Cover of Alive Magazine by Tim Reynolds

SHOOTING FOR SUCCESS:

So, Shooting for Success posts are the stories behind some of my favourite (and most popular) images. Not the aperture and shutter speed, but rather how the particular shot came about.

To start, here’s the first of two magazine covers I’ve sold to Canada`s ALIVE Health Magazine.

This was about as serendipitous a shot as I’ve ever sold. Believe it or not, this shot was taken in late September. The snow hit in 24 hours and covered everything. We had just hiked up Bow Summit (Banff National Park, Alberta, on the 93N north of Lake Louise, on the way to Jasper) and taken a slew of images of stunning Peyto Lake. We were hiking back down to the parking lot and passed these snowboarders who were on their way up to play on one of the many slopes leading down from there.

We passed the snowboarders and on a hunch I turned around and saw this shot. Without hesitation I snapped away.

Now, let’s make it clear that this shot wasn’t all luck. We saw the fresh snow and rushed to get out on the road while the sun was still low in the sky, thus the long shadows. Especially at the higher elevations, if you shoot too early or too late, the light is off. There’s a richness to dawn and dusk light which washes out in the hours between. This simple fact is what makes the difference in probably 75% of all landscape photos. You can have the best composition, the perfect location and then have the image just flop because you picked the wrong time of the day. Some things can be fixed by Photoshop, but light is probably the hardest to fake, even with the graduated orange filter they use on CSI: Miami.

The sale was made simply after I picked up a copy of the magazine (free at health food stores across Canada) wrote to the editor-in-chief, explained where I lived and what kind of pictures I took and then asked if she was looking for any new images.

She said ‘yes, send me some winter samples.’ I sent twenty and she picked this one. I got paid $150 for non-exlusive rights.

That’s it for this week’s Shooting for Success.

Ciao for now.

Tim Reynolds.

Coming up with the great idea of developing a big business opportunity and not having the nowhow to make the event profitable and sustainable is starting to become very redundant. People who start a business with weak plans and easy access to start-up capital will eventually fail. Unfortunately, as in the USA  recently (home to the more money than brains club) this trend seems to follow the motorsport industry. Now Canada has created it’s own issues some good and some not so good. This week Montreal was awarded the 2010 Forumla 1 race again, Edmonton is having troubles with the Indy Car series.  Good solid business plans and marketing plans with the right people is what will create a successful project, not just an angel investor or a business of passion. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada is just this place with the recent news about the Edmonton Indy and the economic downfall on the community. If a Race can bring $80 million to the community and the organizers cannot figure out how to make money… they better start firing and start hiring. Iwould also suggest creating a prober business plan and marketing plan.

EDMONTON, AB – Sherbrooke Liquor, one of Canada’s best beer shops, has released the latest in a series of limited edition house brand beers, KGB Russian Imperial Stout, which has been brewed for them by Alley Kat Brewing.

In a post on his blog On Tap, Mark Suits of the Edmonton Journal quotes Jim Pettinger of Sherbrooke, who describes it as follows:

KGB (650ml $6.99) is our second anniversary beer (We just celebrated our sixth anniversary though). We decided to sponsor the winning home brewer each year at the Aurora Brewing Challenge. The winner gets to pick a recipe which we then have Alley Kat brew commercially. Last year was Heatseeker Coconut Curry Porter. This year, Bruce Sample chose KGB. Named also for his buddies Glen and Kevin, with whom he brewed in the past.

It’s also noted that this is the first Alley Kat beer to be offered in 650 ml “bomber” bottles, but future seasonals and one-offs may come in bombers should this one be successful.

The Wolfnote doesn’t seem like it much fits in with the bands on this blog, but it totally does! These guys are my first Alberta band on here. Great post-hardcore. These guys were pretty intense.

After some home burnt compilation demos they self released “Dancing to a Rhythm”, their first ep. They would also self release their next two eps, “Check the Lungs for Water” and “SI! SI! SI! SI!”. The later would be the first with their new vocalist Travis Sargent. After selling out the initial pressing on tour, Farway Records re-issued it in digipak. They were then signed to BlackBox Recordings, and would release their two albums on the label. “This is the Getdown” and “Sacred Bodies”.

The Wolfnote Myspace
The Wolfnote Discography

Via: GLOBE-Net (November 17, 2008)

Canada’s oil and gas extraction industry spent $2.8 billion to protect the environment in 2006, more than any other industry, says a new publication by Statistics Canada.

