A Lament For A Lost BlackBerry

Today I did a foolish thing.

I was walking home in the rain, and I jammed my BlackBerry down into a coat pocket full of mittens for safe-keeping, and it fell out of that crowded shelter unnoticed onto the sidewalk.

Precious minutes passed before I noticed its absence, and retracing my steps –just a few short blocks– failed to return my lost smartphone to me.

I feel adrift in a way I find difficult to articulate.

I had that BlackBerry for just over a year, and I now have great difficulty imagining a single day without it. Leaving my home even for a short trip to the grocery store without it on my person feels wrong. I should say I am not a ‘phone person.’ I cannot recall ever using up my daytime minutes or exceeding my monthly allotment of text messages. I never exceeded my 1 GB of monthly data, and –with the exception of a poorly planned expedition to Pittsburgh– I never incurred unexpected or excessive charges on the phone in any way. Yet I feel lost without it, adrift and cut off. Naked.

I am consumed with the thought that I let it down somehow. Honestly, it feels as though I’ve disappointed a friend.

I remember my 28th birthday, responding to a hundred well-wishers from the comfort of my bed without even needing to put my glasses on.

I remember my first blizzard with a smartphone, and bundling up appropriately without ever looking out a window because it told me what to expect.

I remember the 7 a.m. fire in my apartment building, and tweeting about it on the long spiral descent down the staircase.

I remember my aunt and grandmother raising a pair of orphaned starling chicks to adulthood, and taking pictures of them eating minced dog food from a spoon.

I remember a hundred early mornings where my phone gave me a two-minute warning when to leave my house to catch my bus.

I’ve composed blog posts on that phone.

I’ve edited my novels on that phone.

I’ve kept in touch with friends around the world on that phone.

I’ve tried and failed to take a picture of my cat with that phone –she distrusts the flash.

We’ve gone canoeing together. We’ve gone skating together. We’ve chased fireflies together. We’ve gone through art galleries and museums and forests and prairies together. We’ve journeyed across North America together, and we’ve shared our discoveries and musings in idle moments with a convenience that staggers me, staggers me such that I can’t imagine how I ever conveyed my thoughts out into the world before it came into my life.

And I dropped it onto a wet and rainy sidewalk carelessly, and a stranger scooped it up. I’ll never see it again.

How thoughtless of me. How careless. How inconsiderate.

With a heavy heart I went to my service provider’s store, cancelled my phone, and purchased a new one, sleeker and slimmer and faster and smarter. I’ve had it less than six hours, and it is now useless: The first OS update has rendered it a gibbering imbecile, unable to boot. It’s a lemon. Tomorrow I will replace it as well, and perhaps one day soon the next new phone will find a place in my existence as comfortable and welcome and familiar as its predecessor.

Somehow that feels wrong.

I cannot shake the feeling I have disappointed an inanimate object somehow. It deserved better from me. It was a trusty friend, asking little and giving much, and it literally fell away from me in a moment of unforgivable inattention.

I’m sorry, BlackBerry. I’m so sorry.

My Top 11 Tweets of 2011

Hello everyone!

Another year has come and gone, and my foray into micro-blogging continues to entertain and distract me in odd moments that I would otherwise spend staring into space waiting for a bus. As I promised this time last year, I’ve put together my top eleven tweets of 2011. Enjoy!

November 5, 2011

Sudden thought: Why is there a jail in Monopoly? I’m playing a capitalist with huge swaths of real estate. My kind don’t go to prison…

October 27, 2011

Lipton could bottle today’s weather and market it with a series of claymation parodies (it’s brisk, I guess is what I’m trying to say).

(For those of you who don’t get the reference, here’s some context.)

September 6, 2011

My reaction to the first day of school: “That will take care of all those troublesome kids.” I think I’m becoming a Scooby Doo villain.

August 28, 2011

Got my good deed for the day out of the way early (caught an escaped dog for an older lady). Now I can dedicate the rest of my day to evil.

August 21, 2011

I’m in a used bookstore. Along one wall are shelves for Religion and for Science. The bookcase between the two is labeled ‘Unexplained.’

June 4, 2011

Things you learn at 1 a.m.? Card-carrying communists bring tambourines to karaoke. Who knew?

April 24, 2011

Bachelor achievement unlocked: I have worn out my can opener.

March 28, 2011

Geoff of the Future? Buy cat food. The natives are getting restless. Sincerely, Geoff of the Past (your biggest fan!)

February 14, 2011

I like the word lampooning: It’s like harpooning without the attempted murder. You’re only stabbing someone with your words.

