Artistic Footprint

Not everyone can be Chuck Norris and have no fear. We’ve all got little secrets that keep us awake at night, peering through a crack in the covers into the shadows  of the closet, hoping that something on your list doesn’t come dancing out at you. These are a few things in my scaredy-closet.

1. Giant Spiders
2. Clowns
3. Fridge Magnets
4. Old Microwaves
5. The Golden Age
6. Capitalism
7. The Great White Shark
8. Ostriches
9. Ignorance
10. Horror Movies
11. Scientologists
12. The Guy from Spence Diamonds
13. Global Warming
14. World War Three
15. Republicans
16. Jared from Subway
17. Getting Peanut Butter stuck to the Top of my Mouth
18. The Quaker Oat Man
19. Eating Too Many Crackers and not being Able to Keep up
20. Aboriginal Boobies
21. RRSPs
22. Menonites
23. Pancake Nipples
24. Getting stabbed in the eye
25. Burrs
26. Christmas sweaters
27. Accellerating in a Ford
28. Hiccuping and burping at the same time
29. Popeye
30. People who don’t drink
31. Outhouses
32. Babies
33. Armadillos
34. Kidney Stones
35. Unicyclists
36. Umbrellas
37. Mary Poppins
38. Kids who pee in pools
39. Hippopatamuses
40. Taxidermy
41. People named Wilbur
42. Nightmares about cheese
43. Giant carnivorous plants
44. Carnies
45. Anyone who sports the confederate flag
46. Light switches outside of bathrooms
47. Bed and breakfasts

While reading the book Shantaram by Australian author Gregory David Roberts, I simply had to fold a corner over when I read a great quote. These quotes are worth more than just space on my hard drive, so here they are:

lin: A politician is someone who promises you a bridge, even when there’s no river.

Karla: The surest way to hurt someone you like, is to put all your trust in them

Lin:  Lovers find their way be such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

Lin: (hate and vengeance) Lin had to forgive the prison guards for their brutal discipline in order to survive. If he hated them, they would have killed him. That saved him from hating the whole nation that “breeds” such brutality, and resorted to hating the one person that caused him to be there and be beaten. Khaled hates israelis and jews because of who they are and what they do. he hates their nation.

Khader: The universe, this universe that we know of, began in absolute simplicity, and it has been getting more complex fore about 15 billion years. In another billion years it will be still more complex. It is moving toward … something. It is moving toward some kind of ultimate complexity. WE might not get there. An atom of hydrogen might not get there, or a leaf, or a man, or a planet might not get there, to that ultimate complexity. But we are all moving towards it-Everything in the universe is moving towards it. And that final complexity, I call god. anothing that becomes more simple is something evil, whereas something that helps us towards complexity is good.

“This is the way Justice is done” Qasim Ali said that night, his bark-coloured eyes sofening on the two young men. ‘because Justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving, justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us. You can see, by what we have done with these two boys, that justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong, it is also the way we try to save them.

lin: The size of our happiness is inversely proportional to the size of our house.

I hesitated. Karla once said that men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when the hesitate. With women, she said. it’s the other way around.

Karla says that depression only happens to people who don’t know how to be sad.

Khader: “well she is wrong!” he declared. “I am an expert in the tristese. It is the perfect, definitive human performance. There are many animals that can express their happiness, but only the human animal has the genius to express a magnificent sadness. And for me it is something special; a daily meditation. Sadness is my one and my only art.”

Didier: “Ah yes he loved me. I loved him. it was true, but he made me error of the judgement. He gave me love a test. He allowed me to discover the secret place where he kept a large sum of cash. I could not resist the temptation that he offered to me. I took the money and ran away. I loved him, but I took his money, and I ran away. For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is not test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die.”

Khader: doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. killing a murderer. it is wrong to kill, but for the right reasons, you killing the murderer saves an innocent life.

Lisa: “a man trusts another man when he sees enough of himself in him, I guess. or maybe when he sees the things he wishes he had in himself.”

Khader: Khaderbai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.