The industry’s expenditures accounted for nearly one-third of the $8.6 billion outlay by businesses operating in Canada for both operating expenses and capital investment in environmental protection. This amount represents all expenditures made in response to environmental regulations, conventions and voluntary agreements.

Industry spending on waste management and sewerage services and pollution abatement and control activities represented almost half of the overall total.

These results followed a long-standing trend in which the largest share of environmental protection expenditures was made to deal with pollutants after they were created.

Provincially, Alberta businesses invested the most in facilities and equipment to protect the environment, again surpassing Ontario, the largest spender up until 2002.

Alberta’s lead position in capital spending on environmental protection was due mainly to high expenditures by the oil and gas extraction industry.

Put in perspective, for every $100 invested by the oil and gas extraction industry, $4 was invested in environmental protection.

Capital investments by Canadian oil and gas producers, most of which operate in Alberta, totaled over $1.7 billion in 2006. This investment occurred in areas such as pollution abatement and control, waste management, pollution prevention, and reclamation and decommissioning.

The oil and gas extraction industry also reported the highest operating expenses ($1.1 billion). This amount went mainly for reclamation and decommissioning, waste management and sewerage services and pollution abatement and control processes.

About $20 out of every $100 invested by the petroleum and coal products industry was for environmental protection, as that industry continued to upgrade refineries to meet new sulphur regulations.

Combined, the oil and gas extraction and petroleum and coal products industries accounted for almost two-thirds of total capital investment for environmental protection.

The industry spent nearly two billion dollars in 2006 on technologies that improve energy efficiency or reduce the use of fossil fuels.

Compared with industry spending on environmental protection, this amount represents a broader set of expenditures. It reflects a motivation by industry to adopt energy-related environmental technologies that exceed responses to environmental regulations, conventions or voluntary agreements.

The oil and gas extraction industry led the way with expenditures of $495.4 million on alternative energy and energy reduction technologies. Most of this amount, $472.9 million, was directed at capital projects.

The electric power generation, transmission and distribution industry spent a similar amount. However, it directed less to capital projects ($155.4 million) and more to operating expenses ($337.8 million).

Industry spending was directed to technologies such as cogeneration, waste energy recovery, solar energy and energy management systems.

It’s been ages it seems since I picked up my camera. That isn’t such a bad thing.

One of the things that I love about shooting for pleasure again is being able to forget about photography and not have to think about it. This might like an odd thing to read on a photography blog but it really makes sense.

One of the keys to being creative is to be able to step back from what you’ve done and see your work objectively. Being afforded the luxury of not having to shoot or look at my photos gives me extra distance and a different perspective of my photos.

We are all guilty of it. It being falling in love with or becoming too immersed in our creations. Have you ever looked at something years after your made it? It looks different. Seeing something “cold” is different than editing your photos in camera or processing them a couple of weeks after shooting them.

I am really looking forward to the next few weeks of weather and getting out to shoot. My batteries are recharged, the creative ones and the goal is to see differently than how I saw this past year.

Do yourself a favor every once in a while and put the camera away and don’t think photography. It’ll do wonders for you when you return.

Happy shooting,

Dan

Natural gas prices are too low.

I’d heard that comment likely a dozen times within a week.

“Nothing’s moving. Natural gas prices are too low. You just don’t get it.”

I get it. Natural gas prices are too low. But then the question is: too low for what?

Living in Canada, we have to deal with inclement weather and we do it easily; we adjust accordingly. It snows, we put on boots and put away shorts and pick up a wide plastic shovel. When it’s summer, we put the boots away again (unless it’s Alberta). If we didn’t, we’d be labeled as eccentric and rightly so.

So why, in responding to low natural gas prices, do most businesses simply say “Prices are too low” and that’s that? Again, too low for what?

Too low to waste time, to be over-priced, to have poor governance models. Too low to buy ten fuel-eating trucks and charge ninety dollars an hour to run them. Too low to toss unwanted models at the market. Too low to pay all but the best workers anything much at all.

Perhaps too low to miss out on? Distressed rivals offer tremendous bargains for expansion, on all levels. Changing needs allow for myriad opportunities. Alliance between companies for a common goal can present entire regions to fresh sales’ pitches. Maybe my theory is wrong, but until natural gas is worth exactly nothing, there are still profits to be made but those profits won’t just go to anybody — they’ll go to the few that can tell it’s winter.

Here’s to a good jacket and a warm pair of boots.

The Canadian Tar Sands is the world’s largest, and dirtiest, energy project. Dirty oil sands crude generates as much as five times greenhouse gas as conventional oil. Yet, unless steps are taken by the U.S. and Canada, both countries will become irrevocably addicted to the dirtiest oil on earth.

