YES, I’M STILL LISTENING TO GLASS HOUSES

Hot Funk, Cool Punk, even if it’s old junk, it’s still Rock and Roll to me.

It had always sat there on my brother’s shelf in between his Blues Brothers Soundtrack and Pat Benatar’s Ballerina LP. I listened to it then and wondered why my brother had also bought the singles. He had three: All for Leyna, You May Be Right, and Sometimes a Fantasy. I tell you, at the age of six or seven, I learned a lot from Billy Joel about masturbation.

My record player was a birthday present: a bright blue Disney suitcase that opened to Mickey in the hood with a huge smile on his face, his arm holding the stylus that you put onto the vinyl. It was built primarily for ‘45’s and story board singles that came along with a story. Star Wars, Raiders, and a dozen others that I listened to endlessly. But if I opened the case just a little wider I could fit a full 33 and a 1/3rd, and one of the first ones I spun was Billy Joel’s Glass Houses.

I knew nothing of the time of punk rock or raw rock or where the new wave was going. In fact I still hadn’t seen the image later emblazoned in my mind of two astronauts planting the MTV flag on the moon. But I knew good shit when I heard it, and Glass Houses was full of good shit.

There was, of course, the opener everyone became addicted to even if you didn’t like Billy Joel: You May Be Right. Unbelievably this opened the album but was not cut as the first single. It followed second in March of 1980, just in time for my birthday. It was a huge eye into the young New York life, a life that some may say was exaggerated, but I tell you, I had two brothers ten and twelve years older than me and it didn’t seem like that life was too exaggerated when I spent my summers with them. And as if to enunciate what the song and the album was all about… a good Catholic boy singing about love and sin… the first thing you hear before You May Be Right is the sound of glass shattering. Here we go, you could say, on a ride to take us on the borderline.

Elvis had only been dead three years, so imitating him was in some cases more dangerous than when he was alive. Joel’s voice mimicry far surpassed what every one before him tried to do: how do you sound like Elvis without it sounding like a joke? Elvis wasn’t a joke, and to a musician who toured most of the year away from friends and family, neither was masturbation. The second track, Sometimes a Fantasy, therefore was an odd mix between the traditional gospel vocal sound and the punk rock guitar-mixed-with-a-Moog that had such a huge impact in the late 1970’s. We can all point to the Sex Pistols because they are easy prey. They sold the most records but keep in mind they only made one – only one real record. Most punk bands of this time were like this. Flipper churned out just one. So did Death. Rare were those like Bad Brains or Black Flag who lasted more than three. But Joel isn’t out to imitate punk rock, only draw from it, and oddly this makes Sometimes a Fantasy, the last single released in the summer of 1980, one of two songs you did not expect to be the lasting legacy of this album.

The obvious legacy is You May Be Right and It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me, track four. And after two songs of overbearing machismo, Joel follows it up with Don’t Ask Me Why which isn’t Dylanesque, but has a very solid history going back to A Hard Day’s Night. This soft melodic tune following such hard hitting songs really shows Joel’s vocal range…but also his songwriting range as well. And when he follows this up with It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me you start to think he might be the American Paul McCartney. Ostensibly about acceptance, the heart of the song is about more than that. A theme that flows through the album, It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me is about conflict between what society wants us to be and what we want to do. Expectations are not set against reality but rather against inner-expectations. In the end it doesn’t matter to Joel what rock and roll is or is not, because he likes it all. He’s already proven that up to now.

But the show stopper was the first single off the album in January of 1980: All for Leyna. Unbelievably paced with rapid piano punches and a Moog instead of a lead guitar for the solo, the song issues metaphors before the bridge, and solid reality after it. The subject of the song, how one perfect night with the right person can just fuck up a person’s perspective on the world, is something the young can side with. You could very well replace Leyna’s name with your first heartbreak and it could be your song. But surprising to us is that this isn’t Joel’s deep machismo voice or his soft melodic ‘For the Longest Time’ barbershop quartet voice, but an angst-ridden midway that screams much like Jonny Rotten would. There are many times I just can’t believe the mike picked it all up flawlessly. There’s not a single hint of feedback or screech. So not only does Glass Houses have excellent song writing and musicianship, it has outstanding engineering and producing.

The machismo voice is juxtaposition against what could be the softer side of his songwriting: side two offers up I Don’t Want to Be Alone. About an established couple wondering whether to take the first step, the song sounds like the man is bringing a lot of baggage to the table: perhaps a Leyna or a Diane to be specific. So we have the young, the old is to come, but here on side two we have reached middle age.

