The Hollow Ones

I am outside. I am standing in my backyard. It is twilight. Something in me has always appreciated the end of things more than the beginnings of them. Years, days, meals, friendships, worlds—whatever.
I walked out of the door and into my backyard with all the intention of a plastic bag caught on a mild updraft. Call it what you will: whimsy, ennui… it’s all the same to me. All just words. And though words have made up the better part of my life I realise how fundamentally flawed language is; how helpless it is to describe certain things.
There I am, in the cool twilight of a spring day. My fingers are cold, my eyes focus on nothing. I make my way toward the front yard. Standing at the end of my driveway I can see the Cariboo Mountains in the distance as they reflect the sun’s final rays back at me.
This is the way the world ends.
What I remember about my youth is the abandon of it. The reckless way I loved: like joy was immutable. The way I despaired at the absolute nature of my angst. The way I moved through life as though I occupied some unassailable position loftier than anyone before me. Specifically, the time I’m speaking about here is when I was old enough to be passionate about everything but too young to know better.
Everything was different then. I could be so bad at sex and believe myself to be the best. I could be so arrogant about my talents without ever having worked to develop them. Words like “gifted” were thrown around a lot back then.
The thing about getting older is that you don’t notice how things change until you get a second to stand back and look at the whole picture. If you keep your eyes downcast, keep your legs pumping and ignore what’s going on around you, you can cover a hell of a lot of ground and be so far from where you started that you don’t recognize a goddamned thing anymore.
The way I look back is to read what I’ve written. When I look back and read a story I wrote, say, three years ago; I can remember everything about that time. If it’s a short story—maybe something in the three-thousand word range—I can think about the two or three days it took me to write it. I can remember the waitress who spilled my drink at the Elephant’s Nest. I can remember falling in love with the blonde girl at work with the smile that could turn the world on its ear. I could remember having my heart broken two days later when the same girl chose to sit on the opposite side of the lunchroom despite ample room at my table. I remember being late for work one morning because I decided to smoke an extra cigarette before going in. I can remember going to the bar on lunch and downing as many beers as I could in the half hour provided. I can remember going out that night and drinking so much I had to wander up and down King Street for an hour before I could manage to drive home.
And I get this from reading stories.
Because the truth about stories is that they’re all we are.

What I know about my present is that it’s all there is. A thread. An ongoing narrative that weaves its way through the decaying banner of humankind’s time here on earth. Tattered and hanging limp from the flagstaff. Just another story that no one would ever want to read. Let alone live.
And what I know about being the age I am now—what I’ll remember about it when I read the stories I write now—is that for all the wisdom I’ve accumulated I should still know better. I should be a much better person. I should fight harder and scream louder and walk slower.
I accept admonition: I know my position is assailable. Looking back I know I was lousy in bed. I also know that nothing could matter less. Looking back now I know I was arrogant and that it all stood for nothing because I fell for everything.
Fuck perfection: at this point I’d make due with passable.
Because I know that some day what comes out of the east won’t be the rising sun. And I—and we all have so little time left. And soon the stories we tell won’t matter anymore. And the narrative will get cut short.
This is the way the shit hits the fan.
And don’t you ever say—don’t you dare say, “But I didn’t know.” Because you did know. I told you so.

Here and now, in this twilight, it’s something you have to see. The way the headlights of the cars coming up the hill on Hammond Street paint the side of the house with light. The way the dark settles over the hills and the day comes down to a few points of light in the eastern sky. The shudder down your spine as the last trace of purple fades from the west.
This is the way the world ends.
And you sigh at the muted colours all around you. And you know that there’s not much time left. And words like “irreversible” suddenly mean something. And words like “forever” and “eternal” mean less than the dogshit you just stepped in. And you pray for a dawn that erases everything you’re feeling. But between climate change, holy war and a generation so caught up in itself it can’t see; you know hope is something we should have fought for earlier.
And this is the way the world ends. This is how her last breath sounds.
And part of you wants to go inside. Gather your loved ones and hold them close. Get a fire going and exhaust it to ash while there’s still time to enjoy it. But the anxiety has frozen you right there. In the front yard. In the dark. At the end of the day. With the missing dawn at the end of the next revolution.
Get down on your knees. See if it’ll help. What have you got to lose?
And write it down. If there’s anyone left to remember it, they’ll want it written down.
Because the truth about stories is that they’re all we are.

This is the way the world ends:
Ten billion hungry souls scraping for purchase against the dearth imposed by the passing of the glut. Ten billion ugly souls crying out for what isn’t left. Ten billion soulless monsters choking on the toxins they once dismissed as merely unfortunate side effects of their comfort. Ten billion angry apes, crawling back into the primordial ooze. Ten billion brainless human beings with nothing. Because they forgot to plan for tomorrow.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, nor with a whimper.
But with a lazy shrug of ancient shoulders; rounding out an arrogant, overfed frame.
Shame on us.
Shame on us for every goddamn thing.


All due credit to T. S. Elliot and Thomas King.

