I’m not angry at the world, or the government, or large corporations (though I’ve sent large mental lightning bolts towards each of those on numerous past occasions). Not today. Today, I’m simply angry at myself.

That happens frequently, too.

My brain betrays me at every turn. It’s not for lack of intelligence. No, I’ve received my fair share of that. It’s not a paucity of creativity, either. I’ve got that one in spades. It’s a little thing called focus.

Let me backtrack a bit. I’m one of those people who is interested in many, many things. That’s good. I have a curious mind, and I want to find out about things, how they work, what happened when, why this is like that, and why that is like this. It’s all good.

Unfortunately, this has led me to be rather scattered over the course of my life. My lack of focus has enabled a certain penchant for flitting from one thing to the next to the next. And while that’s great for learning new stuff and keeping myself entertained, it’s really not ideal for any kind of sustained focus on meaningful projects.

Take this blog, for example. We’re coming up on its one-year anniversary. When I started blogging, my goal was to blog every day. And I did that. For about seven weeks.

Then, in September, I had what I refer to as my “mental health crisis”. Major meltdown. Big time. I was out of commission for a couple of months. I blogged occasionally, but nothing like before. After that, I had flurries of blogging activity, but it still wasn’t anything close to the way I’d started it off.

And that frustrated me. Because, you see, when you take a tendency to flit and combine it with a second tendency towards depression, you end up with one unproductive motherfucker.

And that’s me. In a nutshell. Well, the unproductive part, anyway.

So, what do I do with this inablility to sustain momentum in projects that I start?

Self-knowledge, I have found, is usually an excellent starting point. I consider myself to be extremely self-aware, and I know my tendencies like I know my address and phone number. Sometimes I’m able to strategize around them, and sometimes I’m not. It can be a bit of a crap shoot, but it’s better than not knowing myself at all.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself here. Let me take a deep breath and get back to the point I was originally going to make before blasting into that four-hundred-word rant I just dashed off.

The original notion for this post came from some musing and cogitating I got up to a few weeks ago, mostly about the aforementioned diluted focus and interest in so many things. The anger came from realizing that I’d been thinking about this post for all those weeks and still hadn’t written the goddamned thing.

Many things intervened. The self-same lack of focus numbers amongst them. As does the occasional mood swing. Not to mention a change of jobs. All perfectly legitimate reasons, but they still don’t prevent me from getting mad at myself for not blogging.

However, in with all the angst and self-blame and depression and chaos and general mayhem, a kernel of a seed of a germ of an idea took hold. And, lo and behold, it’s actually a postive idea. Break out the champagne!

Racoons are generalists as well. And, like my brain, they can be damned annoying at times.

You, see, I have come to realize that I am a generalist. I am one of those people who likes to see the big picture. I like to know how things interconnect, how one area of endeavour relates to another. Nothing delights me more than reading a book about, say, computer software, and finding that the author occasionally drifts into an anecdote about music or some equally unrelated area. It jars my brain back into the real world and reassures me that everything is connected together.

Because, you know, it is.

So my challenge is this: How do I use my generalistic tendencies to their best advantage? How to I take what I’ve regarded as a weakness and turn it into a strength? How do I put my curiosity to good use?

These, and other questions, will be the subjects of much further rumination and cogitation over the coming weeks. The fact that I’ve had this insight at all is fairly auspicious. I may be able to figure something out.

Or maybe someone reading this will comment with an idea. Who knows?

In the meantime, I’ve got my blog’s first anniversary to think about. I can’t believe I’ve been blogging (off and on) for a year now. The blog is certainly reflective of my personality: It covers many topics and takes frequent breaks. Perhaps my new insights into myself will fuel a new period of blog productivity.

Speaking of birthdays, mine is the same as my blog’s, and this year is my fiftieth. It’s hard to believe I’ve put up with my brain for this long, but I suppose it’s also testament to my own tenacity that I’ve perservered for as long as I have. At any rate, I’m going to be celebrating big time.

And reflecting on future possibilities.

Hmmm… I might even do a minor blog redesign. You never know.

Don’t forget to leave that light on.

(And, apparently, generalist is also a term used in 3D computer animation. I found a bunch of demo reels on YouTube, and I particularly liked this one by David Radford from 2008.)

I’ve never heard of anything like this happening in Canada before. One of my tweets on Twitter yesterday read: “Is it just me, or is the world getting a little bit less hospitable every single day?” It’s hard to be positive at times, especially when you see a group of anarchists, who basically don’t care about anything except, well, anarchy, hijacking a protest against a group of politicians who are out of touch with reality and don’t, quite frankly, give a rat’s ass about the people they’re supposed to be representing.

It’s the same all over. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about governments, huge corporations, media outlets, or religious institutions. The individual just doesn’t seem to matter any more. It’s all about the institution maintaining itself and, if possible, growing even bigger and more powerful.

