Labels and Brands

I’m a bit of a hipster-I usually get into bands “before they’re cool” and I grow tired of them by the time they hit a mainstream audience. I have one grievous sin against any hipster credibility though:

I like the Tragically Hip.

You see, to the fans of complex or obscure music, the Hip are a band associated with drunken loutish fans, hooting and shouting as they chase the bespectacled kids out of the room, and liking the Hip is an instant indicator of diminished intellectual capacity. To those people, that actual music and lyrics of the band are irrelevant: they hate them for their fans. So when the geeks and cool kids roll their eyes at Hip fans, they inadvertently catch me in their condemnation. One particular hipster/goth friend of mine in high school once pointed at me and said with sadness in her voice  “oh he doesn’t know who the Propellerheads are: he’s a Tragically Hip fan”. I think she even petted my big dumb head to comfort me.

It’s the cost of being included in any large membership group: you end up being judged by the lowest, most visible element, instead of those who actually represent your group. Today, the Canadian press and Twitter are ablaze with discussion on the revelation of the vikileaks source, and many are painting this as a slight to the reputation of every Liberal party member. But this staffer with bad judgement and a grudge did not, and does not speak for me as a Liberal. However, in his well-delivered and sincere apology, Bob Rae does speak for me as a member. Any organization of people will have within its members the wise and the foolish, the ethical and the sleazy, and sometimes even the good ones make bad choices. Good leaders recognize the misstep, correct it, and apologize for it happening. Bad leaders pretend that any wrongdoing is a mystery to them and they have no responsibility for their party member’s actions (though they are quick to take credit for every success).

But that’s the nature of the beast: when you’re a part of the club, you get painted with the club’s colours. And you get lumped in with anyone who has ever been in the same colours. I’m suffering through that right now. Several of the city Councillors responsible for the badly planned budget and tax freeze have their “Liberal affiliations” mentioned in any negative article, and so the anti-Liberal sentiment gets pumped up again. I only speak for myself as a member of the Liberal Party, not as a representative of any level of the organization itself, but as a Liberal I want you to know that those Councillors do not represent my Liberal values:

  • A budget that draws from allocated reserve funds and creates the potential for incurring more city debt is not sensible.
  • A budget that cuts $1 million to affordable housing, throwing away an established long-term housing strategy for a plan scrawled onto the back of cocktail napkin 2 hours before a council meeting, is not responsible.
  • And a budget that cuts $500 000 from the funding to improve accessibility for Ontarians with disabilities is not compassionate.

So, no matter what their history or membership card may state, please believe me when I say that these Councillors are not my kind of Liberal.

Unsupervised and adrift

On Friday morning, I took my lovely wife and my astoundingly delightful 4-year-old son to the airport for their trip up to Thunder Bay for a 5 day visit. I don’t want to read any kind of ominous foretelling into anything, but I did receive a wretched paper cut on the inside crease of my left index finger while removing the old baggage tag from their suitcase, so I was physically wounded by the process of their departure. Once I left the airport, I started to notice an odd absence of direction and purpose.  It turns out that I am so very happy with the routine of my normal life and my happy family, that I have no back-up programming to use in case of bachelorhood. There’s really nothing I can’t do when they’re around, so the freedom of being unrestricted is pretty uninspiring. The only thing I could think of was eating terribly.

And eat terribly I did! In the course of the rest of my mopey Friday, I ate about a pound of ju jubes, a big hunk of ribs, a can of Pringles chips, several diet colas, 5 cups of coffee all before 6pm. When I’m only finding for myself, I have astoundingly low standards. By the time I met up with a couple of friends downtown, I was bloated, nauseous and still pining for my family. I did manage to pull out of my culinary nose dive and avoid ordering deep-fried pickles, so there was that, at least. And when I woke up this morning, the abused lining of my stomach cried in misery and upset for a good long time. I had to gently negotiate a peace treaty with my digestive tract so that it would allow me to have a cup of coffee. It’s funny that eating terribly can punish your gut the same way a night of boozing does.For the rest of the day, thankfully, I have been restrained and wise in my food choices.

