Monthly Archives: April 2008

alone again, naturally…

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because we have my mom visiting we decided to spend some time shoreward and so tracy found a nice suite for us just a few blocks away. funny thing was, l couldn’t stay there last night. we turned out the lights, snuggled into this 4-foot thick king-sized bed, and i proceeded to stare at the ceiling. it was too soft, too hot, and too stifling. the poor dog was panting to beat all hell. i endured it for as long as i could, then got up, pulled on my pants, and told tracy the dog and i were spending the night one the boat. she thought i was crazy, but it was actually a relief to climb back aboard and hear the wind and water and feel her gentle movements as she tugged at her moorings.

this is rather disconcerting  - i don’t know that i could live on shore again. of course i’ve done it several times since we first moved aboard, but this was different in that i couldn’t sleep. i came home and was asleep within half and hour. and it was a dream being able to stretch out in the v-berth, the one place aboard i’ve felt for awhile that was too small. 
sometimes it’s nice to be home without anyone else around and sometimes it’s nice to be able to sleep alone. don’t know hat it’s gonna happen again as it’s gotten a lot windier and she’s really bouncing around now. it will be tough to sleep with this kind of motion.
i was thinking – my first job many years ago paid 6 bucks an hour. my first “career” job netted me about 12 an hour. this would have been in the early eighties. my daughter just flipped the bird to starbucks, who were paying her 9 bucks an hour. what’s the difference? well, when i was pulling in those great gobs of cash back then, gas was well under 50 cents a litre, and rent for my first apartment in surrey was $160.00/month. i bought myself a new car, paid for food, gas, booze, rent, and helped put tracy through university. 
my daughter can’t afford a car, rooms with three other people and pays $450.00/month in rent.
starbucks and all those other retailers like them that pay these crap wages are royally screwing the kids that work there; i think people should boycott them. seems to me that timmies pays twelve to fourteen an hour. not a royal wage either, but at least kind of keeping up with inflation. so if you go there, think if your latte is worth supporting such a corporation. that girl is working for the price of two lattes an hour, and yet watch the flow of customers and cash…

time to sell the boat?

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but we are seriously considering selling fainleog. not just considering, i told tracy to go ahead and sell it. and then retracted a bit because i couldn’t stand it. right now we (i) am/are waffling, but only because i’m over emotional. the end of dreams.

i worked my ASS off last week. i can’t remember when i was so sore or so exhausted. i actually fell asleep at 7:00 saturday night and slept 13 hours. it’s these home renos; i shifted almost a ton of cement single handed three times on friday, and i’m used to a desk job and terribly out of shape. most guys my age are looking at getting out of the business or hiring on some young spark to do the grunt work and i’m just starting. late bloomer they call it, i guess. but there’s an enormous amount of work to be had out here for this kind of stuff and the pay is amazing.
what does it have to do with being a writer – which is what i am, btw –  absolutely nothing, but it pays the bills in a way that the arts cannot.
the dream was adopting the simple life – living aboard and writing. i’ve done it for almost a year now and love it, but i need to bring in more money so off to work i go.
i have no problem doing the work, but there’s a fundamental problem with the notion of working to own something that you really can’t use because you’re busy working to own it. that’s the paradox that describes most people’s lives, but the difference is that i’m fully aware of it and don’t want to play that game. we figured out that tracy has less than two weeks to go sailing this year, and we have been able to use the boat only once since xmas. and for this i’m changing careers to pay for it? doesn’t make sense. i want to live aboard, but there’s a hell of a lot of ways of doing that without going down the road we are on right now.
and it’s much harder living aboard a boat like this when you come home burnt out. when life is slow and sedate you can deal with the little stresses of such a small space, but when you are worn out and want a tub, it’s a lot more difficult.
i remember one guy telling me about his unfulfilled dreams of cruising – he either had the money and no time to depart for distant horizons, or he had the time but not the money to own the boat that would take him there. he described it as either having the horse of the saddle but not both at the same time.
simplicity. simplicity and freedom. unfortunately, fainleog can’t give us both. selling her means forgoing the dream of distant shores, but allows both tracy and i to fully adopt the lifestyle that we wanted. the future cruising was just an added bonus, and so far isn’t happening in the foreseeable future anyway. by selling fainleog we can purchase a much less expensive, much roomier and more comfortable floating home. i can go back to my writing and tracy can take as much time off as she likes. not that we will be able to go sailing with that time, but that’s the paradox.
the only reason i haven’t definitively said just sell it is the possibility of paying of fainleog and sundry expenses by working my ass off for a period of time. sounds great in theory but i have my doubts. and if there’s one truth i’ve learned over many many years is that the simpler i make life, the happier i feel. life is actually quite complicated for us right now, which is one reason why we have only sailed once since december. 
and yachts don’t grow on trees. but you don’t have to own a yacht to live aboard, nor one capable of safely sailing to hawaii or mexico.
choices, choices.

i don’t think it’s hyperbole and we better get used to it

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i just read an article about soaring food costs expected to soar in Canada,following what has already happened in the third world. there’s nothing herethat we haven’t known was coming since the 70s. but because it was just atheory (like climate change), we could all turn our heads and pretend that ourlives were not built on some very real physical principles, and one we’ve knownfor a long time was unsustainable.

i’m not talking a apocalypse here; i just see a massive shift in western culture away from an enlightenment ideal of a high standard of living for all and a return to the kind of civilisation where a few elites have everything and everyone else scrabbles to survive as best they can. what else can you expect? for 7000 years this has been the normal way that human beings organised their lives; this little 20th century experiment that was so successful (if you happened to live in the west) came about because of one simple fact – abundant, cheap energy in the form of fossilised dinosaurs, swamp grass and prawns. the overall distribution of wealth didn’t change -the elites are just as elite now as they have been throughout history (although perhaps there might be more of them these days), but that the entire distribution curve has risen an incredible amount, buoyed on the back of oil. and the oil is running out.

oil and the basics of modern life are utterly intertwined. without oil, agricultural production plummets because most fertiliser is petroleum based. also, inefficient small scale farming has been abandoned for large scale mechanised farming that requires cheap fuel for  machinery. and then there’s transportation requirements to distribute the food.

it’s not that we need oil to grow food; that part has been a recent development; however, we need to oil to have the wonderful selection of out-of season fruits and veggies that we have at the local market. not to mention japanese oranges, salvadorian bananas, and french truffles. start getting use to the idea of porridge and beets unless you happen to be one of those elites.

and don’t expect “them” to come to the rescue, either. you will not be able to get a conversion kit to plug your suv into a wall jack and carry one as if oil was still around. you only have to go back 100 years to see what a world without oil looked like, and it is naive to think that government scientists somewhere will come up with solar panels and wind generators and nuclear moon rocks that will be able to replace oil. 

our standard of living came about because of 19th century thinking of resources, exploitation, colonisation, and a very primitive economic-based notion of the good society. it was a social experiment that succeeded beyond it’s wildest dreams, but now we are having to face the real shortsightedness of that vision.

we in the west are wealthy, greedy, fat and destructive, and the whole planet groans under the weight of our excess, the spiritual paucity of that vision. in many ways even our society functions rather poorly, and if that notion bothers you here’s a prozac. 

my hope in this is that we are at last done with that ancient enlightenment economic model, and we turn back to ourselves and our planet, like partiers after a drunken orgy, and realise our mistakes and pick up the pieces with a headache and bad stomach, and think never again. a society that is not based on consumption but giving, a society of care and stewardship of the planet and one where community, cooperation, spirituality and thoughtfulness replace the ethos of greed and desire that has dominated the consciousness of the west since those first gushers of oil.