Premature Evacuation, or: Confessions of a Suicide Advocate

So a war-funding bill goes before President Bush today. The bill contains a withdrawal timetable for Iraq. The Whitehouse has already told us that Bush will veto the bill and work with Congress to craft a bill everyone can get behind.
This is my second political entry in a row. And right about now there’s a handful of people thinking I should stick to what I know: fiction. And right about now there’s a handful of people thinking that I don’t know jack shit about fiction anyway and that I should just get off my high horse and shut the fuck up.
Those two handfuls of people may be right. I have no intention of disputing that I may be full of shit. I also have no intention of shutting up.
The dilemma, boiled down to the simplest terms (yes, I have criticized simplification of issues in the past, but what I am trying to do here is provide a good jumping-off point for debate), is this: Conservatives (not all of them Republican) claim to believe that leaving Iraq before the war is won will result in chaos in Iraq and may eventually cause security problems for America. Liberals (not all of them Democrats) claim to believe the war was a mistake in the first place and that the presence of American troops is doing more harm than good.
Both ways of thinking are probably flawed but the flaws are not equal.
A conservative will say that the war must be won for the sake of American security. He or she might also say that America started the war in Iraq and it is America’s duty to ensure that the mess is cleaned up before they leave.
Here is the problem: for a war (or anything else) to be won, an objective must be accomplished. There has to be a goal. What is the goal in Iraq? To find weapons of mass destruction?
We know now that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. We know that the Bush administration used unsound intelligence about Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons to bolster support for the war. We must also be cognizant of the possibility that the Bush administration presented this intelligence, not only to the American people but to the UN, knowing full-well that it was incorrect. If this is in fact true, then the Bush administration’s behaviour was criminal and it’s time to start putting together a case for impeachment.
But that is not the point. The point is to find out what, if any, the U.S. military’s objective is in Iraq. Is the objective to deliver freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people?
Perhaps. It certainly sounds like the most benevolent cause for a government trying to rationalize an unjust war. Of course, there is a problem with this argument as well. The problem is that, because of its nature, democracy can’t be given by an occupation army. Freedom is not something that can be enforced from the outside. It requires vigilance from within. In short, it is not up to America to impose democracy on Iraq (or anywhere else). It is the duty of the people of Iraq to fight for their own freedoms if they want them. No one can fix Iraq but Iraq.
So perhaps (and this worries me most) Bush and company want to quell the insurgency in Iraq. They want to hunt down every last terrorist that opposes U.S. political and economic interests and make sure that they are no longer an issue.
Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 was founded on one thing and one thing only. He said to the American people, “I am the only one who can protect you from this nebulous threat called terror.” We all want to be protected from terrorism. What we have to realise, and what we have to tell our leaders, is that the threat is too nebulous to be fought this way. Terrorism is opposition and that opposition will sometimes escalate and it will, from time to time, take extremist forms. You can never end terrorism completely and you can’t fight it physically on the ground. You can take steps to protect yourself from it. You can be open to dialogue and consider issues on a global scale. You can make your country safer by ensuring that you never, ever let blind self-interest guide you. Because if your country plunders the third world, uses terrorist factions to accomplish its own military ends and behaves arrogantly applying strong arm tactics to anyone who opposes it; someone will want to see it destroyed. As much as you hate living in fear, there are people in this world who have spent their entire lives the way you spent one day on September 11th, 2001. That is to say that they spend every day in unrelenting fear for their lives.

Yes, I believe that a military withdrawal from Iraq is in everybody’s best interests. I also believe the U.S. has an obligation to provide funding and intellectual assistance as Iraq rebuilds itself. What we should see is a shift from military force to financial and social aid.
Of course, this is all assuming that at least one of the goals listed above reflect America’s interest in Iraq. We must also consider the possibility that what they really want is oil. Or even more likely: a safe staging-ground in the Middle East from which to launch a military campaign into someplace like Iran. Perhaps then on to Pakistan, Russia and parts beyond.
Of course, the Canadian military is already helping to build just that in Afghanistan.

A liberal, on the other hand, will tell you that they want to end the war in Iraq because it is criminal, wasteful and wrong. And for the most part, the liberal would be right. We have to see that there are other problems, issues at play in America’s foreign policy that reflect much larger concerns. Concerns which, when addressed, may ease some of the tension in the world.
These problems are not all America’s doing. It is, however, largely America’s obligation. They are rich, they are powerful and they have the ability to get the ball rolling. If they are willing to police the world through military force, they must also be willing to assist the world through diplomatic means. They had so much support for it, too, after 9-11. They squandered it on the wrong initiative.
But again, I’ve come away from my point. My point is that though I feel the liberal stance on the war in Iraq is largely the right one, I am wary of the average American Democrat’s motives regarding their opposition.
It is my suspicion that what folks like Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton are doing is adopting the anti-war stance for very, very cynical reasons. They know that a majority of Americans favour a timetable for getting out of Iraq. They see this as a method of capturing votes. Whether or not they actually feel that the war is wrong remains to be seen. But one has to admit that the constant jockeying for position seen from most of the presidential candidates’ camps is nauseating at best (Obama) and outright sickening at worst (Clinton).
Then there’s Al Gore. I have to admit that while I am fully behind his stance on the issue of Anthropogenic Climate Change I wonder about his motives as well. There has been some speculation that there will be a presidential bid from him in the future. Perhaps even as early as 2008. It seems as though his film, while still an important bit of documentary, may have been a two-hour campaign commercial and to think that it was much more is probably a bit foolish.
Remember that this man and his wife are responsible for those stickers on your favourite CDs: “Parental Advisory, Explicit Lyrics”. They lead the inquisition against artists in the nineties to convince parents that all their children’s problems are the result of music. I don’t know about you—but I wouldn’t vote for that, even if he promised to bring in a wizard to reverse global warming (which is basically irreversible, by the way—at this point we can only hope to keep it from getting worse).
On the right you have politicians with outdated ideas about the ways security can be achieved and with some very vague economic reasons for believing them. On the left you have politicians cynically latching on to ideas that they may or may not truly support in a bid to gain power.
Which has only served to reinforce my long-held opinion that no one who genuinely wants to lead is fit to lead.

