ISSN: 1190-8734

• Liner Notes
• Cropduster update
• Johnny Paycheque
• Seven Sacraments of the Workplace
• Memo to all Credit Administrators
• Allen Meece's poem
• Qoire Qadeau's encryption scheme
• Vanier Ontario
• Kia's Apartment
• Appeal for Mentorship

This print version of this issue was hastened to press by the sacking, with two days notice, of the author. This turn of events liberated him from the workplace, as well as from Microsoft Windows 95 and other office supplies, so it was decided that a free printing job of a semi-completed issue was of greater value, in the author's scheme of things, than a paid printing job of a completed issue. Therefore the permanent paper version is a little sketchy in places. The online edition, then, is a much more full expression of the articles included, which could not be fully fleshed-out due to the constraints of time.

Quark Kadoo's piece will be bumped from this issue to be published in the next. Our apologies to QRQ.
 
 

The latest offering, once again stretching the bounds of xerographic expression. Cropduster has always been a summer experience, collected, created, and produced due to large amounts of free time.

Designing a new issue is also a difficult activity, because it is always troublesome to decide what this one should look like. It should be personal and revelatory, because it should be a reflection of me: I want to be able to come back to it a few months or years later and see that it, in some implicit way, captured and reflected what I was during the construction phase. But on the other hand, it should also be appealing to the masses, novel with each issue, and it should avoid quixotic particularities; what John said to Jane may be everything to them, but it doesn't translate well to others. Also, I am getting bashful about being an exhibitionist and telling too many highschool stories.

This seems to be the dichotomy between zines in general. Those that are too personal start to read like diaries, and diaries are the literary form that most requires expunging editing. On the other hand, they can become too mainstream and carry too many articles without much overall cohesion; they become maga-zines. Our last issue strayed into the latter territory, and even featured miscellaneous record reviews.

This summer has been different from the rest because the editor has been employed, this time at a large paper merchant that will remain nameless for legal reasons. This has changed many summer things, not the least of which being the fact that after twelve hours of toil and commute, there is so little desire to create or even to think.

This issue is created not because there is any great pressing need to create, but because the opportunity for "free" photocopying, paper, and postage is simply too good to pass up.

Those of you who are observant will note that Cropduster now has an official ISSN stamp, 1190-1184, courtesy of the people at the National Library of Canada who require them for their cataloging-in-publication data.

I have attempted to make Cropduster less casual by making it more focused and serious; my goal for this issue was content, and not mere nostalgia or personal emotion. I am embarrassed by how much I dwell on extinct highschool issues and other obsolete adolescent things, and am making an effort to get past this.

The slight improvements in production quality of the paper edition come from the availability of 'free' office equipment and supplies. This also means that we can greatly exceed our normal print run of about 20 copies. Much of the preparation of this issue was sneaked through on company machines and company time, making this the first time we have ever made money by doing this thing. (Despite the fact that we have had at least 25 000 online hits over the past few years, and a few hundred more each month, the total number of people who have actually paid for an issue remains zee-row.)

cw has basically lost interest in the zine, along with so many other things that we used to jointly hold dear. He, along with others, were specifically invited to contribute pieces, and eventually did nothing. Two people answered in the affirmative, and you see their offerings herein: The poem Love not Lost, by my long-lost father Allen Meece, and a treatise upon Crypto Fascist Encryption and Compression by Qoire Qadeau.

The author continues in his ecclesiastical pursuits. He is about to enter his second year of post-BA Divinity school at St Paul's University, the first Roman Catholic university in Canada outside of Québec, founded in 1848 as the original University of Ottawa. I'm slowly moving towards my goal of being a clergyman, or, if I do not have the pastoral qualifications or there are problems with placements, otherwise serving the Church in an academic way as guest lecturer or permanent TA or what-all. I am somewhat worried about it, because it is my goal, and so much depends upon reaching it. I have seen all of my adolescent contemporaries fall short of reaching the goals that they planned for themselves, and my joining them seems sometimes inevitable.

This issue is incomplete - there is much more to be written, and much more that will be written. We aren't ready to quit. It's ok, Tommy. The future isn't here yet.

This has been a workaday summer.

When this summer began, and when it was clear what kind of world this was, and, alas, how much it would dominate my days, it seemed almost inevitable that it would have to be the subject of the next Cropduster. This was the case for several weeks, and preliminary work was performed to that end. The idea was thrown on the dung-heap when it was revealed that what had been written was not novel, and was in fact merely the repetition of the litany of workplace complaints. Doing an issue about the absurdities, trivialities and childishness of the white-collar office workplace would be like doing an issue pointing out sexism and xenophobia in the films of Arnold Schwartzenegger: Only too obvious, and done so many times before.

