Splash du Jour: Monday

When I get in the sun I get very tanned.
You can't tell me from the native fishermen in Hawaii or Mexico.
-- Desi Arnaz –

Have a great Monday, all!
I am gone.
I am on my way to Mexico!
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"What happens in Mexico..."

There is no one that deserves a vacation right now, more than I do.
And I know what you are thinking.
You are thinking that you deserve one, too.
And you probably do, there is no doubt of that.
It’s just that I need one MORE than you do.
And so I am going on one.

In less than 24 hours from now.

I am all packed away and ready to go, as soon as I have a bit of sleep here.
Tomorrow I will be in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico.
Here is a picture of the hotel that I will be staying at.

It’s called the Riu Vallarta.
Here is a great little slide show of the place.
I cannot wait to gorge myself on the 24-hour, round-the-clock all-inclusiveness of the resort, and also the Riu Jalisco, which we are allowed to walk to and destroy our livers at!
I’m taking a pager, just so I can reach for it and fling it into the ocean when it rings.
No, actually I am just kidding. That wouldn’t be very environmentally responsible of me.
[I will bury it in the sand, instead.]

I am meeting other members of my family there. We will all be in the air at the same time, departing from all corners of Canada, and arriving within hours of each other.
In my last phone conversation with my sister, hours ago, she said she is leaving the following message on her fridge door, “What happens in Mexico, stays in Mexico!”
I like that!

So I am just writing to let regular readers of Bookpuddle know that I may not be around much during the next week or so.
Any posting I do will have to be based on two important factors:
# 1) My sobriety.
# 2) Computer access.

For reading material, I am taking a little something from the year 1830.
Stendhal’s, The Red and the Black.
Always into the bestsellers. That’s me!

adios,
-- Cip

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Splash du Jour: Friday

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
-- Emily Dickinson –

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.
-- Rachel Carson (1907-1964) –

Have a great Thursday!
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I'll Be An Expert

Forgive me for once again merely talking about a snapshot of my day, rather than writing some sort of profound thing about….. something.
But a neat thing did happen at the end of my lunchtime.
After eating a falafel pita and some cream of broccoli soup, [quite the combo!] I sauntered on into the Public Library downtown and thought I would read a bit of my book:
The Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood.

Instead, I fell asleep in one of the glorious Library chairs in the lounge area. Just briefly, but with the intensity of a fully anaesthetized rhinoceros.

When I awoke I made my way past a used-book display that had been set up in the foyer area sometime during my hibernation. There were books on carts, and man were they junky. [The books, not the carts.] Like really tremendously bad books. You know?
Titles like “Parasitic Entomology of New York City During The Depression Era” and “Pouring Cement: More Than Meets The Eye”…. stuff like that.
Instantly I had the thought → “Wow! Who is going to buy such utter JUNK?”

And I turned to leave, noticing that on the stairway leading to the second level there were other books, standing upright, covers in full view. [Like this is not a safety hazard?]
And one of these books leaped out of the background, into the foreground. I was startled to see it.
Volume 3 of the Canadian Fiction Studies Series. Circa 1989.
Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman: A Reader’s Guide, by W.J. Keith.
I find serendipitous coincidences like this so uncanny!
I mean, I had the novel itself in my jacket pocket at the time.

I picked up this volume and leafed through it. It looked great.
So I sort of held it up in the air and looked around, because there was no one evidently SELLING it. Just then this wee little old scraggly woman [not very edible] came towards me out of the crowd of people and I asked her how much the book cost.
“75 cents,” she said.
I handed her three quarters.
A small price to pay to find out more about the myriad of symbolic nuance buried in the novel. Even though [as I flip through this recent find] I see that my own reading partner has already been as erudite in her comments as this author is here.
Now, there is no doubt about it. As a result of such dual-pronged expert tutelage, I am going to be an expert on edible women!

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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

“Man was put on this earth to eat meat...The Bible says so dumbbell... I mean look it up will ya? All them old Bible peoples, they was always eating meat, soon as they found out eating apples was wrong. It's true! On special occasions: goats and lambs. Who the hell ever heard of sacrificing a head of lettuce? You?”
-- Archie Bunker –

Have a great Wednesday!