“In my first knife fight I learned that there are two kinds of people who enter a deadly conflict. those who kill to live, and those who live to kill. The ones who like killing might come into a fight with most of the fire and fury, but the man or woman who fights just to live,who kills just to survive, will usually come out on top. If the killer-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it fades. If the survivor-type begins to lose, his reason for fighting it flares up fiercer than ever. And killing contests with deadly weapons, unlike fistfights, are lost and won in the reasons that remain when the blood begins to run. The simple fact is that fighting to save a life is a better and more enduring reason than fighting to end one.”

Karla: If we all learned what we should have learned the first time around, we wouldn’t need love at all.

Didier: The fully mature man or woman, has about 2 seconds left to live.

Pity is the one part of love that asks for nothing in return.

Abdullah: Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.

Lin: “love makes men big, and hate makes men small.”

if we can’t respect the way we earn it, then money has no value. If we can’t use it to make life better for our families and loved ones, money has no purpose.

Lin: “fanaticism is the opposite of love. A wise man once told me – he’s a muslim by the way – that he has more in common with a rational, reasonable-minded jew than he does with a fanatic from his own religion. Winston Churchill once defined a fanatic as someone who won’t change his mind and can’t change the subject.”

We all cope with anxiety and stress, to one degree or another, with the help of a cocktail of chemicals produced in the body and released in the brain. Cheif among them is the endorphin group. The endorphins are peptide neurotransmitters that have pain relieving properties. Anxiety and stress and pain bring on the endorphin response as a natual coping mechanism. When you take any of the opiates – morphine, or opium or heroin, in particular – the body stops producing endorphins. When we  stop taking opiates, there’s a lag of between five and fourteen days before the body begins a new endorphin production cycle. In the meanwhile, in that black, tortured crawlspace of one to two weeks without heroin and without endorphins, we learn what anxiety and stress pain really are.
“What’s it like”, karla asked me once, “cold turkey off heroin?” I tired to explain it. Think about every time in your life that you’ve ever been afraid, really afraid. Someone sneaks up behind you when you think you’re alone, and shouts to frighten you. The gang of thugs closes in around you. You fall from a great height in a dream, or you stand on the very edge of a steep cliff. Someone holds you under water and you feel the breath gone, and you scramble, fight, and claw your way to the suface. you lose control of the car and the wall rushing into your soundless shout. Then add them all up, all those chest-tightening terrors, and feel them all at once, all at the same time, hour after hour, and day after day, and think of every pain you’ve ever known – the burn of hot oil, the sharp sliver of glass, the broken bone, the gravel rash when you fell on the rough road in winter, the headache and the earache and the toothache. Then add them all up, all those groin squeezing, stomach-tensing shrieks of pain, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, day after day. Then think of every anguish you’ve ever known. Remember the death of a loved one, Remember a lover’s rejection, recall your feelings of failure and shame and unspeakably bitter remorse. And add them all up, all the heart stabbing griefs and miseries, and feel them all at once, hour after hour, day after day. That’s cold turkey. Cold turkey off heroin is life with the skin torn away.

I never knew how much goodness there was in a man or woman until I owed them more than I could repay. People like karla saw goodness with a glance, while I stared, and stared, and too often saw nothing past the scowl or bittering eye.

Didier: Praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can’t defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.

I watched him with a tiny germ of envy at the ease with which he opened his communication with God. I felt no urge to join him, but the sincerity of his meditation made me feel much more alone, somehow, in my solitary, unconnected mind.

The Russians were so weakened by the war of resistance fought by those very afghan villagers, and millions like them, that their monstrous, caligulan empire crumbled around them. It worked, it played out that way, and what it cost was a million afghan lives. What it cost was one-third of the population forced from their homeland. What it cost was one of the largest forced migrations in human history — three and a half million refugrees moving through the Kyber pass to Peshawar, and a million more exiled in Iran, India, and the Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. What it cost was fifty thousand men, women, and children with one or more limbs amputated through land-mine explosions. What it cost was the Afghan heart and soul. And I, a wanted criminal, working for a mafia crime lord, impersonated an American and looked those people in the eye, and lied to them about the weapons I couldn’t give them.

