshore breakwater, behind which sit large booms of logs headed for the mills of the lower Fraser, means that there are only scattered small patches of sand, and swimming is neither practical nor recommended. However, it’s still pretty scenic (in its own, industrially polluted way) and any tugboats working – when the tide is high – are usually distant enough that their engines don’t drown out the buzz, chirp and rustle (and sometimes, moaning) of the plentiful wildlife.

Ever since I was quite young, I have both enjoyed and suffered the incongruity of wanting to be out of the city while wanting to be in it. When I was younger, I was generally satisfied with opportunities to escape the city for a weekend or a longer journey, despite the inconvenience of arranging transport and dealing with the traffic. And then there is always the trauma of having to come back again. This is a trauma I always experience while leaving the park or the beach. As I leave the density and dissolve into the forest, I feel my stress and urban agitation lift from me. The sensation of relaxing is physically tangible in a way that I get from no other experience. All too often, however, as soon as I begin to leave the park to return to “real life”, I start to feel some of that agitation settle once again upon my shoulders, and as I re-immerse myself back into the concrete, car alarms, yapping shih-tzus and gas-powered landscaping tools, I long once again to make a more permanent escape. If it weren’t for Stanley Park and Wreck Beach, I would surely have either fled this city, or fled my (albeit unique variety of) sanity, long ago. They provide me with the easily-accessible respite from urban hubbub that I require.

Lost Lagoon

I’ve had it in my mind for many years that it would make far more sense to spend most of my time living out of the city, visiting it when I am in the mood for a dose, than to be trapped in it most of the time, constantly craving an opportunity to escape. I’ve had many visions of a semi-rural home over the years, and have been scouting out real estate for years. In the late 90s, I contemplated the purchase of a property in the Horsefly area of the Cariboo region in central British Columbia. It was 80 acres, with a small A-frame house, well forested with some cleared areas for growing, and with a large pond in which beavers and muskrats were known to reside. At only $100,000, it was hardly unaffordable.

So why didn’t I buy it? I can list off any number of rationalisations. How will I make money? What will I do for sex? Will I feel socially isolated? Will my nearest neighbours be gun-totin’ Reform Party loonies? Will I miss the city after all?

All valid concerns. Of course, most of those are concerns living in the city too, but there are likely more opportunities to generate cash in the city (regardless of the quality of those opportunities). It all came down to fear of the untested, really. In hindsight, I regret not having acted while I had the chance, and the resources. There would have been challenges, yes. But, older now, and having faced a few self-initiated challenges, I suspect that I would have found a way, and discovered that the differences between “here”and “there” are not as wholly distinct as might be imagined. After all, as I discovered not too long ago, my own big-city Jewish (now former) physician turned out to be a gun-totin’ Reform Party loony.

While I would be inclined now to act, I don’t currently have the resources to follow that path, though it’s not entirely out of the question that it could happen. In order to do it, I’d either have to win a lottery, or re-join the rat race from which I ran screaming several years ago. I don’t buy lottery tickets, and I seem not to have the fortitude (or the masochism) necessary to make the rat race tolerable. So here I am, a city boy still.

Wreck Beach at sunset

In the meantime, I am trying to make things as earthy as possible under the circumstances. I have always had a very polarised view of city living. If I’m going to live in a city, I want to live in the middle of it. If I’m not going to live in a city, I want to be in the woods. I have no time for suburbs, where people seem to resent foliage and physical exertion. Virginia Woolf (apparently) once said “If the choices are Richmond or death, I choose death”. She did, of course, in the end choose death, and I don’t blame her.

I have no plans to solve my residential plight by loading my pockets with stones and taking a nice long swim (though I reserve the right to change my mind if I ever find myself forced through circumstance, or really bad luck, to take up residence on the noxious Mary Hill), but I have taken steps to make city living a little more tolerable and, occasionally, even sorta pleasant.

For the past seven months or so, I have been living in a rented house on the east side of the city. I had always been curious about living on “The Drive” as this neighbourhood is known, but giving up instant access to the park always stopped me from trying it out. As it turns out, I quite like it. It has more real cultural diversity than any other Vancouver neighbourhood, and that’s integrated diversity. Really, the area is probably on the decline, as character goes, since real estate is getting more and more expensive and the people with lots of money and no sense of community buy up land and gentrify things, but for now, I like it.

The food is great around here too. Though many of the historically-present Italians have dispersed to other parts of the city, there are still a number of merchants around that supply their tastes, which conveniently are also my tastes. Old style deli counters at Santa Barbara and Bosa markets are fattening me up on parmesan-crusted salami, prosciutto, fennel sausage, and a variety of cheeses, and the choices of vegetables, with both the Italian and Asian influences, is much more satisfying than those found in the big chain stores.