And middle age is threatened when you find the right person but they don’t realize it yet or don’t want to take the risk, which is the topic for track seven: Sleeping with the Television On. The track even opens with the danger one faces when they hit forty: the sound of the National Anthem playing before the broadcast signal is cut off. This is Joel’s warning to anyone who lives in a Glass House. This could happen to you if you moralize too much, accuse too much, if you can’t leave that baggage at home.

Cetait Toi (You Were the One) follows in this very same theme only from the male side of the relationship. Having found your one-and-only, you have to recognize that comfort should be found from that person instead of seeking it from someone else. This would be a rejection of say Outside Woman Blues, which Cream most successfully reincarnated just twelve years before, and more than just in theme but in voice. Joel softens it all the way, even sings a whole verse in French, to get his endearing point across. The crass drunkard youth from You May Be Right seems a million miles away from this song. From a different album. From a different time. From a different person. This song slips us to the mature. So now that we’re mature, what do we do?

Effectively, you have two choices: track nine, Closer to the Borderline in which you put everything you have earned at risk. Or track ten, Through the Long Night, in which you settle down with that perfect somebody, all your baggage neatly packed away, and ready yourself for the rest of your life. This isn’t so crazy a choice. For a long time the nation was under the accepted impression that the divorce rate was about half. Some indications are this was inflated but no one seemed surprised. Where you go, Joel is telling you, is really based on whether or not you live in a Glass House… and if you throw any stones. His preference despite his four marriages is the last track on the album. Bless him for it. 

It’s a brilliant album concept. The theme relates to all of the tracks in different ways. Some complain about a being a shortage of music: the longest song is 4:15 for You May Be Right and All for Leyna. But ten tracks is compact and the album might have suffered with the inclusion of any tracks not deemed worthy to include. As it is, these ten tracks are all ten tracks that should have been hits, and Joel had five hits off a ten track album. Glass Houses was nominated for a Grammy but won the AMA. Then he was nominated for Male Artist for the AMA but won the Grammy. The charts read like something stupid. One in Canada and the US but Two in three other countries. It charted in fourteen countries. It didn’t just go platinum. In the US it went platinum SEVEN TIMES. Five times in Australia and Canada, platinum in New Zealand of all places, and gold in the UK and…Hong Kong.

This was a different age of music. Joel replaced Pink Floyd’s The Wall and was replaced by The Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue. I know that everyone grows up and listens to the ‘music’ of the time and thinks ‘this is shit.’ I find it fucking hysterical that people are looking back at Britney Spears’ first two albums and thinking that it’s some kind of fucking golden age. But looking at what is cranked out now, or what is autotoned now, it seems the argument of ‘the old’ not liking the ‘new’ is predicated on music getting worse. We all know art is in the eye of the beholder, but I’m not sure what is made these days is really art unless the artist is truly in charge. Oops…I Did It Again outsold Glass Houses in every market exactly two decades later. In the case of the US, it outsold it by three million albums. But that album has thirteen producers to Glass Houses’ one. It has twenty-one writers, including Spears herself who took one-third credit on only one song… versus Joel writing everything himself.

I remember watching a hysterical bit on Letterman a couple of decades ago when Barry Manilow released a record with a slip of paper that asked people to take ‘the Manilow Challenge. Play this record track for track against any record and see which one has better quality.” In the case of Glass Houses, we can confidently say not everyone at the time liked it. One reviewer said it’s tunes were “catchy,” but then so was the flu. But I have to give credit to Manilow, of whom I am not a fan. He would have lost every challenge had I put any album of his on one turn table with Glass Houses on the other. But then, most records would, regardless of the Beholder… regardless of their sales… regardless of their writers… regardless of their producers… because what Glass Houses has to say about Americans trying to find their way in 1980 is profound. And what Spears has to say… about anything… is not. The best song on her sophomore album is “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Writers: Jagger and Richards. Talk about needing an Emotional Rescue.

And you have to wonder… just a little bit… if Spears is aware of what Satisfaction is all about. Does she know it’s about a guy throttling his cock at the lingerie commercials on TV? And did she choose to cover that song because she is clearly, just by her writing credits, incapable of writing anything remotely close to anything in the same universe as Sometimes a Fantasy? I’d like to think that my fantasy today is a girl who has my heart talking dirty to me over the phone in an effort to get me off. But in reality, my fantasy is that some day, some pop artist will chart something that is remotely akin in quality to Glass Houses. 