It has been revealing in that it illustrated the source of so much of our culture; the way that the workplace dominates people, and therefore the world. It answered questions that I posed to myself in my youth, when I wondered why all the grown-ups of the world seemed to be so anaesthetised, and why only the young people seemed to be really alive and almost free. On most weeknights during my teenage years I would go out for the evening, leaving home at about 7pm, to meet up with people, girlfriends, or be by myself in some inauspicious and forgotten section of the Saug, while my mom would just come home from work and immediately goto bed and watch the television. Why was this? Why, when given some free time, were I and my peers interested in interacting with the world and each other, while my mother just wanted to "relax"?

It was because she was and is a working adult. That is a world in which there is neither extreme happiness nor sadness, where things happen pretty much the same today and tomorrow, and the only goal is to repeat yourself long enough to fund your present activities, build up an RRSP fund, and graduate with a plaque after 40 years of dedicated service. There is a certain amount of satisfaction in that, for even if the work is basically irrelevant to you (as it must be for almost all of the population) you do receive a pay packet every second Thursday, and that pay packet can facilitate buying stuff.

A trouble with the workplace is that it is a closed system, the same process of dealing and transacting with the same ten people in the pit each day, every day. Because repetition is so common, remarkable or uncommon things are treated with a great amount of brouhaha. Gossip is rampant, and any activity or anecdote that is supernormal is talked about to excess: Just like grade nine.

• Totem pole ism and name-dropping like you've never seen since early highschool. The top executive in charge of the Blank Company, CR, sometimes telephones people at this office, and sometimes asks for them to be pages. Normal pages are delivered as "Your name, call holding on line one, your name, line one." But when the president calls, it is "Your name, CR holding on line one, your name, CR on line one." We witnessed one such page in which my boss ran to the telephone to take the call from Mr Big.
• Saying 'how are you' and 'thank-you' dozens of times per day.
• The boss who gives you a task to be done in a certain way, which you do, and then, when you present the task completed to their given guidelines, gets angry at you because they find out that's not really what they wanted after all.
• Intimacy suggested and implied but never actualised. Colleagues go out for lunch together and see each other over the lunch hour, but everyone wants to be alone when they go home in the evening. Jocularity and chumminess is ever present, but it has very strict limits.
• Covering up your mistakes; putting yourself in the clear by moving something to someone else's desk and getting it off your plate of responsibilities. Keeping the good bits for yourself, and delegating the shit jobs to someone below you.
• The incessant and eternal irrelevant talking, talking, talking. Everyone is always chattering and what they produce is only so much empty verbiage. Like a radio sports commentary man who must keep the chatter going and provide at least 120 seconds of pleonasm for each batter who steps up to the plate, so too are workplace dudes, who must talk and talk and talk about invoices, computer functions, faxing, the paper jammed in the photocopy machine, what time the courier is expected to arrive and whether or not Joe Blow has called them yet or given them the right package and ticked the proper boxes.
• The form of government in business, on a macro or micro level, is despotism by the boss. It is most certainly not democratic, for if everyone took the time to be an individual and assert their rights, no work would get done. Democracy has been discarded in order to permit capital concerns to run as unimpeded as possible, while social concerns are the domain only of those who stick up for them. If the bosses had their way, you would be a robot. They more robotic you act, the happier they are with your performance. You are not there to be a human individual: You are there to do their work.
• And paralleling this activity, CHUM FM is sprayed across the credit department at low volume from three or four transistor radios on peoples desks. Heavy rotation: They have played A Change Will do you Good, by Cheryl Crow twice daily, every day, from May through to August.
• The workplace is the location and the situation in which all of the feel-good platitudes of hopeful expectations crash head-first against the low ceiling of reality and are blown to bits in the process. That absurd notion that clothes, race, economic status and style don't matter, and that it's the person underneath them that is important and is how you will be judged. Children are often instructed, by their caring parents, to, above all other things, "be yourself." In the so-named real world this platitude is the ultimate in ridiculousness. In this society, and under this value system, simply being yourself will get you crushed.

But this is her life, it is what she has chosen to do, so is it really wise that I should completely knock it? I realised that I was being a misanthrope if I completely discounted the office work world, because so many of our citizens find their livelihood therein, and by such an attitude they would be just as offended as Danielle was.

