The New Old Man

So, it appears that men are back. I guess they started to lose ground when Elton John became famous and were on the brink of extinction when “I feel” statements came into vogue. The securing (but by no means full acceptance: see below) of Women’s Lib further pushed men to the edges. Real men, that is. They were all but gone for a while in any group born later than 1970. What remained were dudes who hugged, dudes who talked about their inner pain, dudes who made sure she finished, dudes who drank white wine on hot days, dudes who cared. Y’know: sissies.

                It must have been hard for our gun-totin’, tobacco-spittin’, woman-in place puttin’, feelings-quellin’ grandfathers to stand. “We won the war for these pussies?”

                Much to my chagrin, and to the delight of our now-deceased Nazi-crushing forebears, in the past ten years, the man has come back. Well, a version of the man, anywho. It’s like a false front building. With biceps. And extremely tight t-shirts.

                These men coined the terms “hipster” and “metrosexual” because as far as they’re concerned, the only fashion statement you need is ten more bench presses and a five-gallon tub of creatine.

                The new men drive big trucks (usually with some brass balls hanging off the hitch they use to pull the trailer what hauls their garden tractor). They fight and drink and fuck and swear. They own guns. Their idea of a steady girlfriend is one who’s up for round two in the morning before she gets her skinny ass out of my pad.

                Via those social media, I’ve been watching the resurgence of men, and I’m not much for it. They are not specific to a generation, for the older men who once cried about always being picked last in T-ball are also joining the fray, taking advantage of a Brave New World like an RPG-dealer in post-Bush Iraq. However, far too many of these men with the values of my redneck paternal grandfather are half my age. I’ve been trying to figure why so many of our youth have been going backwards on the male scale of evolution, why so many of them feel that they need to buy a $50,000 compensation wagon for their twenty-minute commute, why they feel they need to treat women like masturbatory tools.  

                Now, as all great cultural shifts are, this one looks like a rebellion of sorts. We tell these kids to tell us how “that” makes them feel and look at the girl down the way as an equal in all categories (vive la similarité), and they clam up. Start using “twat” in regular conversation.

                I haven’t swung that way. Maybe it’s because I grew up on a farm, and drove a $400,000 piece of machinery before I owned my first car. I shot a gun (and killed gophers with it) before I was ten. I have been in fights that involved punching in the face. And yet, I think my mother is the most intelligent person I know, I write poetry, I wear Lululemon, and I drive a minivan. I drive the fuck outta that minivan. I have never felt the need to prove myself as a man. I mean, I think 50 Shades of Grey might be the best book I’ll never read and any dude who thinks otherwise needs to have his head looked into. I think a dude that owns a gun or an unnecessary half-ton seriously needs to know that it’s not the size that counts. Yes, I mean that.

I talk about my feelings with my wife. Feel good about doing it. Better yet, I listen to my wife talk about her feelings.

I saw a movie recently in which a typical Hollywood dude who had misplaced his shirt declared that “the battle of the sexes is over and we [men] won.” Seriously? That’s the corner he turned. I didn’t agree with this bouche-dag, with the writer who wrote that line for him, nor the inspiration of it. At least I wasn’t filled with a need to eat protein or “smack my bitch up.” I was distraught that anyone, ever, felt this sentiment needed to be expressed, that this huge backward step in human evolution needed to be declared, even lauded.

Modern man features absolutely nothing modern. Apparently, one too many viewings of (cause they ain’t reading it) Fight Club have led too many males to doubt themselves as such. Fellas, this is the wrong way to prove you’re a man, but a helluva way to prove you’re still monkeys. 

Guns, Revisited

     It feels far too familiar to be in the wake of a massive shooting, and then to hear people attempting to explain it. Motivations are sought, a particular individual's insanity is discussed, so that how isolated this incident may be, or how uniquely American this event was, can be attested. Thus, people can ignore the fact that a man was able to legally acquire guns with which he illegally employed them in the purpose for which they were made. A day from the Utøya massacre's first anniversary, and I've lost count of how many shootings like this have happened in the past year, in The U.S., but also in Toronto, Belgium, in supposedly more peaceful countries everywhere.

