Benjibopper

Click here for more.

Click here for more.

Click here for more.

Click here for more.

Click here for more.

Click here for more.

Click here for more.

Click here for more.

Labels: 2013, best of, books, canlit, Fiction, non-fiction

-
The unquenchable why of this living is mistaken.
We wail for the family lost eons ago
when this land was nutritious candy.

Now God kneels outside our iron bars
seeking hope in humanity's extinction
or survival.
He has created and is horrified.

We have revolted, and evolved -
met our Maker, apologized
for traceless political love affairs,
and demanded a map back to Eden.


[this is a rewrite of one I posted a while back]

Labels: 2011, non-fiction, nova scotia, Poetry

Twice I've seen rosebushes bloom ash
twice felt roots ensnare my skin
and known my remains would fly
with Grandpa and his sisters
and the ocean would take its share -
the grey darkening, solidifying, sinking
But only once has death given roses
You said to me, "I want this same fate
with you and your ancestors."

Labels: 2011, non-fiction, nova scotia, Poetry

You did us profound
you wobbly walker.

Your visible symbols say,
"why do you have that cage?
Why does that cage got blood?"

The mean-saying lady says
her reasons are good.

You nod like you do when Big People
dodge questions.

Mom and Dad do that too
when you wonder on origins
through taboo paths to temptations.

Labels: 2011, non-fiction, nova scotia, Poetry

Hi folks, I have been swamped, working on a nonfiction book called Green Souls (coming out Fall 2011). Thought I'd share a little teaser from the first chapter, see what you all think:

Michel Desjardins' first major life lesson was about excess. "My father has never liked excess," he tells me. "To be excessive is to waste, and therefore to abuse the resource."

The way to avoid that abuse, according to Dr. Desjardins the senior, is to take care of the resource yourself. Despite being a busy professional, the good doctor has always taken the time to tend his own garden and cut his own wood.

"That had a tremendous influence on me," Michel says, "though it took me a long time to appreciate the lesson."

His second major life lesson, passed down from his grandparents, was this: get ahead, find a better life than this tough one we toiling farmers have. Be a skilled professional, not an unskilled labourer. Make your fortune in the knowledge industries and take the world, not just the good earth, into your hands. Buy a bigger house and a better car.

These were the contradictory lessons that were eventually passed on to young Michel, so it is no surprise that his midlife crisis, brought on by the political defeat of his employer, left him soul-searching. Even though his father was a simple man, Michel Desjardins was raised thinking he had to do better, to carry forward the legacy of an optometrist. To get the letters of a legal professional, and to shape his city’s and then his province’s destiny in the new economy. He hadn’t taken the time to look back.

Labels: 2010, Canada, non-fiction, philosophy, publishing

We left Lachutes in what we thought was plenty of time. But we hit Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic at the outskirts of Montreal. "City squirrels go to the cottage and their kids come back from school," Jeff said, his fingers tapping frantic rhythm on the wheel.

We crawled another hour-and-a-half to our turnoff, then bolted through downtown as the rain hammered everything. We drove by the Canadian Pacific sign and scanned the streetscape with stretched eyes until Jeff pulled the truck into the drop off. We fist bumped; I grabbed my bags and ran, glancing at the gates I passed until I found Campbellton and flashed my ticket. "Moncton?"

"Yep. Hurry down and just say 'Moncton' at the foot of the stairs."

From my seat I texted Jeff. "Made it."

Seventeen hours later, the red-headed Hertz guy picked me up at the train station and drove me 20 minutes to the airport for paperwork. He's a Moncton lifer, spent time in the states but after 9/11 things got too weird there and he came to the small town he knows and loves.

We were all set to go until I gave them my wife's credit card - no can do. And mine was in Halifax. No cash deposit. I was stuck at Moncton airport, two hours until my reading in Fredericton. The Hertz guy (another one) asked the Budget girl if they cioiuld rent me a car on cash deposit. Nope, but Delta could, back downtown.

Tristan needed to get some fresh air anyway, he said. He's a Nova Scotia boy, north shore, stuck in Moncton too long. "I hate it," he said. "It's a giant industrial park that people happen to live in. It's ugly and there's nothing to do." I found the outskirts pretty anyway, with the fall colours, but he hopes to move to Halifax as soon as he can.

Delta was empty. I knocked on the glass and a guy came out with a broom and dustpan. "You the one who called?"

It was an all paper, no computer business, with a mandatory vehicle walk-around, and several spots to initial on the long form. He put my cash deposit in an envelope, sealed and signed it, had me check to make sure the tank was full, pointed me to the highway and I was gone, red-lined to Fredericton, only 10 minutes late for the reading.