There’s a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex – a warning sound that frightened potential predators awa from the mouth of the cave when our lower-paleolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep. That group of Afghan nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, famers, and guerilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persisten ferocity through the long, cold night that they would’ve frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.

They’ed lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn’t like or respect or admire them any more, but I still loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can’t kill love. You can’t even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can’t kill love itself. Love is a passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it’s a part of god, or what we call god, and it can never die.

Love, like respect, isn’t something you get, it’s something you give.

Money, if the pile gets high enough, is something like a big politcal party: it does as much harm as it does good, it puts too much power in too few hands, and the closer you come to it the dirtier you get.

karla: heroes come in three kinds: Dead, damaged, or dubious.

Karla: Luck is what happens when fate gets tired of waiting

Didier: It is always a fool’s mistake to be alone with someone you shouldn’t've loved.

Didier: The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly and with the eyes open.

Idiot Drivers, this is for you.

You may be asking yourself  “well… how do I know if I’m an idiot driver?” well I’ve put a lot of research into this study, and boy do I have an answer for you.

The John Smith or Jane Doe:

We’ll start it off nice and simple. Most likely, you live in an urban setting. You’re likely a 9-5er, and you pretty much only drive on one route because you like routine, eventhough another way might be faster or more efficient, but you never thought of that. You probably ACED your drivers exam because you’re a keener like that, but of course your lack of intellect turned you into a monotonous operator with a 2 second memory buffer-zone. You’re comfortable changing lanes without signalling, but when you DO remember to warn others of your intentions, you are completely oblivious to the fact that your blinker needs to be turned off as well. But that’s ok. Your dashboard consists of a few minor things. a switch for your wiper, a knob for your radio (not to be confused with the superHUGE knob that makes the car turn), and of course a brake and throttle. All of these dials, switches, knobs, and buttons feel really good when you play with them randomly. You’ve probably got a pet fish at home, and you like the cell-phone commercials because you think they relate to you. You listen to hit pop music on the radio, but you have no idea how an engine works. “step on pedal, car go fast!” (fast of course being no more than the speed limit, because you stand for the law and enjoy getting in the way of people who like to live life for themselves) In fact you rarely think for yourself, you just stay between the white flashing lines and even speak to roadsigns, often with an upwards inflection. You’re the kind of person that enjoys their rushour commute and don’t mind being a sardine in a sandbox, squeaking by in civilization. Your driving skills clearly reflect your social skills and grasp of the norm. You’ve always dreamt of travel and adventure but quickly you turn on the TV to make them go away.

You MAY also fall into one of these special categories.

The Pickup Driver:

(two subcategories): You’re from the country and have no business or experience for that matter, driving in the city. But you still drive like it’s the outback, and the highway is just another dirt road with no one on it. wanna change lanes? go ahead. Don’t worry about that person on your corner, you couldn’t see him if you wanted to. Yea. You change your oil and do all your own repairs, because that’s what a real man does. Which is probably why your truck is a clunker and throws out thick black smoke instead of accelerating. Your carbureted rustbucket is “great” for climbing hills and towing big loads. You’re the kind of person who shits in a public toilet and doesn’t flush, not because you’re an asshole, you just shit like you drive your truck.

OR, you’ve got some family roots tied to the lovely province of Alberta (which is a bit of a paradox because Alberta has one family tree: a stump) and you’ve just cashed in on your dream truck. A ford F-350 that you paid double for so you could turn it into something from Monster Truck Madness (barely street legal). Oh wait that’s not cash, that’s financing with a downpayment from your oil rig wages, a mirror-image of the province’s financial fuckups. Make a turn on a highway at more than 100km/h and your truck will flip off the road, but you don’t care, its insured. And of course when you’ve got a truck like that, it’s almost illegal for it to be clean. You boast how innefficient your 7.1L V10, rear wheel drive monster by smashing head first into a lake of mud and slap on a pair of truck-balls on the hitch. You replace those huge tires annually from all of those fast-food parking lot burnouts, and assume that you’ve got fantastic control in rain, mud, or snow eventhough you don’t. You can’t put two and two together; no weight in the back means no fucking traction, idiot! You’ve got a 70% chance of owning a Harley, Boat, or Camper, and a 90% change of having a gun rack and a shotgun. You’re a good person though. You go to church every sunday and are close with your family. You’re a republican, eventhough you don’t know what that means, don’t have a passport, and love war movies. After a long day of drinkin, muddin, and shootin stuff you come home to your loyal bud light and KFC family pack to watch football.