     This happened because a violent person had easy access to guns. Don't tell me he would have just found illegal guns if legal ones weren't so easy to buy. That's a justification, and besides, legal ones ARE too damn easy to acquire. Colorado has disturbingly lax gun laws: 
      http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/07/20/denver-shooting-movie-premiere.html.

     But ANY access to guns is wrong. No justifications. It is becoming routine after a killing like this to hear law-abiding, non-violent (?), "leisure," gun owners defending their liberties, touting some variation of an antiquated American amendment. It's not the madness of one person that sees a dozen people murdered. It is the pervading belief that this man could have done what he did no matter what, and just because he could buy an arsenal around the corner, and drums of ammunition online, we shouldn't be concerning ourselves with tougher gun laws or restricting use and ownership, they say.
     In 2012, I say again that there is no reason to own a gun. They're not tools, they're not toys, and those who defend the right to possess them in the wake of this "singular" tragedy are trivializing the lives of the victims in that theatre. Guns should be banned, legislate it. The costs to government are meaningless when measured against the lives taken. 

Southern Alberta in 2.5 Days

Last weekend, I let my tendency to overload myself with obligations get a little out of hand. However, it resulted in a pretty magnificent solo tour of Southern Alberta, and though I’m not sure this is the best way to see this province, it certainly drives in the stark contrasts of beauty within short reach of each other.

            I had just finished a week of work in Edmonton. Yes, I know that’s not Southern Alberta, but it’s framework. After a weekend at home in Strathmore, and a Canada Day performance with my band, I rolled down the hill to Drumheller, to a summer school I was starting work at for my ninth consecutive summer. Drumheller is a city that gets a bad rap sometimes. People see the touristy schlock as overwhelming, they find the population too transient, they hate how in the summer it’s five degrees hotter and in winter five degrees colder than the rest of the area on any given day. However, for almost a decade I’ve spent the first three weeks of every summer living there, and there isn’t a city in Canada that can’t show you its best side in that particular time frame, so you’ll excuse me if I have a soft spot for dinosaur-ville.

           

Thursday evening: Drumheller

            My students are part of the cast in the Canadian Badlands Passion Play, so I spent the evening watching rehearsals. The natural amphitheatre is spectacle enough, surrounded by the hoodoos of the Badlands, by the Neapolitan of those bentonite hills. It’s a well-known fact that on the site it’s five to ten degrees hotter than in town, making it sometimes fifteen degrees hotter than home, so I take my Nordic flesh and search for shade—there were no Vikings in first century Judea.

            A summer storm was drawn out by the heat, and for an hour we were pummeled by hail and then soaked by a deluge. Then the sky did what prairie summer skies do in the summer after a storm, and rehearsal resumed. During the last hour, a rainbow formed, complete from end to end. Then, a second rainbow formed above it, complete as well, and from the crowds of mock-Hebrews below came a chorus of YouTube-inspired praise for this spectacle.

The Passion Play post-storm

Friday: The Foothills and Crowsnest Pass

            I tore out of the valley just after my morning classes had finished, taking full advantage of a rare half-day at work. I stopped in Strathmore to make sure my marriage was still in good shape, transitioned my overnight bag, and then ripped out to the Pass.

            Alberta’s Highway 2, the QE2, is one of the worst driving experiences in Canada. I’m no sissy behind the wheel—I can handle heavy traffic and triple lanes. But’s it’s little better than an American freeway, a sad stretch of bumper-to-bumper, the view choked off by never-ending roadside capitalism, or its unappealing bush country if you go north of Panoka. The QE2 exists so that you may discover secondary highways.

            I plunged into the Foothills at Nanton, taking the 533 and 22 route to Blairmore and Coleman.

The Foothills. A lot of places claim to be God’s Country, but when mountains meet prairie, when the land appears to stretch and say it was meant to be occupied by greater things than us, and then you see the best of what this land has to offer. I don’t say this because I want to live there. I’ve no desire to ranch, and I got my fill of hurricane blow driers during the first twenty years of my life in Southwest Saskatchewan. But it’s one of the most heart-aching of landscapes, and despite being on the clock, I found myself stopping frequently to get out and hear the wind speak.

