Late Jan, 2020

I've done the tour I wanted to do.
The past never ended.
I've seen the general outline of existence; I know limited my knowledge is.
I can now see the horizon.

By the time you crawl out from under the pile of lies the horizon is approaching.
But I won't do this any other way.
Some day "humans" will have eternal life. I'm still of the animals. Afterlife speculation does not interest me.

If you are quiet enough, your brain sometimes lets you choose your type of madness.
Everyone is mad - no exceptions - but there is a wide, wide variety.
We get to curate all the voices in our heads - full of demons and ghosts, and time-travelling memories.
(if you only hear "one voice", you have never truly listened to the virtual radio station of social scripts, PR self-talk and evolutionary impulses that is "you)

Often its less curation than being a bouncer showing unruly guest the door - again and again
So I was surprised when new guests arrived speaking in unfamiliar ways. I'd heard the words before the tone was different.
Mid-life crisis? War jitters? Cabin fever? Reading history? Outside of science, causation narratives only give the illusion of control.

When I was young my brain told me "You might as well walk backwards and wear your clothes inside-out because almost all cultural advice is so bad that its inverse is more moral"
This is 'witiko' thinking. Witiko is my adopted term for the trickster aspect of the Wendigo. I accept this.
A long-time student once said to me, "Hobb, your just like my older brother, except you aren't insane."
Everyone is mad - no exceptions - but there is a wide, wide variety.

That's the goal for every human: choose the least worst madness available to you.

When I was young I read Mark Twain's Letters to Earth and became self-aware of my commitment to Secularity; at the culmination of 8 years of Catholic schooling I refused to get "confirmed" and sat alone in my classroom while all the other students went off, then I refused to continue on to St.Charles, going to a public high school instead where I read Twain's religious cynicism.

I swore to fight religious tyranny the way only a teenager can - but my adult self made good on this when a fundamentalist Pentecostal ex-cop ran for office, I confronted him, got him to admit to that he "obeys the rules of (his) god, not the laws of man", admit that he thought most of his potential constitutes where going to hell when they died, and flustered his Conservative Party handlers so much, that within 5 minutes of debate at a university they we're all tapping their watches. When he finally tapped his, I punkily quipped "Tapping out, Kevin?" and he sneered.  He had reverted to cop half-way through the debate and began profiling me - asking my age, address, who my parents were - and so I answered and then asked him each question back. He was touchy and won't answer about his age. Students would later tell me he was something of 'gym queen'.

But my secularism has not hostility to religion as the Jehovah Witnesses who came to my house for a year will attest. We had many rollicking sessions as I laid out all my skepticism in a friendly manner and he happily took my concerns make to his Elders for counter-claims.  I got free book for the Boys in Brooklyn, he got to meet a quota and we got to have old fashion bible discussions. I like Gino and his sister, the only spooky parts were their apocalyptic beliefs and the linger threat of ostracism that haunts all JWs. I told Gino from the get-go I was never joining the JWs and we enjoyed just talking but eventually the Elders showed up for a show-down, and they were literally much older than all of us and much less fun; but their metaphors were corrupt so I won (or at least managed to pull-out a friendly draw from a semi-hostile enounter)

(...long fruitless bible stuff...)
JW Elders: God has right to demand complete obedience; can you imagine trying to the manager of a store but you let employees do what you want? It would be chaos. A boss has the right to discipline and fire to prevent the whole store from going under.
Hobb: You said you were an INCO miner earlier, so I assume your a union man, and so am I. And as a union man from Sudbury I've never been convinced that mangement had our best interests in mind, nor should they have unlimited power.
(JW Elder smiles...)

And forget much of the conversation but I remember that exchange where and the friendly hand-shake at the end. I like the JWs I met but their ideology was seemed to just another weird protestant-capitalism sect.  They were "anti-war" (as Gygax was in his day) but they watched Survivor all the time and made a virtue of submitted to capitalist discipline.

I also defeated a Roman Catholic at the University in a debate about animal rights. All his authority came from his belief in the divinity of the bible, I pointed out that gave no foundation for any rational discussion and he left in a huff.

All these debates occurred as I was making some peace with religion. At Carelton I had taken Relgious Studies courses in my general arts potpourri which became field trips to Buddhist temples (headed by a shaven-headed woman with a shelf full of graphic novels!), Wicca circles (where people got 'confirmed' with a Wookie name and then we did Halloween bowl-scrying where a woman started crying), was singled out by a psychic from a crowd and told I had suffered deep child trauma (to which I replied "that's dangerous, you're dangerous"), bought copperwire&crystal divining-rods (the seller warned that our skepticism would interfere).  Getting my masters back in Sudbury I had to take courses from the United, Anglican and Roman Catholic campuses where I felt the glow of serious religious inquiry in discussing peace, compassion and salvation.

