Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
poor me
having a day that’s tilted me in the wrong direction – after all these good days of lightness – i guess i need it to balance me back over or something.
i dreamed last night about steve m. getting out of prison – how i went there to see him, and see if he had changed – and when i went to touch his arm, i knew he hadn’t made any progress at all, like an electric shock went through me – later in the dream hunted by him, there was no horror – only fear of being caught. i woke up tired this morning from running all night in my sleep, tension in my limbs as though holding myself away from danger. i realized this morning the need to find out his release date so i can work towards it without the irrational fear that he’s somehow going to show up on my doorstep.
on my way to work, there was a car accident in front of me at the corner where i take the bus – no one was hurt, two minivans collided at a moderate speed, but it sent my nervous system into a frenzy in any case, it being so early in the morning and all.
this was on top of the phone call with my mom last night who is back on anti-depressant medication, and another call from my friend d. (who has been in jail for the past 8 years) who is having trouble dealing with emotional welling and self-forgiveness.
and one of my strike co-ordinators quit yesterday and won’t provide a reason, and work is crazy, and i have to go to a union event tonight after work and lobby mps (which i hate doing).
today i’m feeling a bit of the “poor-me” syndrome, and though i’m not in any real emotional duress, i would like to crawl under my desk and hide from the world at the moment.
someone commented to me recently that i come across as cynical in some of my writing – i don’t think it’s so much that i’m cynical but i just get tired, and to the point where i feel like i’ve really had to deal with enough…..
of course, all this is making me really look forward to my hiking trip this weekend! a remedy is in sight!
photo-real
i have been spending the morning going through the voluminous image-archive belonging to my work unit in the pacific region. lightboard and loupe in hand, i am going through three dozen binders full of slides, photos and negatives that have accumulated over the past hundred years or so, to decide which of them will end up in our digital image archive. i thought this project would take me a day or two max (the photo-selection part), but now i am seeing the vastness of this task. it is easy to get bored and stop looking at the photos critically, and then i have to go back over them and make sure i didn’t miss some gem with historical importance or a species shot misfiled under some other heading.
in communications, we have to access these images frequently. often i am required to locate general photos of a fish species, examples of habitat disturbance, scenic ocean shots or any number of other related areas – a task made tedious with the poor image-management we have had in place for years, and even worse when having to resort to the binders. since technology for archiving, labeling and searching photographs has really improved over the last three years, i proposed to my work unit that we properly archive our images and developed the plan to do it – so this is my big project of the moment (fortunately i don’t have to do the scanning or the initial inputting into the database, i have someone hired to do that for me).
after selecting the images from the archive, my next step is develop the architecture – which is the most interesting part of the job for me. i like organizing data into useable aggregates – as i often am not only the creator, but a user of the end-product.
there is sadness in looking at these decades of photographs – going right back to the time when the people of bc still believed the fish would never leave – trawlers and seiners and gillnetters and even whaling ships – an echo of past policy and the tinge of human arrogance gracing the photo paper in the eyes of men and the full bellies of their vessels. it’s a shame to me to see how the land has been so used here, looking at images of the first clearcuts on slopes reaching the sea, small villages perched on the edge of the world taking as much as they could before it got to be too late.
it’s hard to believe looking from this place in history – that so few people could see the scrabble for resources that would occur, that damage to the earth would not be repaired so quickly as to feed the growing mouths of this land, and we would eventually stand on a precipice of all decisions come before us and weighing on our backs.
awakened
i am distracted today, bored by work, a critter in a cage desiring escape. what’s wild in me is unbound while at the same time caught up in emotion constricted, awaiting, breathing quietly, alert. this part of me awakened is running over the forest floor, wrapped in cedar and hidden in the hollow of a tree trunk. this part of me is ready.
saturday night hot as hades
and i’m sedentary though sweating, lounging about the apartment trying to motivate myself to go out and do something. i think the lethargy is going to win even though it’s illuminares tonight and there’s also a party up the street – my ability to deal with crowds of people is thin in general – i’m becoming a recluse in my old age.
the sun has just gone down behind the trees, which means i can sit out on the balcony and look down on the scrabbly park across from my house – it gets so overused in the summer that by the beginning of august almost all the grass is dead and spread thin over brown patches of weed and dust. scabby ground cover or not, there are always people there in the summer – apartment dwellers who have no luxury of a backyard, children taking advantage of evening sun, drug dealers waiting for clientelle by the cenetaph – a cross-section of living underfoot. of all the places to live in vancouver i think i chose the most interesting one, and have not often been sorry for it.
i packed a little today, ran errands in the morning before the heat overtook, and did my first ever beaded wire-work as a way of keeping my mind off the noise of the indy race and the smell of the chicken plant. i thought about getting out of the ‘hood for the day, but the effort of driving and the knowledge that everything close by would be packed with people, kept me close to home – dreaming of next weekend in cool mountains.
tomorrow i have an all-day union meeting (yes, on a sunday) – to discuss the possibility of a strike upcoming. i keep silently hoping it doesn’t come to that. as an area strike organizer i’m responsible for several worksites (totalling 1500 workers), and galvanizing people to take up the line – but my heart just isn’t in it this time around. i definitely think we should be getting a better offer, but i’m just pretty worn out from political organizing these days and more and more enjoying time off and to myself to do creative and personal work.
forever i have been an activist, and since i gave myself permission to take a break this year, my desire for personal freedom and autonomy has only grown – making me resentful of the struggle rather than a willing participant.
i’m sure it will pass – there’s too much injustice in the world to stay away from organizing forever – and in any case, even during my “break” i have continued to work on the projects i deem essential to my self-identity as a hell-raiser.
what happens when i give those up too? who do i become then?
friday night 9:00 report
it is blistering hot, the chicken processing plant smell has overtaken the neighbourhood (and it’s yuck yuck yuck), and it appears there is no respite from this heat for the next week.
what is going on here? vancouver is a *rainforest* for the love of pete! (no i’m not going to spout an apocalyptic fact here because you all know what’s going on).
i bought a hiking pole tonight at mec at the recommendation of a friend who told me they really aren’t just for wusses… and it would take some pressure off my ankle. i’m going to use it on my trip next weekend.
in better news, i got a phone call tonight from the realtor. there is another offer on my apartment, subjects come off wednesday – i could still get evicted after all! the realtors told me to hold off on giving my notice (they are in on my plan to collect the eviction money), that the sale looks more solid this time.
we’ll see. i can hardly wait to get the hell out of dodge (errrr… east van i mean).
Red Cedar 