For more information you can visit – http://www.agit-pop.com, http://www.greenpeace.org/canada

“Canada is a federation, that we have different understanding what the country looks like, and that nobody has a monopoly on what our national myth; and ours are Cowboys.“

Dr. Barry Cooper is not just a professor of Political Theory at the University of Calgary. Counted among his interests are Canadian public policy, climate change, environmental policy, third party campaign advertising, classical political theory, filmmaking, hunting, and even fishing. He is a man of mystery, self-denying of his fame. When he is not enlightening students on his particular perspective on Canadian politics and political theory, he hunts and fishes with good friends Dr. Tom Flanagan, past advisor and campaign manager of PM Stephen Harper, and Dr. Ted Morton, current Member of the Legislative Assembly; both members of the Political Science department at the University of Calgary.
Dr. John von Heyking, our own resident Political Theorist in the University of Lethbridge Political Science Department, presented Dr. Cooper to speak for the Uleth community. Dr. Cooper was Dr. von Heyking’s Graduate program supervisor, thus there was only slight surprise on behalf of myself at the boys club familiarity Dr. von Heyking bared in his introduction.
After his talk (see page six for more), I sat down with Dr. Cooper to discuss his views on partisan academia, Albertan culture, and the Friends of Science.

Alberta, a distinct and separate culture
Pull quote: “You don’t have a clue what culture in Alberta is like. Ya know, when was the last time you got on a horse?’”
Meliorist: Why did you go into academia?
Cooper: Well, I was always smart and good at school. I was a jock too, but I enjoyed reading books. My dad was a surgeon, and he said ‘you can do anything, except be a lawyer’. This was a generation when doc’s and lawyers didn’t like each other, and he wanted me to be doctor but I quit Chem 300 in third year and I didn’t tell him until I couldn’t get back, and I didn’t want to irritate him again, so I decided to go to graduate school. Back then, if you had a fairly good GPA you could, there was lots of money available and I had good grades so I got a free ride and did graduate school in the States.
Meliorist: So, you have worked at other universities in Canada and you graduated with your Doctorates in the States, so what drew you back to Alberta to teach?
Cooper: When I was a kid, I used to spend summers here working. I went to UBC and when I was there, I worked on fish boats. I enjoyed working on fish boats, but there aren’t any fish boats anymore because there are not any fish. I preferred it actually, because I preferred to get paid. When I was working here [Alberta], I would get paid a dollar a day and I preferred to get a little more, so although it was more fun, it didn’t pay.
Meliorist: So, you came back to Alberta to teach because you missed the culture? You mention in your talk the ideas of Albertan, and western culture, the ‘cowboy spirit’. It seems very appealing to you.
Cooper: I was the first person, well, not literally the first person; but when I was a UofT and another guy was at York, I started teaching Canadian Political Thought in the same year, sometime in the mid-seventies. I began it because I couldn’t understand my students. I couldn’t understand why they were so obsessed with Quebec. They always thought about the West, as being, first of all, out there and not in. We’re in and they’re out. So then I said, we (Albertan’s) think of you as being backwards, back east. They didn’t think that was funny.
So, I started teaching this course on political thought to understand why I thought so differently about the same issues they discussed at length. It wasn’t about Liberal, Conservative, whatever, it was about that their assumptions were quite different, because I grew up with different stories. Both the literature and the literary criticism, they’re much different. In terms of the literary imagination, compared to Southern Ontario, which is what I call Loyalist, it’s anti-American. Part of the Laurentian value that Canada is bilingual, Quebec is like the two Canada’s of the nineteenth century. Upper Canada and Lower Canada, Canada East and Canada West. Those political structure reflected the garrison mentality, or survival. It was something that was foreign to the way I would think, and it would be expressed in detail in conversations I would have with students when I was in Toronto, and that puzzled me. So then, it became a kind of problem, an intellectual problem. How did this come about, that you have these very distinctive ideas, what I call myths in the book.
Meliorist: Alberta does have a very strong culture of being political vocal, and you seem to have a very strong history of being politically outspoken, especially when it comes to decisions made by certain parties. How does this affect your teaching, and your style of educating your undergraduate students?
Cooper: I don’t teach Canadian politics.
Meliorist: Do you think that students take your classes because you have been a controversial subject?
Cooper: No, no. I know that my colleagues in the Canadian government subfields would object pretty strongly, because most of what I think they do is not very interesting. If I were teaching a course on Canadian politics, the syllabus would be different. So, they’re not going to let me, even if I wanted to.
Meliorist: What would be in the syllabus?
Cooper: There would be a lot of literature. There would be books like Mallorys. It would be mostly focused on Alberta, versus the rest of the country. I would talk about what was wrong with Macpherson – and there’s a lot that’s wrong with Macpherson – and how that set the agenda for the way Easterners look at Alberta.
When I was in Toronto, we have these discussions, in public, and I would say ‘You don’t have a clue what culture in Alberta is like. Ya know, when was the last time you got on a horse?’ When he talked about the petty Bourgeois alienation of Alberta grain farmers, of which there was a certain amount of it, he said nothing about cowboys, and the grain industry is important, but culturally ranching is at least as important as farming.