            I arrived in Coleman—just west of Blairmore—for a spaghetti supper and information session. I was a member of one of two teams from Strathmore that were running the Sinister 7 relay the next morning. After we had been properly fed and given some placebo information on what to do if you’re attacked by a bear (just saying “Kiss your ass goodbye” sounds defeatist), Kevin, Mike and the crew took me to the ski lodge we had rented for our teams. Most of them were making a weekend of it, but I only got the one night, so I took a few minutes to watch the sun set on the Pass before heading in for the night.

Sundown in the Pass

Saturday: Sinister 7 to Red Deer

            When you stay in the Pass in July, there’s the temptation to say you would like to move there. It’s inconceivably gorgeous, even for us prairie folk who are born with unshakable suspicion of vertical life. However, before you make any rash real estate decisions, I would suggest—just as with Drumheller and the Foothills—that you see how bearable it is in the winter first. Or, simply spend a night there camping with 1400 other runners, being blasted awake through the night by the horns of passing trains. Yeah, less than a bright side.

            Up just after 5 am, thanks in no small part to the good people of CP, I got ready to race. The Sinister 7 is a 148 km relay across the Pass over two days. I was running Leg 2, a 16km jaunt that would see me done before lunch. Some of the poor bastards on my team would be running in snow after midnight.

            We went down into Blairmore to cheer on our first two runners at the 7 am gun. Jason and Leanne were in one of those rare spots in the sport of running where you get a large crowd to cheer you on. There would be no such fanfare when Jason handed our team’s timing chip off to me, lucky bugger.

            Once we’d seen them off, us Leg 2 folks were piled onto school buses and shuttled up the mountain east of Frank’s Slide. We started at the base of Hasting’s Ridge, waiting on Jason. A few other runners came through before him: the hard-core Leg 1 folks, and even a few of the soloists. Yes, these were the masochistic sunsabitches running the entire 148 km in 25 hours on their own. Holy sweet fuck.

            When I got the chip, it was pretty much straight up for the first hour. Mountain trails up and across the world’s best range, with a view of Crowsnest Mountain and the Seven Sisters. Spectacular, though I admit I didn’t get much chance to admire it because I was too busy watching to see that I didn’t trip over a rock or tree root or cougar or bear—which they’d given us a 50/50 chance of coming upon. Holy sweet fuck.

            It was gorgeous, what I saw, and my eight months of running on a treadmill with full incline paid off, because I was able to run up all but the most stupid sheer climb at the 10k mark, which I had to resort to walking/scrambling. The down slopes were less than inspiring, because you can’t make much time when you’re hammering your feet to pulp on great chunks of broken national symbol, or when you’re mud-skiing slopes, your hands reaching out to grab random trees for balance and speed control. Passed through rocks, fire kill, and dense vegetation.

            There was a lot of good humour and camaraderie on these trails, despite the difficulty the course and the drive of most racers. Despite the fact that most of us were competitive half, full, and ultra-marathoners, after that first savage peak, we stopped worrying about our times and just worried about our feet.

            16.78k, 900+ up, 1100 down later, I was back in Blairmore and passed off to Rob, who was on duty for the even more abusive Leg 3. A quick visit with my friends, some pats on the back and high fives, and I wished them luck as I left for my car. Grabbed a sub and I was four-wheel bound again.

            Perhaps it was the post-race euphoria, but that lunch hour made the Foothills even more spectacular than the previous evening. Again, I stopped many times to take in the view—and to make sure my legs didn’t stiffen up.

On the way out of the Foothills

            I had learned that the QE2 north of Nanton was in full summertime construction mode, so I decided to veer off onto the 547, taking the 24 and 817 route home. From Foothills to purest, rolling Prairie. Canadian Prairie might not make your heart catch in your throat like the Rockies at sunset, but it will always be home. After the elevation run that morning, it was just nice to be looking at something flat.

            I stopped in Strathmore to shower and to shift my overnight bag from race to wedding mode, then out on the #9 and eventually to the goddam QE2 into Red Deer. Yes, I could’ve taken back roads the whole way, but sometimes 130 km per is in order. I made it to Red Deer in time for supper, and to dance the night away with my wife and kids. Still had enough in the tank for waterslides in the morning.