FANTASYLAND

When you wish upon a star…

With all my air miles I cashed in plane tickets to Southern California. With relatives spread all over the Left Coast I never paid for a hotel. Kindness lent me personal cars. Love bought me meals most days. A rainy day account allowed me to take my kids to Disneyland, my son to tour the Warner Brothers lot, my daughter to the greatest zoo in the world in San Diego.  All my family, all my wife’s family, all our friends, all treated us like double platinum super stars, and we needed it. When we arrived back in Calgary the reality set in.

Unemployment in Alberta has doubled from 4% to 8%. Receiverships are at an all time high and credit extensions are maxed out. The CBC reports that Severance Packages are running out and with no one hiring, the Prime Minister has extended unemployment insurance for the Province. Local news is reporting that vacancy downtown is higher than 20%, crime is up, and for the first time in five decades, the Provincial population is declining. On top of this is Quebec saying they won’t let Alberta run a pipeline through to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Americans won’t let another pipeline run through North Dakota, British Columbia won’t let a pipeline run through what is literally (not figuratively) the middle of no-where. Kijiji is packed with free furniture, air tools for under a hundred dollars, and tons of postings for jobs. There is so much for sale the price is now free. Transit tickets are underselling. More houses are foreclosed and the realty market is finally entering a fall…some fear a free fall…and no one knows where the bottom is.

Most people grabbed their campers and headed into the mountains for the summer. I was lucky enough to head to California where we smuggled lunches into theme parks and aboard aircraft carriers to avoid the expensive pre-cooked fare. My cousins and friends are doing well in California and I say good for them. I saw a Lamborghini drive downtown today near the Bow and while other are saying ‘fuck that guy’ I say ‘thank the cosmos it still creates guys like that…and the one thousand well paid blue collar workers in Italy that still have a job.’

Canada might be entering a depression but Alberta is approaching a state of fear. 10% inflation has not been seen in North America (outside of Mexico) since the 1970’s…but we are about to get there. Production and Pipeline companies are now so cheap that small chemical companies in the States are buying them out just to vertically integrate. Some families are illegally camping because they cannot afford rent. Defaults on loans are reaching an all time high, renovation companies have record low orders for the onset of winter…and no one seems to care. Not the Liberal government in Ottawa, not the NDP government in Alberta, certainly not anyone in the States and last on the list of who gives a shit is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In fact, the people who have the most amount of sympathy are the hard working blue and white collar people of Canada. The people you meet on the street every day, who sympathize, for real, who would gladly do anything for you if only you could swallow your pride enough to ask. O Canada! Your people are your greatest pride.

While the world capsizes all around us and I wonder if I’m going to make it another year, another month, another week, on whatever I have left, I have asked the world of my friends and families to save my children from the depression that is the summer of 2016. Take us, please, I said, and show them a good time. And they did. And it was good. And though Hollywood on its best day looks like the worst Canadian Ghetto on its worst day, we went, we saw, we amazed. We rode everything but Mr. Toad. I marveled at the teacups, Dumbo’s revolving circus, the simplicity and beauty of Peter Pan’s Adventure and simple marvelous stories of Pinocchio and Snow White. We shot forward on Space Mountain, traveled back in time on Pirates of the Caribbean, and looked across the Mark Twain to what used to be Tom Sawyer’s Island hoping one day we would return to see an Ewok village.

I am a huge fan of Tomorrowland as I am always interested in what is now the Woody vs. Buzz dialectic, but this trip I was enraptured by Fantasyland. I found myself in the shadow of the Matterhorn finding relief from the heat and on the horses-only carousel with my daughter wishing I was in not another place, but this place, with her, smiling forever. I’ve been here before, even with the kids before, but I’ve never experienced what Walt meant when he wanted to design a place to take away people’s fears and instill them with hope. He was a complicated guy, but Disneyland is a pretty simple place. For our budget, we did it on the cheap, and we will never regret it. Because for a few hours, we lived in Fantasyland. We wanted to get away, and we did. It’s the harsh reality to come back and face another year of unemployment. Another year of dead bottom expenses, another year of going without. I won’t be getting the kids new school clothes and new supplies this year. We simply can’t afford it. This at a time when the Saudis decide they can forfeit a hundred billion just to teach the Americans (and Canadians) a lesson: how dare you sell your own energy in your own market for just as much as us.  