Another way that I am making the best of things is by having a garden as well, which is kind of like farming on a very small scale. In fact, I have two gardens, having also taken over the unused one at the house next door. The quantity of food that comes out of them is not astounding, particularly since the weather was so unusually hot and dry in the late spring and early summer that many of the more water-demanding greens shot stalks straight up and bolted before they could even produce many leaves. However, I am eating out of the garden daily, mainly lettuce, mustard greens, chard, and snow peas. The pole beans should be ready to eat in another week or two, I have a bit of rhubarb, and I have just done a second planting of a few quicker growing things, as well as some fall crops. If the winter isn’t too cold, I should be able to get a good supply of kale through the end of the year, too. My yard also has apple, pear, plum and fig trees, all of which seem to be producing a good supply of fruit.

The Main Garden

Of course, getting food out of the garden is nice, but I suspect a big part of the satisfaction comes from the opportunity to play in the dirt. I can sit out there for hours, digging, pruning, thinning, and weeding. Usually when I am finished, I have half of the garden on me, which I shower off before I return to the yard to sit in the shade and read, or watch the chickadees and bushtits.

As an added bonus to my need to satisfy my farming urges, city council recently passed a motion permitting citizens to keep chickens in backyards, something I have been demanding for years, since it seems absurd that you can have cats, dogs, birds, reptiles, rodents, and even children, but not a couple of hens. The city managers are taking their time actually writing the new law, so I don’t yet know what limit will be in place for the quantity of fowl, but I am making the plans for my new coop in the meantime. Now I just have to start warming my neighbours up to the idea of chicken-sitting for me when I need to escape to the woods for a weekend.

Last weekend in Vancouver, two events took place that sought to advance the idea of the car-free city. One I attended, the other I tried to avoid, with limited success.

Saturday was the World Naked Bike Ride, an event I favour for several reasons. Any opportunity to run around naked ought to be exploited enthusiastically, but especially when it’s being done to increase public consciousness about, as a friend once put it, the “offensive ubiquity of the horseless carriage”.

That same friend – who recently bought a car to replace his deceased one – had to drag his old bike out of storage and dust it off in order to participate, as it had not been used since the last World Naked Bike Ride. It would be easy for someone less charitable than I (!) to accuse him of hypocrisy, but on the contrary, I think he is being courageous and intelligent enough to recognise that he resents feeling the need to own something that he doesn’t really want, but that the forces of capital conspire to virtually (for lack of realistic alternatives, perceived or otherwise) require him to purchase and maintain. He feels powerless to live without the comfort and convenience of a car, and his participation is an act of symbolic defiance.

The point of the World Naked Bike Ride is not to promote nudity, or cycling, or civil disobedience (though those are all very worthy pursuits), but to remind us that “car culture” is not something that we are necessarily stuck with, that we, as a society, have the power to choose a different kind of city, one in which we are not all subservient to the private automobile and the special interests that have caused us to be enslaved to it. That a large majority are convinced otherwise suggests, in my opinion, lazy thinking rather than conscious commitment.

The other event lends some credence to this view, I think. Car Free Day was spawned on Commercial Drive by people not unlike those who participate in the Naked Bike Ride, citizens on feet and bikes and wheelchairs and crutches and elderly legs who took over the street by force of their collective mass as a reaction to the domination of the automobile. Since those early days, however, it has been largely hijacked by civic politicians and business interests, and become an object of curiousity by those who have either no opinion about car traffic, or one supportive of the status quo.

The result is that Car Free Day is quite the opposite: seemingly large numbers of people drive to a neighbourhood that is holding a Car Free Day event. Sure, six blocks of one street are “car free”, but sixteen blocks in all surrounding directions are jammed with cars whose drivers are either trying to park for the event, or are trying to bypass a formerly accessible artery. It’s not “car free”, it’s “car relocated”.

A major cause for difference between the two events is that the naked bike ride is unsanctioned by city hall (in other words, an “illegal protest”) and is largely unplanned. The route is spontaneously made up by those participating. Meanwhile, the city is involved in planning the so-called car free day, an official series of events that are car-free in name only.

Of course, those who enjoy taking over the street and playing hopscotch where cars normally roam will see it more positively. And good for them. They can enjoy their day of faux-rebellion, and I’ll take my opportunity to flash my scrotum at Floridian tourists. In the end, the cars are still going to get to dominate for the other 364.75 days of the year. It’s that that we need to come together to change.

(Main page photo credit: Hepcat Cabal – http://www.flickr.com/photos/19835686@N00)

As I travel about the city, on foot, by bike, or on public transit, I regularly have a very appealling vision. I find myself imagining what life in the city would be like if there were no cars.