My revised summary of this situation is two fold. It consists of two steps, the first being the most important and the necessary, the second being the eternal task and the optional. The primary statement comes from the Bard: "To thine own self be true." There can never be any sort of satisfaction or happiness if you are working in a job that is contrary to your own aims, that has nothing to do with what you want to be. Be true to thine own self when selecting your workplace. Secondly, try to make thine own self as good as possible. Admittedly this is pretty paltry and is nothing more than truisms, but it is the closest thing to positivity that I can come up with.

I. The Pay Packet (saleris salorum jour del bi Thor)
II. The Kissing of the Superior's Ass (labia ultra gleuteus maximus)
III. The Complaining (illegitimus carborundum)
IV. The Break (grabba jabba)
V. The Water-Cooler Society (social aquafrigidum)
VI. The Telling of the Dirty Joke (aurum verbum humourous nihil colorum)
VII. The Fringe Cash Benefits (pensioni et beneficiis)

To: All Credit Administrators

From: P (Ghostwritten by Steven Meece)

In the next two weeks, many accounts will have their credit terms reviewed and updated in order to ensure better performance. You, as a collector, are asked to review the payment terms and the credit limit of some of your accounts in order to keep them reasonable.

P will isolate accounts that she feels are in need of a review of their established payment terms and credit limits. Steven Meece will update the master file according to her specific instructions, and will refer questionable accounts to you, their credit administrator, for your opinion. This will be an ongoing process for about two weeks.

• If one of your accounts needs to be reviewed, the customer file folder and an attached update form will be delivered to you by 1:00pm that day.
• Review the folder for credit habits, NSF activity, and the presence of the original credit application.


If the credit application is missing, please indicate this and Steven will request one from the customer.

• If you do not wish to increase the credit limit, please indicate this with your signature on the update form, and return the entire package to Steven's desk by the end of your day. You will be required to monitor this account very closely.
• If you wish to order a credit report or reports, indicate the fashion of audit on the update form and return to Steven's desk by the end of your day. You may choose from a Dun & Bradstreet, Creditel, or Canadian Legal Credit survey, a bank account statement, or references from up to three of their suppliers. He will gather that information and return the package to you at 1:00pm.
• If you wish to adjust the dollars or days, please fill out the update form and return the entire package to Steven's desk before the end of your day. He will update the master customer records, and return the file folder to the storage drawers.

Regional Credit Manager

A Mohawk stands
in this lonely place by Toronto Bay
where I write.

With long black hair and hungry heart
he looks at the water, at the airport
at the gigantic grain elevator
and has to wonder,
"Where did my people lose it?"

I would say to him;
that which you love you can never lose.
Others will surely inherit what you had
but the memory of how beautiful it was
is forever yours to keep.

It is so very hard on every one of us
to lose what we loved before we knew
that it was time to move on.
But that which you keep in your heart
can never go away.

Allen Meece

Dear Son,

Here's an old one I wrote on my last trip to Canada. It deals with change, a constant subject. Hope I made the deadline and that the new duster produces the most bountiful crop ever.

BTW how's life going?

Dad

HOLD FOR SUBMISSION

Those of you who are familiar with the second issue of Cropduster will recognise this bit. We have another neighbourhood to add to the collexion.
 

Last autumn my girlfriend and I moved out to Vanier Ontario, which is considered the "bad" part of the Ontario side of the Ottawa-Hull conflagration. We moved out there because we were growing tired of our cramped one-bedroom apartment downtown that went for $650, and the availability of an apartment of about twice the floor size in a low-rise (born March 1949) in Vanier for $460 per month was too good to pass by. The rental situation in Capital City is generally good for tenants as of this writing, so it is even better in Vanier; the rationale being that Vanier is last-chance housing, and that if people can afford to leave, they will. The vacancy rate is currently 4%, which is the highest in all of the urban county. In the past five years, the population of Vanier has actually decreased by 5000 people. It is now 17, 452.

Vanier is a mostly French city. Not all French people are poor, by the way. Further out in the east end exists the suburb of Orléans, a super-suburban complex of maze streets that did not exist ten years ago. Orléans (or else Gatineau, over in Québec) is probably the dream of a few French residents of Vanier: That their progeny will move out of the cramped, blue collar, ratty city and out into the land of Chemlawn treated turf and storm windows. But for the most part the people here seem resigned to their lot in life. This is an exceedingly wise idea, because, as we all know, the only people who are free from want are those who are free from wanting. Oh yeah, everybody let out a great big OM.