I dream of returning to Fantasyland with my kids whenever I can. It’ll be the first thing I save up for when I am re-employed. I’ll always be thankful for what I know as Fantasyland – the Southern California filled with studios, theme parks, our cousins and friends -  and what they all did when we were so down, so scared, our future so uncertain.

LEAVE THAT SHIT IN THE STATES

“Karmic.”

So in case you haven’t read my last blog that touched on the radioactive topic of why people hate people who work in the oil patch, go ahead and read this asshole’s tweet, which he later deleted, and you’ll see why:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/tom-moffatt-karmic-tweet-fort-mcmurray-fire-suspension-1.3573156

“Karma” as defined by the Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy published in 1989 by Shambala has a lengthy description but can be nailed down to“1. A mental or physical action; 2. The consequence of a mental or physical action; 3. The sum of all consequences of the actions of an individual in this or some previous life; 4. The chain of cause and effect in the world of morality.”

I am sure that most of us are familiar with karma as a term or use it loosely to define as good and bad things that happen to you but like most things in religion or in this case a philosophy of religion there is a HUGE FUCKING ASTERISK on ‘Karma’ that you should all know….especially this jackass. Karma is not some magical bullshit that happens to you because you listened to a snappy John Lennon song. It’s not the accumulation of your deeds and actions so simplified, it is not a convenient way to cosmically get back at that bitch you fucked you over last Saturday night. Karma, as defined above is a created potential that INCLUDES THOUGHTS such as “I’m glad that he totaled his truck after he cut me off. That’s fucking Karma, asshole.”  This thought…even if your deeds are good, WEIGHS AGAINST YOU. This negative morality is just as bad as any physical decision you make such as cutting someone off on the freeway, kicking the dog in the ass or not asking your girlfriend for anal before attempting the Dolphin.

SO NOW WE MOVE ONTO THE ASTERISK, you wonderful people seeking knowledge as well as you assholes you think you can accomplish something by sneering when you see someone pass you on the street in a turban: Karma is also defined as your LIMITATIONS as in the collective physical and metaphysical decisions. Your thoughts outline what you can and cannot do because you formed these tendencies to behave or THINK a certain way. One might read the previous sentence and be confused “Limitations,” so an asshole can’t break out of the cycle of being an asshole? Great!” NO! NO! NO! NO! NO, you asshole! Karma does not let you off the hook by saying because you make negative potential you forever get to be negative. An asterisk to the asterisk is…wait for it…FREE WILL. You have the option of behaving and thinking like Jesus Christ or Charles Manson or to choose an unexciting middle-man, Donald Trump…or you CAN CHOOSE NOT TO.  As the Shambala gloriously explains:

“This freedom of will and possibility of free choice are a reflection in each person of the freedom of the atman, the consciousness within.”

This allows you to, for lack of a better explanation, replace your ‘bad’ karma with ‘good’ karma (though Hindus do not really define Karma in such ways) and in doing so you release the limitations of one for the freedom of the other. SO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THIS other than to say to yourself “I’m not going to be that asshole who beats his wife or neglects his kids or that whore across the street putting herself through college by stripping.” The Hindu here would huff and say “isn’t being a good person enough of a reward for working on your positive potential?” The Buddhist here would say the destruction of limitations is one of the ways in which you can reach enlightenment. Be a good person…and you can free yourself of karma…forever.

And now that you’ve got that rant from a philosophy major that studied under Dr. Ray Wright of the University of Houston – by far the wisest soul with the greatest potential of Christian Karma I have ever met – now you can see why I am over the board pissed off at a man who looks at 80,000 people fleeing a burning metropolis that was their home through a cauldron of hell around them and says to the world through the non-filter that is Twitter and says:

“THEY DESERVED IT.”

Tom Moffatt, a one time candidate for the New Democratic Party, the closest thing to a Communist Party in Canada other than, well, the Communist Party, lost an election in 2008, 2012 and then a nomination in 2015 in which the Communists, I mean, the NDP, nominated someone else. I can’t believe I’m saying this…but the NDP was right in that decision.

Tom Moffat is just a man. And he is a man with a megaphone that everybody has. This means nothing in the long run but like so many other assholes in this universe he is the only one that we see or hear. Assholes are like icebergs. When you see one, you know there’s more behind them. And behind Moffat is a legion of assholes that actually think that people who work in the oil patch are people who deserve to have their homes destroyed, their belongings burned to ashes and their lives in danger because they labor to create a product that 99.99999% of people on this planet need in order to survive.

When Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, 700,000 people fled with whatever they could carry – namely their children – to Houston where they found insufficient shelter, insufficient funds and insufficient government structure to help them for years. I saw people suffering in numbers that would claim a town seven times the size of Fort MacMurray. Against this suffering was a pile of bullshit that included a number of Americans saying: “well, that’s what you get for living in a shithole like New Orleans.” People on TV, not just talking heads, but real people looked at their suffering citizens and said: “That’s what you get for voting Democrat.”  People who live in cities that have crime rates like Chicago and New York, people who live in States that have Earthquakes that leveled cities in recent memory looked at New Orleans and later, Houston during Rita and Ike, and shook their heads at the idiocy of it, proclaiming “well, that’s what you get living on the Gulf Coast.” I won’t go into the contradiction of everyone freaking out when a hurricane flies off and hits New Jersey or New York…let’s stay on topic. This attitude, this metaphysical moral thinking, is very American…and not very Canadian. As an American who lives in Canada, I can tell you that on this one thing I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

The very least this asshole should get is fired. He should, at the very least, lose one thing that 80,000 people in Fort Mac have lost: their jobs. Their way to earn a living. Their way to take care of their families. Their route to replacing everything that was destroyed. He sees ‘karma’ because of global warming? He, like many people, misunderstand karma. It is inherent. It is intrinsic. It is collective over lifetimes. To Tom Moffat’s logic, the happiest man in Fort Mac whom everyone in town would describe as a ‘good man’ or a ‘pious Christian’ or place your positive description here, deserves to have his life destroyed because he drives a truck full of clean sand back from restoration plant to the reclamation land to be sculpted over the stripped-mined face of the earth. This figurative man, who makes a living turning the earth back into a beautiful landscape that all Canadians desire and appreciate, is guilty as charged for committing global murder: the paramount crime of contributing to climate change.

I’m not going to go into the climate change argument. Instead, let’s look at Moffat’s Twitter feed. For a guy who wants so badly to be a Canadian public servant, he sure spends a lot of time pushing Bernie Sanders in a doomed bid for the Presidency. This is not about Sanders, but about Moffat. Where does he live? Whom does he serve? Canada? Alberta? Or the States? He should be more concerned with helping the people of Fort Mac in his albeit late position as a public servant than rooting for socialist in a foreign country who would, no doubt, agree that refugees from Fort Mac need our help and sympathy. Where did Moffat learn this detestable victim-blaming bullshit? There’s only one answer…and he should really leave that shit in the States. 

MY LIFE NOW

Crowfoot Parkway. My route to work everyday for six years.

I’m at Costco yesterday, on a Wednesday, looking at chicken breasts for thirteen bucks a pound. I haven’t bought chicken breasts in about eight years so I don’t know any better. Come to find out, through Twitter (@thatdylandavis) that chicken breasts at Costco in the States are about three bucks a pound. Even with the rate of inflation and the currency exchange, Canadians are getting screwed. I’m getting doubly screwed, because I don’t really even have thirteen bucks much less three bucks. I lost my job in the oil patch the day before. So here I am, going package by package wondering if I can get a lighter one to save a few dollars. I save a buck fifty.

Ten years ago I left grad school with a Masters in History and a high self-worth. Though I was unemployed for a year, I had achieved a life goal while staying home with my son during the first year of his life. My wife worked part time teaching education at Lee College. We had crippling debt, but we were happy. However, the rate of positions available in post-grad programs to obtain a Ph.D. in history was about two to one. That was challenging enough. I had an emphasis on German history and did not speak German – this was decidedly against my favor. Within a few years, it would get worse. Currently, according to the American Historical Association, the number of Ph.D. history students competing for one full time tenure track position is sixty-four to one.

I’ve been working for my family since I was a fetus. We have a business, which does moderately well, and though I’ve had issues with some aspects of it there’s no denying its success and the dedication of my family members who run it. I love the business, actually, as backward as it is. I know it quite well after twenty years of watching people suffer through it. But at the time I felt as I worked there part-time that every time I made a mistake – which was more often than I wished – I had to explain myself to four people. This was a bit like Office Space and the TPS report cover sheets. So despite the vast advantages of the job and where it could go I decided to jump off the ledge when a friend of mine from college called about a job in the oil patch. Low pay, but no relatives.

