March 25th, 2011 by Chris Eng

It looks like we’re heading into an election pretty damn quick, and while I’m not planning on becoming a pundit and spouting off about every political tidbit that happens to make its way down the wire, I thought I should comment on the general state of affairs and give a brief overview of my General Canadian Political Theory as it Stands at the Moment. My theory is based around the things Steven Harper likes.

Steven Harper likes three things: the rich, corporations and the military.

He likes those things and pretty much nothing else. He hates the Left, he hates poor people and he hates the environment. And if you work for a corporation or the military, let me clear up any possible misconceptions—Harper doesn’t give a fuck about you. He doesn’t care if you die in Afghanistan or get crippled in a workplace accident; he likes CEOs and contractors and if you’re not one of those people—if you’re one of the middle class or below, living paycheque to paycheque and constantly looking for ways to make ends meet—you should not be voting for Steven Harper.

I already hear a lot of disenchanted and disenfranchised people on the left bemoaning their lack of options. They hate Harper, but they hate Ignatieff, Duceppe and Layton, too. They don’t want to vote for any of them. I agree, we could be blessed with better leaders with bolder visions and stronger personalities, but we’ve got what we’ve got and we’re going to go into this election with them whether we like it or not. And it is my earnest opinion that much like Buckley’s, even if you find the taste totally reprehensible, you’re going to have to swallow the stuff and go out and vote because if you don’t the potential outcome is SO MUCH worse.

There exists the possibility that Harper and the Tories could pull off a majority government. I want you to think about just two of the scandals that have broken around the Conservatives in recent weeks: they changed the name of ‘The Government of Canada’ to ‘The Harper Government’ on all official statements and releases and it was discovered that the government lobby of the House of Commons is filled with nothing but portraits of Steven Harper. He did both those egomaniacal things with a minority government, one that’s theoretically supposed to (on some level) keep the ruling party in check. Can you imagine what he’ll do legislatively if he has no one to tell him no? What the Conservatives will try to pull off if there isn’t enough opposition to block any of their bills, no matter how crazy? I don’t want this to sound like hyperbole, but I think it will be a literal and non-waking nightmare for the Canadian people.

To my mind, one of the extreme dangers is the state of the global economy. I know Canada’s faring okay right now, but I believe implicitly that there are worse times ahead and if that’s the case, the last person I want in charge is Steven Harper.

We made our way through a variety of recessions and depressions over the last 80 years due in large part to the large amounts of social programs that were available to all Canadians, regardless of wealth or social standing. Those programs (many of which were seen as rights by our country’s citizens), have been whittled away on a federal level by the Conservatives since they’ve been in power and if they’re holding a majority government during the next massive depression, you can bet the remaining programs won’t last long enough for you to blink. Every poor person in this country will suffer and I can’t bear the thought of that.

“But won’t a minority government just put us through the same crap we’ve been through for the past few years?” Yeah, if the NDP, Liberals and Bloc don’t form a coalition government, it probably will, but I can guarantee that will still be better than a Canada run by an unfettered Conservative party. And hopefully by the time the next election rolls around after that there’ll be some better options on the table.

So vote. Vote your conscience. And if you need to, vote strategically. I vote to the left, but if I discovered that the Liberals were trailing the Conservatives by two points in my riding, you’d best believe I’d be embracing the centre and backing Ignatieff. If you’re against the Conservatives, please vote. And even if you think the political system is irreparably broken, please vote, because even though in some ways it’s not much, it’s all we’ve got and I’m really not interested in seeing how much further the Conservatives can break it.

March 23rd, 2011 by Chris Eng

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
Bill McKibben
(Knopf)
ISBN: 978-0307399182

There is a very simple argument at the heart of Eaarth: we’ve fucked the planet to the point where we’re living on a terrestrial body entirely different from the one we’ve always known and now we have to find new ways to live on it or die. Funnily enough, this is essentially my core philosophy these days. When all the various books and documentaries were coming out over the past several years waving their arms and saying, “OMGWTFBBQ! IF WE DON’T ACT NOW, RIGHT NOW, EVERYTHING IS GOING TO GO TO SHIT,” I stood back saying, “But we’re not going to act now, right now, because it’s too easy for humans to ignore the things happening around us and for us to absolve ourselves of any responsibility in order to keep living our comfortable lives. By the time we actually have visible evidence of our own wrongdoing, it will be way too late for it to matter. In fact, it’s probably too late right now.” And in that sense, the first half of Eaarth is no different from other books of its kind, but its second half, where McKibben tells us what we can do to help fix things, diverges dramatically from the fold.