Vanier is the smallest city (by land area) in Canada, and is the only city that is completely encircled by another. It was born and grew up as the eastern fringe of Ottawa, expanding into empty land on the east side. This was the case for the first half of this century, until in 1950 an application was made to the province to approve annexation of more empty land east of the border, an area belonging to the unincorporated Township of Gloucester. The province of Ontario denied the application with the justification that Ottawa could take better care of those people than Vanier. So that land became Ottawa territory, thus it is that Vanier is a closed and fully encircled island residing inside the east end of the City of Ottawa. This inefficient anachronism has been permitted to continue for so long because Ottawa has never made any serious attempt at taking over Vanier. It remains to be seen why they would want to do such a thing as make themselves responsible for more poor French peasants.

The first settlement in this area was by James Cummngs, who purchased a small island in the centre of the Rideau River, built a toll bridge across it, and established his own blacksmithing and goods-trading shop there. A small hamlet soon built up in the southeast corner of Montréal and River (formerly Russell) Roads, called, somewhat predictably, Cumming's Bridge. There were two other settlements within what would become Vanier: Clandeboyne and Clarkstown; the first existed as a satellite of New Edinburgh (around the CC and XC areas) while the other was a smaller settlement further down the Montréal Road that had St-Charles [RC] Church as the focal point. Clandeboyne was English, Clarkstown was French, Cumming's Bridge was mixed with a slight preference for English. The Anglican church (St Margaret's) was built in 1887 close to Cumming's Bridge, originally as a chapel of ease for St Bartholomew's.

In 1891 a meeting of the area's residents was held at Notre-Dame de Lourdes, which resulted in a decision to offer free land to any industry that would locate nearby. Apparently no industry accepted. {Taken from the City of Eastview Master Plan, published in 1965.}

The French and the Irish were regarded in a similar way in the 19th century, as rogues, ruffians, and Papist scalawags. The Irish managed to tidy themselves up and ingress into the general culture, but, a century later, the French remain basically what they always have been. There is so much continuity in Vanier. There are some streets encrusted still with telephone poles and wires, that, except for the automobiles, remain essentially unchanged in vista since the 1920s. It looks like a thousand hardscrabble working class Mechanicvilles across the world, broken pavement, ramshackle homes, rusting machinery, idle factories. Quite retro.

The three aforementioned settlements (Cumming's Bridge, after the turn of the century known as Janeville, as well as Clarkstown and Clandeboyne) decided to amalgamate and form a town, to be called Eastview.

By 1908, Clandeboyne, Janeville and Clarkstown had grown to such an extent that a petition was drawn up requesting incoporation of the area as a village. Although most of the residents signed the petition, many claim they did not understand what they had signed. A counter-petition was raised by some residents who feared incorporation would mean higher taxes. Despite the opposition, on January 1, 1909, Janeville, Clandeboyne and Clarkstown were separated from the Township of Gloucester, and became the Village of Eastview. The name originated from its location relative to the City of Ottawa. The first Council was apparently composed entirely of those who had opposed the incorporaton, and who still hoped that they could quash the incorporation order in a higher court. Despite their opposition, the Councillors found they now had to run the village whether they liked it or not. {Taken from the City of Eastview Master Plan, published in 1965.}

That is the situation north of Montréal Road, but south of it (in the area that is more English) the housing stock is of newer vintage, consisting mainly (but by no means exclusively) of lowrise apartment buildings of era between 1945 and 1961. Some are private housing, and some are public. Many of the latter were quickly constructed as post-war housing for war veterans; they are still inhabited today, the veterans having being long replaced by other poor folk. This is more than coincidental, for these "projects" in Canada were built by the Canada Home and Mortgage Corporation, a crown corporation created in 1945 to build cookie-cutter housing for veterans and provide it to them at a very cheap price. Over the next fifty years the veterans came and went, but the CHMC and their barracks stayed around, now housing welfarians where the Tommies once laid their heads. Regent Park, the huge public housing project in downtown Toronto, is another CHMC settlement of post-war derivation.

There are two commercial thoroughfares in Vanier: Montréal Road and McArthur Avenue. Montréal Road is the older of the two, the one that was built up when Vanier was semi-autonomous and more of its own place; from the days when the residents seldom left their neighbourhood in order to secure provisions. Montréal Road is our downtown. It has several 24 hour diners, this or that, and the Playmate: What might be the last remaining 25 cent peep show jackoff booth unit left in Ottawa. There is also a strip club attached, but those are fairly common. Montréal Road is also the home of some street prostitution, which is heartbreaking to see, the poor French girls standing on the streetcorners, wagging their hips at the rat bastards in their Buicks who are too lazy either to masturbate or care about what happens to the girls. From time to time, they turn up dead. In October of 1990, a 16 year old casual prostitute named Melinda Sheppitt was killed in the Lowertown area of Ottawa. She died just as brutally and gruesomely as did Kristin French and Leslie Mahaffy, but because Kristin French gave the social projection of being an innocent girl, her death was seen as more of a loss than that of Melinda Sheppitt, or, for that matter, Leslie Mahaffy. When they caught Paul Bernardo (the serial rapist and killer) the people howled for his dismemberment; to this day no-one has been caught for the death of Melinda Sheppitt and not many people seem to care. This sinister judgment of human value has got to change, be it through Christian grace or Red revolution.
 