Because I was smarter than your average bear (you probably pulled that together if you made it to this page) I could run circles around those immediately around me and because my grandfather used to throw me from a Willys Jeep at twenty miles an hour to wrestle and rope a heifer, I was no stranger to hard work. After a year of traveling the world at the bottom rung they gave me an office with no window, twenty percent lower pay, and I said ‘thank you.’ I had my daughter by then and I was happy. That didn’t work out well, but they didn’t throw me overboard. They gave me something else to do, and I excelled. I worked all over, in different departments and found myself on a transfer to Canada – which I will never regret. And though I’m smarter than the average bear, I still got thrown overboard last Tuesday not because of my job performance, not because of a faux pas with clients not because of quality service, but because the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not want Canadian Oil Sands competing with their light oil imports to the United States.

I am less political in my old age (just turned 41 the week before I was let go) because I don’t see much to get excited about in the continuing polemical arguments that ignore the center mass of people that we should be paying attention to. However, I see my situation and the situation of a hundred thousand Albertans as the same. What exactly did we do wrong? We made a quality product and sold it at a reasonable price to the customer. That’s what we did wrong: we pissed off the Saudis.

I don’t quite understand why people dislike oil and gas. I mean…I get it on the environmental side. It’s not friendly, okay. What I mean is, why do people dislike me because I work in oil and gas? There was an artificial shortage in the 1970s, which OPEC created to try and change US policy on Israel (for more on this, see Daniel Yergin’s The Prize). This created a huge rise in prices that has not been seen since and was not the fault of the energy companies. This pressure was relieved when first, the Kingdom and OPEC changed stances to recognize their goal was not being met and second, the industry in America started compensating for what they could not produce domestically. This eventually led to a huge drop in price that I still remember. When I was 16, I filled up my Ford Bronco II with 86 cents a gallon. I drove through the dilapidated zones of downtown Houston as I did it. It never occurred to my teenage mind that it was connected. All during these low prices, in the 1990’s, we had a series of problems spanning the entire Clinton administration with Iraq. People may not remember now, but Iraq constantly defied UN sanctions, violated military agreements with the Allies (including Saudi Arabia) and it was a rare month when we didn’t bomb them in some shape or form. When Bush took office, Iraq was not seen as an irritant, it was seen as an obstacle. In a very real sense the argument went something like this: Whom do you want to buy your oil from? Alaska or Saddam? The Oil for Food Program was a mess before it was discovered to be a fraud and the Artic Wildlife Refuge near the North Slope looked like a good alternative. The House approved the bill but a partisan vote in the Senate killed it, as they had one more Democrat than they needed. AWR was dead. Are we surprised to find ourselves in Iraq three years later? The difference had to be made up somewhere. In the end, the politicians decided that thousands of dead Americans (and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis) was better than thousands of dead Caribou. And who is to blame? Big Oil?

And after the dead and the propaganda and the funerals and the protests and all the bullshit – scandal after scandal, approval ratings and elections. What happened? The price went up… enormously …and people got pissed. Why were people upset in 2008 when we were paying close to five bucks a gallon? Were they angry with the inept politicians who put us here, or the dead soldiers who tried to help lower the cost of production? No, they were angry with the oil companies for, in Nancy Pelosi’s famous McCarthyite lecture to the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, “record profits.” How dare you make money, the politicians said while pointing fingers, how dare you employ a record number of people getting a product to market that the masses demand? Does anyone remember this time? The finger pointing and the name-calling and the screaming “ENRON! ENRON!” because instead of thirty bucks a tank they were paying forty-five? I sold my Dodge Durango SUV. I loved it but I sold it. I bought a Civic, which I still drive…ten years later. I could never afford to replace my car in my career in the oil patch. And it looks like I never will.

What did the energy industry do after this? Did they name call and say ‘aw shucks’ and shrink back into their holes as if they were tobacco? Did they watch Syriana on the weekends and feel sorry for themselves? No. They went to work to create a viable alternative to shipping oil in from overseas: increasing the domestic production of energy. Instead of buying your 8% from the Saudis…how about you buy it from Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Texas? And a second boom began. There were amazing developments – Shale Oil and the shale revolution. The natural gas boom. The offshore installation craze. And there were disasters. Refineries exploded. Pipelines burst. An enormous offshore rig – which I had been on before – had exploded and sank. Lives were lost. Not as many as in a war, but a life nonetheless. And though saddened, the public was satiated. Why? Because domestic production had increased so much between 2010 and 2014 that it was on trajectory to EXPORT oil in just a couple of decades. Was the energy industry the bad guys for making this happen? For getting us off of imported oil from the Middle East? Don’t people complain about “our friends, the Saudis?” Don’t people want to become less and less involved in geopolitical scruffs in a dangerous area of the world only because they make a natural resource we need? Doesn’t the public say “we have no business being over there… they don’t want us there… we should leave?” Isn’t this a good thing?