Partisan political commentary and the role of academics
Pull quote: “The Canadian military are not boy scouts. They are guys that go out and kill people, to defend the country”.
Meliorist: You have voiced very public opinions of partisan choices and government choices, not just the Liberal or Conservative parties. Do you see value in academics getting involved in trying to influence policy?
Cooper: It’s almost impossible to have the same command of information with respect to public policy, because so much of it is necessarily secret. As it is, with respect to interpreting texts. Most of what I have said about Canadian public policy is based on texts, like the Gomery report. It’s emphasizing certain statements that Gomery made, and what the significance of the statements were, or what the Prime Minster – particularly Chrétien – personally, I think he was a coward – but it wasn’t personal. He actually said these things. He said ‘Canadian Military are boy scouts with guns’. Well, that is an incredibly stupid thing to say, and it’s not just that I disagree, it is just stupid. The Canadian military are not boy scouts. They are guys that go out and kill people, to defend the country.
That nevertheless was revealing about the guy, why did he think that? Partly, it’s because of Quebec, not partly, I’d say quite a bit actually. It’s nothing to do with the number of Francophone’s in the Canadian forces, it’s likely about a quarter, likely less. Francophones join the military; they do, just like everyone else does. It has nothing to do with their culture, it’s their politics and the political advantage that Quebec politicians, whether they are federal or provincial see in being free riders.
Meliorist: You are a vocal member of several organizations that have feature – the now infamous – Calgary School, well known across Canada. It is a group of academics from the University of Calgary Political Science Department, and they have been very involved with influencing public policy, especially [Dr. Tom] Flanagan and [Dr. Ted] Morton. Does this influence the way that the political science department at the UofC operates? Does this influence the way you interact with your students or with the university itself.
Cooper: I’ve written two columns on the myths about the Calgary School, because on a lot of public policies we disagree as much as any group of people would. We get along with one another; some of us get along better than others. Morton and I just went hunting, and Flanagan and I go fishing. As far as I know, Flanagan and Morton don’t do either. I think I am probably good friends with more of them than they are with one another. There is not much internal coherence, what there is, is a certain intellectual challenge to the perceived wisdom with respect to the Canadian public life. It’s not really that it’s Conservative, I mean some are more liberal than I. There certainly are distinctions about social conservatives and social liberals; though I think we all think that you should not spend money you don’t have, so there is a fiscal conservatism there. Morton is much more social conservative than libertarian. There is not the kind of coherence that is often contributed, except with respect to be critical of the received orthodox. How that happened, I think it was serendipitous.
Meliorist: So, it is more of a coincidence then?
Cooper: A lot of coincidences, yah.
Meliorist: You guys have formed a pretty strong reputation for yourselves.
Cooper: Can’t help that. A lot of it is journalists. Jeff[rey] Simpson is the first guy that talked about this, and he was invited by Roger Gibbons, who was a typical liberal middle-of-the -road, average, mediocre academic. He invited Jeff to come up here and tell the bullshit. Before Tom got to working with Stephen [Harper], before Bercuson and I got to writing about confederation, about the late-eighties. He was so astounded that we were not giving the kind of Liberal, NDP view of things. He would talk to his friends in the Eastern media, and that’s where it came from. It’s anti-Albertan, its not like they admire all the great work that we have done. It’s a way of marginalizing and silencing any arguments.