Then as a professor I was confronted with a startling fact: despite/because I was proudly agnostic/secular, religious students would talk to me after class and we would usually discover how much we got along. I enjoyed their humbler attitudes and they found me happily open to all sort of discussion. My line at the time was: "You are my student and have my complete respect, but if your priest enters the room I would have go to war," and they seemed to accept this.

I left Catholic schooling a cynical atheist but in my twenties I had soften to a cynical agnostic and as I became politically aware I saw that media corporations were the new priesthood I had sworn to fight. And as I became a activist (amongst the late 1990s anti-globalization protests) and started learning the history I had to acknowledge the huge role of religion in protest. The stories of Jesus kicking over the money-changers and always, always focusing on the excluded and scapegoats had left its impression even when conveyed by an authoritarian structure like the Catholic schools - I had refused to "confirm" my Catholicism because I respected the ideals enough to not falsely pledge them; the fact everyone was doing it as rote confirmed the profane status of the ritual. These are adult words but they reflect my grade 8 self's belief: I refused out of respect for Christianity. I was so happy to hear about Protestantism, I was not joining any more of this nonsesne, but I was happy to hear that other people had fought their way out of Rome's grasp.

If my childhood experience re-enacted a tiny Protestant revolt, my family history enacted the construction of 'whiteness' as Protestant/Catholic divided were slowly dissolved. My maternal side were German/Dutch Protestants, my paternal side were French/Irish Catholics who choose our schooling. My grandfather is reputed to have become a Catholic (and a Knight of Columbus) to marry my grandmother - which might have also aligned them with the strong anti-union postion of the Catholic Church as controlled by Jesuit operative at the University of Sudbury. Cleaning up my Protestant grandparent's house in North Bay revealed troves of Rosicrucian literature, anti-French reactionary literature (this was Mike Harris' home-town) and John Hagee books and tapes. Hagee is now one the largest evangelical forces driving the war on Iran.

https://therealnews.com/stories/coming-to-terms-with-ones-religious-past-rai-with-matthew-fox-8-8 wrote:Joe Campbell, he quit the church at 13 years of age, so he was kind of a precocious Catholic to quit that early. But he often said, “I got my love of symbols and metaphor from the Catholic church.” So in other words, the Catholic church really gave him his vocation that he’s so ran with wonderfully. But if he had just left out of anger and forgot all about it, he would not have been able to accomplish what he had accomplished.

I'm between horse-flank and the concert wall of a bookstore,
in Rivendale North
police boots in stirrups, the cop crab-walking the horse to move us when there is no place left to move
I'd learn the word "kenneL" and realize its equine applications much later
wild-eyes of patrons at the windows, wilder eyes of that horse foaming at its bit, terrified
animal pity mixed with visions of two bully horses I'd faced before
mixed with sudden decision
memories feel like Super Smash Bros. and soccer - time dilates and moments thicken
things are tight : people and huge pillars either side :
a blond women with glasses is raising her hands to stop the horse flank : to stop the cop's action
but between a horse flank and a hard place the human stream must part
...
the memory is that I duck under the horse, but it so defies good judgement,
I fear horse hooves
and Romantic rummaging through his few Adventures is so pliable to embellish
...
I'm out : other side of the horse : our small crowd streaming through pillars
onto the street where the bike-police are using their cycles like two-handed riot shields
to corral us
like stray dogs towards the net

I never swore at police or gave the finger - but I never did what they said
If they wanted us to go one way, some of us were reflexively run the other way
so back to the damn pillars and concrete bookstore battlefront again
and the snorting Minotaur man-beast guarding it

[....the Romantic has pyrated this word-ship, the remembering intoxicated the now hog-tied Reason...]

there is a reason old men send 20-somethings into battle - and no-boy's club this
impromtu socialist street-gang v. the Equites, the eternal Horsemen of Empire
out-maneuvering the Minotaur, quicker, more numerous,
peek-a-boo as the rest slip through
the beast caught amongst a the thick pillars
a low-level Boss Monster in some 2-D Zelda dungeon
a yank of the unlucky and we're gone
they look and decide we're not worth the chase
The majority of the Sudbury contingent was corraled, kenneled
and only allowed to leave by marched single-file through a gauntlet of cops
they weren't beaten and dog-caged [as they would be post-2001]
but they were down-trodden and angry - heads hanging in defeat is not just a metaphor
Worse - they had obeyed the police!

