I really liked this quote in reference to you-know-who:

Never attibute evil to malice when it may be accomplished through stupidity

#$@%^@##@#%&(*&#$@!$

I am beginning to chafe under the stupid, narrow-minded, misbegotten, spinney, bedraggled, and ill tempered snot of a man that is our Adjutant. To bad he's he CO's best friend and best man and the army didn't do its paperwork right when he got out more than 10 years ago. Someone the CO found a way to bring him back as the Adjtant. Anyway, he's managed to have one subbie quit and another ask for a transfer and I think as the senior subbie baton has been passed to me, I'm really beginning to get smarmy with a man that know no lines between mess business and army business and runs everything or at least dabbles his little nosey fingers into everything. He from the army of the 60s and one day his nasty little mouth is going to get him into a good deal of trouble and no amount of loyalty on the part of his cultivated little lot of semi-stooges and quasi-friends is going to help him. He has, well, how shall I put it? an extremely backward, archaic and poor idea of women in the army and I shudder to repeat what he think they are only capable of. I am aghast that we have this man wearing the uniform of a Seaforth, never mind a CF one. My distate and displeasure at having to shut up and take it since he is not only the adjutant, but double hatted as the Coy 2I/C. The was someone's brilliant idea to get him quickly aquainted with the modern army, but he is always spouting about how the army used to be and how he will get us back to the way we were, even if he has to fire some people along the way. I grieve.

Anyway, can you tell that there's a little bitterness there? I'm not usually one to hold a grudge and I can usually be counted to be one of the more mild and team-oriented people I know, but he is stretching my patience very thin. And over the most stupidily trivial things. Anyway, I must stop or else I shan't be able to sleep...

I was listening to a senate committee on CPAC and while I did hear some generally supportive statements about the army (anytime anyone is talking about army and more support in the same sentence has my attention) but they seem to have some strange ideas about what to do with the reserves and from all these overly educated academics. They do talk about wanting to increase the size of the reserves but also have strange notions about turning it into some sort of civil defence mob - that'll hardly help recruiting. It may be fine for everyone else, but I'd have a hard time selling the combat arms regiments on it. It's be disastrous for recruiting and what retention. They seem to think in this cocoon-like state and imagine that what reserves we have now will be only too happy to trade in their weapons for some tracker dogs and search and resue equipment. Where are the bleeding hearted liberals that have this notion of war as distant and will never come if we only continue to give it the face of a flower.

I smell a rat in trying to equate military ranks to civilian ones. The public service commission has for years tried to tie the military ranks to their own civil servant structure so that whenever the military got a raise, they could do along and get their unions to demand a similar one based on the notion that military embers are similar in position and education. When's the last time you saw a civil servant digging a trench or down on the rifle range doing the PWT? Never and I am not willing to that that one go without a fight - you know, I think I'm getting feisty in the small hours of the morning. I have to work tomorrow, so this won't be much longer that it is. I've now been toying with the fantasy that I'll get out of the military and write more regularly. non-fiction writing. But then, who would listen to a has been , or worse yet than the infamous Scott Taylor, a never was? The establishmeent really only wants to accept notions from within and is supremely mistrusting of outside interference. Lip service is paid only, and a good deal of public money spent, but as always, the decision makers cling to the luxury of being able to say "oops" if they get it wrong.

Need a hug. Where are the women when you need them?

I want to write but there are too many emotions and too many things to talk about. I can't. The fingers want to keep going but I am having to repress it and tell myself to stop. It's nothing I can fix, How depressing is that?

I think he was writing in reference to me.

Name: Alex Moises
Email: amoises@telus.net
Occupation: Designer/writer
Location: Edmonton

Long-winded diatribes are the staple of a vacuous opinion.Do we actually believe we can find a more accomodating nieghbor than the U.S.? They have the capacity and the gumption to act unilaterally if they so wish.Yet many times they have reached for an international accord only to be slapped in the face with disdain and vulger comments. To some individuals participating in this sound-off I suggest you follow the advice of Strunk & White, less is more.

"Less is more" ? People who share the mindset of accepting what meagre table-scraps that we get from the United States are oft to quote this. There is more to life than acceptance of might as the only rule. Less is simply less and does not always properly convey the full spectrum of what we want to say. The colloquial tongue will reduce us to writing in "e-mail meter".

Thingy I wrote for a public comment to a National Post article.

Beyond shock: reality.