He doesn’t tell us how we can fix the planet—that option’s kind of off the table now—but he does provide suggestions on how mitigate the damage we’re doing and maybe even roll it back a bit. What he suggests is mostly common-sense but it still needs to be stated loudly and repeatedly: we need to institute global policies supporting urban gardening (it’s been done before—multiple countries encouraged citizens to grow Victory Gardens during WWI and II) and revitalize our sense of community in urban centres and through a reintegration into smaller, rural communities. And while none of that is particularly new, what is refreshing is McKibben’s down-to-earth (if you’ll pardon the pun) attitude. Because unlike messianic enviro-preachers who sermonize about the non-stop benefits of doing exactly that, McKibben knows there will be drawbacks. There will be things we’ll have to give up as a society if we ever want to make a massive change like that work. Some of our big city cosmopolitan attitudes, for instance–McKibben acknowledges that while a return to small town/rural lifestyles is essential, small towns are not always the most open and nurturing toward non-traditional or outsider values.

He addresses this point, though, when he talks about how much more broad our field of vision has become thanks to the internet and its positive impact on social diversity, and for that reason he argues it is vitally important we keep the internet operating at peak levels, both for communication and for the spread of knowledge, because although we’ve done an incredible job of forgetting pretty much everything that was common knowledge three or four generations ago, we’re going to have to remember it faster than we forgot it and the internet’s the best channel for that.

There will be sacrifices in our new, more unpredictable, smaller (in scope, if not in size) planet, yes, but McKibben’s sense of realistic optimism which pervades the second half of the book is extremely heartening and that’s exactly what we need now right now. The time for blind hope about the world fixing itself (or even us doing it) is over. We need pragmatists willing to assess the situation and offer informed choices so we can move forward as a race. McKibben is one of those people, and for those reasons I find myself firmly back in the environmental fold, infused with optimism about the fact that I personally and we as a species can do something about the mess we’ve landed ourselves in.

If you’re feeling beleaguered by news reports, give Eaarth a read (and turn off the news—a lack of sensationalistic reports does wonders for the spirit). It just might revitalize your enthusiasm about finding ways to re-connect with this weird new world we’re living in.

March 12th, 2011 by Chris Eng

First the anxiety, then the depression. They were actually staggered the better part of a year apart, but both of them in conjunction kept me away from this blog for a year and a half. Let’s start at the very beginning… and by that I mean about three years back.

It all started for me with The Long Emergencyby James Howard Kunstler. I’d always been fairly green and very left, but that book was my wake-up call as to HOW BAD the state of affairs on our planet was. The Long Emergency was my formal introduction to the concept of peak oil. It was the Boogeyman ripping the covers off my previously-comfortable existence. To his credit, that was exactly what he was trying to do, so kudos to him; it worked. I went off and dove head-first into the literary pool, devouring everything I could read on various different yet intrinsically-connected subjects like Peak Oil, Climate Change and General Planet-Fuckery. I became reasonably self-educated on the subject, became convinced of the impending doom of mankind and was quite assured that I would be better off in a shack somewhere (or maybe a yurt—I like yurts).

And that’s where everything fell apart. First off, there was no real way that Carla and I could afford even a modest shack in the woods. We have some modest retirement savings put away, but nothing that would buy any kind of sizable chunk of land. Moreover, even if we miraculously acquired said chunk of land, we wouldn’t have been able to work it; neither of us had the skills necessary to cultivate a medium-scale garden, and there was no short term method for us to easily acquire them. (Yes, there were other options like community gardens and the like, but I’ll get to them in a minute.) So going Back to the Land became this distracting pipedream that we (but mostly me) fixated on. And by fixating on it, I set up a feedback loop of anxiety which grew louder and more oppressive as each day passed.

The thing about the enviro-lit books of a few years back is almost none of them had any workable plans or solutions in them, and while the reason for that is almost certainly that when asked how the planet could be saved scientists were forced to throw up their hands and yell “I DUNNO”, the general tone of the books didn’t help the problem. At the point in each volume where there should have been a few chapters discussing what ordinary people could do, the books simply ended. And yeah, there were several books that came out around that time which proposed addressing exactly that, but they mostly ended up addressing the question: “How can I save the environment while simultaneously maintaining my North American bourgeois quality of life?” They were, in essence, band-aid solutions to a triage problem—ways for the middle-class to assuage their guilt through cosmetic life changes—and I found them by-and-large to be trite and insulting and so consequently ignored them.