Somewhere in its growth cycle, the large institution experiences a shift in priorities. Policies, procedures, and power become more important than people. The entity is too large to be flexible anymore, and the people running it don’t care about anything except their end-of-quarter bonuses.

And keeping their jobs.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool cynic. I take everything I read, hear, and see with a grain of salt. The media may be telling us what’s going on, but they’re doing it on their terms, telling us exactly what they want us to know. They have to show us just the right images, couch things in just the right terms, so that we’ll keep watching or listening or reading, and they’ll keep getting their advertisers’ dollars.

I don’t watch or read the news much. Not only is it depressing; it’s misleading. It gives us a skewed view of the world, and inundates us with infuriating stories and disheartening images. I prefer to use the internet for my current events. At least there I have a hope of getting real opinions from real people.

And even then, my grain of salt is close at hand.

Because most people really don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Okay, are you about ready to click away from this post? Have you had just about enough of my cynicism and negativity for one day? Well, hang on just a bit longer, ’cause this rant is about to go in a different direction.

You see, timing is everything. And just a few days ago, before all this G-8/G-20 brouhaha erupted, I made a conscious decision to try something different with my blog. I decided to try incorporating interviews into my blogging mix. Interviews with real people. Interesting people who are doing interesting things and have interesting things to say.

I think I got things off to a good start. If you didn’t read my interview with Julie Wilson (aka The Book Madam), please go check it out. It’s interesting, it’s fun, and it’s a real change of pace and breath of fresh air in what has been, for the most part, a fairly self-indulgent blog.

You see, people are interesting. Governments and corporations don’t seem to realize this. People have things to say, stories to tell, lives to live. We’re not numbers, we’re not database entries, and we’re not blobs of product on an assembly line. Each of us is unique, and each of us has our own, equally unique, contribution to make to the world.

I don’t always remember this. I don’t experience enlightenment every day. Hell, not even most days. It’s hard to ponder an individual’s unique contribution to the universe when said individual is shouting obsenities at the person who just caught them trying to shoplift, or when they’re grumbling at you because they want to pay the American price for a book instead of the Canadian price. On such occasions, it’s hard enough just to keep a civil tongue in your head.

Because people can be damned stupid and inconsiderate a lot of the time.

But we don’t have to get to know everybody we meet. Can you imagine how overwhelming that would be? The world is a pretty overwhelming place on the best of days. Truth is, we don’t even have much in common with most people we meet. And that’s okay. Everyone has their own way to rock and roll. And I have no problem with anyone doing their thing, as long as it doesn’t interfere with me doing mine.

And my thing, as of this moment, is articulating my view of things and trying to make sense of an increasingly nonsensical world.

When I worked for Academic Computing Services at Dalhousie University many years ago, one of the things I did was format and edit the campus IT newsletter, which was called Information Technology Update. While I enjoyed the layout and production process, I also contributed to the publication with the occasional article and, eventually, a regular column, which I entitled “The Human Factor”, in which I made a point of relating all our marvellous technological advances to the reason it all exists to begin with: Us.

Even back then, I was cognizant of the submersion of the individual into an ever-growing miasma of data. I felt it important to poke my head up from the swirls of toxic mist and say, “Hey! Listen! We’re still human beings out here!” The exclamation holds true today more than ever.

I’m glad that BookCamp Halifax happened when it did, because it stimulated my mind and got me talking to a bunch of really interesting people. And that sparked me to revisit the interview thing for my blog. And it’s something I’ll be doing again.

And again.

Because people are interesting.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(And, just to add yet another new twist to my ever-expanding blog, here’s my very first video blog entry, embedded from the Faltarego YouTube channel.)

It’s just that over the last year or so, I haven’t been reading as much as I usually do. I’ve been noticing that I don’t have as much fresh material to recommend to customers lately. I just keep recommending the same books to whoever asks my opinion.

And that’s lame.

So, volunteering to help organize BookCamp Halifax was just the thing. I didn’t realize it was going to be just the thing, but it turned out that way. Not only did I meet a lot of great people (many of whom I knew online but not in-the-flesh), but I also learned a lot about books, publishing, book-related technology, and this little concept known as “community”.

Example: If I hadn’t volunteered with BookCamp, I would not have met my co-organizer Robbie MacGregor and would not, then, have been introduced by him to a little book called L:and things come apart written by Ian Orti. As a consumer of a lot of what most folks might call “mainstream fiction”, this was a foray into literary territory I hadn’t visited for a long time. I think the last time I read anything this artistic, imaginative, and thought-provoking was, oh, back in 2004, when I read The Dreamlife of Bridges by Robert Strandquist and wrote a review of it for The Antigonish Review.

My brain needs more of this kind of stimulation. I need to step away from the Dan Browns and Michael Crichtons once in a while. That’s not to take anything away from the pure escapism of Dan Brown and the meticulous research and vivid imagination of Michael Crichton (who I will sorely miss, may he rest in peace), but it’s refreshing to read a book that is Art rather than one that is a movie-on-paper.