The actions of a neighbour, business partner, ally and friend, acting in its own interest shouldn't shock us. We are quite capable of doing the same, just in smaller and less widely perceived chunks. It is ingrained upon the Canadian consciousness to maintain a healthy mistrust of our cousins to the South. It is, afterall, they who in the midst of our (Britain) war with another self-proclaimed ruler, Napoleon, decided that we needed to be freed from the pangs of colonial rule and promptly invaded us in 1812. While it is generally considered impolite to remind them of this, they have time and again with ample regularity demonstrated what it means to be the kid on the block with all the money and all the candy. If not begrudging us (with the Kaiser's help no less) sea access to our own gold rush and the loss of the Alaska Panhandle, then the constant modern-day reminders of this master-servant relationship, or scratch-my-back-and-I-will-maybe-scratch-yours in the softwood lumber dispute, the constant fishing squabbles, mad cow, SARS, and now being shut out of reconstruction bidding in Iraq. We really shouldn't be shock or surprised.

The reality is that we are talking about US taxpayer dollars and what government on Earth could and would face the backlash of its home public if it became public knowledge that the very people that have sniped at them and questioned their motives and actions and now bask in the security of an evil removed (you must be very naive or cruel to think that Saddam Hussein's rule was benevolent), are now recipients of equally hard-earned tax dollars? The legality of the invasion/war/liberation in Iraq is really moot - Saddam is not currently in power and the Americans are. Whether here in North America or abroad in their administered territories, we simply cannot expect anything less that parochial and childish behavior from a government that sees enemies amongst her long-term and war-tested friends, and treats everyone with a daily filter of the "if you are not with us, you are against us" test.

The pure arrogance of that sentiment must be clear since it is an extract from the Bible. Jesus giving clear indication not to sit on the spiritual fence. What arrogance and confidence in their own prowess, industry and nation are these Americans that they equate themselves to God? I fear that this arrogance will continue much as a schoolyard bully may thrive - until someone or something hands him the short end of the stick. Then he goes around and asks for friends. As always, as the good neighbours that we try to be and playing by the rules, we shall only be too happy to pick up our wayward neighbour, dust him off with a friendly pat on the back and help him on his way.

Or will we?

Some solace is better than no solace.

I sit in the glassed entranceway of the Walter C. Koerner Library. The library is an impressive mix of glass and stone exterior, with semblances of Vancouver's main library inside. The walk leading to the entrance doors is littered with the detritus of our habits: cigarette butts and dried remains of chewing gum like so many small round flakes of paint. It is not a sight befitting the approach to such a fine building in such a fine university on such a fine day. The day is nippy and grey, but not so grey and worn as the dirty carpet in the entranceway between the layer of glass doors where I sit behind a desk and a laptop. The trees outside are swept of leaves and the bare, spindly look contrasts with the grove of evergreens sprouting from the dell between the two libraries, old and new, Main and Koerner. A small flock of Canada geese dart past the clock-tower in confused flight. Confused because the weather and temperature always seems to vaccillate here in Vancouver, never really deciding if it is going to be cold and wet, or cool and wet, or frigid and wet, or frigid and dry - which leaves the animals confused if mildly content that they are still able to find forage here, when in other parts of Canada would leave them little but snow and dirty snow at that.

The occasional muffled conversation and pithy banter as I exchange cards are about the only interruption in an otherwise wonderful opportunity to lie down and stretch out to sleep. There are some curious stares but I gather that most are only too happy to have finished their examinations for this term. Life is otherwise interrupted by having to do these card exchanges.

The place would look so much better if the cigarette butts didn't litter the ground outside as if a bag containing them had suddenly emptied. The situation would be undoubtedly helped by the presence of ash/butt cans and the oft-seen stone kind with the fine white sand would do nicely here but I surmise that in the wisdom of managers in a committee somewhere, they have decided that in order to curb smoking and to eliminate the visible sign that the campus somehow promotes smoking, have decided to do away with them altogether. This measure, while may have seemed astute at first glance, resulted in having no-where for the die-hard smokers to deposit the refuse that is the culmination of their smoke - the butt. And nowhere to put it for it is not meet that butts go in regular garbage cans for they have the potential of sarting a particularly nasty rubbish bin fire, and so they go on the ground to be an eyesore for all to see, and perhaps a visible sign of the migbegotten and parochial half-measures that manifest themselves in the thinking of management so common in a large organization.

There is nothing quite so content-looking as a large white seagull sauntering across the apron of the Main Mall. There is a look and feeling of abject disdain for all around, but tempered with the ever-gnawing search for for.

A note to a friend fled from Vancouver

From wither barren and frozen wasteland writest thou?
Surely not from Kelowna?
That blighted valley that endureth the harsh and remorseless rays of Summer
and the cold bite of Winter's icy-borne breath?
Kelowna - which hath not seen seen or heard of a mightier fury in ringed fire,
since the days of sulfurous fire-breathing dragons?
from what unbespoken ill dost thou flee this mild and temperate land?
what darkness here in the shadows lurk that canst not follow thee?
what flight hast thou taken? and from what indescribable black foulness fear?