The title of this journal, The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide, has a long and storied history. It was originally to be used as the title of a webcomic to be written by myself and drawn by a fine individual we shall call Jeaux Meaux.
The idea behind the phrase, for me, has always been an expression of the sort of melancholy that occasionally fills every thinking person when they look at the state of the world. Or even, for the smaller thinkers, when they examine their own lives and see how it has been affected by the world at large—whether they realise that’s what they’re seeing or not. There can be no question that the culture we are living in is committing suicide. And from time to time there are those of us who think, when observing the trajectory of mankind, that suicide is the best possible option. There are those of us who think it not only on a cultural level—but on a personal one.
There are often disagreements about the cure for what ails us. There are disagreements over whether or not there is a cure. But the illness we see is rarely disputed.
We have outstripped the planet’s capacity to support us. We’ve damaged the ecosystem that sustains us. We’ve alienated ourselves and each other. We’ve latched on to belief systems that prevent us from seeing the larger picture. We find it so easy to discover causes worth killing for, but we cannot bring ourselves to consider anything worth sacrificing for.
So while we kill for anything, we’ll wind up dying for nothing.
We’ll ostracize our gay friends for our faith. But we won’t give up our SUVs for our world. We’ll condemn our sisters and mothers and daughters for having abortions. But we won’t admit that we’ve already breached the planet’s carrying capacity. We’ll go to war with the entire Middle East to maintain our dominance, to continue living in the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. But we won’t use our strength and our opulence to lend a helping hand in the third world. We’ll drill as deep into the earth as we can to pump more oil out of it. But we won’t conserve it for our children, our nieces and nephews, for our grandchildren—if the earth lasts that long. We’ll demand everything of the government. But we won’t stop consuming.

The war in Iraq is only one issue facing us today. But it is an issue indicative of just about all of the others. It may be wrong to say humankind has reached a turning point—but I don’t think so.
The choices we make in the years to come will be of paramount importance. We can no longer make them with closed eyes. We have to decide what we must preserve and what we can do away with because what has become abundantly clear is that we cannot have it all. It was childish to believe we could monopolize the planet’s resources in the first place. It was childish to assume we could always be right. We now have the responsibility to act like adults.
Rule number two in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide is this:
My advocacy of your right to kill yourself notwithstanding: please, please, please explore other options before succumbing to unnecessary acts of desperation. If there is another way it’s probably a better way.

Glenn Beck is a Moron and You're a Moron if You Listen to Him

Here’s the real story tonight:
Glenn Beck, the host of the eponymous Glenn Beck show on CNN Headline News, is the sort of dumbed-down conservative that does what any good liberal had formerly believed was impossible. He makes conservatism look even more out of touch with reality than Reagan and the voodoo economists of the eighties did.

Here’s how I got there:
I’ve been watching Beck’s show at least once or twice a week for the last two years or so. At first he seemed like a relatively harmless moderate conservative who really didn’t know what he was talking about.
I’m afraid that now he seems like an increasingly, absurdly radical conservative spewing dangerous garbage that undereducated Americans lap up with abandon. And he still has no fucking clue what he’s talking about.
Here’s a fellow who has a highschool education, a history of alcohol and drug abuse and is a Mormon. And I’m supposed to take his opinion seriously? Especially on issues as important as terrorism and climate change?
I’ve got a highschool education, a history of substance abuse and no religious convictions whatsoever and no one listens to me! And at least I can verify that I read about and consider the issues—this is apparently not true of Beck’s approach to current events.
One of Glenn’s favourite sayings involves telling people what he’s not (ie: “I’m not a New York Times Editor”) and then reminding us that he is “a thinker”. The only trouble with this Glenn-ism is that it’s abundantly clear that this man is not a thinker.
An example would be his criticism of public schools for choosing to make Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth part of the curriculum. He complained that it was too hard to get God into schools and impossible to get climate change out.
Maybe you need a little help, maybe you can’t understand this either. Allow me to point out the flaw in Glenn’s “thinking”:
Climate change is discussed and should be discussed in public schools because—whether or not you choose to listen—there is ample scientific evidence for the existence of climate change, for the probable severity of its effects and the likelihood that it is anthropogenic. There is no (see also: none, nil, nyet, zero) scientific evidence for the existence of God.
Now, I’m not a conservative blowhard because I am a thinker and what occurs to me here is that the argument I’ve just made stands up pretty well.

A while back Glenn did a special report on the “End Times” prophecy contained in certain books of the bible. He reported the book of Revelation as though it were fact. He then engaged in a ridiculous discussion with Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (authors of the Left Behind series of books) as well as Joel Rosenberg (former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) drawing inane parallels between the biblical apocalypse and current affairs.
Somehow Glenn Beck does not see that the book of Revelation is not sound foreign policy.
But that’s not the worst of it. If Glenn was merely a clueless blowhard I could let it go. If he were just another conservative talking head I’d pass him by without a second thought—even if his show is, as he claims, the fastest growing on CNN Headline News.
But that’s not the case.
The problem, the real deep problem with Glenn Beck is that his simplistic view of the world is as dangerous as it is viral. His dualistic thinking is not only childish in it’s “good guys wear white hats and bad guys wear black hats” simplicity but damaging to the truth.
For one to follow Glenn’s thinking one must believe in the totally outmoded concepts of pure good and pure evil. One must also subscribe to the idea that the U.S.A., capitalism and conservatism stand on the side of pure good while everyone who opposes those ideas in any way is pure evil.
While it is unfortunate that Glenn does not have the capacity to understand subtlety, to discern shades of gray or to appreciate all of life’s nuances; it is tragic that he convinces people to wear the same blinders he does. To separate the world into two, to see the world in binary, is to ignore reality in favour of something much easier to grasp but far more dangerous to believe.

