It is rare that I skip blogging for two consecutive days, but so I have. Events have conspired against me.
It can be pleasant having my wife home, but often her presence allows me no liberty to blog nor to even keep up with my exercise schedule.
Last Friday was the last Summer day in which I fully sunned (i.e., doing so while wearing just gym shorts). As of Saturday, U.S. forest fires flooded the Greater Vancouver and Lower Mainland area with smoke such that the sky seemed solidly overcast. As well, everything had a rosy tint during the day.
We've since had two overnight stretches with a little rain. And yesterday afternoon, I could have sunned, but all I did was sit out in the backyard fully clothed (but for bared feet) as I lounged in a deck- or lawn-chair while facing into the Sun for something like 44 minutes.
That was the sunniest that I have seen it around here since Friday. Overnight since, we had that second stretch with a little rain. And today, the sky is essentially covered with cloud and smoke again. Some feeble sunshine does display quite strongly at times, but it is unnatural with that rosy filtering indicative of atmospheric smoke.
Nevertheless, I may seek to spend some time again sitting out in the backyard if I feel I have the time to give.
I want now to mention two features that I watched with my younger brother that both serendipitously happened to tie in with each other.
The first was a 2017 movie titled The Circle that featured actress Emma Watson as a naive young woman who lands a spot in a major Internet corporation that to me smacked of a blend of Google and Facebook.
She got the gig after a recommendation from a Scottish friend played by actress Karen Gillan, whom I was unfamiliar with. I now see that Karen is the actress playing the rather 'hot' young redhead in the Jumangi movies; and she also plays the superheroine Nebula in the Marvel movies (since 2014, apparently!). Consequently, I am going to have to try and hold onto a memory of the actress's name.
To be honest, Emma Watson is a name known to me, but I would never have been able to pick her out of a lineup. I have never watched a Harry Potter movie, so I do not have that familiarity with her that most other people might.
Her character in The Circle was almost unbelievably naive, but the movie itself was undeniably simplistic. Even my younger brother who can not even recognize a browser icon on a computer screen in order to begin trying to 'surf the Web' recognized what was going on with the movie plot.
It was all about the birthing of a 'Big Brother' wannabe.
We watched the movie shortly after 10 a.m. this past Monday morning via our Android TV Box. Then yesterday around the same time, I risked tuning in the documentary HyperNormalization.
It is presently available on YouTube and Vimeo, but I used one of the other streaming 'apps' (CyberFlix) that I have downloaded into our Android TV Box.
The "risk" came of my brother normally hating it when I seek to impose a documentary upon him...and this one was over 2½ hours long (without any commercials)!
Happily, he was to watch it without a demurring word. I think that because it reinforced his world view where events in the Middle East have been concerned since the years when George W. Bush was President, he got quite into the presentation.
But its underlying theme was related to that of The Circle. And both of them very much echo what is happening today with politicians ─ and also (and especially) unelected persons and powers ─ seeking to use SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic lie to seek the establishment of a new world order.
I am hoping that next Tuesday, I will be able to get him interested in a Dr. Joseph Mercola interview of a man named Patrick Wood on the topic of technocracy. My brother hates long interviews, and Dr. Joseph Mercola does take getting accustomed to.
So stay tuned.
There was one further event that has happened within these past two days that is confessedly of major importance to me, although it may lead absolutely nowhere.
Back in the 1970s ─ perhaps from 1973 to 1976 or even 1977 ─ my brother was deeply involved with a young lady by the name of C. Jeanette G******, the mother of two beautiful little girls.
Jeanette and I had a few feuding periods, but overall I loved her. And when my brother stupidly and implaccably broke up with her, I was too much of a loser to step up and offer her refuge and support, even though I believe that she was presenting herself as being wide open to that possibility.
I was unemployed, and a social misfit and recluse; and I had absolutely no employment prospects nor skills. I didn't even drive.
And I was living in a 'bare bones' housekeeping unit in the basement of a house. My quarters more resembled a storage room ─ apart from a bed and a chair, I didn't have any other furnishings. All I had were some kit bags and a pack that were stuffed full of my belongings, as well as clothes piled up and hanging all about.
There were also quite a number of books.
I kept my only window (ground level) covered over with a blanket because I never wanted to answer my door ─ I truly was reclusive. The very few people closest to me knew of a special knock that they had to use if they expected me to answer when they came to visit.
Suffice to say, I was of no use to Jeanette, and it would have been futile for me to offer to step up on her behalf. Our deep friendship would have been destroyed. I could never have sustained any other relationship with her ─ I was too lacking in so very many ways.
In full honesty, it was to be almost a full 20 years before I was ever to have worthwhile employment that would eventually allow me to retire with a decent pension, for I managed to get a position of indeterminate status in the federal government despite my almost empty employment history and lack of a high school graduation diploma.
