Life also changed paths for the gulley
today in the bright sunlight

Was the coppery brown scum clay melt or deep car part rust? Is this current foam natural runoff or detergent of some kind? What builds up from all the roadsalt coming down. I prefer to think of the rosehip.

I should also make note of the fact that others will have to take up the testing of the waters, there and everywhere else. I have no science background, no lab orientation, no mudboots, and cannot be going down there all the time on my way into work. If I had the energy, the equipment and the time, the wonders of what might be in that water. No less so than the largest rosehip forest in living memory is mine to process. Are there no harvesters seeing this free industry-for-a-winter – albeit along the side back entrance to a complex with an gas station and canadian tire. Who reads my blog? Certainly not local feral harvesters with science degrees and labs. But no any? No need even for contact info or finder’s fee, no need for art as healing medicine, no need for a computer, just the locale, general territory/ruffage, between the closed pool store and the candian tire with a tims and russian grocery. 4400 dufferin north bus stop from the 104, 117 or 105, at different times or in little packs. Shoals of buses. Most are 196′s that go right by. Heading north, when you get off the bus, to your right will be John Barlow’s Gulley, always with a cuppa all your questions asked about the city dump and illegal ravine ‘private company heavy waste disposal’

And it’s important to keep perspective, pursue the undramatic, view wide. All the while you’re looking in one place somewhere around the region a vastly larger emergency could be transpiring. Private contracting dumpany’s often dispose of their waste on the fly. A union worker doesn’t have to think about fast buck turnaround, just has to do it right and reliably. Private junk removal companies double in casual theft harvest what they can and dump the rest under cover of night. I’m often the one who chooses to contend with the garbage detail at the back – the excercize and fresh air is luxuriant – and not a week goes by where illegal dumpers haven’t loaded our back wall and/or bins with their crap. Often private companies rather than crazy individuals. A homeowner doesn’t drive around the back lots with 3 and a half broken toilets to throw out. We’ve had large old fashioned doors, gigantic bagged things that made me think a crime had been committed, furniture, weighty engine parts/ the gigantic bagged things I actually got the owner involved and all other coworkers for a serious debate on whether we should touch it or not. Evidence? Well, the call was to open it and see what it was, and it was just that lot of stuff had got scummy from the rain, while other parts were permanently heavy landfill of the once manufactured sort. Everyone had a good laugh at my expense, but not a one did not see my point.

The gulley is a pit of extra water that develops where they’ve built a tunnel for the brook to pass under Dufferin. It seems a fine structure from a time when people who built such things were quite proud of such things and would design it quite subtly and have much interesting thought in its constructing. The brook loops round the city dump and cuts through light ravine behind industrial lands and curves down to this point at 4400 Dufferin. Once through the tunnel, which I believe animals use as well, the gulley forms, sometimes deep, often shallow, except where it plunges. Then heads off into the woods to a vast bog-like area that above Finch is a lake. The network of streams and creeks would have been quite self-sustaining before all the roads. The water had been much higher earlier in the week, so maybe it reached parts of the soil that have these colourations. The oil from good clay?

Chances are it’s nothing and no one has to wonder why it’s there.

Or, as my mother says, “People will just have to learn.”

 A thing I find amazing with all of the debate of tarsands and pipelines (as well as fracking) is just where realism factors in. The framing of the debate is as if ideological. It may be justifiably be thought of spiritual and/or moral because it’s so fundamental, but it’s nonsense for it to be ideological, conservative versus ndp or republican versus science. Anyone who isn’t already invested in it would see it as the doomed pig it is .

Resources will be part of any kind of politic forever, fuel, energy. If the tarsands were a good idea, if the pipeline were a good idea, I’d be pleased enough but they’re just not.

The biggest most money centric corporations don’t go for bad ideas
as they frame it, but they don’t got for bad ideas this bad.

Weighing against the profitability of the whole tarsands pipelines
stretching of the oil industry are so many factors it’s hard to imagine any positive side to it.

 

Negatives:

1) As pure investment, the ultimate profit or less at the far end
of the utterly unpredictable clean up/civil suits auditting and
other litigation, this is lawyer porkpie way out of the comfort zone
of investors, some of whom may also be deterred by environmentalists
who are not so small in number any more.

2) Trustworthiness: it’s an extremely ambitious greed goldmine,
tends to attract the wrong types. Siphoners. All that job creation
sliding things by and lobbying, and then they betray you.
Think of all the clever young people who could work their way in
to such a job and then 3 years later expose all their secrets.
The real conservatives out there ie conservative with their money
and discrete with their exposure, intensely reluctant to mire their millions in something so tippable.