But by surrounding myself with environmental doomsayers 24-7 and without a shred of hope anywhere to be seen, my anxiety levels soon hit critical levels and the emergency shut-off valve was tripped. What the shut-off valve did was simple: it made me turn my back on all environmental discussion. It’s not that I stopped caring (if anything, I’d been caring too much), but in order to remain a functional human being I had to step away and since I hadn’t moderated my anxiety levels before allowing them to dominate me, I had to step away entirely.

It was an easy solution with an unpleasant side-effect: the depression.

I’m not going to pretend that going cold turkey on enviro-studies is what caused me to get depressed—it wasn’t; there was a much easier cause for that: I lost my job—but it contributed to it in one significant regard.

I had lost sight of one of my most sought-after dreams.

Moving to a plot of land somewhere in BC and being as self-sufficient as possible has been one of my dreams for a few years now, and not staying up-to-date on the environment and farming/permaculture/self-sufficiency basically closed the door on it. Moreover, losing my job and not having any spare income nailed the door shut. And so I sat at home, rudderless and directionless, doing the occasional editing job, not knowing where I’d end up five or ten years down the road, and spiraling down into depression until I finally came out of it, well, really about a month ago.

Landing the gig to manage my apartment building has been huge for my frame of mind. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but at least there’s money coming in and at least I’m doing something. I’m generally happy and motivated again, so I’m pretty pleased about that. The other thing that set me back on the enviro-track was Eaarth and I’ll get to that in my next post.

March 10th, 2011 by Chris Eng

I love this more than words can say.

March 10th, 2011 by Chris Eng

It’s been nearly a year and a half since I last updated this blog. A year and a half since I last checked in and talked about what was going on in my life. A fair amount has happened, too. Here’s a brief checklist:

- I actually wrote the book I talked about here. No, I did. I wrote a damn novel. I’m in the final stages of editing it and have enlisted a friend who will be providing literally dozens of illustrations for it in anticipation of it getting serialized online this year. I even have a website for that where I’ve published a bunch of loosely-connected short stories in the same community: www.hoodieripper.com. It’s exciting; check it out.
- I kept working at Sophia Books through to the beginning of Summer 2010, at which point the ailing book industry and the SKY-HIGH Vancouver rent rates killed Terminal City’s only language/culture bookstore once and for all. After that I did (and in a sense I suppose am still doing) a bunch of freelance editing for a company in the States. The pay is certainly all right, but the work is sporadic. There are essentially two busy periods a year and when you’re not in the middle of them, you don’t work. They sent out an email this January that said that they’d be sending out some work again in June. So, y’know, sporadic.
- Carla and I moved from East Van (East East Van) to smack-dab in the heart of Vancouver’s West End. We actually scored big. We ended up a block and a half from the beach in English Bay and are now living in a 1950s three-story walk-up with hardwood floors. It’s smaller than our last place, but if you scroll back through those entries, it was a constant battle between us and our crap that was filling up the available space. Less room now equals less room to store crap that we don’t need. It’s been good for the paring down and purging of possessions. I have also (as of this month) become the building manager of my apartment. It’s pretty cool. The pay is decent and it’s a smaller complex (only 21 units, including ours), so I’m not constantly in damage control mode.
- I fell into one of the worst depressions I’ve ever been in. Or maybe a better way to phrase it is that I fell out of anxiety and into a deep depression. This one might take a bit of explaining. In fact, I know it will, because it ties in with the reason this blog got abandoned for as long as it did and has one or two things to say about the environmental movement in recent years. I’ll save that for the next post. Don’t worry—I’m not going to make you wait until 2012 for the next entry. I believe in suspense, but not that much.

So, what does this all mean? I’m back. I can’t promise that I will be updating this blog non-stop, but I think I’ve reached a point where I’m mentally prepared to update GeekUnplugged regularly, if not constantly. So, if you’re still following this on your RSS reader, thanks for not deleting the feed and I’ll talk to you all very soon.