It was a small group but I sold a few books and met a women who'd already red Drive-by Saviours and is recommending it to her book club. And I met Corey Redekop, author of Shelf Monkey - soon to be on Canada Reads top 40 must-read list. We bantered on canlit and the mneed for authors to embrace our inner pimps - be self promoters that is.

I nabbed a few hours sleep at an old friend's place, a suburban household of 11 - her stepdaughter, several international billets, a visiting German family of five, and me. "I'll take the ISBN and get it back in Germany," the mister told me. "They'll order in anything for me!" And that's how the book tour pays off, I think, the face-to-face that gets your book in a German store before it's even translated.

Labels: 2010, Canada, non-fiction, Travel

I'm writing from Lachutes, Quebec, about 40 km northwest of Montreal. A good friend of mine is Superintendent of a golf course here and he's putting me up. Tonight, (Thurs Oct 14), I read at 8:00pm in Montreal, at Argo Bookshop, 1915 Ste Catherine W. There will be three writers reading tonight, starting at 7:30 pm. Also up will be Susan Gillis, author of Volta, and Claudia Coutu Radmore, author of A Minute or Two/Without Remembering. Hopefully more authors means more people, more energy.

Labels: 2010, Canada, non-fiction, Travel

I met Ivan Prokopchuk the other night, in person. He's long been one of the most colourful personalities I've met as a blogger, and a character who consistently captures my imagination.

But there he was in the Lula Lounge, in full colour, three dimensions, in the flesh, across the table from me with his book, The Fire in Bradford, in hand. "I'll show you mine if you you show me yours," he grinned.
But with Another Story Bookshop on hand selling Drive-by Saviours I didn't have any swap copies. The swap had been my suggestion, but with all the insanity of travel, visiting family and friends, organizing book launches and an Eastern Canadian book tour, I'd forgotten. I promised to send Ivan a copy in the mail and he gave me his book, shook my hand and heartily congratulated me. And he was gone, making way for the next in line.

It was one of a series of surreal encounters I've had lately with old friends. The support has been overwhelming - people I haven't seen in years, people I've only met online, have come out to my two book launches in Halifax and Toronto to celebrate my accomplishment.

And now, writing from a friend's home in East Toronto, planning to head up to Kent Bookstore in Lindsay Ontario in a few hours for another reading and more old friends (and to meet a boisterous one-year-old), I'm feeling a deep easy happiness in that willingness to celebrate what others among us do.

At the same time, I ache for my wife and son, who flew back to Halifax yesterday morning at about crack o'clock, and I long for my own bed where I could properly nurse this worsening cold. Suddenly I'm a lone drifter again, something I missed and didn't expect to experience again so soon. Last time I was a young man, full of abstractions and equipped with an eager pen and ink-hungry notebooks. It all seems a little more businesslike this time - I'm a drifter with a mission, a product to move. I feel like a huckster with a money-bulge in my pocket.

That's not a complaint. I'm loving meeting people, sharing my art with them, and experiencing their kind and enthusiastic responses - their questions, comments and cash. Living the dream for me has moved beyond sloganism and into reality.

Labels: 2010, love junk, non-fiction, Toronto

I was given $100 by the Downtown Halifax Business Commission to spend on anything I wanted, as long as I documented the experience publicly. I, naturally, chose books. Here's a video (shot by my wife, edited by me, with music by my brother) of the experience:

Labels: 2010, non-fiction, nova scotia, politics

Desire is seed.
Your arms
snychro-waving in the dark,
flashing across the dance-cave.
My stillbirth reborn.
My feet walk themselves over.

Tears lubricate my body over;
Tetris pieces withhold seed
until ancestors are reborn.
Telephone chords mimic arms
poorly, cold as caves,
desiring touch in the dark.

Tree pastors towering dark,
our shivers gratefully ruled over.
The sauna a geothermal cave,
where idealized eternity sows seed,
across the arc of the other’s arms;
tradition is repetition reborn.

Desire is reborn
in the deepest dark,
stillborn with too few arms;
hungry voices’ journey over.
Our spinning globe scatters seed,
frees us from the cubicle cave.

365 exploration of continental cave.
365 labours daily reborn.
Restively flailed seed,
unharvested from the faraway dark;
ocean’s gravity heaves vagabondage over.
Ancestors require our arms.

Hands in sand and legs as arms,
an inverted tower till elbows cave.
Reunion summer’s over.
Old routines reborn.
In cavernous downtown funkitecture’s dark:
A desire, an egg, a seed.