3) The actual environmental impact. After all it’s the government,
reasoning minds, that make the decisions based on the best for all.
Not in this case so far thats for sure. Tarsands is on the one hand
oil that is not ready; give it a million years; and on the other hand
is there and a part of that ecosystem. Since that project began
northern alberta goes up in flames all summer and the ice cap melts
and manitoba and parts of the northwest territories flood. All good?
Is it a write off? What are the costs? Texas and Alberta, good neighbours?
And thats just the tarsands. Tarzan’s big idea. The attendant pipeline
rips right through the continent and spreads all that risk through
The United States of America!? Multiple by about 9000 vectors the
civil suits, litigation, compound issues, endless claims, disasters
so regretable like a new orleans. If intensifying pollution were a
good idea and huge losses and liabilities were desirable, a reasonable
person would applaud the possibility of profit. Be rich on a destroyed planet

4) and after all of the above, the real backbreaker: all it takes is
one election loss to end it. To kill it. Invest?  It’s incredibly how weak the civilian populace is against giant multinationals. The whole thing can be blocked by the courts in countless jurisdictions.

All that said, I’m glad the below proves some people agree
and feel sad for the guy who signed off for the 7 million.
But that isn’t the main issue involved, the main issue is shared by all.
If it was going to happen anyway take the 7 million?

I’m lucky never to be offered money for my opinions to change.
My opinions are just my opinions. The sacred opinion part of life.
Consider me ready to analyze the prospectus on it the day some corporation offers me 7 million not to oppose something.
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/life/First+Nations+pipeline+support+surprises+chiefs/5811196/story.html

For all the while I’ve done poetry readings it’s always been a quiet tradition to comtemplate the spaces in the room, wondering where those whom could not be there might be, a spare seat at a table for 6 occupied by 3, an unseen bench along the side, standing, at the edge of the dance floor, or side by side, on stage.

Didn’t take an audience photo this one, nothing to analyze. Where might they be? Thinking of my cats, but I didn’t mention them.

Instead read all from Safe Telepathy, with the one addition of my father’s journal entry of his flight into Ankara, Turkey in 1954. I love reading that; his perfected grammar and punctuation, like a fine little brush for the brain, exacted text so good for the brain; the clarity.

From Safe Telepathy included a poem that involved Ed Fielding back when I first got to know him, 93 to 95 or so.

And the quotes of Althusser and Corso, which I remain pleased to have placed side by side all that time ago. Althusser says “Ideology is the representation of the imaginary relations of individuals to their real conditions of existence” and then Corso says: “On acid you see more of what isn’t there.” For me, those two quotes combined is probably the 1985-1995 contribution to the data of philosophy and political science

and the rest of my reading was spongy curls on the consciousness of consciousness theme, in a long room that was a buzzing hive of consciousness. And the people just kept arriving. Packed. Noisy at the back. Among the miracles, nash the slash stepped forth from the crowd to find me a lamp when it was too dark. Talk about safe telepathy.

That part of College St hangs onto that working class urban feel thats so hard to maintain. All the dark little trees and the unfathomable, where reality dwells.

Amazing to read having not sat down since arriving, still in jacket and at last to sit. But on stage. And everyone or some at least all looking at me expecting activity of some kind.

Nik Beat gave a much better than reading than mine a bit later. Look out, solid work coming down. Missed some of the other readings, sucking wind out on College St. So warm in that bar. The subsequent sets were to go super intense, but it’s imperceptible to mortal eyes, how it takes it out of me doing poetry readings, and all the depths of it. Joanne and I signed a book for the host, and it was out for a withering browed team meeting in front.

the sunday night cloak patio in november
the sunday night cloak in february
the sunday night cloak patio in april

Oxygen, in its greatest form, on the human planet

process, process, writing process

Writing is a value in itself, good for the heart and mind foundation, the heart and mind ~ writing is so good for you it almost is better than vegetables, the mind keeps us all alive, together, our minds

the glorious trees in the dark of november monday write and what is a sentence with a kestrel angrily flying off… (I’m just learning kestrel, and haven’t got a thing against them, they’re just so realistic, birds of all kinds) and birds of all kinds are overwelmingly talented poets, every bird we will ever see, and every tree writes, everything knows what has happened, consciousness and oxygen may be one. So very fortunate.