The Ricer:

This one’s a real hoot. Your computer skills are at par with your video-gaming, and are likely in school for IT. Your small stature is the opposite of your attitude, and your girlfriend is always riding shotgun with her IQ surgically removed. Her timidness and high-pitched voice is a blatant annoyance to everyone but you think its hot because you like control. You practically live in your car and drive it all night for fun. But enough about you, lets get into that car… fuck ford or GM, this is a most likely a honda civic, toyota celica, or subaru WRX. If you’re driving a hot Nissan ZX3 or something, then you either own your own IT firm or are part of an asian mafia. But shit it’s not a honda anymore. This car has been ripped apart to the frame and put back together again with somewhere close to a million dollars worth of upgrades. 25″ rims with 26″ tires, practically no suspension, and a skirt that is inches from the asphalt, resulting in your car being allergic to speedbumps. Speed for you is a necessity. Other drivers on the road are just pylons in your way and you scower the streets looking for someone to race for cash or girfriends. You added a new muffler not for the performance but because you like the sound it makes. In fact you like it so much that you want the whole world to hear it, but of course then no one can hear that over those new subwoofers. CLEARLY you have the best taste in music and blast Lil’ Wayne or Soulja Boy through town so that everyone can enjoy it! how nice of you. The amp is so powerful that the hinge on your trunk is threatening to go stellar and your license plate is vibrating off. You speak in L33T (which is like digital jibberish) when you text your friends to meet you at the movie theatre or to show up at your next Final Fantasy XIII gaming night.

Or then you could be a bald, white, wife-beating nobody who drives a purple dodge neon that’s actually like… 7 dodge neons (all of different colours) put together. All you could afford was a muffler and a second-hand spoiler that looks like it came from the NHRA’s Funny Car drag races which you bolted to the trunk yourself. You think you’re hot shit, but really those people are all laughing at you. Actually there’s not much else to say about you. You have no friends and no body likes you or your ugly car.

The scary thing I find out this little study of mine is that it’s far more real than I’d like to admit. Perhaps I’m not cut out for the city, but these are ROADS. A car is a human’s arch-nemesis, and we don’t mix well. Why do we go and make the worlds most dangerous method of travel MORE dangerous by driving like a bunch of assholes? How is it possible that upgrading your car to dangerous levels is legal? why are people so ignorant when they drive? I drive a LOT, and I’m sure a lot of you do too. But from what I see? How you Drive is a perfect example of the person you really are. You’re either a bitch or you’re an asshole, you’re stupid or you’re ignorant. But at least maybe this post will promote a little awareness.

If you’ve got some time to kill, I highly recommend the following lectures, mostly found from Ted.com’s best of the web.

some of these are pretty long, but totally worth your time, and are rated by me as “Life Changing”

A.J. Jackobs abides by over 700 rules set by the bible for a year

Sam Harris: Science can Answer Moral Questions

Robert Sapolsky: The Uniqueness of Humans

Douglas Adams: Parrots, the Universe, and Everything

Elaine Morgan: An Old Woman’s lifetime acheivement of proving that humans evolved from Aquatic Apes, yet to be embraced by the scientific community:

Vilayanur Ramachandran: On Phantom Limb Syndrome and how humans learn by watching.

(search for more from Vilayanur. This guys on to something.)

Christopher DeCharms: Invents a realtime MRI that allows the brain to relieve pain and “program ourselves”

Noah Feldman says Politics and Religion manipulable technologies

Barbara Egnrenreich: Teaches us about how optimism masks our true necessary response

And Check out this clip from Season 5 episode 5,  of Rescue Me from FX networks, Sheila Keefe played by Callie Thorne, a NYFD firefighter’s widow after 911.