            I don’t recommend seeing hoodoos, foothills, mountains, and prairie in a forty-eight hour period, but I do recommend seeing them all at some time, and close enough together to appreciate the contrast. The beauty of my adoptive province hit me like an assault last weekend, and the easy transition of the topography was countered only by that dramatic disparity. God’s Country? Dunno, but certainly several slices of His favorite counties. 

Upon Seeing My Eldest Ride His Bike

     They're right when they tell you that the day your child is born it changes you. They're right when they point out to you how deeply affected you are by first words, first steps, first injuries. Those that pause for longer than a cliché will tell you that the world becomes big again when you see it with your children.
     A bike trailer became a favorite purchase, pulling my children around, sharing in the world that they see. Then yesterday it was time to get my oldest his first bike with training wheels.
     After supper, he nervously took it halfway down the block and back. Me beside him, righting him once when he almost tipped. Still, independence. The time where he will need to be attached to me for transportation, where my motion is his motion, is slipping away. I watched those sixteen inch wheels spin, the determined set of his jaw, the white knuckles on his handle bars.
     When they told me all that, they didn't mention the symbolism of a day like this.

Divided By Zero

Whenever I tell people that I’m a teacher I invariably hear, a) “I was a terrible kid—you would have hated teaching me,” and b) “There’s so much wrong with the education system. And kids these days are so lazy, entitled, and show no respect.”

                Everyone has gone through school, and for some reason that makes everyone an expert on the education system. It’s phenomenon unique to my profession. In learning how to drive a car, I never felt that I had acquired expertise on the finer points of internal combustion; I go to the hospital when I am injured, but I do not point out how I feel a surgeon can improve her methods; I enjoy a lobster once in a while, but I have no idea how to set, bait, or retrieve traps. You get the point.

                But because everyone goes to school, everyone is an expert on education. Sitting in classrooms for twelve years is apparently all you need to know about how education is implemented and modified. And because high school involves two groups that are more often than not despised by society at large for their laziness and pampered lifestyles (namely teens and teachers), when something controversial comes up, the reaction of the general public is often incomparably negative and inconceivably ignorant.

                When it came out last week that Edmonton Physics teacher Lynden Dorval had been suspended for not following his school’s “no zero” policy, the media pounced, and the masses leaped a foot in the air. It’s been everywhere lately, and the enraged surprise has me flabbergasted because none of this is new. Many school divisions have been using no zero polices, or something like them, for years. Dorval has just made a calculated decision—this was all done with intent—to bring it out fully to a public that may have been unaware.

                Unfortunately, because people are already experts on the education system, they attacked this with resounding ignorance, making no attempts to delve into the facts. If this were a Social Studies essay, they would have failed miserably. Bombardment! Facebook, Twitter, CBC Radio’s Unconventional Panel, Calgary Herald columnist Naomi Labritz—everyone has been shooting off their mouths, pens, and keyboards as to how the system is creating a bunch of spoiled brats who don’t know the meaning of working for results. All anyone has heard is “teacher fired for giving zeroes,” and it was picked up and sprinted with.

“Entitlement.”

“Rewarding laziness . . .”

“In my day . . .”

“In the real world . . .”

Dorval’s case hasn’t received the careful sort of analysis we would have our English Language Arts students use in approaching a character’s motivations. If you have heard the man interviewed, he’s not drawing a line in the sand with zeroes on one side and anarchy on the other. He has given his students every chance possible to get in late assignments, but at the end of the semester, if he doesn’t see the homework, zero it is. Personally, I agree with this approach. Dorval is 61, and the higher you go up the pension ladder, the more resistance you see to no zeroes, comment-based assessments, and floating due dates. He sounds like he has tried harder to bend than a lot of those more jaded by years in this profession—just not quite hard enough.

Is he being fired? I think he’s chosen to retire with a very loud bang.

Assessment For (as opposed to Of) Learning is not an “every kid wins even if she does nothing” philosophy, as critics in newspaper columns would have us believe as they dump buckets of dirt into clean wells.