I had entered a competition for one of three available trainee positions with a federal government department's HR branch, and the people wanting to staff those positions were trying something radically new ─ they wanted to take on three people who were entirely inexperienced with the work.
Up till then, it had always been the same people who would come in whenever term positions were offered. And although the people were okay, since they were intimately familiar with the work, no one stood out enough that this HR branch wanted to risk permanently staffing anyone they had yet tried out.
And so they opened up the competition broadly.
Somehow, I managed to place second. And I think that my to-be supervisor ─ a brazen young Newfie woman ─ liked my demeanour and unusual look at the time. I was 46 years old, although she did not know it. Age was initially kept secret in order not to factor into the determination of the successful candidates.
What stood out about me physically was that I was quite well-built, and I had just recently had a rather bad bicycling accident in which I had been speeding through an industrial complex with a friend one weekend, and I had looked back to see if he was keeping up.
When I looked ahead again, it was just in time to see that I was about to collide into a massed pile of wooden skids. I had no time to try to brake ─ all I could do was grip the handlebars tightly and await the almost immediate collision.
The impact was so severe that my mountain bike's crossbar ─ the bar running from the seat to the handlebars and the front wheel stem ─ was crunched in for about four inches as if it had accordioned into numerous folds, which it had.
I had a number of impact lacerations, but the worst was to the outer orbit of my left eye. The lower part was gouged deeply and bleeding profusely, while the upper part at the end of my eyebrow was gashed.
When my friend caught up to where I was lying amidst the carnage and he saw how profusely my face was bleeding around my eye, he was convinced that I had been blinded and lost the organ.
I lived maybe three miles away, but his suite was only a quarter mile from there. So we made our way back to his residence and I was able to recover a little.
Then from there, I had to try and cycle home ─ as yet, I did not realize what had happened to my bike's crossbar, and I just assumed that the poor manoeuvring of my bike was solely attributable to wheel damage. Some spokes were shot, after all, and the rim may have bent somewhat. But I could still ride it to some degree.
I think this happened on a Sunday, but I never felt well enough after I was back to my room to seek medical attention for a couple of days. I wore a hoodie to try and cover my damaged face from too much public notice.
The gouges around my eye had been filled with dirt from the old skids, and I still have tattooing because of it. The doctor I was to see tried to clean up the wounds, but it only inspired a renewal of heavy bleeding.
The eyeball itself was deeply blood red, and even my good eye was surrounded with some bruising as a result of some collateral damage.
My interview was within a week of my accident.
So when I showed up with my knuckles scabbed from where I had been gripping the handlebars at impact, and with my bandaged, wickedly damaged face shrouded beneath the hoodie, the Newfie woman was quite intrigued by the spectacle.
She even ventured of me whether I might have been involved in a brawl?
She was very earthy, and spoke in the style typical of Newfies. I think that she interpreted me as being someone who could handle one heck of a lot without whining about it.
But I won't get any farther into this ─ I am only trying to explain that when Jeanette knew me, I was a total 'nowhere man' living on the very fringes of society with utterly nothing to my name.
She moved distantly away from the area, but would sometimes phone ─ my brother would never speak to her, though, so I had to. She and I even had some correspondence.
I believe that I last saw and spoke with her in 1979.
And I have always rued that I was unable to retain her permanently in my life.
Well, just three or so years ago, I managed to discover her married name and address. She now lives in Central Canada.
I have always known her birthday (September 22), for she shared the same day with a maternal cousin of mine ─ much to the irritation of his rather jealous wife.
So I bought a birthday card for her this past Sunday, and I believe that it was early yesterday before it was yet dawn that I finally mailed it away.
Thus, unless there are an incredible number of coincidences and this is not really the Jeanette I once knew, I anticipate that the card will likely arrive in time for her birthday.
I didn't say much; but I left her one of my E-mail addresses and the invitation to get in touch if she had the inclination.
I hope that she chooses to, if she happens to be conversant with computers and the Internet. After all, we have over 41 years of catching up to do.
I rather liked a younger sister of hers, too. Of course, both of them are now well into their 60s ─ I think that Jeanette will be having her 68th birthday. But it is my hope that Jeanette will find this enormously unexpected reaching-out from her remote past when she was a young woman in her 20s that she will be eager to contact me ─ and let her sister Marian know of me, as well.
But that's enough retrospection for today.
My younger brother went off afoot this afternoon to catch a bus so he could hook up with one or two of his drinking buddies at a pub, so I do not expect him home until into the latter half of the evening. I can get to bed early, in other words.
I did not sun this afternoon, by the way ─ I found the sky too heavily overcast, and it was a tad cool out there. It seemed senseless to try to sit out there in just a pair of gym shorts.
The smoky air is distinct ─ one can actually detect the fine particulates of the smoke, just as surely as one can see the fine droplets of mist in a fog.
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