Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, It's nice to write your first sentence without knowing where you are going with it.  Like now. You can call me a compulsive writer, a chronic chronicler of life.  You might think snapping a picture with my phone is easier--which is not untrue, and also indeed fun--but writing is funner.  For example, you can invent words that you can't find in the dictionary.  (And you are wrong, " funner " is actually a word.) Anyway, let me say something I really want to say: I like to see there's still sunlight on my path when I leave work at 5.  Like today. I am ok with darkness.  I can tolerate rain.  I can by and large steer clear of cursing when wind joins in.  The whole climatic dome of melancholy like an umbrella over my head gives me a shroud of seriousness, an excuse to write silly things. Yet I am hungry for sunshine.  It's all so trite, I know: light=life.  The hope, the joy, the fun, a light so exuberant that you almost want to talk it d

Dear Eugene, This morning I wrote about ten years, counting backward.  Now the rain came and the night fell; I am going to write about the next ten. What if someone is to tell me, Alex, I know exactly where you are heading.  You , being a middle-class man living in Vancouver, rainy but still one of the best places on earth, this is how your next ten years will unveil. You have your job now.  It pays the bills and a few optional luxuries on the side.  The luxuries you will want to keep: vacations, eating-out, gadgets and interests and obsessions, all discretionarily necessary to keep you you . That's it.  Two words makes a sentence, a subject and a predicate are all you need.  And the sentence of (the rest of) your life is: "You keep." You fought hard all these past years to get to where you are.  Now the remains of your day is about keeping it.  (Let's not define the it in the last sentence.  Not relevant.)  You know you will need to lose some along t

Dear Eugene, Selfies, ways we look at ourselves to dictate how others should look at us, the propaganda of one. There is a " Ten Year Challenge " going on encouraging people to post two of their own pictures side-by-side, one from 2009 and one this year.  Anyone who can hand in a good report card of course is overjoyed.  No one needs a reason to be vain but it's good to have one and make it legit. Much has been said about the relationship between social media and self worth , but we don't really need studies to tell us anyway.  What good is more naysaying going to do us if we can't even tell there really is no "challenge" to speak of just for posting propaganda ten years apart?  That living through ten years is always a challenge and if we think two dressed-up images of ourselves would suffice to speak about it we are doing injury, inanity, injustice to our mind, body, and soul? There was a time when traveling is a dream, getting out of the ba

Dear Eugene, No more  backyard crawlers trouble  for me this year, touch wood.  In fact the trouble is no more because woods were touched. Every fall and winter since I moved into this house more than a decade ago I'd been struggling with one sort of unwanted neighbor or another.  A big family of skunk would hide underneath my shed and crawl out for meals after nightfall. Last May I wrote this: "This morning I looked out my kitchen window and found big patches of my lawn being opened up like crude drug-store novels, folded and curled. Raccoon(s). Skunk(s). It was artfully done, I must say. I dutifully spent an hour to remove and reinstall my stratagem of garden nets (which they outwitted), closing up all the scattered books, which, upon closer examination, looked more like failed open-heart surgeries. Mud splattered all over my legs. I tried not to swear (and failed). What a bloody mess." In a way that's how things should work, that this homeowner should we

Dear Eugene, If I can choose, if it's up to me, to find a way--the best way--to make sense of myself, would I choose to sing a song, to pen a poem, to fashion a garment, or, like now, to compose a sentence? And if I am to do just that--to make sense of myself in the best way I know how--would I do it like it's the last given chance and be happy with the sense I am making, however fragmentary and inconclusive it might be? No, it is not about being solemn or serious or intentional, though all these have everything going for them.  Quite the contrary: the song might well be silly, I can hear that, and the verses broken, I can see, or as in how this very sentence finds no satisfaction in keep on running on. We live life to do things that are meant to be done and it's in such doing that we can speak of ourselves as having lived a meaningful life.  This way we can't complain or be blamed for haven't lived a good day, as we busy ourselves with complaining about

Dear Eugene, Everything old is new again. Life is one big paradox, isn't it?  Even the avant-garde among us are really re-traditioning things given, elements that are never truly value-free. The road we took to end a year last night is the road we are taking to begin anew today.  I can walk on it and make little footprints or I can step on the gas and kill something.  Many things.  Unaware. Hit-and-run, that's how life often feels like. Now if I can see the victims, truly know the faces of those who are left on the roadside because of my living a decent, normal life, would it make a difference, any difference, to anyone, in me? Every December when the whole world is having fun (at least that's how our self-portrait looks like) and we hear news about accidents on the road, we feel bad for the victims and secretly worse for the victimizers.  We might not be so broken to truly sympathize with the injured and deceased; we have certainly broken enough things in li