Some people get the travel bug and go see the world. I got the snowbug. I do firedances on occasion to please the snow god Ullr and bring big coastal dumps. I’d happily skip on work to be knee deep in pow, but I fixed that problem by getting a job on the hill. Problem-solved (sort of)

The thing I find interesting is that there are many different ways to enjoy the hill (or perhaps I’m just addicted to categorizing things):

Moustached-grandpa: has a ski-in/out chalet, is a local at the family resort and knows the resort like the back of his hand. He’s loyal to this hill alone, and is uncomfortable anywhere else.

Overconfident business-man: who believes he owns the slopes, and his skiis have been custom-made shitty. LOVES moguls and the opportunity to advertise their successes on the chairlift. (their trophy wives usually don’t ski, and spend their time in the resort spa all day)

Little Fat kids: Sweatty, Stumpy loud and often annoying little shits. But hey they enjoy the field trip that gets them out of school, and a little exercise and time away from their PS3 is a refreshing change

Steeze Junkies: – well in my opinion just look plain fucking retarded. They wear pants and jackets in sizes that no human could fill, their bulbous eyes hidden behind impractical sunnies, they taught themselves how to ride – with an invisible friend or sitting in the back seat, power sliding from side to side. But they can rip up boxes and rails like nobody’s business.

The Escaped Pro: This guy is the shit. Drives an old pickup, lives in the backcountry, and literally is known by a select few. The phantom of the slopes, he was born with a snowboard attached to his feet, and at the first sight of sponsorship, realised that money can’t buy the love he’s got for true solitary pillow-dropping. He realises the bad taste that corporate sponshorship does to his riding style and would rather make his own friends.

Ski-bums: People who live out of their vans, on the dull when they can get it, eat canned beans over toast, ride broken equipment and have no style – I think I fall into this category

The Bi-sexual: This person does it all. owns 3 pairs of skis, 2 boards, a split deck, snowshoes and a set of skins. Usually not seen on the chairlift, but digs a snow-pit to put their AVI-one to use and then hits the backcountry. The total undisclosed pro who rides for themselves only, and wets themselves at the possibility of riding where no-one has ridden before.

In any shape or form, it’s awesome to see people so in love with a mixture of gravity and frozen water.

To Be Continued……

Your legs are screaming, your heart is 10 beats behind, amongst a cage that doesn’t fit the volume of your lungs. Your jaw opens like a shark, bearing teeth like a starved wolf pouncing on its scared-stiff prey. You’re pushing the limits as you’re shot into the air and you feel something squeeze adrenaline into your bloodstream, instantly racing ou to your fingers and toes. Everything “fits” as you place your board back on earth, fuelling your transition. Your eyes dart back and forth, focusing on the next feature to hit. Nothing can stop you now. The snow pounding back at you is synced to the fast-paced beat of the track in your ears, motivating you to launch higher, go faster. You’re not thinking about anything. There’s just not enough time for your cognitive mind. Everything is autonomous and all you know is that you just fucking want it. You shove that toe edge in like you own the bitch you`re sticking it to. She reacts by throwing a huge cloud of pow and shreddies into the air like a curtain for your glorious entrance. You reach the lift and in seconds you`re on your way to hit it again, with more rage.

This is what I call: `being in the fucking zone` its the difference between a good day and a bad day. Complies with any sport, specifically jib. Its the reason why you can`t ever get a spin right vs. stomping and riding away clean. It`s why you smack into the gound in a big splat vs a rolling tumble and landing on your feet and not even giving a shit. It`s pain vs. good burn. Things hurt less, the body works as a unit, every move is timed perfectly, and there`s a surreal perspective on the edge of control. You`ve seized the reigns and cranked down on the bucking bronco and turned its fire into your own. There`s a breif lucid moment where the only phrase that sparks your neurons is: `fuck yea`