I described this to a friend in Newfoundland. You know what she said to me? “Fuck (insert my company name here), Fuck Oil, Fuck You and Fuck Off). As oil paid her boyfriend’s wages and got her through grad school, I was a little amazed. As you can guess, we don’t talk anymore. We don’t talk now that the Saudis have decided their long-term market share is more important than the billions they make off of their decreasing market share. Not only did the Kingdom NOT make money last year…they LOST 100 billion. I find this astounding. Rather than make close to a trillion every year, they would rather lose a hundred billion…because an independent producing America is not in their best interest.

And Canada…that has the most expensive oil in the world to produce because it is heavy…was the first to get hit and the one who suffers the most. Canada can completely replace all oil the Saudis import…at a price. That price is now half and Canada cannot compete. I worked for ten years, my fingers to the bone. I have tendonitis in both my arms. I missed time with my kids, tested the patience of my wife and passed on other offers to do other things in my life. Why? Because I believed in it. Because I was doing something I thought was good not just for me, but for North America. And as it turns out, that’s not the same thing as being good for the Saudis. They don’t care that I’m out of work. They want me to be out of work. And as the oil industry crashes and infrastructure suffers and depression sets in…recession sets in... families full of questions and regrets and foreclosures…who do people blame? Does the public blame the Saudis? Or are they looking at what used to be the giant industry that tried to give them independence and hope they never return? “Fuck oil,” they say as they kick the roustabout or tool pusher, “and fuck you.” Hating the Oil Patch has become as American as Apple Pie…and it’s becoming a real national Canadian sport as well. Municipalities in Quebec have plenty to say about pipelines running through their districts to help alleviate Alberta’s economy. The Mayor of Montreal said it best: “fuck oil… and fuck you.”

I am thoroughly convinced that the working class of America would rise up in a figurative sense, go to the polls and vote for the first candidate who said the following: “If you elect me, I will push a measure through congress that bans Saudi oil from our markets.” That person would win Pennsylvania; win Ohio, and most likely Florida – the only three states that swing. But that’s not going to happen. Not from Hillary Clinton, who took Saudi money for her campaigns and for her husband’s library. Not Trump, who is too much of a businessman to piss off a client. And not Cruz or Rubio, who don’t have the cajones even to challenge Trump. What are we left with, then? Corrupt politicians; corrupt overseas nations…and an industry that by and large…only wanted to give the public what they wanted. Who got fucked here? The consumer? The politicians? No. I got fucked. Not because big oil wanted an extra billion, but because the Saudis wanted an extra trillion. And American politicians are fine with that.

So now I’m at Costco looking at the buck fifty for the hot dog. It’s a huge hot dog, and I’m hungry. I’ve been out of work a day and I’m already thinking cut back. No more movies. No more dinner out. But I’ve saved a buck fifty from getting the smaller chicken breast…so I tell myself. So I pay a loonie and a half and I get my hot dog. It comes with a drink, the lady tells me, and I feel like I got a deal. When’s the last time you got a deal? Who gave it to you? Was it a politician? Or a company? 

Originally published 31 March 2016

BEING DAVID BOWIE

Keep your ‘lectric eye on me, babe.

Warning: this blog will be by far the least organized in thought or expression. Emotion being the better part of human nature, it is also sure to override all attempts to keep things logical.

Over a decade ago, Joan Jett was a guest columnist on an MSN blog about music. In one of these blogs she evoked evocative (I can do that, can't I?)  images of Mick Jagger and David Bowie in an attempt to understand what it was like to be, not fantasize, but to be a living rock and roll star. Just as you woke up in the morning and went about your day, Jett argued, so to do the living gods of rock. Humans being equal by natural rights, the only difference between you and David Bowie would be about 130 million screaming fans. Imagine what that does to a person. Bowie and Jagger, Jett explained, could not possibly know how else to behave other than how a rock star behaves. People may see the snake skin jacket Keith Richards wears or Jagger’s continuously matching purple suits or Bowie’s long list of fashion flops and think “how can they not know that it’s ridiculous?” it might be ridiculous. But it is them. David Bowie didn’t know how not to be David Bowie, Jett informed us, just like you wouldn’t know how not to be you.

So who was David Bowie?