Yes, yes. I know. All authors are artists. It’s just that some are a bit more… um… artistic than others. To my mind, there’s a big difference between spinning a good yarn and crafting a piece of written work that steps beyond story and actually starts to spread itself through the reader’s mind like a fine web. It settles there, fastens itself to your neurons, and makes you pay attention.

I love a good yarn. No question about it. I appreciate a tale that will whisk me away and get me turning those pages. Sometimes I just want to be entertained and told a story. That’s the kind of writing I do myself. I have no delusions about my style. When it comes to allegory, allusion, and analogy, I’m all thumbs. I like to get characters talking to each other and seeing what happens next.

But as a reader, it’s nice to challenge myself once in a while, read a work that is not an obvious A-to-B-to-C narrative. Throw my preconceptions out the window and look at the world through a different set of eyes. It’s called expanding one’s horizons.

So, yes, the BookCamp experience has juiced my brain up a bit for the literature. But it’s done something else as well. I was so stimulated by the discussions at the event, and so intrigued and impressed by the people I met there, that I began to revisit a notion I’d entertained back when I first started this blog.

And that is the notion of interviewing interesting people. It’s not something I’ve ever done, and I have no training in journalism, but the concept is intriguing, and because I’m a curious person with a slightly skewed view of the world, I’m pretty sure I can come up with an interesting question or two.

So, I’m doing it. It’s a done deal. I’m taking my rediscovered literary zeal and my rediscovered fascination with people and setting off into the hinter-net with my binoculars and compass to track the species known as “interview subject.”

So watch this space. In the next day or so, I’ll be posting an interview with my first victim, book maven and publicist extraodinaire Julie Wilson (also known as The Book Madam), whose generosity of spirit has given me a tremendous shot in the arm in terms of getting this new aspect of my blog started.

What can I say? I’m excited.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(Here’s a brilliant stop-motion book trailer for L:and things come apart, put together by the author, Ian Orti.)

Anyone who’s read my blog with any regularity has probably come across a post or two wherein I talk about my own mental health, my challenges with it, my depression, and my struggles to stay motivated. It’s an ongoing battle, and it’s one I fight every day. I’m dealing with things better than I did a few months ago, but I still have to keep a close eye on myself.

So here we are, then, with the countdown to Iron Man 2 overlapping with Mental Health Week. At first glance, it would seem that these two events have little in common. Practically nothing, in fact. The common thread is there, however, and I’ve latched onto it.

Even Tony Stark has to step back and reevaluate once in a while.

Fictional characters can often show us things we wouldn’t bother to look at otherwise. Especially characters that we look up to, like, say, superheroes. If a character we like is well-written and has some depth, then that character can teach us things about the human condition.

Comic books seem an unlikely place to gain profound insights, but it happens. Marvel Comics has never shied away from this. They did a Spider-Man story in 1971 that dealt with drug abuse. It was so controversial at the time that the Comics Code Authority refused to put its seal on the issue. Marvel published it anyway, and the CCA eventually loosened its code.

DC did a drug story as well, dealing with the Green Arrow’s sidekick, Speedy, and his addiction to heroin. And in Identity Crisis, DC’s heroes deal with psychosis, betrayal, rape, and memory tampering.

Pretty heavy stuff.

If something shocks us, it is likely to make us think. And comic books can shock us just as effectively as any other medium. Moreso, in fact, because we don’t usually expect heavy topics in the colorful pages of our favorite superhero tales.

I’ve come to think of Tony Stark as representative of a certain kind of mindset. On some level, he knows he has problems, but on the surface, he puts on a brave front and lets his ego do the driving. He rarely admits weakness, and he rarely admits to being wrong.

His dual persona is a perfect representation of people in the real world who cover up their insecurities and issues with a façade. Just as Tony Stark dons his Iron Man armor to protect and strengthen his damaged heart, so do many of us don our psychological armor to protect our vulnerable personalities. We’re sensitive people, we humans, and if we don’t pump ourselves up, we can easily be trampled down by the stresses of life.

But some people have so much armor built up that it’s nearly impossible to get through to the sensitive core deep within. Society is filled with angry, combative people, who react defensively and agressively if they feel threatened. Their heart is buried so deep within the outer shell that it’s practically inaccessible.

I’m learning to access my damaged heart and help it heal. If I can do it, so can others, which is why I want my readers to know about Mental Health Week and to pass it along. Mental Health issues need to be brought out from the shadows and into the light of day, so that everyone has a chance to peek beneath the armor and get at what’s real and true and healthy.

And when I say “Don’t forget to leave the light on,” that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

(Here’s a video from the Canadian Mental Health Association about Mental Health Week.)

Frank had cystic fibrosis, a condition that affected every aspect of his life. That year, the year we were both thirty-five, Frank died of complications associated with the disease. He was a bit of a record-breaker at the time, as few CF patients lived that long.

That was my first experience with someone my own age, in my immediate circle of family, friends, and colleagues, dying. It shook everyone who knew him, and it left a lasting impression upon my mental landscape.