October 28th, 2009 by Chris Eng

There sometimes comes a point in creative people’s lives where, despite the solitary nature of their hobbies and/or trades, they have to admit that they can’t do it alone, that they need the support of other folks. And that’s a hard thing to accept for headstrong sorts. Being able to admit that you need someone else to lean on to get stuff done isn’t easy. It’s admitting weakness and, some might feel, defeat.

I’ve got about five or six partially competed novels sitting in my notebooks and boxes. It’s a collection I’m not particularly proud of, but I wasn’t sure what I could do about it. To be honest, the 3/4 point pretty much kills me every time. And I’ve reached the point where I finally need to say, “Yes, I need a support network, or I will never finish one of these things.” They will become the skeletons in my closet and I’m not particularly interested in raising a zombie army of half-completed manuscripts before I die. Which is why, in order to get past that block, I need the aid of something that makes the simple act of support fun, and that’s why I’m going to do the Nanowrimo this year.

National Novel Writing Month could be considered a contest of sorts, but the only person you’re really competing against is yourself. The aim is to complete a novel from start to finish during the month of November. You’re allowed to go into it with notes and plot, if you want, but you don’t start writing it until November 1st and you must complete 50,000 words by November 30th.

Signing up on the Nanowrimo website gives you a profile page and the ability to mingle with the other writers—about 80,000 so far (from a count that’s a couple of days old). Every day you input your word count and watch it climb toward your goal, which is a nice bit of visual encouragement. And twice a week, they send out pep talks from various established authors, just to make sure you stay on track and keep working at what you’ve started. This year, they’ve got Lynda Barry, Gail Carson Levine and Tamora Pierce (among others) on board. (They get a lot of YA authors to contribute, because there’s an entire Young Writers Program that collaborates with teachers in order to get kids to write—1,100 classrooms so far! Awesome!)

Schedule

I order to do the Nanowrimo, I am rearranging my life schedule. My computer recently died (I tried to give it some beer and it stopped speaking to me! It was Blue Buck, too! What gratitude!) so I’m sharing my wife’s computer. This normally doesn’t cause too many problems because we keep different enough schedules that I can get most of my computing done while she’s at work. If I’m going to be writing for at least two hours a day, however (I write at around 1,000 words an hour), I thought I should probably try to schedule it so I’m out of her hair as much as possible, so I’m getting up at 6am.

This isn’t the most outlandish time of day for me to be up and around—I’ve had jobs where I’ve needed to be up at 6:00, if not earlier—but I’ve still started scaling my wake-up times back incrementally. No, it’s not outlandish, but it’s not natural for me, either. Plenty of black tea will be drunk in November. Coffee, too.

Prep

You can go into the Nanowrimo with notes and prep, but you can’t start it until the first, so I’ve taken advantage of this and essentially plotted the book from beginning to end. Mostly. Some of the characters are a little rough in my mind and I’ve left room for the cast to deviate from my ideas, but I think it’s mostly there. It’s a punk romance novel, or, as I’d like to call this new genre, a “hoodie-ripper”. (Ever seen a punk wear a bodice? It doesn’t happen that often.) I can write 50K about young punks in love, easy.

Contact

If you want to do it too, you’re got about 3 days of prep left and then the shit’s gonna hit the fan. My screen name at the Nanowrimo site is chriseng. (I know—shocking right?) Feel free to add me. And let’s write some damn novels.

October 14th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Just FYI. But really, if we’re going for outlandish lies, I prefer mine to be a little tastier and easier to swallow. Like so:

Mmmmmmm… Still, let’s try to keep the “bacon emissions” down to a minimum, okay, folks?

September 10th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The Crisitunity (also known as the Great Almost-Flood of 2009) passed without incident. I know that not having closure on that unresolved aspect of my life was keeping you up at night, so I wanted to clear that up right off the bat. The mess that was distorting and cramping our living room is gone, the boxes have been sorted and moved back into storage and six new boxes are on the “For Sale” pile. Despite that, the bookshelves are all still overflowing to the endtables and there’s still a general lack of space in the house. But at least it’s a clean and generally organized lack of space. What else is going on? Here’s some Pluses and Minuses:

+ The Donald Westlake kick I’ve been on for the past few weeks is a massive, massive plus–specifically with his Parker books. Fans of hard-boiled crime fiction need to take specific note of this, in case it’s somehow passed them by.
- The greenpunk books I should be reading are mouldering on the shelves because I’ve been reading Donald Westlake and noir fiction.
+ Gonna go hide away in a cabin on the Island for my birthday in a couple of weeks.
- The general malaise and depression that seems to be afflicting me at the moment. Not sure of the reason. Not sure there needs to be one.
+ Will and Kyla’s fantastic wedding that I went to a week back, hanging out with a ton of awesome people (many of whom I probably haven’t seen in the better part of 15 years). The wedding featured a bicycle procession (with the bride and groom on a tandem bike) through the streets of Victoria to a park for a champagne toast and then to the reception. Freakin’ amazing.
- My friend Jeff getting on an accident on his bike on the way home from said wedding and shattering his clavicle. He’s okay, if a little sore and chagrined.
+ I’ve been spending less time obsessing over what’s happening online and tending to my downloads, allowing me to spend more time IRL…
- …mainly because my computer disagreed with the beer that got poured on it and now refuses to communicate with me. Or with anyone else. Or in any way whatsoever. So it looks like a new computer is on the horizon, but that’ll have to wait for a little bit. In the meantime, I’m on Carla’s machine. *sigh*

All right, I’m off to sell one of those boxes of books. A local store said they’d take them off my hands for $150. w00t!

August 22nd, 2009 by Chris Eng

First off, apparently TIME is reporting on unsustainable farming practices. It’s nice to see that this is a topic which is finally filtering over to the behemoths of the mainstream media, and in a decidedly readable form, too.

Then there’s the various Victoria-area entrepreneurs who have started making a go of their own small-scale local/organic grocery stores. Yeah, I know it’s Victoria and you expect this kind of thing to come out of Victoria, but still–it’s pretty rad. If you live in the area, be sure to give them a shot.

Finally, there’s the new KFC Double Down. Seriously–scope the nutritional information on this thing. Y’know, when Burger King introduced the Enormous Omelet Sandwich, I felt perversely compelled to try one. This, I’m pretty sure I can skip.

August 17th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Lisa: Dad, did you know the Chinese have the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity’?
Homer: Yes! Crisitunity!

It could have been a lot worse than it was, but it still sucked.

Over the past year or so, “the office” in our house has morphed into “the storeroom” and things that I’ve decided not to immediately part with but which we we don’t have room for in the rest of our modest-sized house have made their way there.

Yesterday, after Carla and I came home from a lunch/shopping/window-shopping expedition we discovered our landlord (who lives in the suite above us) at our door in a bit of a state. It seems the pipes were backing up in the house. The laundry room had flooded with black water and he wasn’t sure where the blockage was coming from. He did, however, need two things from us:

1) To not use the water at all, maybe for another 24 hours or so.
2) Access to the storeroom where the plumbing access valves were hidden in the walls.

After not being able to get into the access valves himself, he called in a favour from a plumber friend who came over and determined that our personal plumbing wasn’t blocked and we could use our water (yay), but that he couldn’t find the blockage in their plumbing, so he needed a plumbing snake to find it. They went off to Home Depot to rent one, but not before telling us: “You’re going to need to move some of this stuff out of here.”

“How much of it?”

“Whatever you don’t want potentially flooded.”

Considering that almost every box in that room was filled with books, I considered that as an encouragement to empty the room top to bottom–posters, stuff on shelves, EVERYTHING. And so we did. In 20 minutes flat, Carla and I emptied the room to the bare walls. And just as we moved out the last box, our landlord and the plumber returned with the snake.

Long story shorter, they found the blockage (NB for GeekUnplugged Readers: don’t put grease and coffee grounds down the garburator–your pipes won’t like it), only sprayed down the walls with a bit of black water, cleaned up the mess (thankfully) and departed. The only problem was that the contents of the storage room were still in our living room. Carla and I could have just moved them back (probably in only another 15 minutes or so), but I preferred to see it as an opportunity to strip down my belongings yet again.

See, my problem with keeping stuff in storage is that, by definition, the various belongings aren’t available to access. And if you can’t access them, you can’t use them, so why do you have them? I know I may have more display space eventually (though I’m not counting on it), and some of the things I don’t have room for I do still want, but I bet I don’t need everything in the 20+ boxes that were in there.

So, before the Chris & Carla Overflow Project goes back into storage, I’m going to go through all of it again to see how much I can live without. In point of fact, I’m going to challenge myself to take advantage of this near-disaster and get rid of as much stuff as humanly possible. I’ll report back when I’m done and let you know how well I took advantage of this crisitunity.