February 8, 2011

Okay Tuesday *rolls head left and right until a pop-click sounds from both directions* let’s dance!

January 8, 2011

Had some company over to see the new apartment. Best compliment? “Now there’s the television of a man who reads books!”

- – -

Anyway, I make no claims to any of this being great writing, but I have a lot of fun with Twitter, and I look forward to continuing with it in 2012. All the best to you and yours in the New Year!

I Yust Go Nuts At Christmas by Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Stewart)

Hello everyone!

I’ve written a great deal about my mother’s father, Murray Anderson, on this blog, but very little about my father’s father, Philip Micks. Philip passed away before I got a chance to know him, and I can probably count the number of two-minute anecdotes I have about him on one hand. That said, every Christmas I get a reminder of the man I never knew, and it never fails to paint a picture.

My unknown grandfather’s favourite piece of Christmas music was a 1949 recording by Harry Stewart. Stewart was a radio and night club comedian whose shtick was built around well-meaning stereotypes; he found a lot of success with the character Yogi Yorgesson, a Swedish Hindu mystic who eventually devolved into an excuse to mispronounce words in a thick Scandinavian accent and tell ‘aw shucks’ stories about life as a suburban paterfamilias in late-40s, early-50s America.

Stewart sold a million records of Yogi Yorgesson’s attempts at Christmas Carols, and I’m told one particular song was my late grandfather’s personal favourite. It always bring a smile to my face, and as it is little-known Christmas song today I thought I would share it with you:

I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas

By Yogi Yorgesson (Harry Steward)

Oh, I yust go nuts at Christmas,
On that yolly holiday,
I’ll go in the red –like a knucklehead–
Cause I squander all my pay!

Oh, I yust go nuts at Christmas,
Shopping sure drives me berserk.
On the day before I rush in a store
Like a poor bewildered jerk.

I look at nightgowns for my wife,
Dose black ones trimmed in red.
But, I won’t know her size, and so,
She’ll get a carpet sweeper instead!

Oh, I yust go nuts at Christmas,
Ven each kid hangs up his sock.
It’s a time for kids to flip der lids,
While der papa goes in hock.

On da night before Christmas,
It’s still in the house.
My family is sleeping,
So I’m quiet like a mouse.
I look at my vatch, and midnight is near:
I tink I’ll sneak out for a cold glass of beer.
Down at the corner the crowd is so merry,
I end up by drinking about twelve Tom & Yerry…

I get to bed late, and yee whiz how I’m sleeping,
Ven on to my bed dose darn kids dey come leaping!

Dey sit on my face, and day yump on my belly,
And I’m quivering all over, like a bowl full of yelly.
Dey scream Merry Christmas, and my poor vife and me,
Ve stumble downstairs, and she lights up da tree…

My head is exploding. My mouth tastes like a pickle.
I step on a skate, and fall on a tricycle.

Yust befor Christmas dinner, I relax to a point,
Den relatives start svarming all over da yoint!
On Christmas I hug and I kiss my vife’s mother…
Da rest of da year, err… ve don’t speak to each other.

After dinner, my aunt, and my vife’s Uncle Louie,
Get into a argument; dere both awful screwy.
Den all of my vife’s family say Louie is right,
And my goofy relations, dey yoin in da fight.

Back in da corner, da radio is playing,
And over da racket Gabriel Heatter is saying,
“Peace on Earth everybody, and good vill toward men…”
And yust at dat moment, someone slugs Uncle Ben.
Dey all run outside vhooping for da neighbours will hear,
Oh, I’m so glad Merry Christmas comes just once a year…

Oh, I yust go nuts at Christmas,
but I still have lots of fun!
Yust the same as you,
I enyoy it too…
Merry Christmas everyone one!

- – -

Merry Christmas, everyone. My very best to you and yours this Holiday Season.

My 100th Blog Post: Faceintheblue, 100,000 Readers and Counting

Hello everyone,

I started this blog on October 24, 2009, at the urging of a friend who has also dragged my reluctant self kicking and screaming into an appreciation of hip hop, Twitter, and e-publishing. Apparently, I owe him a great deal of thanks for his well-meant browbeating: This is my 100th post in a little over two years, and sometime early next week I can expect to welcome my 100,000th reader.

It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable ride so far. I am still impressed with the number of people who run a Google search for ‘Guns used during the Great Depression.’  I remain less enthused at the lack of interest in my long and rambling annecdotes, but as those are the bread and butter of a personal blog I’ll keep putting them up as the spirit moves me. One day, someone is bound to enjoy them half as much as I do.