We believe in dualities because they’re easy. There was a time in human history when we needed simplistic thought to survive. We had to believe that another tribe’s motive was evil and that they must be exterminated to prevent unwanted competition for food. We had to believe that good was on our side. We had to believe everything had intention one way or the other and that that intention was either for or against us.
But this is an archaic and outmoded form of thinking. We are capable of far more complex thought now and I believe we are obligated to use that capacity. We can afford, now, to try to understand others. We are able, if we so choose, to sit down and discuss matters. We have at our disposal modes of thinking that allow us to consider complex situations critically and come to more insightful conclusions.
The good guys don’t wear white hats. There are no good guys. The bad guys don’t wear black hats. There are no bad guys. To pick sides on an issue because it’s deemed “conservative” or “liberal” is stupid and all too easy.
In any given situation there is a best option but that option isn’t always the simplest one. It’s not always the one on the right or the one on the left. And until we do away with these silly binary methods of problem solving we may never see the best option. Remember, Neo-conservatives are the only real Marxists left on earth as they’re the only ones who still believe in economic determinism. And the Green Party has some pretty draconian ideas about personal freedoms regarding health.
There is no black, there is no white. There is a lot of grey though. And I think we’d all do much better to see in full colour. And in high-definition… if it’s available in your area.

Recording Angel

In a class taught by the novelist Tom Spanbauer called “Dangerous Writing” (a class that produced Chuck Palahniuk of Fight Club fame) he talks about a lot of the principles of writing specific to his brand of minimalism. One principle is called “Recording Angel”. It means writing without passing judgement. You’re not supposed to feed details to the reader. No abstracts, no silly adverbs. No feet long or years old.
You “unpack” the details—you describe actions and appearances in a way that will make a judgment occur in the reader’s mind. Let the details assemble themselves in the reader’s mind. You don't say, "When I was eighteen years old". You say, as the brilliant Amy Hempel does in The Harvest, "The year I began to say vahz instead of vase..."
Of course, in reality we know we can’t be a Recording Angel. We know that because of the observer effect and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that we can’t possibly record something without having an effect on it.
Besides, there’s no rule in the art of fiction that cannot be bent or broken under just the right circumstances to stunning effect. This is Recording Angel, bent and broken.

Try to pretend that this blighted webscape is a navigable space in the material world instead of a mere analog for it. Imagine that you can, as you do in the real world, walk up to people and have conversations. Imagine you can step in and out of different places, see your way through different buildings and pass over various physical boundaries. Try to picture yourself stepping through the door of a chat room, flying through the blogosphere, shopping in the eBay.
Or hooking up with old friends at a bar called Facebook.
I joined this little on-line community recently—despite my concerted efforts to avoid these sorts of webscenities going all the way back to Makeoutclub.com. I can’t say exactly what it was that prompted me to take a look; certainly I can’t pinpoint what it was that made me want to do anything other than eschew the networking site in short order.
But I did look. And I did join.
Something about turning twenty-eight, I think, made me wonder where everybody had gone. I remembered this close circle of friends from my youth. A pool of affection that had evaporated, leaving a puddle. It’s not as though I didn’t appreciate the puddle—I did! The thing is, I couldn’t figure out when or how the evaporation had happened.
One day I just found myself in a cold, rainswept parking lot in Northern B.C. with the temperature on the brink of turning the soft drizzle into stinging sleet, and I was more alone than I had been in a long time.
It wasn’t the sort of alone that makes one imagine dragging a razor over his wrists. Quite to the contrary: it was the sort of alone I’d sought most of my life. The sort of alone that let me focus on writing; on turning the wayward thoughts in my head into little jewels of fiction.
And I wasn’t entirely alone. I had (and have) a rewarding, loving relationship with a woman who has often provided a lens to focus my creative efforts. I had (and have) friends and relatives from back home that I communicate with regularly: a growing family and a support network that I’m sure would be enviable to most.
Even here in Prince George I have a handful of acquaintances that I can count on to entertain me every so often.
What I’m trying to tell you is that, despite being comparatively alone, I was left wanting very little in the way of interpersonal relationships.
But curiosity about where all those people had gone got the better of me. I couldn’t keep myself from asking the one question I thought I didn’t want to ask. That question was this: Where is everybody?
I wanted to know where all those Catholic school uniforms, stinking of weed and beer-puke, ended up. Were they exchanged for business suits? Maternity clothes? Coveralls? Did those clothes carry the heavy, acrid stench of pot and liquor as well? Were there wedding bands around fingers? Did they clink against beer bottles, or had the glass bottles been exchanged for crystal wine glasses and champagne flutes? Or plastic sippy-cups full of Kool-Aid?
So I walked through the door of Facebook Bar and Grill. I sidled up to the bar, put my money down and ordered a double scotch on the rocks and took a look around.
Of course, this is a metaphor. I’m actually sitting at my desk eating M&Ms and drinking cheap Australian Shiraz from a screw-top bottle that tastes surprisingly like an expensive Shiraz from a screw-top bottle. I’m not at a bar: I’m staring into the screen of a laptop computer.
My wine glass is plastic. The music on the stereo is a Polish hardcore punk band called Post Regiment.
And as I go from table to table I’m not actually sitting down with my old friends. I’m sitting down with carefully chosen web avatars of them. And I don’t learn about their lives so much from conversation as from deciphering digital displays of their lives.
And what have I learned?
Diaspora!
There are two kinds of diaspora. There is the physical kind, the kind where a people disperse and move in different directions over a real, material landscape. The other kind of diaspora is mental. This involves a change of direction in a person’s mindset. It’s often natural but sometimes shocking when you walk in on the result rather than observing it as it happens.
What I’m most glad to see is that the damage we’d done to each other doesn’t seem to have been permanent. The bruises left by knuckles have healed. The welts raised on our psyches have quietly disappeared. The psychological ramifications of hands gliding over naked skin seem to have been positive—if they were anything at all. The regret about punches not thrown, psychological damage not inflicted and sex not had—for myself anyway—is very small and mostly insignificant.
What I’ve learned is that Monika is taking her masters in forestry in B.C. Jen is a pastry chef in Jasper Alberta. Shawn got married. Rena is poised to take over her parent's restaurant in Ridgetown and likes going to Pistons games. Geri-Lynn is a mother in Manitoba. Regine had a kid, got married and pictures of her give the impression of full-on mommy-hood and financial well-to-do-ness. Stephanie got married, moved to London and had two babies. Ryan B. got married and seems to take his Facebook account seriously as a means of disseminating his sociopolitical views. Andrew got buff and lives in Toronto. Mars got married to Shawn and they had two kids. She runs her own day care. April got married and is performing at the Elephant’s Nest this Tuesday. I'm told Sean ran around the continent, he may have gotten married and divorced and ended up back where he started. Craig is a University Administrator on the East Coast. Eoin is in Ottawa. Dawn moved to Ridgetown and had a baby. Brock is a Graphic Designer in London. Ryan S. lives in Belle River. He got engaged and works a metal stamping plant. Michelle and Aaron hooked up and live together.
And what about me? What about Dave? Dave lives in Prince George, British Columbia. He sometimes calls himself J. D. Buston and spends his time making up stories for people who look at the world and need to laugh or cry a little. To say to them: “It’s okay, you’re not alone.”
Good for them!
Good for me!
Good for us!
Diaspora!
Who knows what I’ll find out next?