little is known (on my behalf anyways) of what goes on to make your brain tick to the gold medal clock. First thing is the conditions. Sure you can definately make fun out of a shit-piss foggy rainsoaked day, but it`s not as likely. A bluebird with either sweet groomies or *meh* maybe just thigh-high of fresh will do. Just the sight of that is an immediate stoke to the fire inside. Next is the people. You`d never go to a theme park alone would you? Who else do you have to share the conversation of `dude I fucking rocked the gnar of that cliff eh?` Having someone ahead of you (hopefully who knows the ropes) shows you where the best hits are and how to hit them. Failing that you`ve always got your mates to push you over that edge, out of your comfort zone and into the air. Third is a good set of tunes. Anything faster than your heartbeat will do, because for some reason your heart and your step will lay rubber on the asphalt to keep up. I listen to a playlist of tracks that make me feel like I`m Travis Rice or Jeremy Jones (farfetched of course.) Lastly is a constant supply of dirty drops, rails, booters, rollers, spins, shreds, and chutes. A constant high of blasting up and over and not looking back because you`re too all you care about is the next one.

And at the end of the day, you`re left with a good sore pair of legs being tendered by a cold brew in a womb of a churning mountainside hot tub.

How to live without money.

The funny thing is, that in this world, you can’t. We have created a culture where you no longer live by natural selection but by financial succession. People can work in an economic sandbox toying with innessential trades of passive income to survive in a material world.

Does the evolution of money, inflation, taxes, and trade exemplify the root human instinct? The harder you work and the more optimistically creative your mind, the more successful you are. Sounds like natural selection to me… The prospect of inflation and taxes seems to be parallel with the concept of community, and trade the exchange of information and invention.

But in some ways, money personifies humans in a way that is far too systematic, calcuated, graphed out way that is scary and over simplified, creating an easily markettable norm of categories that are inherently inhuman. Categories that are concerned with survival in a material world as opposed to a realistic, resolved method of living that allows resources to sustain a worldly community.

We know already that the supply of resources in the human food-chain is obviously top-heavy, and has created an infatuation of gluttony within the poorer communities. The cliche of white western citizens with an obvious “head start” is being naturally assimilated by the masses of those who seek opportunity where we once took it for granted. Do they have the sense to correct our mistakes and learn that we weren’t capable of doing it right? Do they notice that our lavishing lives of comfort and adventure they so eagerly want are horridly greedy and unnattainable for eternity?

I’m trying to invent, in my brain, a method of community, trade, and progression without the concept of corruption, instability, and innaccountability of the economy. Community has been tarnished by digital ostracization and an ease of personal access, trade has been misinterpretted by false advertising, manipulation, and corner-cutting, all through the veneer of a neverending supply as if we have created our own heaven at the expense of our own hell.

Locally, I want to live in world of paying it forward. Where one good deed begets another for the benefit of a tightly nitted group. Specifically close friends and family, because it appears as though that is the limits of a structurally sound community. Its difficult for me to be comfortable around friends that are more financially successful and willing to cover for me in desperate times with no perspective of retribution, but I have to step back and understand that my relationship with them is not based on a tab, statement, or chequebook. We keep a mental tally in our heads that is expressed amongst ourselves that determines who owes who, and has nothing to do with a trade system, but the necessity to keep the well-oiled machine of a community running on track. I believe it is important to understand that people shouldn’t meet halfway by balancing an account, but that a certain placement, possibly of no cost at all, can be equal in value and maintain a strong relationship.

So lets rebuild the concept of community and understand that money cannot govern our emotions, desires, friendships, or sustainability. Instead, realise that the appreciation of smaller, well-suited friends and family have the power to continue the world within, and alter the world without. Think twice about who you really are your friends, and develop your own true community that touches your life directly every day. This malleable bubble of teamwork changes with your values as well as theirs, but somehow you will always find like-minded people who will accept you and your beliefs into a system that preserves them.

Something about the way the “free first world” is turning strikes the thought in me that… perhaps humans were not meant to live in such a large community. This coming from a Great White Northerner with a sparse population of 30 million. But regardless I find that taking a large amount of people, all who have different needs, ideas, and beliefs, and categorizing them as one entity with a common governing body just doesn’t quite cut it.

From what I see of city life on a daily basis is that people have some sort of constant confusion, lack of awareness, an automaticity in their stride, and bewilderment of the crowds among them.