I marvel at some of the people I have met through this site. Thanks to my post about one of my ancestors founding the town of Kenmore, Ontario, I got in touch with a 102-year-old fourth-cousin four-times removed who helped me trace one branch of my family tree back to 1720s Scotland. My deep and abiding appreciation for the Beatles on Ukulele project has put me in contact with the organizers and some of the artists. I’m long overdue for a new post on that site, and I suppose I’ll have to set aside a Saturday this December to do it justice. I’ve also connected with several people whose fathers and grandfathers served with my grandfather, Murray Anderson, on the HMCS Drumheller during the Second World War.

There are a number of things I’ve been proud to share with you all over the last couple of years: My grandfather’s eulogy, the publishing of my first novel, my love of notable quotes, everything I know about dancing, how men feel about barbers, and just about anything I have to say about poetry. Your positive feedback has meant a great deal to me, and  I would like to encourage you all to add your comments whenever you like. I write for me, but I’m also writing for you, and I’m happy to produce more of what speaks to you, whether that’s Canadian history or Russian art or things I’ve eaten with my fingers. I’ll do what I can to give value for your visits.

Anyway, that’s the update from FaceInTheBlue 25 months in. It’s been fun so far. Thank you all for reading. As I said in my 1000th Tweet, “Without you, I’m just whistling in the dark.”

November 17: A Day of Amnesty to Remove People from the Facebook Friends List

Hello everyone,

I’ve just posted the following on Facebook, and it occurred to me it’s worth putting up on this blog as well.

Last year Jimmy Kimmel declared November 17th to be National Unfriend Day, and I thought that was a great idea: There should be one day a year where we can just clean out our friends list without guilt, angst, or recrimination. In 2010 I believe I removed something like 50 people. Only one of them complained, and since I re-added him we have not exchanged so much as a ‘like’ to any comment or post. This year I’m going to shoot for 100, and I don’t think I’m wrong in guessing it will be a pretty easy process. For the sake of clarity, I thought I’d write a note ahead of time to explain my reasoning and also perhaps campaign for others to adopt this purge for their own purposes.

What do we really use Facebook for?

Facebook is about keeping in touch with friends and family and acquaintances of all distances and distinctions. I’m all for that, and I revel in the fact that we live in a world where I can remain in touch with childhood friends and old co-workers and people who I’ve never met in person but with whom I share common interests. The trouble is that not all Facebook friendships remain relevant or active after their first beginnings, but a window has been created into our lives that will remain permanently open unless we actively seek to close it.

As of the writing of this note, I have 426 Facebook friends. To my understanding that is neither an unusually high number nor a remarkably low number, but it is certainly not representative of how many people I care about, in all the connotations of that term.

I’ve come up with three questions that I am going to ask every name on my list on November 17th:

1) Would I feel comfortable congratulating you on a marriage or the birth of a child?

2) If I sent you a message or asked a question on your wall, would I expect an answer within a week?

3) Can I recall the last time we had a meaningful interaction –either in person or online– and do I hold out realistic expectations that we will do so again in the foreseeable future?

If my answer to more than one of those questions is a no, exactly why do we need access to our daily thoughts and activities? These questions speak to my levels of trust, comfort, interest, and respect. There’s no reason to feel perpetually awkward with people on your friends list.

I’m Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo 2011

Hello everyone,

I’ll be trying by hand at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) again this year. As you may remember from last year, it’s an internet community project where thousands of people around the world try to write a 50,000-word manuscript between November 1st and November 30th. Last year I only managed 34,000 words, but I have high hopes of hitting my goal this time around.

I’m going to deviate a little from the original premise of the contest, in that I’m not planning on doing an original project from scratch. While I enjoyed the exercise last year –and it definitely helped shake some rust off the old writing toolbox– I’ve found myself wishing I had put those hours into something I plan to finish. I don’t think I’ve made it a secret that I’ve written a couple of works of historical fiction already (one of which I have e-published), and a third project has been in the works for the better part of four years now. I will produce tens of thousands of words of first draft nonsense towards that project in the next thirty days, and I’m sure some of it will be of some use towards a finished third novel.

Wrimos, as we are apparently called, keep in touch through the website, blogs, and hopefully meet up in early December at bars all over the world to commiserate and swap war stories. My profile on the site is also calledFaceintheblue, so I should be easy to track down; I encourage anyone reading this who is also doing NaNoWriMo to add me as a buddy. A community is only as rich as its members, after all.