Urban Observations: The Sequel

For the past couple of days I have been working offsite, at a highrise building in the downtown core. So I walk there from my place. I love it.
At lunchtime I walk down Metcalfe Street to the Foodcourt at The World Exchange Plaza. [Note…. that’s World Exchange Plaza…. not World Sexchange Plaza…]
Today it was snowing, and the weather was mild.
On the way back to the office I stopped at one intersection with the rest of the herd and waited for the “Walk” signal.
I looked to the right and saw a guy and his dog.
This guy was bent over on hands and knees beside his dog and patting around on a patch of grass, freshly snowed upon.
I found this so interesting that I missed the “Walk” signal altogether and moved a bit closer. With my new angle I could now see what he was after. You probably know too, right?
There it was. A little steaming pile of…… digested Alpo©!
And that’s when I noticed that the guy has a plastic bag over his hand. But I am now wondering why in the hell he doesn’t just pick up the….. treasure….. instead of flattening the snow all around it.

That’s when I noticed the special body-harness on the dog.
This is a seeing-eye dog.
This guy is blind.
Wow!
Now everything within me is refraining from lending a helping……. voice!
“Little to the left….. some more… oh, too much. To the right now… left again…. you’re getting warmer…. oh too far… back a bit. That’s it. Oh, almost got it….”

But I didn’t. I just watched.
And by Jiminy, he found it.
I wanted to applaud.
But I didn’t.

As the dog led him past me, this guy slipped the bag of treasure into his jacket pocket.
Now that’s dedication!
That is SERIOUS responsible urban living.
Out of respect for you Mr. Blind Person, I did not applaud at the time.
And out of respect for myself, I did not shake your hand!
But seriously, kudos to you my friend, for your canine poop-consciousness above and beyond the call of duty.

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.
-- Woody Allen –

Have a great Tuesday!

Splash du Jour: Monday

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.
-- Jack Handey –

Have a great Monday!

Urban Observations

I hope that no one misconstrues what I am about to say, thinking that I am making some sort of value-judgment on the phenomenon itself.
It is merely an unanswered question that has come to me today, and so I share it with you.

I am an urbanite.
I LIVE in the downtown core of a city of approximately a million inhabitants.
As such, I encounter a fair number of what has come to be known as “street-people.”
Perhaps another phrase would be “homeless” people. Whatever the proper descriptive name for them may be, I am referring specifically today to the sector of this social grouping that are the ones that ask you for money.
I pass them every day, in my pedestrian travels.
Like today.
I spent the afternoon downtown drinking coffee all over the place, and reading Margaret Atwood. When I left Starbucks and made my way home, I was repeatedly asked to part ways with any money I may have had in my pocket.
It is incredible the amount of times I am asked for my money, on the way home.
[Remember, I am not making a judgment upon the gross amount of need out there, I am merely recounting an observation of reality]…. I mean, one guy asked me for money, and literally, I could see, not even fifty feet yonder, the next guy gearing up to ask me the same question.
Where am I? In Calcutta?
Walking the streets of my city is beginning to be like crossing a never ending toll bridge!
But today, for the first time a question hit me.
After I had said, “Sorry pal” to about the fifth “pal”.... I asked myself:
WHY IS IT NEVER WOMEN?

Honestly, I had never noticed this before!
And I am a well-travelled, experienced urbanite.
Why is it always men asking for money?
In all seriousness, I would estimate that for every 100 people that ask me for money on the street, upwards of 95 of them will be men.

It’s just an observation I have acknowledged.
I have no answer to the question.

To see a former blog of mine on the phenomenon of urban begging, click → HERE.

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Musical Genius

One of the things about myself that I have rarely mentioned on this blogpage [if ever] is how much I love singing. Both doing it, and listening to it, when both are done well.
I am the consummate dashboard-tapping guy that gets caught singing at the red light!
So today I thought I would just take a minute to tell you of one of my favorite songs of all time.

It’s the song Sacrifice, performed by Elton John.
The song was originally released on the 1989 album entitled Sleeping With The Past, but was also subsequently released on the 1996 compilation album Love Songs.
The lyrics are written by Bernie Taupin, who has composed at least eighty thousand poems for Elton to put the music to. Seriously, check this out. Taupin is some sort of writing machine! The success of the collaborative efforts of Taupin and “Sir” Elton are impossible to exaggerate.
OK, but this one song, Sacrifice.

