Wedding Vows and Chloroseptic

It's been since Tuesday now that the second battle against the evil strepp throat has raged on in the back of my mouth. "It's no big deal really" I told myself "you pretty much just slept it off last week and you were fine." All I needed was a little numbing action from my handy dandy trusty chloroseptic bottle and everything would be right as rain.

Fast forward to Friday morning and allow me to set the scene for you:

After being woken up in a strange bedroom by the inability to swallow this morning, I went to the bathroom at the friend's house I was staying at in lieu of the wedding that I am to be in tomorrow morning in Medicine Hat. It was there, in the depths of southern Saskatchewan, that while gargling an entire mouthful of the local anesthetic, I inadvertantly swallowed over 4 times the recommended limit due to a tickle in my throat.

My kingdom for a time machine...

Had I known what was to transpire over the next 10 hours I would have forced myself to instantly vomit up the concentrated evil I had just put down my soon to be numbed oral cavity. THAT, however would not make for a very good story and we've all guessed at least a couple lines ago that yes, I did in fact go back to bed.

To be woken up 45 minutes later with the queerest feeling in the top of my stomach. "How odd" I thought sitting up and rubbing my hand over the area of my lower chest that was beginning to feel increasingly tospy turvy, "I'm sure it's just a little side effect of the chloroseptic that'll wear off soon enough."

An hour later I was in that position we've all found ourselves in during moments of intense pain without a forseeable ending, negotiating with God, begging, pleading, offering up my own mother while in the fetal position on the bathroom floor of some poor family now wondering what sort of strange, animal noises are eminating from behind the door.

Knowing that there was a wedding reception to go to though, I peeled myself off the floor long enough to stumble to my car, doubled over and unable to stand upright without going dizzy from pain in my stomach. I'd always wondered what the guys in the Alien movies felt like just before the Alien ripped out from inside their chest cavities...

I wish I didn't know.

After only 20 minutes on the road however the dizzy spells were going to endanger the lives of my other passengers so I opted for the best solution I could think of at that point: I would resume my divine bargaining. This time curled up by the toilette of a tourist info stop on the Alberta border, puking like a prairie kid in a Pacific squall.

There's no adjectives to describe the next hour in that Info center bathroom. Rest assured that, even though said adjectives probably don't exist, I came up with a few on my own somewhere in that period of time.

The moral of this story though is this: If ever you drink anesthetic by accident and are pleading with your God to take your life in a Tourist Info center, just hold out for a few more minutes until you've eaten. Please stop and remember that you haven't eaten since yesterday afternoon and that the only reason this shit is staying in your gut is because it's empty.

I recommend Taco Time in a pinch. It goes down easy and makes an otherwise unbearable wedding reception tolerable (though still a little bit unbearable). Oh yea, I'm not really sick anymore...

But now I can't swallow again.

This has been a public service announcement and a test of the emergency broadcast system.

Mellow Drones Are Full of Tones.

If there's one band on the planet that I want to see right now, it's The Smashing Pumpkins. I've always been such a huge fan of these guys if for no other reason than that they seem to be so polarizing with their music. People either love them to death, or wish they were dead. I think that's the sign of a great band. No one who likes that genre of music has a neutral opinion of them, there's no apathy about them. And No Apathy is awesome.

P Is For Parking

There's nothing pertinent about these pictures. They don't pertain any hidden meanings or possible interpretations that may give you feelings of premonition or perceptions of the grandiose. Preconceptions and impertinence aside...

I just really like the letter P.

I'm Starting A Generation War With Your Parents.

A very dear friend wrote this to me in an email this week after I shared a very pressing issue and trying circumstance in my life

Maybe one day i will be in a place where i'll know what people are thinking when they cast young people aside without reason, and maybe i will be able to stop it from happening. It's like young [people] are expendable in their eyes, or they don't need to be mentored or critiqued, or they're young so they'll just bounce back, or it was never their thing to begin with.

Without knowing anything more you understand now that I myself have recently been "cast aside" to quote my friend or, as I like to put it in the words of my favorite band, "Trampled Underfoot". And what I am realizing more and more these last weeks is that if you're like me, and find yourself 35 years(ish) old or younger, we're in a bad place my friend.

A very, very bad place.

If you are in this particular demographic, you are in what I consider the greatest generation ever to have walked the earth. What makes us great? I'll tell you. We were born Princes and Princesses of this western world. We inherited a world our grandparents built with their bare hands. They fought off one of the greatest evils in history and returned to make a world so full of comforts and safety that it now seems invincible.

But it's not.

The life that we live, the lives our parents and grandparents built for us is not invincible. This world of western ideals and principles is being brought down not by those who built it, but by the next generation that inhabited it. These "baby boomers" are what puts my generation in a very, very bad place. They're also the generation that will make us great.

At Woodstock, the Baby Boomers declared their freedom from the previous generation as all generations do. Vowing to build a world based on peace and understanding ,they embraced social liberalism and flower power at a young age. When they all left their hippy state and got jobs, they all voted for low taxes and a small state and favored "as much for myself as I can" individualism. Then, upon the realization of their impending mortality, up goes spending on healthcare and pension. As one economics pundit puts it "Perhaps we are seeing the scary sight of a generation that has been rather brutal in getting its own way sqeezing everything it can out of it's children."*

I feel a great affinity for our grandparents generation. They fought against the great injustice of their time and built for themselves a world that suited them. It earned them the oft used title "greatest generation".

Likewise, will we do the same. We won't sail to the battlefields of Europe to do so though. Like Tyler Durden said, our Great War is a Spiritual War. The great injustice that you and I will fight against in our lifetime is the lifetime that came before us. One bent on selfishness and greed, gratification and self imposed piety and self righteousness. Our weapon will be our philosophy. We are the post modern generation so feared and often warned of in the halls of politics and sanctuaries of Religion. We have no regard for absolutes, we trample on the hard and fast and tread lightly in the midst of those who declare posession of the only Truth.

The world that the previous generation built was one built on absolutes, black and whites and hard and fasts. The previous world scorned our creativity and spurned our worldview.

In answer to my friend's email then, the reason for the older generation casting aside it's younger counterparts is often times an issue of self preservation. Forgive me for believing this slightly more than halfheartedly but it's little less than a conspiracy by the middle aged against the young.

So stake your claim now you who have become apathetic, fat and lazy in your offices and suburbs and mini vans. Your claim will not be yours much longer. For all your institutions will be torn down. This world and this lifestyle you've grown accustomed to will cease to exist. Your inefficient houses of parliament, your gluttonous social programs and most of all, your irrelevant churches will rot away and be swept aside. The truths you claim to hold and vaunt over all the earth will be revealed as the empty skeletons that they are. It will not be a violent revolution. It will happen gradually. We will simply wait for your ideals, thoughts and lifestyle to pass away. Your politics will erode and evolve and your wars will end. And, thank heaven and earth, your churches will wither and shrink. Your monuments and edifices to a God whose message you've long forsaken will crack and fade and the "Truth" you've told everyone you have a monopoly on will be laughed at and scorned by the homeless you've turned away and the widows you've let fend for themselves.

This generation promised us the Truth. I spit on your truth. I scorn the ideals and principles on which this lifestyle is based. And I will live my life in a manner that reflects the one who tore it down two thousand years ago and showed the world how it could be, how it ought to be.

It's dying. All of it is in its death throes. There's no cure and there's no going back. Have you noticed it? Have you woken up one sunny morning with the morning light beginning it's slow crawl across your bed and thought that it will all be over, and very soon?

Soon and very soon. The trigger will be pulled.

And you will be the shooter.

*Faisal Islam