With his birth we’re reborn
in a solitary cave.
Desire is seed.

Labels: 2010, love junk, non-fiction, Poetry

"Why do you bring your mistakes here?" -elderly Ghanaian woman to journalist Joan Baxter






















Dam
Sunlight soil and water,
the Hank Aaron (former) homerun king sandwich.
Former: cocktailed from history's highball of fame,

left out wind-twisted in late-night Chubby Checker marathons,
an asterisk's footnote.

Could be worse:
Harder to be a fish,
whose life beats odds of exponential shrinkage
and just before the life-dream's achieved
she hits the wall.
Her estrogen-laden piscine brain's last thought:
W-T-F?!

Her mercury diet betrayed
with a concrete kiss.

Formerly: One in ten million spawn,
the (parallel universe) Pete Rose payoff.
The plants are the lucky ones.

Labels: 2009, non-fiction, philosophy, Poetry

"Boredom...is really just another screen to deflect our attention away from the arduous yet delightful, joyous though painful process of allowing ourselves the stillness to remember what we feel and to begin assuming responsibility for our lives." --Derrick Jensen






Roadkill always makes me sad. All these lives taken for what? So we can ramble on down the road, recreate elsewhere, traversing the highway scars over the vast land, smack through the middle of someone else's home. All manner of forest creatures doing the same, rambling around and suddenly their goals, their destinations, their lives are no more.

On the way to Cape Breton a bird flew straight into our tires on a downward trajectory. Maybe it saw a mouse and, not knowing the creature's already doomed fate, went after it, joined it with a sickening thud.

We frowned at death. "That's the first time I ever did that - hit anything," she said.

I told her about the other time a bird flew into the side of my car. "We stopped and got out, walked toward it. It was just sitting there and we weren't sure it was dead. When we got close it flew away."

"Maybe this one did that too," she smiled hopelessly. We remembered the thud.

Roadkill is an understated tragedy of civilization. Another of our centuries long list of assaults on God and Gaia.



********************************************************************************



We were in an inflatable canvas canoe. Looking up into the tree at the end of the little island we saw an eagles' nest, 2.5 metres across. There were two jeuvenile eagles standing up on the edge of the nest.

What amazed me about those young eagles was that they just stood there, glancing around at the wide world, as we sat watching them.

They completely lacked ambition. They had no desire to work toward any dream. They felt no nagging guilt that they weren't labouring on the manuscript or the business plan. They didn't need to organize, tidy, or clean anything. They weren't dying to escape their one-horse town and see Paris or Bombay. They didn't even have a television to pass the hours until their parents returned. They just stood there, looking around, without anxiety or concern.

No one would judge them for their inaction; no one could hurt them.

Labels: 2008, non-fiction, nova scotia, philosophy

"For what what the world spends on defense every 2.5 hours, about $300 million, smallpox was eliminated back in the late seventies. For the price of a single new nuclear-attack submarine, $726 million to $1 billion, we could send 5 to 7.5 million Third World children to school for a year. For the price of a single B-1 bomber, about $285 million, we could provide basic immunization treatments, such as shots for chicken pox, diphtheria, and measles, to the roughly 575 million children in the world who lack them, thus saving 2.5 million lives annually. For what the world spends on defense every forty hours, abut $4.6 billion, we could provide sanitary water for every human being who currently lacks it."
--James A. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi




I loathe writing about vice. I find myself increasingly saddled with responsibility, deadlines, demands, external and internal pressures, and it's hard on my system. I can't drink anymore, can't tolerate fatty fried foods, don't have time for messy affairs even if I had the desire for them.

So forgive me if I numb my brain with occasional images of 7-foot behemoths smashing spherical material through nylon mesh, while I yell at the TV, "De-fence! C'mon!"

Forgive me if I swear at computer screens 'fuck you piece of shit you have one function in life why can't you do it?!'

Forgive me if I swear too much in general, grumble and complain and sometimes neglect the pleasantries.

Forgive me if I take work to bed and sleep in come morning.

Forgive me if I need a little caffeine in the morning, and if I come off a little cynical when you're whimsical, dreaming your dreams for two.

Labels: 2008, non-fiction, nova scotia, philosophy

For 10 million I could buy a mile of the new twinned highway and still have enough left to get me one of those smart bombs, just a little one, just big enough to blow up my strip of twinned highway. I'd have to squirrel away enough to buy a wide angled camcorder and film the explosion from a rented helicopter. And there'd have to be road blocks to make sure there was no traffic - I couldn't afford the lawsuits.