People ride together on busses, all heading to the same direction, but they can’t stand the confrontation of another person trying to make room to sit down. This idea of a personal space or private bubble, sewn together in designer clothes, senses cut off with headphones, eyes dazing the busy streets to avoid contact with another pair.

We no longer know our neighbours by name and spend statistically 25% of our time glued to a flickering screen that sells useless products and services through fear.

Social Networking has been redefined from the baseball field to a digital game, obscuring our identities with our photoshopped lives, not just our makeup and vanity. Friends and family are always far enough away that the best way to communicate is, again, through electronic means, hidden behind a backspace key.

As a crowd, humans are not an intelligent species. We’re more like a flock of birds or a school of fish. We mimick each other or our idols, develop styles that help people judge us by our cover, and shy away from an opportunity to make a decision for ourselves. I think this is very scary for our little brains up there in this big world. It’s a lot to take in and most minds can’t grasp the big picture, and would much rather conform to the simple, easier ways about things. But that’s really dangerous! thats where the weak, ignorant, and malleable neurons follow what the big man on the TV tells us.

I think that humans inherently were designed to live in smaller communities, and we’re having problems evolving our brains to be compatible with the expansion of the metropolitan. In towns and villages, the people are much more calm, they take their time, enjoy a life with no traffic or crowding. They rely on eachother for help to keep the community intact. A small community can still fit the definition of a team, whereas a city relies on paperback systems and automated programs.

I haven’t been a patroller for very long, nor have I seen incidents of severe trauma on any significant scale. But here’s what I’ve learned from what I have experienced so far:

First and foremost, I don’t need a paycheque to motivate me to help people. I applied for this job because I enjoy being in the shit. The constant state of readiness, the jump-to as the radio goes, the booking it up a mountain on a sled. It’s a rush. I like the challenge of assessing and diagnosing and… well to put it plainly, “not killing your patient.”  But the barebones of it is that people come up here and spend a lot of money to ride. I want them to keep coming back and earning a love of the sport.

The first thing I can say about it is that training, the years of simple to more complex courses, the practice, the protocols, the scenarios, the extrications… It all goes out the window when I get to a call. Which of course is why the training is so important.  When I learn, the information just sits atop my skull, slowly seeping into my brain like a water into a sponge until it’s something that comes natural to me. And that way, when I arrive at my patient, I don’t have to think about what to do, I just do it. (try to) it may not always be the right thing to do, but it’s better than nothing at all. I’ve been to a few calls where I somehow did follow every procedure I learned in course, but I don’t remember doing it. That is what I define as good training.

I would consider assessing a patient to be like drawing a flow chart in my head. You ask questions, get some answers and go down a road, crossing off the things that stop you, and making note of the things that are important. “Is he breathing ok?” “how far did she fall?” “How is this person reacting?”

But I guess most importantly, I’ve only spent like 4 weeks in training how to “save lives” but really, I am only capable of sustaining life until a real paramedic gets there. The trick for me, is stimulating self-repair. The human body is actually a pretty stupid fucking thing sometimes. For example anaphylaxis, or an allergic reaction, is the body “killing itself trying to protect itself” It opens up all your veins to dump blood into your tissues and swells around your trachea… eventhough things like peanuts aren’t damaging it at all. Or shock – the body reacting to a frightening or traumatic event. Like if you were to fall on your ribcage (may or may not have happened to me) your intercostal muscles tense up, effectively “spinting” the damaged bones. Little would your body know that it was “splinting” your ability to breathe. Not necessarily the most strategic plan when trying to keep yourself alive, but is also an explanation for why spinal patients can get up and walk around, and wind up a paraplegic the next day, because their muscles splinted their affected vertebrates.

So I think that the most important, and most influential intervention happens in the first 10 seconds of a call. The first thing I try to do is speak in a confident, upbeat, and often comical voice, even if I’m shitting myself. Because as soon as the patient sees that red jacket and someone who is competent (or at least is pretending to be,) Immediately they go from deterioration to improvement. The dread, worry, and pain levels drop just because you’re there.