[FIK-shuhn]

I have come to lay pearls before swine!
Just kidding; you’re not swine.
At least, no more or less than I am.
Here is the fiction I’ve promised. This is what you call a character-driven narrative. It comes from a real experience I had which I then extrapolated upon with fiction. Like most stories it has a beginning, a middle and an end; a conflict and resolution; but unlike some stories you may (or may not) have to think about it.
At any rate, enjoy it. And then check out some of the links to the right there…



The Good Trick

J.D. Buston


The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-- Albert Einstein

“This is what I want to be,” she says from somewhere behind me. I turn away from the shelves of books to face her where she stands by the magazines. She holds it out for me to see. The glossy pages of the magazine reflect the florescent lights and I have to move my head around to see past the glare.
The photo—shades of grey—shows an elderly couple. Fat, underdressed and falling apart in the lockstep of a tango or a salsa or—something. The sidewalk beneath their feet actually looks younger than either of them. The people that pass by don’t seem to notice them and I wonder if they’re ignoring the couple or the camera.
I can see how either one might make someone uncomfortable.
At this hour, on this day, in the grocery store, there’s no one shopping. No one normal, anyway.
The jug of milk we came for sits on the shelf with the magazines. The naan, frozen salmon and chocolate bars we didn’t come here for are in my hand.
I rest my eyes on the stock boy down the aisle. I can almost see the grease from his hair running down his face, closing pores, birthing zits. His white dress shirt is too big, his tie too long, his green apron bearing the store logo is tied too loose because his waist is too small. Imagine what it would be like to be both trapped and lost in something like fabric.
“We should get a move on,” I say, hoping she’ll put down the magazine. “We’ve been here for hours.”
“Hours, nothing,” she says. “We’ve been here all of fifteen minutes.”
The trick to turning a minute into an hour is to spend it in a grocery store. The trick to turning an hour into a minute is to spend it with a book. The trick to turning yourself into someone else—I haven’t figured that one out yet.

When I was younger—old enough to be curious about women but young enough to have no vested interest—my best friend’s big sister showed me her breasts.
She called us all up into the tree house one by one. Including her own brother. I was last. There, sitting opposite each other on benches of pine, with all the other boys trying to look up through the cracks in the floor, she pulled up the front of her shirt. In that moment I might have tried to remember what it was like the first time I saw an apple tree. I might have asked if I could touch them. I don’t remember anything except that I didn’t touch them.
Whatever else happened there in that tree house, I didn’t touch her breasts.

Up another aisle we pass jars of preserved crap neither of us would ever eat. Why save something as useless as an egg by pickling it in salty brine that makes it inedible?
She kneels down to look at—something.
I check my watch and realise I’m not wearing one.
We came for milk, and to get out of the house, and to kill time. We’ve got milk, we’ve run out of time and I want to go home. The rumble in my gut tells me that the time between dinner and bed has stretched on for too long. I watch the hem on my pant leg, hoping to make time go away, and see the loose thread. I imagine pulling it and turning my pants into shorts like in a cartoon—and I imagine that if I could do that I could make it be spring outside.
Imagine being trapped in something like fabric.
Down the aisle a woman comes around the corner pushing an empty cart. Her face looks like the moon would if the moon were made of something more malleable than rock. Cratered, pale and deflated.
I watch her pick up two jars of pickles of two different sizes, two different brands. She turns them both as she reads the labels. She puts one down in the cart and puts the other back on the shelf. She begins to walk toward us and then stops dead. For an eternity—okay, maybe it’s just a second but this is a grocery store so it’s hard to tell—she stands there. Then, she walks backward, pulling her cart with her, and exchanges the jar of pickles she put in her cart with the one she put back on the shelf. She moves away with what she’s probably hoping looks like purpose. I know better though—she thinks indecision is a point on a map that she can get away from.
The trick to making a decision is to stop trying to make it. The trick to avoiding the feeling of uncertainty is to fake it. The trick to actually being certain? I’m still working on that one.