Or maybe I'd buy me one a those new private sector prisons, double my fortune selling recycled uranium-powered tasers to convicted panhandlers so they can take their antisocial disorders out on sadistic guards peddling refried baked bean sandwiches. I could have a nice little factory farm in the yard - the inmates could provide free labour while I watch the US Open. I could give free sausages to whichever con raised the best sow.



-

Labels: 2008, non-fiction, nova scotia, politics

Labels: 2002, non-fiction, Travel, west coast

HeyHey Sports Fans,

It took a couple months, but I finally have my first Hali publication, in The Chronicle Herald, the more serious of the two dailies here:

Neighbourhood versus HRM

Check it out!

-The Bopper

Labels: non-fiction, politics, publishing

The lighthouse of the cousin who once dubbed me a 'Long Tall Drink of Silence' is out of commission now.

Labels: 2007, Canada, non-fiction, photography, Travel

True to my word, I expand on some comments I made at Lynn's about pitbulls and chickens, which recently made the news in Nova Scotia:



Of Dogs and Hens

Last week in rural Nova Scotia a couple of dogs broke into a barn and killed about 40 chickens. The most remarkable thing about the incident is that it made the news, as if dogs killing chickens is unusual.

The story made the press because the dogs in question happen to be pit bulls, a nebulous category of dogs that includes several breeds and cross-breeds. Now that this chicken-killing incident has been debated ad nauseum over ink-stained pages, talk of legislation banning pit bulls, similar to that enacted in Ontario, has surfaced.

Some dog advocates have rightly pointed out that banning a breed of dog runs counter to attempts to restrict the bad behaviour of owners, which is the real cause of canine violence. A spokesman for the Canadian Kennel Club has said that “it’s not an individual breed that’s responsible for what they’re trying to curtail, it’s usually an owner or an environment.”

Some have also noted that pit bulls are not technically a breed anyway, so any attempt to ban them outright would be fraught with technical difficulties.

These are all reasonable points, but they miss the bigger picture of a fact so plain, so overwhelmingly obvious and natural, that nobody has noticed it lurking behind the flying chicken feathers. That fact is this: dogs are carnivorous predators.

Dogs kill things. Things smaller than themselves, like chickens. And by dogs, I mean all dogs, from the smallest shiatsu to the largest mastiff. The latter are just more likely to be successful, equipped as they are with a hundred-plus poundage and jaws of steel.

I mean no disrespect to those chickens; they have as much of a right to life as the next livestock, but the doggie advocate who claimed that “both the chickens and the dogs are victims” is missing the point. Had the dogs not reached the chickens first, dog’s best friend would have done the job for them. For we humans, too, are carnivorous predators, in our own special way.

And had a human done those chickens in, as happens every day in every rural town across this province, you wouldn’t have seen any heavily armed cops seeking retribution at the local abattoir, “for public safety.”

I have to confess here that I myself am a dog-lover. But when you think about it the human effort to domesticate animals as wild and dangerous as canines is one of our more hair-brained schemes, and that’s saying something.

Still, through careful breeding and the provision of a loving environment, any dog of any breed can become the most loyal, gentle friend. But that doesn’t mean that the dog loses its natural hunting instinct.

And, the bigger and stronger the dog, the bigger its prey will be. So, a couple of dogs of the pit bull variety can, if left to wander, break into a barn and slaughter 40 chickens. And, sorry fellow dog-lovers, they can also turn on a small unattended child at any time.

So, our experiment to totally control dogs has thus far failed. What should we do next? Ban the breeds that seem to most often breach our unwritten agreement that they eat only the packaged and prepared portions of livestock we provide for them? Even though there are thousands of other bigger and stronger dogs that unscrupulous and lazy owners could turn into public hazards once pit bulls were banned?

Or, should we focus more on human behaviour, more specifically dog-owner behaviour, something we may actually have some hope of controlling?

In this case, the dogs went after a small prey that some human being would likely have killed anyway. It boils down to an economic loss for a farmer. The owners of the dogs should be required to compensate that loss; that is a punishment that fits the crime.

Unfortunately, the dogs have already paid an unnatural price for their most natural instincts.

Labels: 2007, non-fiction, nova scotia, politics

Recently watched a beautiful doc called ‘Naked on the Inside’ by an Australian filmmaker. It’s crazy how much pain our bodies cause us when other people tell us how we’re supposed to be, when what they tell us does not and never will match reality.