This Thursday just past, I attended a memorial service for one of my theatre friends, Scott Murphy, who was three years younger than I am. He died suddenly, the Friday before, of a heart attack. It was a shock. We had just seen him and talked to him six days prior to his death. It didn’t seem real.

The cast of —Romance With a Twist—. Scott is the big guy in the middle of back row. (click for larger version)

I met Scott back in 2003, when he auditioned for a show at The Pond Playhouse, which is home to the Theatre Arts Guild, an organization I’d been involved in for less than a year at the time. I’d already acted as producer for one play and had a walk-on part in a second, and now I was going to be co-producer for a musical, called Romance With a Twist.

Scott was one of eight cast members chosen to star in the show, along with my wife Vanessa and six other talented individuals, some of whom I knew from previous shows and some of whom were new to the group. It was a diverse mix of voices, and the show was a lot of fun.

From early on, I could tell that Scott was a kind and generous guy, with a heart easily as big as his voice. He was friendly, pleasant, humble, and also a bit devlish. He was fun to have around, and I always enjoyed his company.

At the end of that production, Scott wrote me one of the nicest “end of show” cards I’ve ever received. It was a heartfelt message of appreciation for the work I’d put in on the show, and I was quite touched by it. I’d been correct from the start: This was a gentle soul in a big, burly body that housed not only a tremendous singing voice but also a sensitive heart.

At Scott’s memorial service, there was a lot of music, much of it recordings of his own songs. During a slideshow of photos from his life, however, two songs from other artists were played: “Oh You Delicate Heart” by Hawksley Workman and “Hands of Time” by Ron Sexsmith. After the slideshow, Scott’s wife Michele spoke from the podium, and one of the things she said—something that will stick with me for a long time to come—was that she had chosen the Hawksley Workman song because she always felt that Scott had a delicate heart himself, and that sometimes, it seemed like perhaps the world was too much for him.

As a highly sensitive person, this spoke volumes to me. I’ve struggled with depression and overwhelm for a long time, and knowing that Scott had a similar temperament deepened my resolve to find that balance point where I can put out what I need to put out and let in only what I need to let in. The world is a noisy, chaotic, and dizzying place, and it’s up to me to sort it out and make the sense of it that I need to make.

I don’t want my delicate heart giving out on me before I’ve done what I need to do.

Scott’s death has had a profound impact on me and my theatre community. When someone that young is taken from the world, it’s a wake up call to the rest of us. As many times as you’ve heard it, it’s true: Life is short.

Scott… You were the real deal, my friend. I wish I’d spent more time in your company, gotten to know you better. We didn’t see each other often, but you were always one of those people that I felt connected to regardless. I think we had a lot in common, and though regrets are often pointless, I do wish I’d taken the initiative and explored that with you.

But know this: In life and in death, you’ve taught me things I needed to know. I thank you for that.

I’ll miss your voice, your talent, your larger-than-life presence, and your gentle good humour. You leave a gap that will never be filled.

I’ll leave a light on for you.

(Here’s a video of “Oh, You Delicate Heart” by Hawksley Workman.)

This is no mean feat for me. It’s forever been a challenge, and I’m one of those people who always seems to have six zillion things bouncing around in my brain and never enough time to focus on any of them.

I’ve often thought there was something wrong with me, because I never seemed to be able to focus on any one thing. My interests are many and varied, and I’ve just never managed to narrow things down to my One True Passion™. Writing has always been there, but so have music, videography, web design/programming, and a whole host of other stuff, mostly creative, partly creative with a technical bent. Again with the “both sides of the brain” thing.

Annoying.

But lately, I’ve been rethinking things. I’ve begun to wonder why on earth I can’t do all the things I want to do. Why can’t I have my cake and eat it too?

It’s just a matter of getting organized.

If I can break projects down into bite-sized chunks, manage my time better, and keep track of what I’m doing, there’s no reason I can’t have half-a-dozen projects on the go at once. It still sounds kind of daunting, and maybe I’ve got a streak of the crazy bouncing around with the creative juices, but if I really stop and think about it, it seems doable.

But back to this “organized” notion. It’s always been a bit of a sticky point for me. I can’t keep track of things in my head, and the software tools I’ve tried have either lacked in some important area or simply imposed too many restrictions.

I need a to-do list, but it has to be more than a to-do list. Sort of a to-do list with a mind-map attached and a bunch of links to documents and websites.

Yeah. I hear you. Where on earth am I going to find something like that?

Well, it’s funny. The tool I’ve been looking for has been right here, right under my nose, for months now.

It’s called Google Wave.

And no, it’s not exactly like what I described above, but it’s pretty damn close. (Actually, now that I think about it, it does have a mind-map extension. Haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds cool.) I already check it every day, just to see if any of the waves I follow have new items in them, and even though my project list is not a collaboration, the structure of a wave is pretty close to what I need.