On First Nation, Métis, and Inuit federal policy or, in his words: “Indian Policy”
Pull quote: “Basically, it’s bureaucratic management.”
Cooper: What I said today about Indian policy, that’s extremely upsetting to a lot of people. I know lot’s of Indians, and they say ‘Yah, yah, it is, this is what’s happening.” You can’t do anything about if you’re not focused on what the problem is, the problem is dependency, being dependent on bureaucrats.
Meliorist: So, then, what was your response to [Prime Minister] Stephen Harper’s statement at the G20 conference that Canada does not have a history of colonialism?
Cooper: I think that nonsense. What do you think the Mounties are? They were Red Coats. Where did they get their red coats from? Not from Canada. The British way of dealing with aboriginals in Canada is no different than their way of dealing with Aboriginals in India, or in Africa. Basically, it’s bureaucratic management. Unlike the Americans, who have fights. At least with fights, with Long Knives and the Apaches. I have American Indian friends who celebrate the destruction of the 7th Cavalry. They say, ‘at least we showed them once’, and it gives them a sense of pride. I mean, there are some Métis I guess who think that of Crazy Louis and Batoche, but not very many. I think most think that is was a terrible tragedy. I think it was an interesting minor skirmish, what the British used to call the turbulent frontier.

Partisan politics, Cooper backs Martin
Pull quote: “I think Paul Martin really did initiate the change, it wasn’t Stephen Harper. “
Meliorist: Has being vocally partisan helped your academic career at all? Has it benefited you in anyway? Do you feel you have received any gain from this partisanship?
Cooper: No, I have not received any gain. For all I know, some other difficulties I have had may have been because of this, I don’t know. I certainly haven’t gotten any benefits from being critical of Chrétien, and I think Paul Martin really did initiate the change, it wasn’t Stephen Harper. I think he was basically a decent human being, in a way I can not say about Chrétien. Nobody has ever said what a decent guy Jean Chrétien was. That tells you something.

(Un)Friend of Science?
“…the University of Calgary had received a huge sum of money from the government of Alberta to deal with how are we going to sequester CO2, and this was like hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Meliorist: You are involved in the Friends of Science…
Cooper: No, I am not involved with the Friends of Science. I did one project for them. It was the making of the DVD.
Meliorist: Which landed you in quite a bit of hot water with the University [of Calgary].
Cooper: Yes, it did.
Meliorist: The audit did not come out favorably for you.
Cooper: No, the audit was fine. The audit said there were, there were some reporting procedures that had changed, not because of anything I did. They were changed because, well, there were two reasons they were changed. One is, the most important one, the University of Calgary had received a huge sum of money from the government of Alberta to deal with how are we going to sequester CO2, and this was like hundreds of millions of dollars.
Meliorist: When was this?
Cooper: A couple years ago, just before this other thing.
Meliorist: 2005 or 2006?
Cooper: Yea, and for reasons best known to themselves, they thought this project [Friends of Science DVD project], the total cost on it, I dunno, a couple hundred thousand dollars and I mean it didn’t come to me, it came to produce the DVD. The DVD was done by the Friends of Science. The University of Calgary would have guys like David Suzuki – I call them Climate Change Alarmists -  that’s a polite way of saying it.
They had given a number of lectures at the University with the University’s logo on it, and since the money for the DVD came through the University I thought it would be perfectly legitimate for the University logo to go on the DVD, I didn’t know that.
Meliorist: Didn’t you create the Trust Account in the University on behalf of the Friends of Science?
Cooper: Not on behalf of me, it was for the funders.
Meliorist: The Friends of Science?
Cooper: It was like, I’ve had SSHRC funding, people, friends, other foundations, they have given me research funds. I treated this like any other research fund[ing]. It was not political, it was the construction of a DVD. I ran it the same way, with the same kind of controls on it that I would with a SSHRC account. Apparently, this violated a policy of which I knew nothing. Senior administration said it did. I said, ‘if you guys say so’.
A lot of it [the DVD] was technical stuff. I was managing the production of this product. When I was called in by these guys, I was a little surprised until I realized they thought this was putting this enormous grant that they had not yet nailed down from the government of Alberta in jeopardy, that their behaviour was inexplicable. I still don’t know for a fact that’s why they did, because, they would never admit it. They just said there were accounting irregularities, I didn’t have sufficient controls, the logo was used without permission. It was so vicious, I am not naturally suspicious, but there was so much, it made no sense really. I looked to me as if it was just another research project, it didn’t look that way to them.
The final thing was that Friends of Science took some advertising. They were in Ontario, there were some radio stations, some commercials, ‘if you’re interested in some of the facts about climate change that you won’t get from CBC’, or whatever it was, ‘go on our website’. The Vice President and a lawyer, the general council for the University – she was a very pretty woman – they were extremely upset about this, because these things appeared during the 2005 (sic) election campaign, and some guy who was on the David Suzuki Foundation board in Vancouver complained during the elections.
Meliorist: Because it contravened the Elections Act?
Cooper: Because he alleged it contravened the elections act.
Meliorist: Right, but the Friends of Science didn’t register as a third part advertiser?
Cooper: No, they didn’t, and they didn’t do it for a very good reason, because it wasn’t third party advertising, because every party opposed the Friends of Science position, every party. I’m a expert witness on third party advertisement. The lawyer said ‘this was third party advertisement, didn’t you know it contravened the elections act’? I said, ‘look, I know more about the Canada Elections Act pretty near anybody in the country, I’ve been an expert witness on third party advertising, this was not third part advertising. There is no way in God’s green earth’. They said, ‘we’re going to have get outside opinion’, and I said ‘well, you have the best opinion in the room’, she said, ‘no’. The guy [presumably, the outside opinion] said it was kind of ambiguous. They went to a [Elections Act] tribunal, and they said no, this was not third part advertising, but no one told the university, but they told Friends of Science this. One of the guys sent me a PDF of the letter they got from Elections Canada, so I sent it to the Provost and the pretty lawyer.

