Dec. 1: Changes

"I hate change."

"I know."

Those were the final two lines from the first scene of Three Scenes from a Bus Shelter, which may be the best thing I have ever written. The characters were two men in their early 20s who had gone to high school together. They weren't friends in school but a chance encounter in the bus shelter on New Year's Eve gives them a chance to get reacquainted. Both of them subtly confess that they are not happy with their lives and their entire conversation is a desperate attempt to mine some encouragement out of each other. 

I was 21 when I wrote it. My life was even more pathetic than the ones of the two guys in that scene, both of whom were at least enrolled in college. I was a dropout and, on that particular New Year's Eve, I had been kicked out of a bar where I thought I was "employed" as the house magician. I took the bus home in the freezing rain, the derisive laughter of the bar's patrons still ringing in me ears, and let myself into a house that was cold and dark and alone. My parents and both of my siblings were out celebrating. They had lives. I did not.

So I spent New Year's Eve writing that lousy little play. Years later, I realized that I was writing about myself. I hated change. Still do, but not as much as I did when I was younger. Maybe that's why I write. I write because I have to tell myself not to be an asshole.

-

So here I am on day one of note-a-day and already I am starting with the solipsism and the navel gazing. My new friend, Catherine Moise, did note-a-day for November. Her notes were wonderful, full of crisp prose, and most of them garnered more than a dozen comments from her faithful readers. One of her notes, inspired by a title provided by my son ("Store") was so poignant that I want to reprint it in the newspaper where I work. I know that virtually no one will comment on my notes, which is fine. My friends have long grown fatigued of this project. 

That hasn't changed.

-

The late American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who was born on Remembrance Day, said that the biggest social change of his life was that racism became unacceptable pretty much everywhere. When I was a boy, my dad told me he admired Martin Luther King. "I knew racism was really bad and it was all over the place," my dad said. "And I always wanted to do something about it."

And then Martin Luther King came along. He had a dream. He made a speech. He was assassinated. His detractors like to point out that Mr. King was a philanderer. Some of the detractors are probably philanderers too. "Most people are having affairs," a psychologist told once when I asked her what she learned the most from her occupation.

"If they stopped having affairs, maybe they wouldn't need to see you anymore," I said. The psychologist gave me a dirty look and walked away."

The movie, Selma, which chronicles many of King's civil rights accomplishments, also touches on his infidelity. It doesn't dwell on it though and that was a fine cinematic choice to make. The filmmakers wanted to show Mr. King not as a superhero but as a man, as prone to exhaustion and to sin as the rest of us. I saw that movie in Calgary with my dad and I remembered that long ago conversation that we had. I really hoped that Selma would show one of the most curious bits of trivia I have learned about Mr. King's life, which is that he had a pillow fight on that fateful day in April of 1968 when that murdering sonofabitch James Earl Ray shut him up forever.

Here is what the film reviewer Odie Henderson wrote about Selma:

In a perfect world, “Selma” would exist solely as a depiction of darker days long since past, an American history lesson that concludes with reassurances that its horrors will no longer be perpetrated, tolerated nor celebrated. Alas, perfection eludes us on this mortal, earthly plane; “Selma” shows the evolution of change while beaming a spotlight on the stunted growth of that which has not changed. Its timeliness is a spine-chilling reminder that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it. Its story provides a blueprint not only of the past, but of the way forward.

-

Listen:

The biggest change of my life was the internet. I know that it's older than I am; it started out as a US Department of Defense project in the 1960s and it didn't become fully accessible to civilians until the mid 90s. I kind of heard of it as early as 1988 when we got a primitive word processor called PaperClip 3, which could be used on our Commodore 64. If you had a modem, you could connect your computer to a vast international network of basement dwellers and share information via the magic of telecommunications. 

This seemed like such a magical albeit geeky way to kill a weekend. We didn't have a modem and I never asked if we could get one. I knew it wouldn't be seen as a practical request. "Why in the world would we need to get connected like that?"

Imagine saying that now.

-

My brother has always been eager to embrace change, which is why he's had more success in life than I have. He's a pragmatist who knows that time waits for no one. He had a hotmail account before I even knew what one was. He encouraged me to get one so we could keep in touch while he visited Australia.

"How much is it?" I asked.

"It's free," he said.

Stupid me. I had no idea how the internet could afford to stay in business if it was giving away free email addresses.

So I got me a hotmail address - electricangel@hotmail.com - and the very first person to ever send me an email was a teenager in Illinois named Carmen. She thought she was emailing a friend of hers: electric "angle" (the friend was either a bed speller or really into geometry.) Carmen and I have kept up a casual correspondence over the years. We are friends on Facebook. She is in her 30s now. Married. Kids. Every year in late February, I wish her a happy birthday. 

I became a hotmail fanatic and quickly developed an anxiety if I didn't check it every so often. Once I had emails from 8 people. I was ecstatic. I had gotten the emails of a bunch of people I knew and had emailed them to see if my email was working. All eight of those emails assured me that it was.