This is what I learnt in street protests: neither obey nor antagonize the police

Your strong personal feeling of innocence are no shield, a target rather
snatch-squads and NLT weapon operators are predators
predators prefer an easy target, slow-moving, unwary,
on the buses down south, 'this is what democracy looks like' indoctrination videos playing overheard,
someone would always announce their complete pacifism and lack of trouble-seeking
and that person would be inevitable be jailed, beaten or shot with rubber-bullets

My partner and I spent 5 years engaged in "anti-globalization", "anti-poverty", Union solidarity (and occasionally animal-rights, anti-Pope) protests. This is how we spent the turn of the Millennium from the late 1990s to the first years of the 2000s.

Sept 2001 and the massive US-funded "Wars of Terror" / "Homeland Security" / "Anti-Terrorist Security" made the police increasingly brutal. My partner stopped joining, I did too after being cornered in a dead-end alley in defense of a "house-squat" (where abandoned building where seized for use as emergency public housing). Night -time, dead-end, with a row of unpassable riot police banging their shields and stomping in unison. We join arms to form a counter-line and sing... TV theme songs and show tunes! yep, I was a mining-town lad among the urban queer marxists ... I didn't know the show-tunes but hummed along. [N.B Don't sing the Canadian anthem as it is a trigger to begin a 'sporting event' with police-jocks]. A student from one of my classes comes and gives me a unexpected hug, then disappears through the police-line, they are letting protesters leave, it was a "good-by and good-luck" hug...

Being in street protests taught me how much of a coward I was, I explicitly took steps to avoid arrest; casing the area, looking for police and their informants (counter-intelligence is a mind-fuck), hanging back from vulnerable protests with only limited escape routes.  My family history makes me aware of what arrest and booking and bail are: costly pains and humiliations. I had no martyr complex.

So I don't know why I stayed. The hug, the linked arms and signing, being asked to defend a building of idealists from face-shielded troopers and our ace-in-the-hole the hotel across the street with a giant glass facade filled with curious on-lookers who have been coming and going for the last 3 hours.

The troopers rhythmically tighten the noose, batons on shields. The pressure gets to some, an anarchist approaches their line and puts on a jester show of anal defiance and is chicken-winged and repeatedly tazered to the screams of the crowd.  Laser points appear on the squat building, I had seen tactical cops with those laser-sighted long-style HK MP-5s earlier that day (a benefit of reading all those gun catalogues in RPG games!).

Then those fuckers slowly dragged those laser points over all of us. I believe this called "poor muzzle control" or more realistically it is called:
We can kill you as we wish.

I watched the Toronto Police lose their morality between 1998 and 2002.
In their political union with Mike Harris and then the post 9-11 authoritarian high.
Largely respectful early encounters had turned into random confiscations, kenneling and ugly paranoia - the police told Sun Media our group used dirty needles and rusty razor to attack officers at protests! The would publicly claim that protest banners were being used to conceal cauldrons of boiling crazy glue (some sort of chem-weapon) and that other groups attempts were trying to get into the sewers to poison the water-supply. It was wild stuff.

Now they were casually aiming guns directly at us from dark rooftops in a show of strength.  We reform our line.
More shield-pounding as they advanced again.
That little patch of street exists in a strange sort of memory. It stretches up all those tall confining building and into the dimly starred night-sky and into the world. The fear makes the memory wider than me. Fear has that patch of real estate.

Then - TCHUK! - the wall of riot shield turns sideways like a sort of roman centurion maneuver. The unpassable line is now a sieve.
Protesters tentatively approach, I don't remember any communication but their may have been, a few file through these opening and no snatch-squad grabs them.
I look back at the sqaut, with its hanging banners and faces at the window. I understand the student's Judas hug now. I walk between the plexi-glass barricade and into the street. I rode the adrenaline right until I got a block away. The sky and street were glowing. I hung my head in exhaustion. I was free - but my nervous system had just acquired Stockholm Syndrome - in other parts of the world I wouldn't have been able to walk away. Terror mixed with freedom is a great strategy for the police. I was Stockholm'd *and* a young university professor teaching about the police.

After we left, after enough hotel guests and their cel-phones went to bed, they stormed the squat and tazered and frog-march everyone into a police van. I spent the night sleeping on a old church floor that a painting of the 'Pearl of Great Price' on the ceiling.

it is easy to be a consumer of rebellion
that does not erase defiance
a deep stream of historical emotion

one victory, for a thousand defeat and a dozen Pyrrhics
yet never lost though bodies broken, heads hung
bug-splatted minds

defiance itself was the victory
hollow words to those whose young blood
was not dashed
never fidgeted
through a boring union meeting

I turned once and felt so
proud of humans so unfamiliar
that emotion
Ambrosia