School is there to teach first, to impart knowledge. It is a place for trial and error, so if a kid performs a task and the only feedback he gets is 7/10, where does he go with that? How does he improve? School does not exist only to “prepare kids for the real world”—that preparation comes from the combination and synthesis of the information they get from school, parents, and personal experiences.

And what is this “real world” that keeps getting preached, anyway? This “if you don’t do it and do it right the first time, you get fired” world where no one has even had a mother who loved him and every Boomer is the model of hard work and professionalism?

Is this the real world where we ask for extended deadlines on projects, knowing that the quality of the project trumps all? Is this the real world where you wait half an hour for service from a disinterested clerk in an electronics store? Is this the real world where you order your steak medium rare and get chicken? Do these people lose their jobs? Puh­-lease. I think you’re confusing reality with ideality—your ant-hill utopia doesn’t exist.

Overall, I have a pretty similar approach to Dorval. When every last chance has been exhausted, I do give a zero. But then, my school division doesn’t have a policy like his, so zeroes are a resort I have access to. That’s what they are, though, a last resort. I avoid giving marks as punishment. My job is not to punish, nor to teach that the only valuable pursuit is reward, nor to present kids with some dog-eat-dog depiction of a world that doesn’t exist. My job is to teach, to help kids turn themselves into people who can think for themselves.

Hopefully, they will learn to consider the facts of an issue before firing off an opinion on it, and accept that because they have experienced the results of a system, they may not be experts on how it works. 

Productive Art

                Art. For something mean to be a celebration, a term that is supposed to have the positive ramifications of, say, “joy” or “love,” it certainly is a divisive idea.

                Art brings joy, and it expresses love. We accept that these are good things, and yet they are not quantifiable. Art, on the other hand, is treated with nervous suspicion. It’s as if, as ideas go, Art is some sort of unwashed uncle with limitless untapped potential who just loafs on the couch all day. What good can Art do if you can’t count its virtues?

                I was out for a run the other night when I stopped to speak with one of my town councilors. He addressed our town’s consideration of forming an Arts Council, and the troubles entailed. How can a town of over 10, 000 people justify all the golf courses and hockey arenas you could ask for, but we have no museum, no gallery, and our local theatre group has often been forced to put on shows in a barn at the rodeo grounds?

                Because Art, as I said, is often treated with suspicion, or at least a suspicion of its purposes. People can see validity in entertainment for entertainment’s sake, but Art for Art’s sake they find rather icky. No judgement is made of television, a mindless medium many people dedicate the majority of their evenings to consuming, because it’s entertainment. Art, while it can often be entertaining—and I’d argue, when it’s best should always be—is about something richer, something more fulfilling. I’ve been stuck on Julia Cameron’s definition: “Making [A]rt is making love to life.”

                I suppose, as with most I see wrong in the world, once again it’s capitalism’s fault. Capitalism is just a human version of one of our most basic mammalian behaviours: win. Taken at its most base, that’s all living for money is, a more eloquent version of what monkeys do: eat, fuck, sleep.

                Art for Art’s sake is often viewed with a cocked eyebrow by most people (and by the major levels of government in this country). People who work exclusively for money cannot seem to fathom doing anything without doing it to accumulate capital. If you do something and you make money doing it, you can push the furthest boundaries of morality and you’ll still have reams of supporters. But do something for the sheer joy of doing it, because you’re expressing yourself or because you want to explore an idea and you risk being labelled lunatic, hippie, or—worst of all—non-contributor. Art does not always toss slop into the trough.

                Recently, I completed a history text. I found this overall to be a great experience, unfamiliar and refreshing. As I learned the history of what I was writing about, I also stretched my creative muscles to fit the information into the concept and the parameters of length and design. History writing has a very specific style and a purpose, it calls for careful creativity. I succeeded, I was rewarded.

                I encountered a friend just after finishing the text and told him about it, and he became fixated on the topic of how much I made doing it. When I tried to share my joy with him, or even a historical anecdote which I was packed full of, his brows knitted.

                “Yeah, but how much did you make?”

                This was his only concern, his only interest in the project.

                When you make Art, you struggle with enough inner guilt that you don’t need this exterior stuff. Hell, I’ve struggled with guilt in composing this very blog because I am only a partial—I have yet to abandon my day job, because I need the money. I see my slight hypocrisy there, though I would argue I don’t live for the money.