I just think that it is incredible, and it is not so much the lyrics that impress me, even though they are pretty dang good. It is what Elton John has done with them that makes me listen to the thing a thousand times over, wanting to hear it one thousand and one!
The genius of the song is in the “phrasing.”
By “phrasing” I am referring to the value of each syllable in each word. And it includes the invention of syllables that are not there. Phrasing refers to the artist’s choice of how long these syllables will be drawn out or extinguished. With careful attention given to inflection.
For instance, from the very first line, there is an artistic choice involved in making the word “sign” have three descending steps to it. Stuff like that. This first sentence ["It's a human sign"] has five syllables, but Elton John makes it contain eight.
And the result is that the listener runs UP five steps and DOWN three, and pauses, as though waiting to hear what more needs to be said. And that is exactly what the writer [Taupin] would want a listener to do.
But to create it, to do this, requires musical genius.
I could mention similar things about every single line of this entire song.
I just think it is one of the most beautifully crafted songs of all time.
So much so, that the best thing I can do is shut up about it. My comments cannot do it justice.
You can hear and see the music video for Sacrifice, HERE.

Sacrifice

It's a human sign
When things go wrong
When the scent of her lingers
And temptation's strong

Into the boundary
Of each married man
Sweet deceit comes calling
And negativity lands

Cold cold heart
Hard done by you
Some things look better baby
Just passing through

And it's no sacrifice
Just a simple word
It's two hearts living
In two separate worlds
But it's no sacrifice
No sacrifice
It's no sacrifice at all

Mutual misunderstanding
After the fact
Sensitivity builds a prison
In the final act

We lose direction
No stone unturned
No tears to damn you
When jealousy burns

Music by Elton John
Lyrics by Bernie Taupin
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Splash du Jour: Friday

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
-- Joseph Campbell –

Have a great Friday!

A Poem...

I Am An Orchid

A girl told me, so it must be true.
And I told her she was a peach.
I said, “When I look at you
I think of how a man will preach
until he is black and blue
and never know the half of who
God is,” and she said, “Teach
me the way that I may eschew
all others, and preferring you
above them…” Just then I reach
her lips with mine, and two
and two is one and each is each
and we, no longer on the beach
with juice and petals slipping through
our hair and hands, are lost to view.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2007
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality.
The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him will never have any other than
an existence of mediocrity.
-- James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) --

Have a great Thursday!
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

The memories of my family outings are still a source of strength to me. I remember we'd all pile into the car - I forget what kind it was - and drive and drive. I'm not sure where we'd go, but I think there were some trees there. The smell of something was strong in the air as we played whatever sport we played. I remember a bigger, older guy we called "Dad." We'd eat some stuff, or not, and then I think we went home. I guess some things never leave you.
-- Jack Handey –

Have a great Wednesday!
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In The Year 2107...

I work at a gigantic archival storage facility.
To say more about the logistics of my job would be too boring for you to adequately comprehend.
However, one thing happened today that even I find interesting.
We process, store, retrieve and ship millions of bits of information. My day-to-day life revolves around the never-ending search for the exact information our clients require, whether it be in hard-copy [paper] or computer-data [tape, disk, etc.] format.
[OK, when does the part that is NOT boring kick in, Cipriano?]
→Today, I retrieved five boxes of ancient files [of a nature I cannot divulge here] and was just about to seal them shut on this special machine, made for just that purpose.
As I was doing so, my co-worker informed me that these boxes were to be shipped to another location where they were to be stored and then re-opened [here is the neat part]….. in one-hundred years.
One-hundred years?
That's almost a century!

Immediately, as I lifted the next box onto the banding machine for the sealing procedure, I had this amazing sense of how profoundly dead I would be when that very box would be re-opened.
It was sort of creepy a bit.
What will the world be like, when that box is unsealed, and some guy or gal [or maybe by then there will be a third gender?] will peer into its contents?
All of a sudden I had this wild urge to write a little note and slip it inside one of the boxes.
But what would I say?

“Umm. Hey! How’s it going? Uhhh… I sealed up this box way back in the year 2007 and I have… I mean had a blogpage called Bookpuddle. If you go there and check the archives for January…..”