I just uploaded some pictures to my picture page. Check it out for some shot of the G-Force and his family. If you have any comments or questions please let me know. Here’s a little taste.

Grant

Dear A,

I’ve been writing emails to plenty of people now and since I am currently on an email writing frenzy and that I cannot control myself anymore because of my apparent OCD… I’ve never actually asked my doctor if it was OCD but sometimes I go crazy on simple things like this ( and actually I like it because i always feel fulfilled once I’m done… 3 hours later ).

You kinda gave me an idea. I don’t know if I told you about this but I am seriously considering hitchhiking Canada. I would start from here in the province of Quebec, then I would go to Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and then I would come back. If I have more time on my hands and everything is right I also consider checking out Yukon. I started planning stuff. I began thinking about what I should bring and what I shouldn’t bring and what kind of craziness might happen. In between this I began to realize that I needed something to attract drivers in order to be picked up easier and faster so I don’t stand like a wounded dog under the rain for five hours. I almost immediately thought that I should bring my guitar ( and that means I have to re-learn how to play it ) but then I thought that it would be too big so I thought of the ukulele you kept mentioning and now I am considering buying a cheap ukulele!!! Wouldn’t that be the coolest thing!?!? I mean I would be known as the legendary ukulele wanderer!!! I would make the news like ” Have you seen the Uke Traveller?! ” and ” The Ukulele Wanderer strikes again! “. Ok, ok, I’m dreaming here… But I do think about bringing a ukulele with me.

So yeah I’ve started planning this thing. I subscribed to a hitchhiking forum where experienced people will probably be able to give me some advice. I plan on doing this in two years from now on june 2011. I will try not to spend money during this trip and I expect to spend most of the summer travelling this way. I still have to tell my family about it and I am pretty sure everybody’s going to freak out so I have to choose the right moment or unless they will believe I am in some sort of state of distress or something… Frankly I have no idea how I will present this idea, most especially to my mom, because I’ve been there forever for her and she has been there for me as well.

I see this as a personal journey rather than a travelling experience. I will write my daily experiences in a journal that I will bring with me. I will also bring my Canon camera that is neither too expensive neither too crappy so I will bring some great pictures ( I think ). I’ve started thinking about some “tricks” like putting two 200$ in two plastic bags and hide them in my two shoes for desperate measures. I also plan on bringing my cd player and some amazing cds like Sigur Ros!!! I will try not to go in hotels and rent rooms and I will try to camp as much as possible and for this I expect to deal with cops and thugs so I will bring my best smiles with me for the cops and my little handy knife for the thugs…

I think what’s triggered me to think about this seriously is Jack Kerouac’s book titled ” On the Road ” which is all about hitchhiking. The guy in the story is pretty messed up and I am different ( I think ) when compared to him, but I still need that freedom I can’t seem to find in here. Plus, this Jack Kerouac guy, well, the “hero” in the book, is him and it’s mostly an auto-biographical novel. I don’t know if I told you about this, but I have always had some sort of love for the 50s and when I found the Beat Generation writers like Kerouac I immediately associated myself to them and Jack Kerouac seems to have some sort of link with me. He was french canadian too! I don’t know what the hell is going on between him and I.