Just imagine sitting at outdoor cafes, newly enlarged to take advantage of all the extra space available now that the roads aren’t lined with parked cars, and enjoying your coffee and conversation without having to try to hear your friends over the din of roaring engines. Imagine being able to ride a bike without feeling (quite reasonably, on most streets) that you’re at risk of being mowed down at any moment by two tons of inattentively maneuvered steel. Imagine sitting on a comfortable train car on your morning commute, sipping tea and reading a good book, and arriving at the office relaxed and ready to face the day with optimism, instead of sitting in a car that’s creeping along the freeway at 20km hour, listening to universally dismal traffic reports, and arriving at the office tense, frazzled and ready for whatever other misery may arrive through the day.

I find that this is a particularly difficult thing to imagine for most urban, and especially suburban, people that I talk to. It’s not necessarily a lack of imagination that’s the problem, but negative imagination. People are imagining alright – they imagine what they think the phrase “public transportation” means, and they picture standing on a wet, mouldy bus next to a homeless psychiatric patient who smells of urine, being jostled back and forth as the bus continually accelerates and brakes. This is not necessarily an inaccurate scenario, but it’s not necessarily accurate, either. We do have buses like that, but forget that they don’t have to be like that. We’re provided with insufficient numbers of poorly designed buses by people who never ride them. The design of our public transit system is overseen by provincial government ministers who ride around town in limousines and SUVs. More imagination and committed resources, and less pandering to the billionaire owners of multiple car dealerships, and perhaps we’d start making some progress toward having a public transport system that people actually want to use.

We’re at an interesting point in history right now. The US government has already handed over some $40,000,000,000.00 to auto companies to bail them out and keep them from failing. And they are asking for billions and billions more. And what will come of this? We’ll have car companies that are – stable. That’s it. Oh, maybe we’ll get more hybrid cars and fewer Hummers on the market, but essentially, we’re in for more of the same. A government that is already trillions of dollars in debt is donating billions that it does not have to keep dinosaur businesses alive. It’s like bailing out the horse and buggy industry to keep it going. At the same time, they are asking auto-industry retirees to trade their future health care benefits for stock in the car companies. If I were a GM retiree, I’d be pretty leery of accepting pieces of paper that are almost certain to be worthless for health care.

The time of the private automobile is coming to an end, at least for the urban market, and a new order is coming to replace that tired old, destructive model. A model that is destroying our atmosphere, polluting our lands, encouraging war, ripping apart societies that have the oil to operate the machines, and generally making our cities less and less livable the more crowded they get with private, noisy, filthy, dangerous machines.

I have a more imaginative suggestion for Barack Obama, along with Stephen Harper and other western leaders. Instead of simply handing over all these billions to the auto companies in exchange for minor improvements in fuel efficiency, lets put this money to the most effective possible use. Let’s turn the whole industry on its ear and use it as an opportunity to shift the entire urban transportation paradigm. Let’s pay the car companies to stop simply making and selling cars, and pay them to build and operate a public transportation infrastructure like North America has never seen. Efficient, comfortable buses, streetcars, trams, and light rail for local transport. Rapid transit and conventional rail for longer and high speed routes. Build transit routes in cities so that no one need walk more than two block to access the system. It could be done.

In order to make this work, of course, cars would need to be gradually, but not too slowly, eliminated from city streets, starting with the downtown centres, and expanding in sections or belts to the external limits of cities. The effects of this would be monumental. We would become less insular and more social. Our housing would evolve to become more efficient, in terms of space, resources, and energy. Communities would become friendlier, more child friendly, safer. We would become much more attuned to our surroundings once we’re walking, cycling, skating, or looking out the windows of the bus while someone else looks after the driving than we do when we’re sitting behind a wheel staring at the bumper ahead of us, or trying to avoid being killed at every moment. We’d all relax, and the gods know, we all need to relax a little.

There is precedent for this sort of public works initiative. The Depression of the 1930s was the spark for all kinds of public works initiatives that provided new infrastructure and put people to work when there was little work to be had. We can keep auto workers employed, put more people to work building, maintaining and operating this new infrastructure, and generally end up with a quality of life improvement of which it is difficult even to imagine. But imagine we must.

One of the great things about imagination is that no action is required. We are not compelled to commit to decisions. All we have to do is sit down for fifteen minutes and imagine, just imagine, what life would be like if our streets were car free, and yet it actually becomes easier and more pleasant to get around. That’s all. I’m not asking you to get rid of your car, walk 20 miles to work, or sit in a bus seat that has a puddle in it. Just imagine. That’s it. Just imagine.

Just imagine!