No, that’s stupid. How about…

“Hi, person of the future. I am writing this in 2007. Do you drive a spaceship? If you do…. just think, this note was written by a guy who had to drive a CAR to work. Yeah. A CAR!”

No, that’s pretty bad, too.
In the end, I never wrote anything at all.
Now, the Spaceship-driving alien-type hermaphrodite-creatures that will open those five boxes will never even know that I existed!

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

If I can stop one heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

-- Emily Dickinson –

Have a great Tuesday!
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Splash du Jour: Monday

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
-- Robert Frost –

Have a great Monday!

No Answer

There is drama all around us.
I am writing this, mere minutes after it happened.
I am sitting here at Starbucks, with my laptop open in front of me. It had just booted up, and I had just taken my first sip of my first Sunday coffee. I'm at the bar-like counter, at the plate-glass window, facing a sidewalk full of pedestrians.
In fact, here is a picture of the very exact spot.

The street is Rideau Street.
A blue van pulls up rather quickly, zipping into the bus-lane to offload passengers. “Blue-Line Taxi” says the sign on top.
The rolling side door opens and a young woman, about 20 years of age, jumps out. She steps onto the sidewalk and walks a few feet, and as she does this, I notice that there is still someone else in the back of the van [it had tinted windows] and that person reaches out and slams the door shut and says to the driver something like, “Go! GO!”
I saw some frantic hand waving from the backseat area.
The van then disobeys every rule of the road [as taxi-drivers do] and cranks the wheels to the left, cuts across three lanes, and takes off in the opposite direction from which it arrived.
At this same moment the woman who had gotten out turns around and flings her arms out, palms up, saying, “Whaaaat?”
Immediately she sets her handbag on a newspaper stand and takes out her cell phone, looking in the direction of the fleeing cab, and dialing. There is no answer.
No answer.
It is, to me, one of the most amazing things about the human body's emotional reaction time, how quickly tears can well up. Because I can already see them in this woman’s eyes, and she is about twenty feet away from me.
As the phone rings inside that cab.
And there is no answer.
With this agonizing [for me to see] look on her face, she snaps the phone shut and zips it into her handbag and turns, and walks away.
And I was already wondering, like even before any of this had happened, I was wondering today, the following question:
“Why do human relationships have to be so difficult? So precarious? So precariously difficult?”

There are a few personal reasons I was already thinking this, but it helps that I also just finished reading a supremely excellent philosophic novel that raises this exact question… and provides really…. → no answer.
The novel is Alain de Botton’s On Love. [a.k.a. Essays In Love]. I must write something about this book, it was so damn good.
But heartbreaking. Good, but heartbreakingly so. Like human relationships, I guess? The best ones having the most potential to hurt, at some point?
I am just about to begin, as soon as I refill this coffee here, another de Botton book, called The Consolations of Philosophy. The table of contents shows that one chapter is called A Broken Heart, so perhaps the author will answer the answerless question in that chapter. But I am not going to hold my breath.
Because love is complex. There is nothing as complex.
To the question, there is no answer.
Unless love itself is the answer.

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Two Things!

Last weekend some friends and I gathered for a post-holiday Starbucks gab-session.
The four of us meet every Sunday evening.
Sun, rain, or snow.
One of the things we discussed were New Year's Resolutions.
They had such interesting ones, involving fitness programs, character-building sort of self-assessment things a la Stephen Covey, healthier eating regimens.... all of that sort of planned-out sort of jazz.
When it got to me I had to say...
"Umm. Nothing! Not a single thing!"
Poor planning, I guess. I am just not the "resolution" type.
But just tonight I have thought of two things that are My 2007 Resolutions:

1) More sleep.
2) Less beer.

You may think I am joking but I could not be more serious.
Concerning #1, I am not an insomniac at all. Once I decide to sleep I pretty much go into a coma, but the things is.... by the time I DECIDE to do so, it is usually tomorrow! [Umm, for instance, check the post-time on this blog here...]
That's gotta change.
Concerning #2, I am not an alcoholic at all. But I do consume beer in a bit of an all-too regular sort of fashion. Two here. One there. But I mean, why not drink something else in 2007? Like.... vodka! [No, just kidding]. Like bottled water or something?

So, these are my two resolutions.
I know, I know. I am soooooooooo ambitious!

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