Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog



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Fark Garlicster Metafilter Plastic The Register SciFi Daily Sexblogs Slashdot Space.com The Smoking Gun Zeropaid [ CARTOONS ] Corrigan Children of the Atom Fiona Smyth Maakies MacKay MNFTIU.cc Secret Lair Smell of Steve [ VARIETY HOUR ] B3TA Hoogerbrugge Milk & Cookies Mumbleboy Onion Rathergood XE [ RERUNS ] [ 2005 ] JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH APRIL MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST [ 2004 ] MAY JUNE JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER [ 2002 ] [ 2003 ]	Tuesday, November 02, 2004 September 10th Last time the Americans voted for a president, in the days before Osama bin Laden was distinguished enough to endorse the Democrat, I was safe and warm on the train to Vancouver, sacked out in the lounge reading my morning paper, trying to forget about some woman back home and leaning on a big cup 'o joe when an old Yank walked in and announced, "Well, I hope the moral man wins!" I looked up from the paper and snapped at him, "Drunk driving and drugs. How moral is that?" And he shut up for the rest of the trip. He could have said, "I hope the guy on my team wins," and I would have let it slide. I met a girl on the train. One night at dinner in the middle of a blizzard at the Alberta-BC border, the woman sitting next to me elbowed my ribs and said, "That pretty girl there keeps giving you a long look." The motel in downtown Vancouver was a scruffy, post-war joint with a courtyard in the middle. The building was being crowded by gleaming new condo and office towers (though, in the case of the tower next door, good sense was trumped and it had the misfortune of having the colour of its window glass changed halfway up) In the afternoons, I looked through the window of the tv at the election mess and started having difficulty distinguishing the pigs from the humans. It only took the Republicans ten years to become the Soviets themselves after Reagan "beat" them. I was in Cuba when the Soviet Union was collapsing and one sunny afternoon, my brother, a friend and I were out exploring and we met up with the sloppy, local Harbour Master who had just detained the captain of a Norwegian yacht that had accidentally strayed into Cuban waters. They were sitting at a bus stop, sucking back on a bottle of rum together, laughing and enjoying the day before dealing with the paperwork and they joked with us for a bit. I was a little confused by the warmth and friendliness of the Harbour Master. Wasn't he a Communist? He had the uniform. Sometimes you experience the same thing in the US, where everyone is unusually friendly: aren't they Americans? Earlier the year I went to Vancouver, I saw this movie, YI YI. In that flick, the father character meets up with an old flame who tells him that she always loved him ... but he realizes that the choice he made decades before was the choice he made. And he goes back home. And that's what happened to me in Vancouver. On the train home, there was a gruff, elderly German man who was a pilot in the Luftwaffe during the Second World War but was now a hippie backpacker in his fading years, travelling the world. Which sort of made sense, 'cause in high school it was always the uniformed Catholic School kids who became mohawk-wearing punk rockers. At dinner, the seniors on the train whispered to one another, "Did you meet the Nazi?" I said to one of them, "Yeah, I think he's smoking dope in the washroom". Once back home, I found the trip had knocked me off whatever path I thought I was on. Sometimes you smash right into people, sometimes it's a near-miss but the gravity still warps the space-time around you. I guess having a strict ideology is like wearing a futuristic bionic exoskeleton. Your abilities are improved, but you're locked into a range of limited movement and, because it's a cheat, you eventually lose the ability to function without the exoskeleton and get nasty bedsores. Being in love, on the other hand, is like being hit by a train. You may go flying for sixty metres and hit a lamp post, but at least you're moving in a new direction. BLC: Warbloggers & Their Exoskeletons Abroad 9:14 AM , # , \|