I don’t know. Read a few dozen books, listen to all of his music. That will tell you more than I ever can. But I can tell you what he meant to me. Yes, there is that corny ‘artist’ sense: wow he was so different, made great music and all the rest of it. I was what seemed to me an abnormal kid growing up in a horribly normal suburban environment that had all the trappings of the rat race training. I’m not saying because of Bowie I escaped it, but because of Bowie I had a sense that you could, that he could, that we could all do different things without loafing off our parents, without being that joke that sits in the corner of the not-Starkbucks with a fucking beret on writing poetry about flowers and shit. It took me longer to get around to the idea that I could contribute more, that I could express myself better without being a cliché, and I’m not going to say that it was ONLY because of Bowie that I was able to do it. 

But when he died, seemingly all of a sudden, I felt that pang. That, ‘oh, shit, no, really? FUCK!’ that a lot of people get who don’t know what they got ‘till it’s gone, to quote Cinderella (if you don’t know who Cinderella is stop reading and fuck off). I’m not going to write a paragraph about how his Goblin King in Labyrinth changed my life, or how The Man to Fell to Earth stuck a chord on the two A.M. Million Dollar Movie when I was ten. I’m not gay, or bisexual, so I can’t relate that way other than to say like a lot of people may have thought that if Bowie was doing it, maybe it wasn’t okay for me but maybe it also meant it wasn’t evil as well. The most profound thing I’ve seen him do in theatre was playing Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ, a presentation of that character so thoughtful was amazed at how sparing he dealt out his acting talent. But what did it mean to me? Not much. But if that was the case, why did I feel robbed, why did I feel horrible for his family when he passed?

The only thing I can pin it to is the realization that he was a large part of an increasing public mindset in ‘80’s culture that promoted being different not for the sake of being different but simply to say it’s okay if you are different regardless of how you are different (Yes, these were the Eighties in which now I'm being told were so violent, intolerant and fascist). Bowie himself would probably put obvious limits on that – don’t go around killing people for example – but as an Earthling who expresses himself those limits are so far gone they fit everyone who need not commit a capital crime. I’m not going to go into a self-indulgent and rambling bullshit paragraph about how I felt different when I was a child, only that it was extremely apparent to me that I was different and that other people noticed because they told me (Heathen!). In fact, many people felt it so important to tell me that they had to beat it into me. I’d love to say that perhaps if they were Bowie fans and found more self-expression they possibly would not feel the need to up my parent’s medical bills. I’d love to say that if they were Bowie fans maybe they would tolerate the rest of the world. That’s how I saw Bowie then, and see Bowie now. A guy who sings some strange songs and not through the music but through his outrageous fashion and lifestyle exemplifies the ideal that it’s cool to be cool, and cool to be whatever you want, so why would you care what anyone else wants to be? In this collective space in pop culture, Bowie was perhaps a front man of change and toleration. Millions of people may have looked at him and thought ‘why?’ I’d would look at them and ask ‘why do you care?’ Being a Bowie fan meant that you were okay with all his weird shit, and if you were okay with that then you were okay with your friend’s weird shit. And if you were okay with that then your friends were okay with your weird shit. And pretty soon, no one’s weird shit mattered any more. Like a bumper sticker my wife used to have on her Jeep: Harm None, Do What Ye Will. From Bowie’s stand point it might be Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane or sleeping with Mick Jagger or the indescribably beautiful Somali supermodel Iman. For someone else it might be bucking primogeniture by not going to  the family alma mater, or not getting that job the parentals want you to get, or to take it to the next level working a more meaningful job that has more psychological awards than the square footage of a house or another zero in the bank. You can take this all the way to candle wax and butt plugs if you want. Harm none, do what ye will. And I will listen to Seven Years in Tibet really, really loud. 

On a completely different note I think it’s important to emphasize Bowie’s constant, incessant smile. Every footage I have ever seen of him off stage, on the streets of New York or in interviews dating back four decades or anything offhand: look at his smile. Not only is it glowing and effervescent, but it is never ending. Bowie smiled continuously. A beaming, wide grin. Yes, it must be cool to be a billionaire, yes I’m sure it doesn’t suck to have his life, to be David Bowie, but as you go back through the struggling years you’ll see that smile regardless of the downs he had to endure. Bowie was a happy person during a couple of decades that were really rough, especially to many people about my age.  Want to be moody? Put on some Seattle alternative. Wanna shit bats? Go goth, girl. Wanna be a complete pussy? I hear Emos like Type O Negative. I wanna be happy when I rock. I want devil horns. I wanna dance. I wanna smile. I want David Bowie playing The Man Who Sold the World, with my windows down and my system up.