In case you haven’t tried Google Wave yet, I’ll give you a brief description of how one of these puppies is set up. Inside a wave, you create things called “blips”. A blip is really just a block of text with a green rounded rectangle around it. A top-level blip is called a “wavelet”, and wavelets can have blips added to them, either as replies tacked on the end and indented, or as in-line replies embedded inside them.

Blips can also have links, images, YouTube videos, and all manner of other strange and exotic beasties embedded inside them. And the text inside a blip can be formatted in a myriad of ways. This makes the tool incredibly versatile.

The thing that got me hooked on trying this approach was the fact that, if you add your replies to a blip by embedding them in-line, you get the option of collapsing the in-line replies by clicking on a little minus-sign inside a tiny speech balloon icon. This allows me to use Google Wave as a sort of rudimentary outliner, collapsing the “to-do list” inside each project so that I don’t have to scroll through the entire wave to find what I’m looking for (although there is a search feature, if push comes to shove).

So this is what I’ve been doing the last couple of days. I’ve created a wavelet for each project I want to work on, and then added the “to-do list” for each project as in-line blips inside the wavelets. And because each blip is like a tiny word processing document unto itself, the whole thing lends itself to being really free-form and unstructured, even though there is an underlying structure (a method to my madness, as it were).

This appeals to me enormously. I love writing, and I love expressing myself, so even though I’m the only one who will see this wave (at least for now), I will still let myself be verbose, humorous, clever, or silly, even though I’m only laying out a series of tasks that I intend to perform. Traditional to-do lists are as dry as dust, and I find them deathly dull and boring. They don’t inspire me in the least. I need a bit of elbow room, space to expand and expound, if the mood so strikes me.

Google Wave allows me to play.

And playing is what unleashes my creative mind.

Now that I’ve got the initial structure nearly complete, I’ve started adding some depth to the wave. I’ve put in some links to websites I need to reference for particular projects, I’ve inserted a link to a Google Documents file that contains further notes related to one project in particular, and I’ve even inserted a Google Map (thanks to the maps extension) to plot the locations where I want to shoot footage for that documentary I’ve been saying I’m going make for several years now.

You already knew I loved Google’s stuff. I wrote about it at length in a previous post. Now I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and make some really good use of some of the stuff I’ve just dabbled with so far. If I use Google Docs to store important information related to each project, then I can access my entire project “library” from any computer, anywhere I happen to be.

And that’s just plain cool.

(But I still use WriteMonkey to type the first draft of my blog posts. Because it’s cool, too.)

Organization, here I come!

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(This clip has nothing to do with getting organized, but it’s one of the best uses of Google Wave I’ve ever seen. Not for the faint of heart, to be sure, but full of the awesome.)

It’s been a month since my last entry on this blog. On February 28th (which was also a Sunday, because that’s just the way February rolls), I wrote a blurt about the Olympics and how my attitude towards them changed dramatically over the course of their seventeen-day run.

Seems like a long time ago, now.

Since then, I’ve started a couple of new posts—one on the remastered CD of the Beatles’ Help! album and one on the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics—but both of them seemed a bit flat upon rereading. I just wasn’t feeling it.

So, what have I been doing, then?

Well, sometimes it feels like I’ve been sitting around with my thumbs in a strange place, and sometimes it feels like I’ve been exploring the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything (but no, I haven’t been reading Douglas Adams).

Being in the place where I am right now is kind of a paradoxical thing. On the one hand, there are financial pressures and the constant need to increase my income so that ends can meet and the day-to-day can carry on normally. On the other hand, there’s a tremendous opportunity to really figure some things out if I just don’t give in to the tempation to rush things along.

I wish my mind were this crystal clear.

I’m in the process of reconstructing myself after a serious piece of demolition. 2009 was The Year of the Fuse, and the last third of it was The Detonation.

Shit went down.

It wasn’t all bad. I started this blog, I wrote a NaNoWriMo novel, and there were day trips and mini-holidays and movies and friends and family and all the rest of the normal good stuff that happens in the run of a year.

But in the end, something had to give. And, unfortunately, that something was me.

Or maybe fortunately, because now I’m in a place where I can step back, survey the wreckage, and start putting Humpty back together again.

I’ve begun to examine what’s really important to me and to consider what it is that I really want to do with my life. I turn fifty this summer, so I guess this might be a good time to really get a handle on things.

I know that writing will always play large part in my life. It’s always been there, I’ve always gone back to it, and I’ve always striven to express myself creatively and to make myself understood.

You have no idea how important it is for me to be understood.

Okay, so I know I have the skills. I’m the grammar guy, the punctuation pundit, the spelling shark. I know how to string a sentence together, and I know how to say things in an interesting way.

Fine. Great. Fantastic. But what the hell am I going to do with that?

Well, I’m going to get my novel published, for one thing. That much I do know. Because, even in third-draft stage, I think it reads pretty well and has some great stuff in it.

