Groceries

I'm certainly not doing anything to help my unease these days with my choice of reading material. I'm reading a biography of John Wilkes Booth, the man who nearly 150 years ago assasinated Abraham Lincoln. The book is an examination of how an "ordinary" sensitive man of the arts could snap and commit an act of horrific violence.

One of the differences in Canadian and American history, we have almost no violence in our history, with the exception of D'arcy McGee, whose assasination most historians agree was probably a mistaken identity, or Pierre Laporte, assasinated during the October crisis, we have almost no violent outbursts in domestic history. I feel it necessary to put a caveat there before I start getting e-mails about Sun Peaks, Kahnestake, and the Winnipeg riots. We have no violence in our history directed at politicians.

Turning my thoughts outward again, the bunker is bathed in sunlight this morning, a pleasant change from the gloom of the past few weeks. Looking at the weather wizard, it seems destined not to last through the day however. How does the old saw go, "red skies at morning, sailors take warning"?

Stealing a page from Rumpole of the Bailey my thoughts are with my muse. I'm in a weird state where my muse is untouchable to me. While frustrating, it's allowing me to meditate on certain emotions that I haven't been able to meditate on for awhile. My thoughts are usually so logical, rigid, and devoid of emotion that I've become comfortable with that line of thinking. Every so often, someone enters my life who rips open a door that releases a flood of emotions that my perspective on almost everything changes. Politics, art, society, history (general and personal) are seen through a different prism. It's necessary to change the prism through which we see the world, otherwise our interpretations become rigid, and inflexible.

It's far too easy to see the news feeds as mere facts cycling through a machine to be displayed in grey and white on a monitor. Once that emotional door has been opened, and the prism changes the view, it suddenly becomes quite a bit different. The heart, normally covered with a crusty shell, suddenly starts pounding, shaking off the remnants of that shell, again becoming flesh and sinew. Ordinarily my heart is something in the grocery store, wrapped in plastic, prompting no emotional reaction whatsoever. However, laid bare on a slaughterhouse floor, it becomes a sad reminder of a wasted life.