Instead of embracing what is, embracing what others are, seeing and appreciating that real beauty, we kill ourselves in pursuit of air-brushed two-dimensional fantasies. More delusions of control. Too much power, too close to godliness but never close enough.

One body type they didn’t cover explicitly was the old type. So crazy to think I’ll be old one day. Seeing my 11 years younger cousin it’s hard to believe I’m even this old, hard to remember my mindset 11 years ago. I know back then I couldn’t see a decade down the road. And still I find it hard to imagine 40, yet here it comes, faster and faster.

Hard to imagine being a grandfather, an old man surrounded by progeny’s progeny. Knowing the end is near. What must that feel like?

I become more aware of my own mortality with the passage of time. More risk averse too. No need to hasten the inevitable.

I feel increasingly out of touch with the reality around me. Television is mostly nonsensical, a parody of itself that isn’t in on the joke. How can people watch the supposedly serious garbage on TV? The news is the worst, crime shows a close second. Crime show beauty pageants.

What must the alien anthropologists think of us? How humiliating.

“Shove it up the hole in your culture.”

“Generally the more noise people make the quieter you get,” Maven observed astutely. Especially when the noise is that of talons on throat. I just can’t handle useless petty conflicts. We should be embracing each other’s beauties, appreciating what is there.

***********************************************************************

Sometimes life gets in the way. MikeyZ and I were supposed to hop a U-haul and make a cross-country cash-grab, stopping at every ex-hippy’s paradise along the way, visiting old friends and greasy spoons too. CMcC was supposed to maybe join us.

Life got in the way. There were babies to feed and jobs to secure and begin, and most of all U-haul fucked us in the form of a 250 percent price increase. It’s seasonal. This is busy season.

I have this memory of barrelling across eastern Canada, my dad at the wheel, me on the navigation tip, belting out Blondie as we rode. There was a flat tire, three days travel, half the time allotted by U-Haul’s insurance sharks. It may or may not have happened like that, but it’s a fine memory.

I wanted that journey. I wanted to bond with someone again, play my music loud and watch the road unfold, no hurry or worry.

Life got in the way. Turns out it’s cheaper to hire a moving company. They make life easy, load up your junk, haul it over, unload it too, all for a third the price, and that includes coffee runs, gas and insurance.* Saves us a trip back to the people trap. Saves us a bundle, and time too, and a lot of labour. Labour I was looking forward to, because it would have been communal, with those old-fashioned friends of a fading era. But you gotta move forward, backward never as Kwame Nkrumah said.

Life moves forward fast, and it still gets in the way.

*post-script: the moving company misunderestimated (thanks George for that word) the weight of our stuff, so the actual cost was as high as a U-Haul anyway.

"The only thing worse than growing up
is never quite learning how."
--Joel Plaskett

Labels: non-fiction, philosophy, Travel

I dreamed I was Gene Hackman
on the run from other celebrities
and the celebrity lifestyle in general
Specifically George Clooney and Halle Barry chased me
through a shopping mall full of hostiles

I committed violent acts on the run
all for the sake of my freedom
I dodged neutrals and friendlies
delivered sharp elbows to the necks of evil-doers
Halle and George forever on my aged heels

I had to escape the celebrity microscope
the cocktail parties and political orgies
the ego-inflationary hot-air balloons
I took flight in that dream-time buoyancy
restricted only by labyrinthine rafters and clutching claws

Finally the dynamic power-couple overtook me
embraced me in the oppression of their love
“We’re here to help, Gene,” they said
Halle’s lips seeking my flesh seductively
They brought me down down down to the basement

They locked me away there for my own good
in a place I could no longer endanger myself
with my ideas of sweet anonymity
Their strategy was disingenuously ingenious
I was too isolated to be overwhelmed

I was lonely enough to crave anyone’s company
My kindly Old Lady was the one to save me
with her diabolical invisibility spray
she somehow snuck into my basement tomb
and joined me there in my prison cell

Together we awaited the inevitable nervously
and when George and Halle came to reintegrate me
into their monstrous balls and antechambers
they found my sweet Old Lady there
alone befuddled bemused and confused

“Gene, my sweet sexy old man where are you?”
Halle cooed as George scanned the shower
under the bed and behind the wardrobe
I stood shivering off to the side
completely invisible and conscious of every breath

When George opened the window and called out
into the delirious night so dramatically trained
I took my cue and my cure and I took flight
vowing to come back some day to save my Old Lady
I flew deep and far and fast into darkness’s warm heart

I was naked, unseen and unknown
gloriously free like never before.

Labels: non-fiction, Poetry