Up in that tree house, years and years ago with my best friend’s sister, I didn’t touch her breasts.
Much, much later—I did touch them. I was at least twice as old. On a camping trip. In a tent. She let me touch all her softer parts. Reverence is the word that describes my memories of that night.
In the dark, fumbling like the kid I still was. Her soft breath against my neck, the pulse of my heart and something else so quiet I don’t quite remember it. Pushing the fabric away from her—letting her out of her trap. Finding her where she got lost.
Spending passion like we had endless stores of it—an account that would never be overdrawn. Discovering the things we both wondered about. Learning a trick or two.

Imagine being lost in something like a dishtowel—a damp one.
I play with the keys in my pocket. She lifts and squeezes various fruits. Mangos are not in season here; these ones have ridden all the way up the coast in the back of a truck. It had to take at least as long for these to get here as it takes to drink a case of beer—and recover. Fully.
She holds up the mango to me and says, “I think we should get some.”
I tell her to go ahead and get a dozen.
She knows things about me that no one else does—or will. Ever. She knows things about me that wouldn’t be true with anyone else. She knows things about me that I had to learn from her. She knows… She Knows.
I remember the night, two summers ago, sitting on the bank of the river and watching the ducks in the dark. All you could really see was the wake they made swimming, the way it shimmered in the little bit of light that made it down to the water. I remember the heat—the sweat that coated every inch of me—and still wanting to be as close to her as possible. I remember it because that’s what it’s like in bed still. Sweating in February, not wanting to roll over. Not even wanting to move enough to turn up the cool side of the pillow.
The salmon is beginning to thaw in my hand. I’ll need to return it to the freezer and take another before we leave.
The trick to remembering the past is to relate it to the present. The trick to enjoying the present is to relate it to the past. The trick to not fearing the future—I wish I knew.

Up in that tree house, years and years ago with my best friend’s sister, I didn’t touch her breasts.
By the time she died though—I had.
After she died, at her funeral, I stood before the casket wishing I could reach in there and move her hands. They were crossed carefully over her chest, protective and lifeless. I don’t know what I wanted to see more—her breasts one last time, or the desperate gashes I knew were inside her wrists.
Imagine being trapped, lost and confused in something like a funeral shroud.
The trick to finding belief in God is seeing breasts for the first time. The trick to loosing faith in Him is seeing them covered and dead. The trick to getting through life without Him is something I won’t know until I’ve taken my last breath.

Imagine knowing that everything is dissolution and that nothing lasts forever. Imagine memories of the past that constantly intrude on the present. Imagine seeing life as a series of incidents, moments, places and people. Imagine a string of tricks you pull like a magician in order to get people to believe you know what you’re doing. I doubt you have to work very hard at it to know what I’m talking about.
In the checkout line I see she’s buying the magazine. The one with the photo of the old couple dancing. I know what she means by, “That’s what I want to be.”
She means: “That’s what I want us to be.”
I can’t dance. I’m embarrassed to try. And I don’t know what to expect—maybe there’s a trick. Maybe I’ll figure it out. Maybe I won’t.
Imagine being limited by something like fabric—something like yourself.
The trick is something I’m going to have to figure out.
The trick to life is realising there is no trick to life. Just a bunch of little tricks to get you through the moments that make up the whole. Not that you’ll ever know all the tricks. But you can try. I know I will. What else is there?

Meditations on Faith (Among Other Things)

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.” - Kurt Vonnegut

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” - Voltaire


Doubt is more precious to me than faith. Doubt is where questions start, it puts us in touch with reason and common sense. Faith, unchecked and rampant, can make us do stupid and horrible things.
I could cite historical proof from before the Inquisition to well beyond 9/11 but that’s been done before and if I can’t add anything new I’m not going to waste keystrokes.
I have a naturalistic world view. I have no superstitions and I do not believe in the supernatural. I make no apologies for this—this is where reason and common sense have lead me.
I was raised (quite accidentally, I’m sure) by Catholic parents, teachers and priests to be an atheist. I don’t believe in God or gods. If you were to place me on a sliding scale numbered zero to ten with zero expressing absolute certainty that there is no God, ten being absolute certainty that there is a God and five being perfect agnosticism; I would be a one. I think anyone claiming to be a zero or a ten has an absurd belief that there is definite proof one way or the other.
There isn’t. trust me, I’ve been searching for the better part of my life.
I do, however, believe that the evidence—scientific, philosophic and otherwise—points strongly toward a godless universe. And certainly within the scope of scientific understanding there doesn’t seem to be much need for a creator God.
I will submit that there may be something we don’t understand that results in a universe that is greater than the sum of its parts. But that’s not God—it’s gestalt, perhaps super-string theory. And it has nothing to do with an anthropomorphic creator god with a chip on his shoulder as described by virtually every religion.
I don’t believe in an immortal soul. There is no heaven, no hell and reincarnation seems unlikely. I believe in trying to behave decently in this life without expectation of one beyond it.
It is all any of us can do.

Don’t get me wrong. If you’re religious I don’t begrudge you your God belief. In fact, there are times when I envy you for it. There are times when I wish I could pray and feel confident that someone who cares is listening.
But I don’t. So I talk to my friends and family instead.
I may begrudge you your religious convictions, though. If they extend so far as to make you believe you have an incontrovertible roadmap to morality that others don’t. If it leads you to hate. If it leads you to believe that you can achieve a great reward in the next life for doing something stupid and hurtful in this one.
If it makes you say things like “homosexuality is immoral” or to do things like fly an airliner into a building so you can become a martyr.
If it makes you believe that this world is merely a stepping stone and as such needn’t be respected.
If it makes you able to ignore ecological disaster, political discord and the rights of the rest of mankind.

Please try not to be offended by this. This is where my doubt has lead me. And I’ve always been more comfortable with the path doubt leads me down than the one faith leads me down. Like Bertrand Russell said: “The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts.”
But hey—maybe I’m wrong. And when the shit hits the fan we’ll all be together. That is, on the off chance we’re anywhere at all.