And don’t be fooled into thinking I’m not trying to be productive during this brief monastic adventure. I’m trying my best to assume the guise of the manic and productive writer, who slaves away at the word machine from the moment he wakes up until the tallow burns so low that the eyestrain brings terrible visions and miserable migraines. So far I’ve had some qualified success at this. I’m still, at the young age of 37, learning how to hold my nose to the grindstone and keep at a task well past the point where the joy and fun has vanished. The big ideas and bits of dialogue that pop into my head out of nowhere are the fun bits of writing, but the rest of the iceberg, the part that makes it a career and not a casual hobby, is the grind.

It’s a strange circumstance I find myself in. I’ve made some progress in creating an actual writing process that isn’t “sit down, start panicking, and write until I get stuck”. Each day that I follow my new routine, I feel like I’m more aware of the story I’m working on, and I’m starting to accept all of the advice people give writers about the importance of doing revisions and multiple drafts of a story, and that is some good stuff to buy into. However, as I develop a better system of working on a story, I’m realizing that it take s a lot more time than I usually anticipate. To be fair, my previous timeline estimates have been wild guesses designed only to push me forward into writing, so they really shouldn’t be taken as accurate predictions of when the work will get done.

Another wrinkle that I didn’t see coming: after finishing an 8 hour day of writing, it would be really nice to have the family here and not just the useless cat. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced this level of solitary loneliness, especially in my own house. It’s a good reminder of how essential my wonderful wife and boy are, and how very very lucky I am to have my family. I hope I can stick to my industrious plan and have a real sense of accomplishment to share with them when they come back. Oh, and I’ll have to buy some more treat candy for the lad, to replace what I ate while he wasn’t here.

A clinic in bad municipal government

What a fun time was had by the audience at last night’s city hall meeting. This was the meeting to discuss and decide on what will be cut to achieve the poorly thought out promise of a zero % tax increase. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again-painting yourself into a political corner with an absolute and inflexible promise is a dumb move. But, dumb or not, it won the election for the gang of zeros. So now it’s down to the ugly part of the budget process.

To reach this year’s zero, city council voted to reduce the contribution to the new affordable housing reserve fund by $1 million. This proposed cut was introduced at the last minute to the agenda last night, without giving the citizens a chance to speak up and object to its inclusion on the cut list. The councillors in favour of the cut have tried to reassure people that there will actually be more housing units available in the near future despite the cut, through some kind of planning magic that they are reluctant to explain. They also found $2.3 million in secret staffing savings. No really, it was secret-that element of the budget was decided “in camera”, with no transparency or accountability. Will this $2.3 million come from layoffs? Only the secret council knows.

And to scrape their way to the zero finish line, council voted to divert $1.3 million from the city’s various reserve funds. Yes, I know that the word ‘reserve’ can be mistaken for ‘extra’ , but it’s not. This is the money that is set aside each year to make sure the city can pay for upcoming maintenance costs, both planned and unplanned. The city staff had warned council that doing this would cause problems in the upcoming year, but the warnings were ignored. Our Mayor, Joe Fontana, declared that the reserve money must be used “It’s for a rainy day, and ladies and gentlemen, it’s hailing out there.” Keep in mind that the crisis Mr. Fontana is trying to use to justify the reserve spending is one he made. He doesn’t want to use the reserve fund to pay off some of our city debt and reduce the $60 million we have to pay to service that debt this year. Nope, he wants to shortchange our long-term strategic and financial stability to make himself look good.  And to save me, the home-owning taxpayer, 26 bucks. That 26 bucks sure will come in handy when my car falls into a sinkhole downtown, though.

And while I’m casting blame about, let me send a special “thanks for opting out” to the 160 000 eligible London voters who just couldn’t be bothered to vote in 2010. Congratulations! This is the kind of government your apathy bought and paid for. If 117 of you in Ward 14 had gotten off your asses and voted against Sandy White, the vote to cut affordable housing would have failed. But who cares about the 8+ year wait for affordable housing, when I have an extra 3 bucks a month to blow.