I pray that you shall be safe and girded with the peace that you seek. I am glad that you are abound with life and a little change is good for us all. It has always signalled the casting off of albatrosses. (LLRR - go and read the Rime of the Ancient Mariner) And as we see them plunging down the depths of misery, our lives lighten up a bit and so it is that I hope for you. A little solace is sometimes greater than all the material gifts of this lifetime.


On a separate yet connected note:

I do immensely like Kelowna and the cities that ring the Okanagan.
There is a strange mix of peaceful sedateness and yet a frentic if confused vibrancy there.

You don't have to be in an actual physical relationship.

I think I sleep just fine if I have some thought of a person that I can imagine. She could be the nice delectable young thing that I happened to notice whilst meandering through Chapters one evening - sitting there in a corner with her legs folded underneath like some yoga position, or else some brown-haired maiden wistfully wandering through the racks, toying with her curly locks and swinging her handbag behind her as she cranes forward, peering sideways at the binder titles, printed perpendicular to the ground. Or else a chance encounter with a person that leaves you wanting more - mentally and or physically.

Physical doesn't neccessarily mean sex. To paraphrase - sex if neccessary, but not necessarily sex. There is so much more to being physically intimate, the nuzzling, soft caresses or the semi-firm hand, feeling its way over flesh. Bone, skin, fat (yes, we're human), hair and even the smell of things - skin, hair. The scent of the small of the neck is different from that over her arms and similarily off her midriff.

To go to bed alone is a sad and increasing modern fixture. Not that the ancients were bedding each other on a regular basis. Women certainly have a greater variety of choice and the means of finding that choice. The arrival of the internet and the advent of online dating has brought an unhitherto large number of willing, fit, employed, and mildly interesting males in not only the reach, but the consideration of today's female at the touch of a button. A few clicks and phtos aside, the ability to find not just a mate for lifelong bliss, but a blissful nitelong mate is unprecendented in our history and has dramatic social and cultural consequences.

No longer are women subjected to the social graces that attend the ritual that is the stylized search for male partner, never mind a partner with whom to spend a lifetime with (or perhaps until something better, or richer, or prettier, or healthier, or fitter, or smarter, or just plain interesting comes by). Now they can do their shopping for humans online and there are plenty of men willing to advertize themselves, sometimes truly, sometimes falsely but always there is an overabundance. What to do as a woman? Take your pick. This may actually not be so simple as it sounds, for almost all women will have said this at one time or another "I don't know what I am looking for - but it's not you". And there's the problem - most women are looking for the same thing, in as much as most men are looking for the same thing. And women carry more of a social program in their head with them, enough to come up with the notion that if I am asking you out, then I must think that we are on the same level of attractiveness (or did I read that in a Dilbert comic strip?), whereas men are simply happy enough for you to have said yes, never mind the utter banalities of figuring out what to do with you once we have you on the way to a restaurant, cinema, coffee shop , whatever.

Are you selling yourself short by selling yourself electronically for all the superhighway to see?

Times they are a changing.

Are they ever. I remember sitting quietly with my head abuzz with how it is normally when one has had either too little or too much REM sleep. I was thinking to myself how different I am from how I was or how my thought processes may have been when I was, say, 25 and freshly out of my first almost long-term relationship. Am I really all that different? Have my thoughts and or processing changed that much, and where will it all be in 10 years? Is there ever a point when it stops? not that it should, but I wonder if this has any bearing on me seeing (that is dating or trying to have a relationship on an initimate level) women younger or older than I.

Just wondering.

Quod erat demonstrandum

Is it narcissistic to think that the world would be all the more boring were it not to contain the nauseating yapping of trivialities that is one's voice? To what end is all this constandt hum-drum that is the ceaseless, and continuious banter that pours forth like an unquenchable deluge? What good dost this my voluminous yet meaningless rant? What poeple have I saved? What minds have I caused to pause to think? What evils have I thwarted with some rightly-timed discourse? None that I can think of and certainly equal is the same in my recent remembrance. So what, therefore, I ask you, is the point of being such an insanely ascerbic smart-arse? If you have the answer to this question for the ages, please feel free to file it under G and call 1-800-U-BUGGER.

Now that the momentary self-question cloud has blown past, I'm right as rain again and ready to spew out vast and infinitely worthless drivel to all and sundry. Hey, are you busy? I've got lots to say, neverminf your not wanting to hear any of it. When a mind as mind is filled with all sorts of worthless claptrap from years of studying and reading encyclopaedias as a child, I've got to have some place to deposit some of it. No? Damn.

Hey, you there, boy have I got some talking for you...