Montréal Road seems to have the largest concentration of gas stations in Ottawa. It also has the Concorde Hotel and Cocktail Lounge. Montréal Road sometimes seems stuck at about 1966.

Montréal Road at times seems to be one large disposal area for paper, potato chip cartons, and other debris casually tossed by pedestrian and motorist alike. The lanes and alleys behind the stores and shops and the yards of many dwellings contained an accumulation of rubbish, junk, and wrecked autos. Many of the commercial buildings, as well as residential buildings, require cleaning and painting. Eastview would take on a completely different appearance with a little effort by each and every citizen to clean and paint up. Where necessary municipal legislation should be enacted and enforced. {Taken from the City of Eastview Master Plan, published in 1965.}

Vanier is encrusted with bargain basements (Crazy Chester's House of Plastic), bingo parlours, smoke shops, and Roman Catholic Churches. The brand of Roman Catholicism in vogue in Vanier is still very pre-Vatican II, based upon behaviour control and iron-fist moralism; this is the case for what remains of Québecois religion in general. The Roman Church, in an attempt to clutch their population's loyalty, has, as any Taoist would tell you, predictably lost it. The further down the economic ladder, the more Christianity becomes as tough as nails, be it either Roman or Protestant. This is so very unfortunate and incorrect. It should be inverted; the more poor you are, the nicer your religion should be to you. It's the moneychangers in the temple that deserve the theological punches, not the ragbags in the streets.

Vanier is the Anglican parish of St Margaret's. It was established in 1885 as a chapel of St Bartholomew's in New Edinburgh and was a country church at a crossroads in the bush, on the Montréal Road. It is still a small chapel, fairly middle of the road liturgically, except that they ring bells thrice at the Consecration, which isn't usually done with Anglicans. It was our parish for some time until we had a falling out with the vicar on the subject of homosexuality. Also, we found ourselves in disagreement with the tone of many of the sermons; perhaps because the vicar is from Newfoundland (ie, more poor people) the pastoral philosophy seems to be give em hell, and let them know that they aren't worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs, you bastards. Our dislike of the sermons was actually preventing us from Receiving, because at 8:30 on Sunday mornings in the winter we did not want to get up out of bed, put on our boots, and trudge through the snow in order to be told how much of a worm we are. We changed to All Saints' Sandy Hill, in the shadow of Ottawa U, on the Ottawa side of the river and prefer that now.

In doing research for this article, we discovered that the census of 1951 polled religious denomination. It was quite odd to read this; more odd than the denominational affiliation itself is the fact that they would even ask such a thing. Today you would no more expect to see census data of people's religion than you would census data about their hairstyles. Today, the amount of Presbyterians as opposed to Lutherans living in any specific place is about as relevant as the number of toupées against brush-cuts.

Of course, back then it was asked not for theological purposes but for social demographic ones, and everyone knew the codes. To be a Church of Englander in 1951 meant that you had a certain kind of job, voted for a certain party, had a certain ethnic background and amount of education. To be a French Roman Catholic in 1951 meant different attributes, of course, but with the same level of certainty. Staticians are not at all interested in knowing whether their citizens are monophysites, subscribe to Calvinistic predestination theory, or reject the homoousia, but they are interested in knowing what party you vote for, what your race is, and how much money you make: And, in 1951, your choice of religion often said that much about you.

Of the 24000 residents that year, 19000 were Roman Catholic. There were 1800 Anglicans and 1600 in the United denominations. There were also four Seventh-Day-Adventists, two Mennonite males, eight Mormons, and 31 Pentecostalists. There were also a small amount of Jews and "Confusists / Buddhists." Only 224 people listed some other denomination.

So much for dat ol' time religion. It is no surprise to anyone with a memory or with research that the Fundamentalists who preach "Back to the Bible," and the Old Time Gospel are really preaching nothing of the sort, for they have no history to them beyond the Jesus Freakers of the early 1970s. That's as far "back" as they go.

Also, as revealed in the 1951 census, there were a grand total of two "Negroes" in Vanier. One male and one female, I assume they were married to each other. A few more "Coloureds" have arrived in the past forty six years, but Vanier is still a rather Caucasian place.