The next thing I do is I usually give them a white lie. Another thing that stimulates self-repair and helps them relax. I downplay their injury, tell them I’ve seen worse or that it’s not as bad as it feels. I remember getting to one call at the bottom of the bunny hill where a foreign girl had just fallen on her ski. She said that her leg felt “wet” and that she just needed a bandaid. “Pretty easy call” I thought. But I remember asking her if her pants were normally red, which they weren’t. I rolled up her pant-leg seeing more and more blood until I reached her knee, which, to be honest, was a shocking and horrifying sight (it was my first, alright??) What happened is that her knee was bent, her skin taught when she landed on the edge of her ski, which split the flesh like ripping a tent. The subcutaneous fatty tissue was cauliflowering outwards. But I didn’t flinch. That’s how I knew I could handle blood and gore. I didn’t look away or make a gross face. I remember my head went towards her knee to get a closer look, and my hands immediately when to cover the 4″ gash that went as deep as it could go. Her surrounding friends immediately put hand-over eyes and gasped and “oh-my-god-ed” And thats when I knew that the first thing I should do is cover the wound and to tell her that she can not look at her knee. For all she knew, it was just a little cut. The skin was cut so cleanly that only a few nerves were severed. Hell she went for another run before calling me! But had she been able to see the damage that had been done, her reaction would have been far more sobering and far less humble.

That’s the other interesting thing about the body. How the Nervous Systems interacts with the body and each other. The Sympathetic Nervous system is an automatic system that works with your heart, stomach, bowels, and gland secretions. In Traumatic events, such as confronting a giant bear, or accidentally finding yourself in a knife-fight, your body is stimulated by this nerve in something coined as “fight or flight” – as in get the fuck out of there (although of course we all know not to run from a bear) or stab that dude first before he stabs you. The Parasympathetic Nerve system is the exact opposite. It’s the one that stimulates the secretion of dopeamine and the craving of grabbing a beer after a long day of work. The “Feed or Breed” system. What’s most interesting is what happens when you get an owie. When that happens, your homeostasis, the harmonious “ecosystem” that is your body, is threatened. Your blood pressure will go up or down as your arteries and veins contract or relax, and you’ll feel the effects of things like endorphins or adrenaline. When you snap your tib-fib (lower leg bones) and you can’t handle the pain, your sympathetic nervous system may shock the neighbouring Vegus nerve which causes you to vomit or piss yourself, which indirectly helps you relax (I mean come on we all feel better after we puke or after dancing to the bathroom). At the same time, if you’ve broken a limb and you’re helpless, hours away from any form of help, the endocrine system in your body has the ability to turn pain off as a survival tactic by flooding the spinal cord with endorphins. People have been known to shatter their lower limbs and yet crawl, days away to safety and not scream in agony until the moment rescue arrives.

I was first on scene to a woman who had been smacked in the side by a reckless tuber, snapping her humerus. Not so… Humerous for her…  Not a significant injury, she still had blood flow to her hand (most of the time, if she would have just relaxed a bit). But she was just howling in pain. A very low pain tolerance which made the call a lot longer, louder, and more emotional than it needed to be. We made the call of entonox (laughing gas) and for an ambulance to meet us at the top. It literally took about 2 hours to get her from the bottom of the tube park and into the patrol hut, still howling away in my ear beneath the entonox inhaler (which of course she wasn’t getting any of because she was hyperventilating)… probably scaring people in the parking lot. One thing I noticed is that when the paramedics arrived, regardless of how caring and patient they were with her and her obsessive teary screams, I instinctively watched over their every move in a protective way. Something about being with her for so long, and eventhough it was only a limb-at-risk, part of my treatment seemed to fall on the fact that outside forces could hurt her more – including the paramedics. (which of course was not the case at all, they were far more professional than I was)

Overall I’m not going to lie. I get paid in bad weather and have been known to pray to promethius for fire and Ullr for snow. I would love it if every day people came up here and royally messed themselves up and kept me busy and happy. So if you are reading this and are not a close friend or family member of mine, ie a valued reader of this website, please come up and throw yourself off cliffs so that your graciously donated corpse can be my specimen. I will try my best to keep you alive. For everyone else, wear a fucking helmet.