                I imagine there are no artists who haven’t struggled with guilt over doing what they do. Why? What’s the purpose? What am I saying? What am I accomplishing?

                I had a little epiphany when considering my own Art/guilt struggle, it’s what led to this blog. I’ve been struggling with why I write what I write. I don’t write exclusively to entertain. I suppose there’s some expression of the human condition in it, but that’s always felt like pale philosophy in search of a moral to me. I enjoy playing with language and telling tales. The epiphany occurred—as so many do—while I was playing with my children. They were telling me about their days, in language rife with errors and non-sequitors. The plot of this day mattered much less than the details of a cheese sandwich or a game of tag. The quality of their language, their ability to express joy, sadness, elation and pain, is improving daily. This, I realized, is the importance of what I do: I use language, the triumph of humanity, most significant of inventions, and I push it as far as I can. This separates us from the beasts. Unlike money. 

More Than Meh

     I was recently called out by someone I respect. This is a person of some celebrity who has a large group of keen listeners, readers, and online followers. He writes a column for a city publication and, without naming me directly, took exception to something I said in the column and via social media. This a person I respect, understand, though we do not agree on too many things the same outside of a love for beer and football teams.
     The dispute stemmed from his sharing on Facebook the comments of someone whose ideologies rarely align with my own. The commentator was being intentionally provocative about the Quebec student protests (from his comfortable spot in Alberta, where a bash against Quebec is always a safe bet). He then went on to belittle those who replied to his comments.
     I commented on the thread, and my esteemed friend, who had reposted the thread in the first place, asked me to justify my feelings that it is an Albertan cliche to attack protesters, be they Quebec students, members of the Occupy Movement, striking CP employees or, god help us, teachers or nurses. I got into one of those "I respect you but don't know you" Facebook debates with a person who also has a completely different political, ideological and possibly ethical leaning than myself. Those aren't always much use.
     My friend, the one person of the three I actually know, commented in his column that I was glomming him into the masses, those who belittle all forms of protest, those who feel that their own opinions of why a protest is happening justify telling protesters to shut up from the safety of their own couch. Perhaps I did, though that was not my intent.
     The single stopping point, that is, the point where we do not agree, is on the judgement of the student protesters in Quebec. I don't know how it's being reported in the rest of the country, but in Alberta what we're hearing on most media is how low tuition has been in Quebec, and the opining has leaned towards calling the protesters spoiled babies who are making the Charest government into villains for doing their jobs. The Charest government are doing that well enough on their own, introducing a despicable anti-assembly law in the same vein as the feds' back-to-work legislation.
     When I was in university, if I would have seen a drastic hike in my tuition, you can be damn sure I would've taken to the streets as well. I would not have looked to my East or my West and said, "Shucks, I'm doing better than those guys." I would have gone after a government that has traditionally done a terrible job of funding post-secondary education and called them out for their lack of creativity, for saddling the cost on the people least-equipped to bear the load. This is the sort of thing that can turn the wary away from an education, and the idea frightens me.
     My education has created an arrogance in me that I must be cautious of. However, since long before I had finished my degrees, in the days where Canada Student Loans annually found some giant roadblock to throw in front of me (such as counting my father's farm machinery as liquid assets), I have been afraid of people accepting that they won't go to university because of costs, and instead taking the fast track to easy money. "I'll take my Grade 12, work in the oil patch, exploit, consume, and die having accomplished . . . what?"
     My umbrage stemmed from the comments regarding these students that echoed so many I have heard regarding protest of late.
     "Accept. Relent."
     "It could be worse."
     Is this what we've resorted to, saying that life's good enough, don't complain? Don't seek to make it better? Don't point out injustice when you see it? And to pointing fault in the deeds of anyone who does not feel they should do the same?
     I welcome protest in all forms, because protest is dialogue. Do I agree with religious crackpots bashing gay marriage on the front steps of the White House? No. But I allow that they should have the right to express themselves so that I may weigh their arguments and decide where I stand.
     Complacency has been the Western Canadian operating word for a decade or more. Apathy and lethargy are the greatest threats to freedom of speech.