But beyond that… What am I going to do in the long run with my writing skills? How am I going to use them?

This is where the reconstruction of my beleaguered self comes into play. I have the chance to be my real self and chuck off all the shackles of expectations and conventions that have been placed upon me over the years. I have the chance to come out of the basement and step into the light of day.

I don’t want to screw this up, people.

So… mixed in with the writing and the musing and the day-to-day living, there’s been the occasional consideration of a little thing called “meaning”.

Basically, I’m starting to wonder why I’m here, what I’m supposed to be doing, and what the point of it all is.

This has nothing to do with religion. I’m going to brace myself here, screw my courage to the sticking place, and finally own up, right on this blog, to the fact that I don’t believe in God, and that I think that organized religion is one of the most dangerous and destructive forces on the face of the planet. It has no place in my life, and if that offends you, then there’s really not a whole lot I can do about.

I’m not going to go on and on about it. I’m not one of those atheists who feels they have to argue about everything and stick it in your face. I’m not like that. I just don’t believe in God.

It doesn’t make me a bad person.

I am, however, a thoughtful and contemplative person, an inquisitive and curious person. I want to know where things come from, why things are the way they are, and what else is out there. I look at the world as a wondrous place, filled with marvels beyond imagining. Nature is amazing, the universe is amazing, and the human mind is amazing.

So why am I here?

Questions like this have brought me back to my Philosophy for Dummies book. I bought it a couple of years ago and read a bit of it, but the time has come for me to delve deeper and see what all those great minds of the last few centuries have been going on about all this time. I want to challenge myself and explore what it is to be human, what it is to have self-awareness, and what it means to be able to think about such things at all.

It’s a starting place, anyway.

I feel that this blog is about to transform, just as I am. I’m starting to figure out my place in the world and what I can do in it. I suppose, like most of us, I want to leave my mark here on this planet, but I think it might be better if I thought in terms of how I can improve things while I’m here.

And at the heart of it, when you get right down to brass tacks, there’s this little concept that has always been important to me, and which is now emerging as a defining force in my life.

It’s a little thing called “respect”, and there’s not enough of it in the world right now.

And I’ll be writing a lot more about that in the days and weeks to come.

Stay tuned.

And don’t forget to leave the light on.

(Okay, just to bring a little levity back to the proceedings, here’s some Deep Thought for you. This still makes me laugh.)

I do have a topic for today, but before I get to it, I feel an odd compulsion to share with you the rather bumpy and circuitous route by which it arrived in my brain. Synapses work in mysterious ways, and this is a fairly good example.

Bear with me here. The link density in this first bit will be rather high.

One of my Twitter friends, who goes by the handle @AliasGrace (and whom I met in person for the first time at PodCamp Halifax two weekends ago), has a blog entitled East Coast by Choice, for which I wrote a guest post three weeks ago. She’s had a number of guest posts over the time she’s been blogging, the most recent of which, entitled “The Death of Barrington Street?” and written by Paul MacKinnon (Twitter handle @downtownpaul), was a really interesting read.

Paul’s post mentioned a number of well-known buildings on Barrington Street, but the one that caught my attention was the Green Lantern building. Now, being the geek that I am (you knew that, right?), you’d think I’d have known Halifax had a Green Lantern building. For some reason, though, I didn’t remember the name at all. But, of course, I was tickled by it. So I went to my dear friend Google to see if I could find some pictures.

And find them I did. The Coast (our local artsy/cultural/gritty/emo/freebie newspaper) has an article about the building, complete with historical pics from the time when the building actually housed the Green Lantern restaurant. The building’s official name is the Keith building, and it currently houses Pogue Fado, a traditional Irish pub. Nice to know the green is still there, anyway.

Still with me? Good. ‘Cause I’ll be getting to the point any second now.

When I looked at those pictures of the Green Lantern restaurant, taken in 1941, I very nearly audibly sighed. The shiny newness of the tables, counters, seats, and fixtures made me want to step into the images and experience what it would have been like to sit there, order a meal or a coffee, and watch the people go by. It all just looked so… nice.

How weird is it to suddenly feel nostalgic for a restaurant that opened a couple of decades before I was even born? Well, it did operate into the sixties, but I don’t remember ever going there. Even if I had, I would have been extremely young, and the shiny newness seen in those pictures would have long since faded.

The whole experience of finding these photos and reacting so strongly to them reminded me of how much we romanticize the past. I know I often think fondly of times gone by and wonder what it would be like to visit times before my birth. Sometimes I want to pick a spot, stand there, and move progressively back through the years so that I can see the changes unfolding backwards.

Intellectually, I know that the past was not better. Previous years of my life all had good points and bad points, ups and downs, high and lows, just like the present time does. And some day down the road, I know I will look back upon 2010 with the same gauzy filter through which I now gaze upon my childhood.

So why do we do it? Why do we remember selectively? Why do we idealize past events and put them up on pedestals built of nostalgic longing? Why do we filter things so much? Is the present really that bad?