Vanier is somewhat like Parkdale, but with a few exceptions, the main one being the lack of a lunatick asylum in the neighbourhood, keeping the streets somewhat sane. Also, Vanier is, by Ottawa standards, outside of downtown, so there are not as many panhandlers or bums. It is not crazy or even very violent. It is just poor.

Poverty is the sine qua non of Vanier. Basically everyone there is poor; the only non-poor housing in the entire city are the homes with a cross-river view alongside the east bank of the river, and two condo towers at McArthur Ave and River Road that, seemingly, house government workers for the Dominion offices directly across the street. You see pauperism every day, but also you sometimes see crushing poverty and unhappiness; many people drink their lives away at the Little Beaver booze house, puking their pilsner across McArthur Avenue, and sometimes it seems as if few Vanier girls reach the age of 18 before giving birth. There are a lot of grade ten girls pushing around second-hand baby carriages. That reminds me of Rexdale somewhat.

But for the most part the poverty is genteel. I do not know if it is because of social benefits, or the low cost of living, but for the most part the people are not ground down into the ground by their poverty: It is not like the United States, where the poor areas are battle zones of stray bullets, dirty needles, and carjacking. It is the kind of poverty that is best described as bucolic, because it means that materialism is, for the most part, killed stone dead, and the people accept each other more honestly, without affectation. If there is such a thing as a "nice place to be poor," then Vanier is it. You don't see as many people fired up about clothes and status in Vanier as you do in other places. The people work sometimes, and have no money, and have not had money for generations, and do their thing without excessive fussing or feuding with each other or the bourgeois, except of course within the aforementioned bars, in which fussing and fueding is an art form. Perhaps (and this is just a perhaps) it is because they have been French peasants since the days of Charlemagne, and through hundreds of years of experience they have learned how to deal with it, how to create a meaningful and enjoyable life without money. Maybe this is my benefaction as well, something inherited from my Kentucky hillbilly ascendants. Carl Sandburg would be inspired, no doubt. The other thing that keeps the low-income neighbourhoods calm is that most of the residents are female, because most poor people are women and children.

As I said to Qoire Qadeau the first time he came over to our apartment, I feel more comfortable in poor Vanier than wealthy Streetsville because when I used to walk around Streetsville (in town or in the highschool) I was always aware of the fact that people were noticing that I had a big rip along the shoulder of my coat, or that I didn't have shoelaces, or that the left arm of my glasses was not the same as the right arm, and I felt that people were pointing and snickering at me. That doesn't happen in Vanier, that could never happen in Vanier, because everyone is wearing a torn up coat, holey shoes, or badly repaired glasses.

It's possible that the reason I like it this way is that I am a secret snob, and it's easy to feel good about yourself when you are not constantly being beaten. And, truth be told, in Vanier if you can read and write you probably have the jump on about 40% of your neighbours. I feel comfortable because there is almost no inter-neighbour competition. One day at the beginning of the summer, I put our cat on a leash and took him behind the apartment complex to sit at the picnic tables and I read, for an hour, my textbook on the Jungian psychology of religion while Gilgamesh skipped about around me. The simple, satisfying, life-enjoying pleasure of that sunny afternoon in Vanier has not been possible and has not been repeated in Richmond Hill, despite the salary, social approval, and worldly success of this job and this ersatz middle class life.

Another night at Kia's apartment, same as last night. Arrived here, yesterday night, for the second session of apartment minding while Kia cohabitates on the q-t in Washington with her Jewish lawyer. I came in, put on her Strangeways record, and did computer shit in the late evening; I remember my last visit with Kücman (23 Aug 92), going up to her bedroom, looking at her Québec take-homes, wondering if we were going to end up in bed together or not, wondering if I cared enough. We put the cassette version of this on her tape player and went to bed, and listened to only the first side because her machine didn't have autoflip and by the time the it finished we were too busy to get up and change it. I thought that it was a rather short side, and it turns out that the whole record is only 36 minutes long.

I'm just trying to take this as it is, as an aesthetic experience, and then let it go when it has to go. But every little while there is an unexpected voice coming up from the background that appreciates this perhaps too much, and wants it to continue, and starts to wonder how we might go about making this a more permanent placement. Not to switch off Michelle for Kia (I'm much too wise for that; some of the things in this apartment make it entirely clear that Kia and I could never be compatible for more than three consecutive weeks), but to keep Kia around in some good, close, meaningful way. I never did that with Kücie. Or her house. When I first came here, I knew that I'd have to hold this residency in my hand, love it, accept all that it would give, and then let it go. Same thing with Kia the human. I'm still 90% inclined to do that, but there is a nagging 10%. This portion of my brain says that Kia's apartment, and Kia's company, is one of the places in which I exist and is an aspect of the "ground of my being," in the words of St John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz) instead of being merely a fluky social thing with a girl from Carleton. But you see, that's silly. It'd be like cleaving to Chandra. Or Fleur.

