knowing i might pass over to the other side - the johnny cash side, i just sadly discovered today - at any time, there are a great many things i need to do. these include:

learn a martial art
learn a marital art
no, just kidding
learn to speak cree, french, mandarin, russian, german, latin, and portugese
learn to do a cartwheel
get hypnotized
learn sleight of hand
scuba dive
build a stone house
ride an elephant
mock the president of the u.s.to his face with a witty limerick
become a lucid dream master
motorcycle down the west coast of north america
fall asleep in a hammock
get my mom stoned

Hey, Michael Moore. I wish Canada was the place you make it out to be in 'Bowling for Columbine'. For a moment I felt smug, watching it. Yeah, we are extra nice up here, aren't we. Hell, no, we don't like hurting each other. Not like those zany Americans. But just for a moment. Really I think we're pretty much the same. Our prisons are full of Indians. They're the people dying violent deaths (sometimes at the hands of police officers), populating the slums (the real slums, not those tidy looking ones), working the streets at the age of 9. Especially out here on the prairies.

City life is alllllright. No more bugs - hardly any. Here in the city they just take your garbage away, magically, to the garbage place. You could throw away anything, and nobody would ever know. Here in the city we'll never run out of water - it just keeps coming. And around every corner is something new and exciting. And here in the city everyone is happy, courteous, colourful and sane. Periodically doves descend from heaven and alight on people's heads just to let them know the great I Am is well pleased with them, and often people burst into song spontaneously and to great effect. Humans and animals can speak to each other with the greatest of ease. My jet pack allows me to enjoy all this from a comfortable floating position. It really is quite nice. Too bad police officers keep killing young native guys.

I'll be shooting at the Stonechild inquiry today. Sure to be bloody and tearful. Luckily I'm wearing the protective hangover veil that separates me from the rest of the world by a gauzy curtain of confusion.

Airport dreams last night. Couldn't find my boarding pass. Running hither and thither trying to get my shit together. Sam was there. And Sally. I really want to fly away somewhere, oh glory, by and by, but not the way it was in that dream. I kept waking up, too, sick and guilty and sad. I go through phases like that. You too? Shitty.

Oh, if I could synchronize my brainwaves and eradicate guilt, that sneaking jerk of an emotion.

Geese rallying their giant collective sense of purpose and their numbers and their strength - they're leaving. How come I never notice them except when they're leaving or coming? They're like family members you don't really have a relationship with - fanfare when they come home, much ado when they leave, but no real hanging out in between. I don't know these geese. Why should I care that they're leaving? I'm just jealous. There's a clean, brisk sort of ache that blossoms in the chest this time of year. Leaving is the only way to fix it. And when you can't leave, the ache widens until you think the desolation of winter will be a relief. And it is, for awhile, because we're all surviving together. We get over the loss of the fucking geese we never knew.