Family, a group united by blood, marriage or other union or through adoption, interacting with one another as spouse, partner, parent, children, siblings growing through each generation.” Definitions and descriptions vary but nowhere does it say you can join a ‘family’ by calling into a radio station.
“This is not my family” I spoke up.Fam
“So how many men have you slept with?” asked the boyfriend, inevitably stepping into unsafe and private territory. “Ummmm” pondered his girlfriend, weighing the need to be careful in the answer. “None besides you honey. All the others kept me awake all night.”
So the day I take my advice from Elon Musk is the day I … oh never mind. In any event a recent comment by Musk caught my attention. He warned in rather apocalyptic tones that artificial intelligence is the greatest threat to humanity that we have ever faced. Good Lord man, in a world of hyperbole that takes the cake.
I am the son of English parents which means that I consider it my birthright to express a firmly held opinion with every drawn breath. As I write, I can hear my mother and what she would say to this relentless tide of uptightness washing over us.
“Oh do shut up!”
Perhaps she means me.
I studied Latin in my early years. Mr. Green, Kelowna Junior High 1963, if you don’t believe me. Weird I know and it did nothing for my dating life.
Apparently facility unravelling the root meaning of any English word did not get otherwise available teenage Canadian girls hot for young Tony. It was the ’60’s. How could they possibly know the adventures awaiting?
I don’t know where this will all end for Mich. Hockey finds talent wherever it is in Canada and I expect opportunity will come calling. I am as sure as one can be that big things are ahead for Mich The Dreamer. And I do know this. It is on the backs of people just like him that hockey has become what it is for Canadians.
Mo and Dan are a couple of OLD buggers, right out of central casting. Craggy faces etched with life’s lessons, both of them limping and sore, the result of life’s wear and tear. Their ‘Best Before Date’ stamped on their creased foreheads. They were exactly what I was looking for.
Humour can strip us bare and reveal us for what we are as individuals or on a bigger social scale, what we are as a people. Humour lets us see ourselves for what we really are. Sometime that ain’t pretty but how can we change if we can’t see ourselves. How can we see ourselves if humour is cancelled?
Writing for profit is a fool’s game. I don’t, I write for myself. Some of my writing is profound, some is important, but most of it is neither of those two things. I am at my best as an observational humourist, filtering the mundane through the ‘amusing’ lens and writing.
David Sedaris is a great American observational humourist and he has unknowingly guided me as I spelunked my way through many a dark, confusing writing tunnel. He taught me to stop worrying about inspiration. He says that human beings are very funny, hilarious at times. The knack he says is to get better at seeing it. He is right, if I have grown as a writer it is because I am better now at ‘seeing’ us as we are, simple and complex, shallow and profound, tragic and hilarious. We are endlessly fascinating, a never ending source of writing inspiration.
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