I had an OC Transpo idle fantasy the other day in which I impregnated Kia, and we raised the daughter in an extended family of myself, Kia, and Michelle acting as parents!

Tom said that much of Kia's appeal comes from her status as a bird with a broken wing, in that men come to her with the hopes that they will soothe and comfort the poor dear, and be the shoulder to which she can pour out her grief.

I would not put myself up at that level, but I can see the ways in which Tom is correct. I'm sorting out things for her, defusing situations, pulling the slivers out of her hands, as it were. Helper guy. This means simple things like picking up her mail and sorting it out (including pretending to be her for parcel claims), keeping the apt lived-in and aired-out, but it also includes keeping her ..., by ..., and ... the ... to the .... Before she left I gave her $20, partially as my "rent" of her place but mainly just because she asked. I wrote a letter of reference to help her get past the US Customs Service at Pearson last week. Her April rent cheque bounced, there are eviction notices on the front door. I called Kia and we talked it out; I'm to give her landlord her extra rent cheque, write a little explanatory note, and either slip it under the door and go down and talk to Finola the landlady and sort out the mess.

"On her behalf, I apologise for this troublesome situation. What happened is this: ..."

Help her guy. But it's all like this: The telephone here is in Craig's name, because hers is mud as far as Bell Canada is concerned, Andrew is her personal chauffeur and cabbie, Tom lent/gave her a television set, and Ted is giving her room and board and semen for a few months in Washington. It seems to be Kia's thing that she puts together a male support group who lend a hand when things get too hard-going.

I'm not bitching about this specifically (it is my Xian duty to assist my neighbours, and I love aiding women) but it's interesting to note that it's happened. It seems to have been like this for several years at the least, with people in Ottawa and Victoria offering to help out with money, shared apartments, crash pads, and all the like.

This is a rarity. So few people receive this, including women. What would happen if I wasn't around and Michelle went to the dogs? Would anyone step in and offer assistance for this or that? I honestly doubt it. Look at people like Lynn and Christina: They've been twisting in the wind for years, and there is not a lot of concern expressed there. When my mom hit the shits in 1977, only the Culhams helped out.

Maybe it's the sex appeal or her pixie-ness. It's difficult to think of anyone else offhand who could garner as much assistance in the world.

Out for a jump to the Mac's Milk for provisions and back again. I purchased two litres of milk and a squeeze bottle of Brown Cow syrup: Guess who's going to party the roof off tonight?

Working in the credit/sales department is perhaps not a true reflection of what's out there, because it is somewhat fraudulent, even by worldly standards. But you know, there are so few men out there, yet there are a thousand million guys. Perhaps they are tired of the responsibility, or afraid of the patriarchy label, but they seem to have given up on any kind of leadership role: Even the $100000 vice-presidents try to portray themselves as chummy and chipper and cheerful, as one of the guys, because they grin in the face of the $9/hour temps like myself. Maybe our culture has finally become so post-modern and so silly that the last person has given up on honestly caring about it. There are not many leaders around, but there are more bosses now than ever before.

When the word leader is mentioned today, the immediate resulting view is Der Führer Herr Hitler, or other petty politicians. Leadership has fallen into disrepute because there is so little of it left. What used to be done by leaders is now done by bosses and dictators. Bosses have given leadership a negative connotation, just as charlatans and mountebanks have given religion and piousness a negative one. When someone bristles away from the concept of leading, what they are really in revolt from are these two corruptions, not true leadership, which is always mentorship. The true leader is a mentor, while the true boss is a dictator. You follow the leader because the leader clarifies and illuminates the direction you wish to go, but you follow the dictator or boss under duress. Our world has confused the two, because so many bosses and dictators have done their evil deeds under the guise and nameplate of leadership.

"But every meeting with his so-called superior is a humiliating kick in the crotch..."