Well, I have my theories about that.

From what I’ve observed, people tend to get more nostaligic as they get older. This applies not only to people I’ve met, but also to myself. The older I get, the more stuff I have in my head, and the more stuff I have in my head, the less attention I have for the world around me, and the less attention I have for the world around me, the faster time seems to zip on by.

Remember when you were a kid? (Yes, let’s get nostalgic for a moment here.) Remember how long the Christmas break was? Remember how long the summers were? Remember how each school day dragged on and on? Time was different then. There seemed to be more of it. Even the pleasant days lasted longer.

That’s because there was less stuff in your head back then. Less worry. Less planning. Less responsibility. Less distraction from the moment. You were free to soak it all up, see it for what it was, without all the voices in your head tearing your attention away from it.

We talk about the carefree days of childhood. And for a lot of folks, that’s pretty much what they were. Obviously, not everyone has the same experience. Childhood was a nightmare for some people, and they look back with a different filter entirely. But for many, thinking about childhood brings back fond memories. We might not have been free of cares, but we certainly had less of them.

As we grow older, however, and accumulate knowledge, skills, and responsibilities, our attention is more frequently hauled away from the here and now. And so the present becomes something less than it could be. We miss the moment because of our inner time travel. We fret about the past and worry about the future. We go over and over things we might have done differently and try to plan things we can’t possibly control.

And suddenly, the present is not so great. But it’s not the present’s fault. We’re clouding it with hurts from the past and uncertainties from the future. The poor present moment doesn’t stand a chance.

And therein, friends, lies a profound irony. As much as we look back on certain past events with pink gauze over the lens and sigh about how much better things were back then, we are simultaneously corrupting the present moment with ghosts and shadows of past events that just weren’t that shit-hot at all.

Today, I purchased a book entitled The Secret Pulse of Time. It’s a science book, and it looks like it’s going to be an interesting read. I’m looking forward to it, because, well, I’m a little obsessed about this whole time thing.

As I’m sure many of you are as well.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(And, in keeping with the nostalgia theme, not to mention the time theme, here’s a live performance of “Time” by Pink Floyd.)

[I'll still wait until tomorrow to take my Christmassy banner off the blog.]

Anyway, on to the blopic at hand. On New Year’s Day, I started writing what was to be my first post of 2010. It was all about how horrible 2009 had been, and it got rather long. It also ended up containing a lot of really personal stuff and a few passages that I now consider to be bitter whining.

So I decided to sit on it a while, and I’ve now come to the conclusion that this stream of negativity should not be posted. I no longer have anything against sharing personal stuff on this site, but some of the things I wrote on January 1st really went a bit too far.

I’ve decided to move on. 2010 is not only a new year, but a new number ending in a zero. And that’s something we can all get excited about.

I know I’m on board.

I’ve never been the sort of person to indulge in New Year’s resolutions. I find the whole concept repulsive. It’s become a cliché, and nearly everyone who makes them ends up tossing them out the window by the middle of February.

[If you join a fitness center in January, be patient. It will get much less busy as the first six weeks of the year roll by. The "resolutionaries" will start dropping like flies.]

I do, however believe in setting goals. “Resolution” is such a dictatorial word. I’d be setting myself for failure even trying to resolve this or that or the other thing. But I’ve definitely got a few goals in mind for 2010. Many of them involve my health, both physical and mental, and others involve my financial world and my creative world. None of them is unrealistic.

And that’s the thing, right there. Whether you call them goals or resolutions or bumblebee lollipops, they have to be realistic. They have to be things that you actually have a hope in hell of attaining. If you get too grand and sweeping with them, you’ll overwhelm yourself and thus put the kibosh on any possibility of actually accomplishing them.

Because 2009 was such a consistently horrible year for me (with some notable exceptions, of course), I am uncharacteristically motivated to seek massive improvements in 2010. So, the goal-setting was a no-brainer. I know what I need to do, and it’s not going to take a whole hell of a lot of doing to make the coming year a better one than the last.

Okay, even that was too much whining. I think you get the picture: 2009 sucked. Moving on…

"The Three Sphinxes of Bikini" by Salvador Dali

One of the things I am going to be working on, and have already been working on, is my mental health. I have been subject to bouts of depression for a very long time, and I was recently told, after years of wondering, that it is probably not a chemical-imbalance type of depression, but more of a psychological-issues type of depression.

I could deal with that. I’m not a fan of the psychopharmaceuticals. So I’ve been working on dealing with past issues and getting in touch with buried feelings.

And it’s been working.

It’s been heartening to see the occasional public service ad on television dealing with mental health. For a very long time, this whole issue has been something people have been reluctant to talk about. Mental health patients have been marginalized, and people seeking treatment for mental illnesses are very unlikely to share that information with friends and colleagues.

I have no statistical data on this, so don’t ask. It’s an impression I have gotten over the years.