I also encourage you to follow me on twitter here, as I’m bound to complain heartily over the course of the month, and everyone likes to hear colourful rhetoric in the place of thoughtful prose from time to time.

For anyone who’s interested but not already involved, you can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Perhaps we’ll fail spectacularly together, but I suspect we’re going to have a lot of fun doing it.

Good luck to you, to me, and to all of this year’s Wrimos. Cheers!

The Tallest Man on Earth: Walk The Line

I came across this song three or four weeks back, and I can’t get it out of my head. I find myself listening to it on repeat for hours at a time, and so I thought I’d share it. I know nothing about the artist. I know nothing about the message. There’s just something about it that I can’t ignore. It’s like a landslide, relentless, inevitable, that holds my rapt attention. Here are the lyrics:

The Tallest Man On Earth

Walk The Line

Well it’s the season of thunder,
And the season of rain.
All the little angels are growing wings of pain.

And I see no point in asking.
There’s no point of return.
When I steal those rings, well I know I’ll have to burn.

He said you bring me down, oh child.
He said you bring me down, oh child.

And I will fly through the lightning.
When the thunder will strike.
All tomorrow’s parties will dance before my eyes.

And I will scream like an eagle,
When i fly above your house,
Just to bring salvation to peasants and their wives.

He said you bring me down, oh child.
He said you bring me down, oh child.
I ain’t gonna walk the line!

Well I see Jesus and Judas,
Making love now of course,
And all the Roman emperors hanging up their whores.

And I see no point in landing.
I see no need to learn.
From the day we’re lifted we know we’ll have to burn.

He said you bring me down, oh child.
He said you bring me down, oh child.
I ain’t gonna walk the line!

I said, “Please, don’t shoot me down.”
I said, “Please, don’t shoot me down.” Oh!
I said, “Please, don’t shoot me down.”
I said, “Please, don’t shoot me down.” Oh!
I ain’t gonna walk the line!

I feel the arrows and bullets,
They are combing my hair,
And all my feathers falling so slowly from the air.

And from the speed of my body,
Earth will pile up my bones,
From my little skull –Oh!– just a little whisper comes

He said, Oh! Bring me down, oh child.
He said you bring me down oh child…
I ain’t gonna walk the line… Oh… Oooh…

- – -

Again, I have no analysis, no frame of reference. I’m mesmerized by the thought of sitting around a campfire with this fellow with his acoustic guitar. I smell pine trees, and there’s a lake somewhere nearby, with the gentle murmur of waves lapping against canoes grounded in the sand. I can’t explain why, but it’s just a gorgeous mental image that I can’t quite shake. I hope you enjoy it.

A Few Thoughts on the Life and Legacy of Jack Layton

As a rule, I don’t blog about daily events. Things that seem important in the heat of the moment so often fade and blur with the healing balms of time and distance, and I want these posts to have longevity and relevance beyond the moments of creation. I doubt I’m violating that principle now: The world is a little dimmer and darker than it was yesterday, and I suspect a void has been created in Canadian public discourse that will never be truly filled.

This morning shortly before 9 a.m. I read on Twitter that Jack Layton had passed away. I felt like a stone had hit me between the eyes. I’ve spent the last twelve hours in a daze, reading obituaries and an outpouring of grief from Canadians across the political spectrum. Friends and foes alike, no one can ignore the dull thud of sad fact being committed to unchangeable history. Canada lost a giant today, a lion cut down in his prime after an incredible life-long story of struggle and hard work and perseverance.

I ache that Pierre Berton died almost seven years ago: Jack was his kind of character; Berton’s unwritten words of off-hand admiration –the wry twist on a matter-of-fact retelling of the improbable-but-true– would have formed a lasting tribute worthy of commemorating that remarkable breed of Canadian politician, neither boring nor crazy nor insincere.

I appreciate that many of my readers are not Canadian, so perhaps I should take a moment to give a little context: When people say that all politicians are crooks and cheats and liars who will say or do anything to get elected, somewhere deep inside of you exists a belief that there are exceptions, even polar opposites to that statement. The Honourable Jack Layton was that sterling example of what you always hoped a politican would be, could be, should be. Jack really was a dedicated public servant. He really did work incredibly hard to make things better. I didn’t agree with his entire party platform –even members of his caucus often quibbled with some of his decisions– but no one ever said he wasn’t the genuine article. No one ever said he was in it for himself. He wore his heart on a sleeve rolled-up to allow for serious effort, and he did his best to make friends and neighbours and total strangers happier through a combination of optimism, seeking the middle ground, and never letting a lesser politician get a superior quotation in the media.