You know, this is supposed to be a literary outlet for me but I can’t seem to find any fiction short enough to post. Sure, there’s Viesalgia, but that is in competition and publishing it (even online) before the winners are announced might just queer the deal for me.
As soon as I find out one way or the other I’ll post Viesalgia here. In the meantime I’ll look around for some shorter passages in some of my stories to let you read.


I’ve added the list of non-fiction suggested reading. I stand behind some of those books for their entertainment value more than their devotion to fact—but all of them are worth a read and guaranteed to get you thinking. Particularly the rather extreme and provocative theory laid out by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
It’s not as tough a read as the title might suggest.


And finally…
If you got here through my Facebook account, stick around. Bookmark me—even if you find me horribly offensive. Especially if you find me horribly offensive! I find that getting a good daily rage on helps me focus.
If you got here through other channels then friend me on Facebook so I don’t look like a loser.

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Has anyone else notice how I've managed to update at exactly 2:22 each of the last two days? If I were more superstitious and less of a skeptic I might be concerned.
I'm really only posting this to break up the strange coincidence before it has a chance to repeat itself.

You'll notice a list of suggested reading (fiction) on the left there. I'll try to add to it every so often.

I'm also considering a list of suggested non-fiction.

That is all.

Binary is Not Enough

Has anyone else noticed how political discourse has changed lately? To engage in discussions of a political nature these days seems to require some twisted, absolutist logic. It’s almost binary.
Consider it:
irrelevant/relevant
right/left
bad/good
black/white
0/1
The binary expression of the implication runs thusly:
The good news is that if you can count to two you can engage in political discussion. The bad news is that if you can count higher than two no one will understand what you have to say.
Apparently shades of grey are no longer recognized.
Moving on…

This entry is really just to make a few quick notes for people who are wondering what’s going on at the Buston/Gorzelak Compound in beautiful British Colombia’s not-so-beautiful central interior and to clear up a few things for anyone who may stumble across this blog by accident (run!).

First of all: I don’t want to hear any whining about the insensitive title. Any e-mails I get that that start, “I had a friend who committed suicide and…” will be deleted without being read.
And just so you don’t think you can slip one by me by saving your recriminations for the end of the e-mail, I’ll save you the trouble: I am an insensitive prick and shouldn’t make light of such a serious subject and the only reason you can see for my thoughtlessness is that I must be horribly insecure about something. Either that or I’ve got a severely grotesque sense of humour and therefore must be a thoroughly sick individual.
Feel free to reiterate or write variations on these complaints—but save them for the comments section. Don’t bother e-mailing them.
As far as an explanation of the title: the things you’ve heard about my being horribly insecure as well as a sick man with a grotesque sense of humour are true. Here’s how disturbed I am: I think we can deal with anything we can laugh at. That goes for suicide as well as anything else wrong with this world.
The difference between me and someone who is offended by the title at the top of this page is that I know that getting rid of the word will not make anyone less likely to take his or her own life. It will only make it harder to talk about.
Lenny Bruce once said, “take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck the government’.” By extrapolation, if you take away the right to say “suicide” then you take away the ability to say, “Hey Cho, don’t commit suicide and take thirty-some-odd people with you!”
And if you don’t think that’s an important thing to say go ahead, turn on your television to CNN or CBC Newsworld and watch the coverage of what happened at Virginia Tech yesterday.

Now, on to less troublesome topics.
My writing is going well. I’ve started work on something new that I don’t want to talk too much about just yet. It’s a pretty massive and complicated undertaking and I don’t want to jinx it in the early stages by nattering on and on about it. Suffice it to say that once there’s enough to say about it, I’ll talk.
Endlessly. Relentlessly. You’ll wish me dead.
As far as the novel, Redden Black; I am writing up a synopsis to include with the sample chapters. I’ll be getting that off to one or two publishers (at least) very soon. I can’t say I love it—but then I’ve looked at almost nothing else since Christmas.
And yes, I am saying this in public so that I can’t chicken out and not send it.
More important is a collection of short stories that I’ve been trying to compile. Again, I don’t want to tempt fate by giving you too much information but there is a very small chance that a very small press might be interested in putting out a very small book of short stories by yours truly. It’s exciting and I hope it works out. As soon as I know something definite I’ll let you know how you can pay me for it.

I should be finding out in the next few weeks how my flash fiction piece, Viesalgia, fared in the Short Grain contest. Wish me luck—a deadline extension by Grain magazine suggests I may be competing with more people than I had originally supposed.
I am also considering entering a contest run by sub-Terrain magazine. The Lush Triumphant Literary Awards Contest led Annette Lapointe to have her first novel—Broken—published by Anvil.

Looking back through the files which contain the entries for my old blog I can see how my opinions about this city have changed. I remember writing after moving here that the locals didn’t seem to trust me. I opined that something about me—perhaps a swagger—led folks around here to read something metropolitan and perhaps even populist into my person. I figured that people around here didn’t want to trust anyone who looked like they might have spent more than an hour in Toronto.
I don’t know if I’ve lost that swagger but I noticed while running errands this morning that people don’t react to me the way they used to. I don’t figure that I look any different. I still dress in black, I still wear big boots and spit into the gutter. I still shave my head and endeavour to look as unapproachable as possible. But for some reason people in Prince George smile at me now—wish me a good morning and wave.
What hasn’t changed?
I still say this is a lovely place to visit. I encourage everyone to spend a summer up here in northern BC. Unless you fear bears and physical exercise more than I do (which is unlikely) there’s nothing but adventure to be had. I’ll show you some things.
It’s just not a place you’d ever want to find yourself living.
I was twenty-six when I moved here. I’m twenty-eight now. I was beginning to think that my relocation might be a failed experiment. Which lead me to think that my early adulthood might also be considered a failed experiment.
That lasted about ten minutes.
The end of my residency here is in sight. Perhaps even closer than I imagined when I moved out here. Perhaps. And in that light, I can’t say I’ve failed anything. Oh sure, there have been set-backs and dark, dark days—but Gloria, let me tell ya, raven shit down the back of my neck is about the worst of it.

