Hard not to get depressed, even when John Stewart makes it funny

Is the world going to hell in a handbasket? Seriously?
I ask cause the news this morning talked of how gas in Canada is predicted to jump 20cents by the end of the summer. I don't know shit from math but that's a hell of a big jump. Well over 10%, closer to 20%. How will truck drivers and cab drivers survive, never mind the average Joe on his daily commute. I ask because of the food shortage in Africa. They don't have enough rice?! I ask because food prices in Japan and now Canada are rising in ways we've not seen in our lifetime. Because it seems to me that the middle class are about to get a lot poorer. It seems to me that we are spiraling out of the cushy bubble that's been our post-war prosperity and now it's time for something much tougher. And maybe this isn't a bad thing. But it's hard to feel good about. Hard not to get depressed, even when John Stewart makes it funny.

We are the first generation to be poorer than our parents.

It's our generation that's gotta start taking the bus. (I mean that in two ways.)

Our generation that will/is watching the short-lived American empire crumble.
Canada, I just heard on the radio, is the third worst carbon emitter on the planet after the U.S. and Australia. How long before the average Chinese citizen gets a car, or three. What then?

JM

Letter to a President

My good friend Roosvelt,
I don't know very English, but I know as much as write to you.
I like to hear the radio, and I am very happy, because I heard in it that you will be President for a new (periodo).
I am twelve years old.
I am a boy but I think very much, but I do not think that I am writing to the President of the United States.
If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green American, in the letter, because never, I have not seen a ten dollar bill green American and I would like to have one of them.
I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.
Thank you very much. Good by.
Your friend,
Fidel Castro

If you want iron to make your ships I will show to you the bigest (minas) of iron of the land. They are in Mayari, Oriente, Cuba.


[I cut this out from an issue of Harper's a couple(?) years back]

Osaka, I miss you already

again, like a traveler

Internet cafe again, like a traveler. i am a traveler, again. its what i want. its the leaving, the feeling loved by the few you met who loved you and give to you all they have that last time they see you cause they wonder if they ever will again. that is so much of the travelers addiction. to feel loved when leaving. its the unsettled feeling too. its the way each leap across the ocean shakes me up, makes my dreams so much more vivid. i feel it in my belly. this fear, this excitement, of what can be, of what might be next. into my 30s already, but i chose to trade it up. never had a house, a car. ive never even bought a tv (it was a furnished apartment, this last i lived in with ai in osaka). would love these things. big flat tvs and fancy cars. even just a shitty car. i dont yet envy the white picket fence mind you. the fireplace, yes. the fence, no. but its a tradeup. i chose experiences for my 20s, for all my 20s and a couple 30s too. to have lived on a kibbutz near jerusalem, or in a lousy apartment with a pyscho of a neighbour on St. Marc in Montreal, or the place in ikeda city ai and i have spent these last couple years by an airport and a highway, which is to say by concrete and more concrete, that also, by sheer and absolute dumb luck, was a second floor place with a balcony overlooking a grassless wee parkette (dirt ground) not much more than a slide for the kids to play on, but two sakura trees, one of whose branches would reach to our balcony and for 2 precious weeks a year, the cherry blossoms like soft pink, nearly white popped popcorns would flutter down around our laundry hanging out to dry.

so i traded up the pension starting, investment planning, house buildings, career solidifying usual route i was to have taken, according to text books and guidance counelors, according to family members immediate and distant, and anyone else with advice, help, love, judgment, suggestion.

i could already have a house. i could even have owned my very own toaster oven by now. but i decided fuck it. you only live once. wonder how long ill stick around in toronto this time. dont know, but promise ill be getting a toaster oven first thing. cant live without one.

Reading: Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" (non-fiction) and Michel Houllebecq's "The Possibility of an Island" (fiction)
Listening to: Band of Horses and over and over again on me ipod a song called "Carnival" by Dead can Dance
Watching: nothing because i am no longer in my apartment
Peeing: in the toilet, when aim is well and good
Loving: me Ai-chan
Praying: for the family of an old friend whose birthday is today
Needing: to return to Canada bringing with the person Ive managed to be these last 5 years in Japan