About a week later, I logged into hotmail and saw I had 63 new messages. Here's what some of them said:

- Tired of girls rejecting you because of how small you are? This African elongation ritual is guaranteed to...

- hello blessed kind sir I am madame mohammed butuutu of sacred tribe of Medicine Hat. before my death, I have put $5 million US into an account and I wish to share it with you...

- THIS WEEKEND ONLY!!! GET AMAZING DEALS AT THE BRICK!!! THIS BRAND NEW LEATHER COUCH, WHICH NORMALLY GOES FOR $1,999, IS ONLY 54 CENTS. OUR PRICES ARE INSANE!!!!

-President Bill Clinton does not want you to read this. Clinton and his wife are members of the Golden Dawn Society, an underground illuminati group whose stated goal is...

Yeah, so I guess some things don't change.

-

I am an admirer of the late William F. Buckley, who could write a newspaper column in 20 minutes. This lousy note you're reading took me several hours. Mind you, I composed it while a rambunctious and autistic eight-year-old ran like a dervish around my apartment, clamouring for my attention.

Mr. Vonnegut, who I also admire, believed that William F. Buckley had won the "decathlon of life." He had succeeded at almost everything - though he was never elected to public office - and, in the words of Mr. Vonnegut, was an "undefeatable debater." There are four reasons why I like William F. Buckley:

1. He took on pretty much everyone on his show, Firing Line.

2. His near fracas with Gore Vidal after Vidal called him a crypto-Nazi.

3. “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” I get the gist of what he was saying; that a group of everyday people would, perhaps, be better at crafting laws than a bunch of privileged Ivy League trust fund babies. Of course he was also saying that if former Calgary Flame player Zarley Zalapski ever wanted a career in politics then he'd better not live in Boston.

4. He is the first person I ever heard use the trans Atlantic accent.

-

This note is starting to get stupid. This always happens on the first day of a month when I take up the note-a-day mantle. Those privileged enough to give me the first title have the luxury of reading me ramble on and on. Hopefully I made a couple good jokes along the way but I guess I didn't do a whole lot of talking about change.

I mentioned that the internet was a big change, but that was only for how I interacted with the world. The other big change in my life was becoming a dad. When I was younger, I used to say I didn't want kids and, when asked why, I would deflect by making a joke: "Look at how weird I am. Do you really think that someone like me should be reproducing?"

Most of the time, the people I asked would say no. Probably a few of them intuited that I was just afraid of the responsibility but were too polite to tell me.

-

My first boss at a newspaper was a crusty old guy who was old school all the way. It was 1999 and he didn't want the internet in the building; said it was lazy. Someone managed to convince him that there should be one computer somewhere where people could get stuff off the web if they needed it. Grumbling, he obliged. I think I used that computer twice. Knowing that my boss hated it made me apprehensive about handling it. It emitted the same bad juju as a Ouija board.

That boss also insisted that I do all my story writing on a Mac that might have been built by George Washington. The screen was so small that I could cover it with a postcard. Colour? Forget about it. My words floated in a pea soup, gloriously immortalized in that crappy Chicago font.

I wasn't very good at that job and I wound up quitting a few months later, thinking I'd have better luck in Quebec, where I barely even spoke the language. So 1999 was a huge year of changes. I changed my home province three times. When the year started, I was an aspiring novelist/grocery store employee who may or may not have been dating a Hungarian chef who looked like the girl from Roxette. When it ended, I had worked at three different newspapers and was unemployed in Lennoxville, Quebec, spending New Year's Eve alone in a dorm while my roommates - all guys at least five years my junior - were away getting drunk and high and laid while they welcomed in this brand new millennium. I so wanted the first person I ever saw in the year 2000 to be someone I cared about. Instead it was a fat middle aged man in a Montreal Canadiens toque who was walking home from McDonalds. One month later, I would be living in an abandoned (and possibly haunted) nursing home in Montreal and trying to train my 27-year-old body to get used to being a bike courier.

And somehow, through a little divine intervention, a little help from my parents, and a little persistence on my part, things changed. That was probably my rock bottom. I didn't aspire to a career in newspapers; I stumbled upon it and now I'm the editor of The Glengarry News and I'm going to be 50 years old in a little over a year. 

Sad thing is that I feel just as clueless as I did when I was an adolescent. About the only thing I've learned over the past three decades is that its and it's mean different things. 

-

I realize that this note started and ended with New Year's Eve. Perhaps that's appropriate for a note about change. Isn't it natural that, on such a grand occasion, we should wish for the opportunity, and the willpower, to bring about some positive change in our lives?

I'm glad I have learned to embrace change a little. I shudder to think what my life would look like if I was a 48-year-old bike courier in Montreal today. Maybe, by now, I'd be another ghost in that haunted nursing home where I lived during the early stages of the year two thousand.