I’m pretty sure that what I am searching for won’t be found during this trip but I have been sick enough in the recent years to see people around me are living in a daily routine and I don’t want to live that. I’ve spent some time in hospital beds and when I would talk with other sick people the topics were really different. We would talk about simple things. Things you don’t think of when you aren’t sick. I remember I spoke to an old man while we were eating that horrible hospital food and we were wondering what we would eat and drink when we would get out. I remember I wanted a good bloody steak with mashed potatoes and some green broad beans. It was enough to make me feel happy and I wanted to get out of there just to eat that. Nowadays I’ve begun to fall back into routine and I almost forgot about that desire I had back in the hospital and I don’t want to forget about that and that’s why I want to leave this place with a feeling of uncertainty so I can enjoy everything I see, taste and touch. It’s like in my favorite book, “The Little Prince”, when he goes to the well in the middle of the desert and he drinks water with the aviator. The water would be ordinary to other people who drank water everyday, but to the aviator, it was the product of their desire to get water, the fact that they walked so long and the fact that they had to use the pulley in order to ultimately get it! That’s why it tasted so good to him and to the little prince.

The fact is that I am doing this knowing that I will probably find adversity. It’s not like I am going there with an improvised bag using a red cloth with white spots on it, all of it attached to a wooden stick like in the cartoons. I know I’ll probably be unable to sleep during some nights. I might get robbed or beaten or whatever. I’ll try to avoid this as much as possible, but I still have to hitchhike the way I want to or else it won’t be hitchhiking anymore. Still, I have to train my body for this because I’m pretty sure I’ll be dead tired most of the time so I have to be in the best shape possible.

That’s why I’m going to walk practically everyday from now on. I’ve already been walking pretty often but it was only for entertainment purpose or to go out with friends. I don’t have a car and when I have to buy stuff or whatever I just WALK to the store and bring back the goods home. I still don’t get the car thing and I don’t understand why so many people have cars. I don’t know if I missed something here. So, yeah, from now on I’ll walk a lot. Next summer I’m planning on walking from home right to the camp ( which means about 250 kilometers… and seriously I won’t do the math to explain how long that is in miles because you americans need to use the metric system ). I will bring the usual stuff I bring when I go there ( clothes and books and some cds and other things ). It should give me a preview of a hitchhiking experience without drivers picking me up ( which should be the hardest days ).

So, yeah, I’m going to write a book on this. I don’t expect it to be published by anyone but I’ll try to if I feel like the material is somewhat worth it. I’ve never studied literature ( so my curriculum vitae in that department would be pretty short ) but I think I’m pretty good ( in french, at least ) and I know a couple of authors in the area who might be able to help me.

I’ve recently met very old friends who were in classmates in primary school and high school. When I was really sick I lost sight of them and back then I thought that they were really ahead of me in studies and jobs. I mean, they are. Some of them are going to be doctors and pharmacists, others already have great jobs and live a steady life. But somehow I feel like I have something more inside my head that they don’t have. They don’t question society like I do and they don’t see the things I see. They don’t know how to write either ( I found that out on Facebook ). I think that all these years of illness I’ve spent reading and listening and watching others is finally paying off. I feel like I am stronger inside. I also am sad to see that these young minds who sometimes were breaking laws and questioning so many things in life ended up as ordinary human beings with very little imagination, ideas and hopes. Of course they still have these things but it’s hidden deep inside now and it will only bloom when it will be too late.

I can’t believe I wrote so much stuff! I don’t even know how much time I spent on this email! Ok, I have to stop myself now. I guess I had to tell someone about this and since I’m too chicken shit to tell my hitchhiking plans to the people who live next to me and I wanted to tell them to someone like you who can’t really judge me or anything. I guess this is the good side of internet? I don’t know, really. This place is both full and empty at the same time. It’s confusing.

Thanks for reading my “dreamer’s melodrama”,

X

PHILIP
“Can you believe what Al Gore said on the front page of the Toronto Star yesterday?   You know, Al Gore, the guy who was VP under Bill Clinton for eight years. He actually said that the Alberta tar sands are a threat to human existence. I’m telling you, even the the word ‘Armageddon’ was in the article, although I don’t actually know if Gore said that specific word. It’s pretty amazing, eh?”

TONY
“Sorry Phil, what’s your point, if you don’t mind me asking that?”

PHILIP
“My point is that this is the same Al Gore who was the number two guy in the most powerful country on Earth for eight years straight and who is the winner — if you ask me –  of the 2000 US Presidential elections and, to top it all off, is a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his work on the environment and to top it all off all over again, he also has longstanding, and entirely warm ties to the current US administration. He’s has ‘tossed the gauntlet’ at Canada. I think he’s signalling that the US government will be playing hard-ball about the environmental consequences of the oil sands, and that’s going to  jeopardize billions of dollars and jobs in Alberta. You gotta realize that the folks who own and work in the sands are Harper’s biggest supporters. OK, so I don’t know exactly how this is going to play out but I think that this means Harper is toast. Finis.”