- The Police, Synchronicity III

Everyone is always trying to be funny, always attempting to make jokes. This would be an appropriate response if life was indeed a fabrication, a series of well-timed jokes, and other such niceties. But of course it is not. It's quite interesting that even as our civilisation falls further and further to tatters, and becomes more and more of a crazy place, the response of the general public is to become more and more silly and irrelevant. There have never been more issues on the world's plate than there have been now, and in the main, the people are interested only in Jim Carrey and his funny faces, or movies that feature aliens, cops, robots or a combination thereof. As the need increases, the supply shrinks. Do you think, maybe, we could become serious again as a people? Is it because of post-modernism, which has reduced anything serious to satire and pastiche? Is that why we have films like Pulp Fiction, in which (celluloid) killing and slaughtering is put forth as comedy? My life was serious, damn serious - my grade twelve girlfriend was a victim of rape and I had to almost literally pull her back from the brink of suicide - and the only thing that mainstream culture offered to me in response was Howard the Duck or the $2.99 Big Mac with Fries deal.

We used to know a young girl named Coby: cw's somewhat step-sister, the daughter of the woman with whom his mother entered into a Holy Union, a marriage by any other name. She was about four years younger than we were, so when we met her (in 1989) she was twelve, and when we last saw each other (1992) she was fifteen. She developed much in these three years, and, it seems to be, set the die for her future life, which, unfortunately, was not to the positive.

I always thought that Coby could have been so much more than she was, because at the beginning she was still relatively clean and an unwritten-upon slate. A young person like that, almost by instinct, recognises leadership (and mentorship), so it is much better that it should come from something worthy than something unworthy. People are going to be shaped and formed by something, so why not you? If you won't do it, then David Letterman will. Obviously he did, because for want of a real leader, Coby went into a sinkhole and ended up as yet another victim of the Saug.

True mentorship is self-sacrifice. It is about putting the needs of your subject above yourself, and receiving your happiness when they receive their happiness. This is the secret key to successful parenthood, and, of course, successful parenthood is simply proper mentorship of someone designated as your child. But you can be a leader and a mentor to someone other than your child of course, if you care enough to make the sacrifices necessary to improve their lives. Most people don't care, so most people don't bother.

But for those who do bother, the rewards, both personally and socially, are paramount to any other accomplishment in this world - and especially paramount to self-indulgence and cash accumulation and other such tail-chasing pursuits suitable only for chumps and greenasses. The Sage works in private; their deeds known not to an appreciative audience but only to their disciples. The Sage comes and goes without touching the structure, but his wake crests the breakwalls. Everybody say OM...

But of course, there is the need for discretion and for reservation. As Martin Buber wrote, you cannot relate to everyone and everything as an I-You: For if we did, it would 'consume' us. Oftimes we need to keep to the I-Them situation, for practical reasons.

For young people, mentorship comes mainly in the area of romantic relationships. This is especially positive because the relationship is reciprocal and both are effected. You never know who will learn more. For most people, adolescence is an age of dislocation and confusion as they question the values of the society that they have inherited, and attempt to decide what their place in that society ought to be. At this time, more than any other, they need mentors who sympathise with their situation and are able to cast light upon the unknown areas. These people should be, in the words of St Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits) "soul companions on the spiritual journey." Sex is the catalyst for this development, because when virginal types journey through the various stages of progress they are completely at the mercy of their companion, and here they learn trust. I remember fondly those afternoons and evenings when Fiona would come to my bed, and we would progress together, anxiously and amazèdly, towards the future.

I miss those highwire days of having the entire world opening up for you when your girlfriend opened her bra. It wasn't the heat that did it as much as the novelty of the journey, the trust in the travelling, and the revelation of new social paradigms. But as much as I cherish those days and that experience I am certainly no pubophile and I leave teenagers alone, realising that when it comes to my sex life with nubile teenagers, what's done is done and will not be done again. I'm not suggesting that everyone go out and pick up a 14 year old girlfriend for her own good... I address this to people of that age, people who are in grades ten or eleven or so and are looking for a transcendental activity to give meaning to their teenage lives. Are you tiring yet of your Nintendo? Have you had enough of Seinfeld? Find the peer that you can trust, and can trust you, and bring them grace and redemption by saving yourself as you save them. You're in for something extra in your life if you do.

When Fiona, the 15 year old girl, would look into my 15 year old eyes and tell me that she loved me, everything fell into place and everything made sense, was beautiful, and was complete. In such a relationship, the dichotomy between teacher and pupil, between guide and disciple, are expunged. The union is perfect. That was all anyone ever needed or wanted... back then.

My message to the grassroots is quite different from that of the Regional Credit Manager, for my message for us is to love each other as he has loved us; do what you can to make it the most important aspect of your life, and your true vocation in living. It will cleanse your soul, and, if you do it correctly, it may just be the one thing that will make someone else's life worth living.

Here endeth the lesson.

See you later for Cropduster 7, coming sometime in the undiscovered future.