Mental illness is just as real as cancer or any other disease, and it needs to be addressed just as seriously as other diseases. We only get one mind, and if things start to go wrong with it, we need to know that we can seek help for it and not feel like we’re suddenly creatures from another planet.

Because the stigma is still there.

I have a mental illness. I’m not going to make any bones about it. It’s just something that is. It doesn’t make me any less intelligent, or creative, or verbose. It just means that I get overwhelmed easily at times and find it hard to see the positive in things at others.

I consider myself fortunate, however. I get depressed, but I can still function. Other people are not so lucky. Some people sink into depressions so deep that they can’t even get out of bed in the morning. Others become afraid of the simplest things. And it’s not their fault. It’s an illness. And it must be treated as such.

I’m also fortunate in that I’ve finally found the right treatment for my illness. I’m stronger now than I have been in a long time. 2010 looks pretty good so far.

It’s all about awareness. And perspective. People who know me would probably never guess that I had anything wrong mentally. But it’s been there, hovering just under the surface for a long time.

And I’ve decided that I’m not afraid to talk about it. Yes, this is very personal information. But it’s also important. Because mental health is important.

So along with diet and exercise, one of my goals for 2010 is to take what I’ve learned about maintaining and safeguarding my mental and emotional health, and put it into practice.

And while I’m getting healthier, I’m also going to finish editing my novel and get it publication-ready. Because I’m going to become a published author this year. That is most definitely a goal.

I wish you good health, mental and physical, in the coming year.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

I embarked on this blogging thing back in August with guns blazing and pedal squashed to the metal. I wrote a blog entry every day for seven weeks without so much as a hiccup (a couple of cheats, but no hiccups). I was on a roll, baby. I was smokin'. I was in the zone. I was—

You get the idea.

And I was professional about the whole thing. I wrote movie reviews, music reviews, book reviews, superhero reviews, and the occasional thoughtful or humorous blurt.

Life was good.

Or was it?

Looking back on it now, I see that I had all my ducks in a row (well, most of them, anyway) and a plan of attack. I was ready. I was willing. I was able.

But I wasn't honest.

What a kicker that is.

I wrote a post about honesty in writing a while back, in which I went on at some length about putting your whole self into a project and making it real. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was not practicing what I was preaching.

Cue the dark organ music.

Remember the times when I said I wasn't going to get personal on this blog? Yeah, there were few of them, and it finally got to the point where I realized that I protested too much. I began to reconsider the whole notion.

And then, the inevitable happened: I started missing days of blogging, and then I started missing whole weeks. I knew that it would happen; I just didn't know when.

I remember also stating early on in the life of this blog that I wasn't going to discuss my depression here. I was going to save that for my personal blog. Well, funny thing is, I haven't been doing anything with my personal blog since I started this "professional" one. I think I've written one entry on the personal blog in the entire time this "professional" blog has been in existence. And it wasn't a particularly noteworthy or memorable entry, either.

So, here I am, on my so-called "professional" blog, mentioning my depression.

Because it's the reason for my lapse in blogging. I had a sort of meltdown back in late September, and things started going a wee bit Pete Tong. I managed to rescue the last bit of September, but October was a write-off (literally) with a total of four blog posts.

Then came November, in which our hero began to feel a bit better about things but was kidnapped by the NaNoWriMo Monster and kept chained to the wall of a cavern with only breadcrumbs and bats for company. And a computer, of course; otherwise the NaNoWriMo Monster would not have gotten its daily offering of words.

Let me be perfectly clear on one point: I am extremely pleased with myself for the accomplishment of finishing the first draft of a 66,000 word novel in twenty-eight days. I do not in any way diminish this feat. I set out to do it, I did it, and I'm bloody well going to crow about it.

But I still feel bad for ignoring the blogging.

This is a transitional time for me. I'm reevaluating my priorities, my beliefs, my goals, and my behaviors. I'm taking a good, hard look at myself and starting the long and arduous process of figuring out what I really want from life. Not easy stuff, but necessary. I need clarity, and I need purpose.

Neither comes without a bit of sleeves-rolled-up work.

I love this blog. I've put a lot of myself into it, and I'm starting to mold it into something that I think I can be proud of.

What I have to do, however, is stop writing stuff just for the sake of writing. For the sake of filling a screen with words. I have to write for me, first and foremost. I have to start putting more of myself into what I write and not worrying whether or not people will read it.

Because if I'm true to myself, I'll write the things that are important to me, and if there are people out there who connect with those things, then I'll have my audience.

But the honesty comes first.

So, enough namby-pamby shuffling of the feet. I have opinions, and I'm bloody well going to share them. Not everyone is going to agree with me, and that's as it should be. If we all agreed about everything, this would be a pretty boring world to live in.

I've been thinking about drawing up a "Faltarego Manifesto", and the more I think about it, the better the idea sounds. I think it's time to shit or get off the pot. Make my stand. Make my principles known to the great "out there."

Let there be honesty and self in the writing on this blog henceforth.

Sounds like a plan.