TONY
“So  … OK, you’re telling me that Gore just sort of slapped Harper upside the head in public by telling Harper’s big oil buddies in Alberta that their investments might end up losing them some money.”

PHILIP
“I don’t think I could say it better than that, actually.”

TONY
“OK, like the kids say: “‘Is this is a good thing?’”

PHILIP
“Holy smokes. You bet it’s a good thing.  I know I tell you this stuff all the time, even if it doesn’t get into the blog. It’s simple,man. I don’t think that Stephen Harper is good for Canada. I actually think he’s dangerous, maybe not him specifically but some of the people around him, that’s for sure. And that’s not a risk I want to take. I’ve got four kids and a mortgage … sorry, Tony, you heard all this stuff before. And now, he can’t even provide diplomatic cover for his oil buddies.

“Look, there’s a lot of people at the top of the Harper government who openly supported the Bush Administration, including even Harper himself for god’s sake. My basic point is that I’m telling you, if you give the Harper guys a majority in Parliament, all I can say is “watch out”, because it’s going to be a disaster. Environment, economy, you name it. Sure, I know that Ignatieff supported the Iraq War in the beginning. But c’mon.  At least Ignatieff had the huevos to own up to his mistake in public. And he didn’t support Bush’s other crazy policies the way Harper has. Heyman, everybody, including even smart guys like Ignatieff, they learn something when it’s the first time the situation has ever come up, like deciding to go to war in Iraq in 2003, for example. Let’s be honest. Quite a few Canadians supported the Iraq War in the beginning. Face it, when the guys who won World War Two [the Americans] ask us for military support, you at least have to give them the time of day, if you know what I mean.

Anyway,  at least Ignatieff took some time to think about how the actual Iraq War actually played out over actual time after it started, and he learned what the whole world also learned about the actual Bush Administration decision processes in regard to the Iraq War.”

Anyway, you know what I can’t figure out?  Somehow, I think people think that having the Liberals  in Ottawa for the next few years won’t make any difference.  Now maybe I’m missing something. If our PM and the US President are actually, true-blue, real-life friends — which you can see they are, you know, friends like you and me — then international negotiations about things like the oil sands will be better for Canada if Ignatieff’s the Prime Minister. After all, the top folks make make the final decisions, no?

You know, I bet that Ignatieff has the secret phone number for Obama’s Blackberry. And I bet Harper doesn’t.” [Note from Philip: I really have no idea if this is true.]

TONY
“And your point is …?”

PHILIP
“The point is, it’s weird. Ignatieff’s Liberals would do a better job protecting Alberta’s interests than Harper can possibly do. If that’s true, then Albertans should be voting en masse for Ignatieff. It’s weirdly simple, in a way.”

TONY
“So you think Ignatieff should be our next Prime Minister?”

PHILIP
“Duh.”

An Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission report released Tuesday indicates that total provincial gambling revenues dropped about five per cent last year to $25-billion, down from $26.3-billion the previous year. Of the $25-billion in revenues, about $15.5-billion came from slot machines, $8.9-billion from VLTs and the rest from electronic bingo and lottery ticket sales. About $22.8-billion was paid in prizes. The effects of the downturn have been felt in Calgary. In August, the operator of Stampede Casino placed itself into voluntary receivership and a few months earlier the owner of Silver Dollar Casino filed for creditor protection.

Autumn in rural Alberta is immensity amplified.  Big sky and expanse of farmland is the main scenery, something what W. O. Mitchell describes as “the least common denominator of nature… land and sky.”

The air is crisp, fresh, and dry.  Colors are simple:  Big blue sky, golden harvest, even just hay rolled up in bales.  Farming against the snow-capped Rockies, rustic, serene, rejuvenating, harmonious fusion of nature and human endeavor.

Trees as windbreaks in the summer, nature’s sculpture in the fall.  So the leaves are gone, but only then can we see the beauty of the bare branches, like dancers celebrating the changing of the seasons.

The solitary figure in the field… en masse.

“Think I’ll go out to Alberta,
Weather’s good there in the fall.
Got some friends that I can go to working for…”

For some inexplicable reasons, as I’m posting these photos, a flood of nostalgia whirls up in me.  The melodies and lyrics of those songs and singers that we can claim our own keep filling my mind all day. Not too many up-and-coming like to hang around here, since all the fame and glory one seeks is down south.

But these remain our own: Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Neil Young… and songs about Alberta, about heading west to seek a new life, or to escape from the pain of lost love.  Maybe the wide open country, big blue sky and wide expanse of land do have their healing powers.

And memories, forever clear, keep us rooted… here’s home.