Thousands of people better qualified than I have spent today talking about his life and his politics and his contribution to Canadian history. I have little to add to that, except to say that I met Jack somewhere between a dozen and a score of times, and I was always impressed that he really did care. I spent three semesters going to school in his riding, and I lived there for a year and a half some years later, at least in part because I admired him as a man and as a representative of the people: He never missed an opportunity to participate in the things that mattered to his constituents, and he never played politics with the things that shouldn’t matter but political handlers agonize over.

The first time I met him he was wearing one of those hand-knit sweaters that even Annie Liebovitz couldn’t make look flattering. A little starstruck, I complimented the woolen wonder for lack of anything better to say, and without missing a beat he said, “Well, I knew it would be cold in here.” I remember reading once that shortly after becoming leader of the NDP someone in the party ran a survey to see whether voters liked his mustache. When he found out, he called over a media scrum and said something to the effect of, “The only person who gets an opinion about my mustache is my wife, and she likes it!”

He was a straight-shooter, and when he shook your hand and made small-talk, you really had the sense that in that minute or two he cared about whatever you had to say. The only politician I ever gave my email to was Jack. Again, I’m not a party member. He was that good.

It occurs to me I keep calling him Jack. I’ve shaken Stephen Harper’s hand. I’ve met Bob Rae half a dozen times or more. I admire them both in their way, but I wouldn’t dream of calling them by their first name, let alone the familiar diminutive of John Gilbert Layton, the man the majority of Canadians would have liked to have a beer with and perhaps see as Prime Minister one day –whether they liked his politics or not.

When Jack announced he was taking a leave of absence –when he looked so drawn and thin and weary– I strongly suspected it would come to this. Maybe not in four weeks, but I worried I would never hear from him again. When Jack had prostrate cancer he said so and wore a blue tie, and he fought the good fight and he beat that damned disease into the dust; then he campaigned across the second-largest country in the world with a strut and swagger only embellished by a cane. This ‘new cancer’ was never labelled, and I’m sure that was a mercy: Jack knew he was going to go, and he didn’t want his name attached to a fatal prognosis in the mind of other Canadians suffering the same dreaded illness. I don’t know if he died of lymphoma or liver cancer or lung cancer, and I hope we never learn what finally laid him low. Fighting cancer is a life and death struggle, and Jack made the conscious decision to throw himself on the grenade and keep his death sentence a private matter, even when you could see it written on his face, hear the quaver in his voice.

My e-book, Inca, is now live on Smashwords

Hello everyone,

In addition to Amazon’s Kindle store, My e-book is now also available through Smashwords.

For those of you with Kobo, Nook, Diesel, or Sony E-Readers, this should now work without any issues. Some of the formatting may be simplified during the conversion process, but all the prose is still there.

For those of you who are just running a search on Smashwords, apparently my book is being censored off the list for having adult situations. There’s enough sex and violence in the story that I ticked the box when they asked, but now that I know it limits my visibility I’m going to review the terms and conditions tomorrow to see if I can opt out of it.

I’ll have further updates and details on this soon. In the meantime, happy reading!

You Don’t Need a Kindle E-Reader to Read My E-Book, Inca

Not necessary to read my e-book. It certainly doesn't hurt, of course.

Hello everyone,

A couple of people have told me they can’t read my e-book, Inca, because they don’t have a Kindle E-Reader. I thought I’d better put up a quick blog post saying you don’t need one. If you have a computer, laptop, netbook, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android Smartphone, or anything along those lines, Amazon offers a free app that will let you read any e-book from their Kindle bookstore. It prompts you as soon as you try to make a purchase: Amazon needs an Amazon program on your device to send the book to, but it will give you their reader software for free.

Now there is one small hitch: There are some proprietary e-readers (Kobo, Sony, Nook) that do not play well with Amazon. They have their own online bookstores, and they do not permit Kindle files onto their hardware. In the next week or two I will publish compatible versions of my e-book onto their stores as well. I wanted to start with Amazon because it is the industry leader, and I hope that by concentrating my sales on one site I might more quickly climb out of the anonymity of the hundreds of thousands of other e-books also available for your consideration by authors who are not me.

I was hoping to wait longer, but I will of course accelerate my plans if it’s putting anyone out. There will be updates on that soon, I’m sure.

Happy reading!

–Geoff

Update: Non-kindle formats are now available at Smashwords.com!