For the record, the first rule in the thinking person’s guide to suicide is this:
If you insist on taking yourself out of the equation, please, do us all a favour and go alone. We’ve all got enough to worry about with industry trying to poison us, religion trying to recover us, government trying to control us and business trying to buy and sell us—no one wants to have to dodge bullets on a university campus on top of it all.

Call This a Promise Kept

As promised: a blog.
Naturally, this means no more impersonal e-mails sent out to groups of friends who were expecting personal correspondence. This begins a string of impersonal blog entries that no one ever has to read if they don’t want to.
You can, as always, thank me in cash and/or naked photos.

The first thing my friends may notice is that the name at the head of this page is my pen name rather than my real name. Of course, calling it a “pen name” is unfair to clever and thoughtful individuals who went to some effort in selecting their nom de plume—like Mark Twain. This is merely an inversion of my initials—from D. J. to J. D.
The purpose of the inversion is twofold:
First, I am told that one who entertains notions of becoming an even moderately public figure must be prepared to have his or her name Googled.
Reasonable enough—so go ahead and Google “David Buston”.
It’s okay, I’ll wait.
See? I would like to avoid being confused with a prairie-dwelling photographer. I should note here, too, that I have no idea who this man is or if I am in any way related to him. I’m told my last name is none too common so I suppose it is possible. Maybe one day I’ll trouble myself to find out.
But probably not.
The second reason for the flip-flopping of my initials is that I wish to give a nod to one of the greatest (and certainly craziest) writers of the twentieth century. I refer, of course, to J. D. Salinger. I don’t entertain any notions of being a writer of any caliber similar to Mr. Salinger—however, I think I could out-hermit him if pressed to do so.
And my, how the daily news does press…

But as novelists go I don’t think I want to kick this blog off with a perplexing recluse. We have, after all, lost a genius recently.
And I swear, I won’t say, “So it goes” or “Kurt’s up in heaven now”.
Kurt Vonnegut died on the eleventh of April. A lot has been said about him since and it’s still nowhere near enough. I’d like to think that what I perceive as a lack of interest is merely a mourning culture struggling to find the words.
Still, I know better.
I realise that Anna Nicole Smith’s death deserves more coverage.
I also know that the people who care about Vonnegut’s death have already thought all the things there are to think. And the people who don’t care—well, nothing I can say now will persuade them to care. I’ve coerced, persuaded and campaigned for Vonnegut’s books to be more widely read. I give up.
I will only say this on the subject:
Kurt Vonnegut inspired me to write when I had given up on the art form. He showed me how to be funny when everything in the world is pitifully bleak. Through his novels and essays he taught me more about the art of fiction than any other writer ever has. And certainly more than any instructor or teacher could hope to.
I have learned from one of his final interviews that he claims to have reached what Nietzsche called “the melancholia of everything completed”. I know he was done writing and that there would be no more novels to inspire, entertain or inform me. I know he envied his dead friends like Joseph Heller. Still, one cannot escape a sense of loss.
Like Hunter S. Thompson before him—he has left when we need him most. Vonnegut’s ironic humour has gone a long way toward making a lot of people feel just a little bit better about what seems to be imminent political, economic and ecological collapse.
I have begun to realise how few people know Vonnegut’s works. How one escapes the genius of the greatest satirist of the twentieth century (easily on par with Twain and Swift before him) is beyond me.
Which brings me to my next point…

Another recent death worth mentioning is June Callwood—and I won’t be surprised to learn that even fewer people recognize that name.
June was a Canadian journalist and social activist. She was referred to, at times, as “Canada’s Conscience”—which I think is a terribly wonderful thing to be known as. She was actually born in a city very familiar to me—Chatham, Ontario—and was raised in a community I am equally comfortable in—Belle River.
June began her career in journalism working for the Brantford Expositor at the age of sixteen—imagine that! She would eventually move on to work for the Globe and Mail where she met (and married) Trent Frayne.
Callwood left journalism for a time to raise a family but returned as a freelancer and ghostwriter for more than a few biographies detailing the lives of some rather prominent Americans. June eventually landed a job hosting In Touch on the CBC.
June’s career was marked by a strong personal desire to see social justice done, founding or co-founding a myriad of social action organizations. She also founded Casey House, PEN Canada, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Feminists Against Censorship.
Callwood was a Companion of the Order of Canada and was awarded the Order of Ontario.
She gave her final interview to George Stroumboulopoulos on CBC’s The Hour. Some have suggested this was a passing of the torch—I’m not prepared to make that statement. I am prepared to say, though, that if it was, George has some big-ass shoes to fill.
June finally succumbed to cancer on June 14th, 2007. Three days after Kurt Vonnegut died of injuries to his brain after a fall in his Manhattan home.

And here’s something to think about:
June Callwood was eighty-two years old when she died—two years younger than Kurt. I can find no information anywhere to suggest they knew one another. These two atheists who didn’t believe in heaven (just like myself) and who would get along so famously in the Everafter, will get no such opportunity.
That’s ironic.
I can’t speak for June, but I’m pretty confident that Kurt would find that funny.
And so do I.
Hope I didn’t bum you out. I hope you keep coming back.