The Last Person

I met a young woman, perhaps 25, at a party. She’s a nurse who works in a busy emergency room that specializes in heart patients. People who have heart attacks and strokes go to her hospital.

I asked her if she ever spoke to people just before they died. She said yes, that it happened frequently. I asked her for a specific example. She said,

“A few weeks ago a man came in that had just had a heart attack. He told me that his wife had died a few weeks earlier. ‘I’ve been learning how to cook and clean and take care of myself’ he said. ‘I’m starting to get used to life without my wife.’ Then he turned pale and died.”

The last person we ever see in life could be a stranger.

But there are worse things than dying guided by a pretty nurse.

The Fighter

He is in his thirties. Old enough to be ugly from the battles but young enough to still have fight left. He is a native Canadian and he’s drunk, just like everybody else in the bar.

He’s a drunken Indian. At least that’s what the whites call him. The little group at the next table are the only ones in the crowd. He can’t hear it but he knows they say it, and other things, “chug” muttered under their breaths when they see his people. The First Nations.

He’s drunk and angry and he punches his wife. Hard enough to knock her back a few steps, send her stumbling into bar stools. One of the white guys stands up and comes for him, he balls a fist but gets hit in the face, hard, brutally.

Then several more times as he falls. He feels the crunch in his face as the bones crack, hears his wife screaming “stop!” over the shouting. He is powerless. Rage fills his eyes, his life of pain and frustration and hardship brimming up. Then he is unconscious.

The Lovers

Another year has passed. The couple sit on a couch in a warm living room. The tree is still sparkling. The remnants of a hangover still cling to them but this is not stopping them from having a couple more drinks.

The brain cells damaged in the previous few days have not yet regenerated which contributes to a mood of hilarity. Tickling, teasing, pet names and jokes that no one else would understand or tolerate are spread around liberally.

It’s fun.

“I love you”, she says, and he responds in kind. Then she starts to cry.

“I feel as though I’m going to lose you”, she sobs. “I don’t know what I would do if I ever lost you.”

He tells her that they have a lifetime to live together. But he knows he cannot guarantee it. What is a lifetime, anyway? Every one of us will meet our day, and time passes by so quickly.

He says their spirits will live together forever. “I don’t want a spirit”, she says, “I want you!”

The problem with taking time off to rest and recharge is that for me, it has the opposite effect. The less I sleep and the busier I get, the more productive and energetic I am. All the relaxation and sleep I’ve been getting lately has me just wanting more. Why write when I could just rest my head on my desk and have a short – maybe even a long – nap?

Because I usually end up drooling on my desk is one reason. More importantly, I need to kick back into gear, because there’s going to be lots of stuff to talk about in 2006.

This is the end of the year, though, and that’s always a good time for a little reflection. To start, I present a brief photo tour of the last few days.

Pulling out the Visa over and over again can be a painful experience.

But when it comes to making bizarre faces, wemi is in a category all of her own.

When gifting a bonsai, care must be taken to dress appropriately.

“I’M HAVING…THE TIME OF MY LIFE! AND IT’S ALLLLLL BECAUSE OF YOUUUUU!” There’s nothing like the Dirty Dancing soundtrack to get the party going.

Some pictures need no explanation.

They say taking pictures of mirrors is bad luck. Who knows what evil lurks here, what creepy weirdo this may awaken…

Uh oh…I think I see something…

Ruuuuunnnnn! Run, while you still have time!

Christmas isn’t a happy season for everyone, as this man’s dispirited shuffle indicated.

Originally a birthday gift, GW finally made it up on my office wall this season.

alevo is in fighting form as we prepare to face off over turkey dinner.

Complaining about the politically correct versions of Merry Christmas is becoming more of a Christmas tradition than putting up lights or chopping down trees. This year it’s worse than ever.

In the last few weeks, I’ve read petitions urging government to abandon Season’s Greetings. I’ve seen people call for boycotts to punish retailers that say Happy Holidays. I’ve read countless complaints on blogs, watched celebrities like Jim Carrey mock the PC terms, and even heard it straight from the mouths of Christians.

The Reason for the Season is under attack. The meaning of Christmas has been stolen from the West.

But what is the meaning of Christmas?

Judging by what people do every Christmas – talk is cheap, after all – the meaning of Christmas is gluttony, alcoholism and hyper-consumerism. Roll that all together and you’ve got Consumption with a capital C. It’s appropriate that the most recognizable symbol of Christmas is a chopped-down tree.

With his simple message of love and moderation and his command that his followers give up all they have to follow him, it’s hard to imagine that this orgy of earthly riches is what Jesus Christ intended.

Perhaps the assault on Christmas isn’t led by politically-correct liberals but by mega-corporations intent on another big December. Maybe it’s not the Muslims, the Jews, the Hindus and those pesky PC liberals who are stealing the meaning of Christmas. Maybe it’s us.

And yet, in spite of the profit- and consumption-driven subversion of Christmas, it remains a special season of generosity and closeness with family and friends. Spending time with the people I love is my favourite part of Christmas. But generosity and closeness with family are not particular to Christianity, they’re values shared among religions and cultures everywhere.

Attempting to make the Christmas season more inclusive is admirable, but replacing Merry Christmas with Season’s Greetings or Happy Holidays is not the way to do it. Instead, people from other cultures will become naturally included as they see that instead of being about Jesus, Christmas is really all about generosity, friends and family on the one hand – or about getting fat and drunk and buying lots of stuff on the other.

Just like Happy Easter is free of controversy because most associate it with chocolate bunnies instead of resurrecting deities, Merry Christmas is en route to all the religious symbolism of the word holiday: holy day.

Merry Consumption, everybody. Let’s get wasted.

I used to work on the mountain in Hamilton on Hester Street, between Upper James and Upper Wellington. Across the street from where I used to work there’s an automotive repair shop called Brucedale Garage, and whenever I had car trouble I’d drop it off there to get fixed.

Since leaving that job Brucedale is a pain-in-the-ass to get to, but I still take the car there because they’re trustworthy and affordable, two things that can be hard to find in the automotive industry. After dropping the car off, I walked down Hester to get to Upper James so I could hop on a bus to get to this office, which belongs to a friend who lets me use it when I need it.

Hester Street is a commercial and residential mix. The block with the garage is single- or double-story commercial buildings. The other two blocks have houses and an elementary school. It’s a nice street, and it was especially nice today, covered in snow. Kids meandered down the slippery sidewalks and across the road as the roly-poly crossing guard blew her whistle. Cars with parents pulled up to disgorge loads of bundled-up children who scrambled over snow banks in their snow pants.

Then I heard the loud blast of a horn. I glanced to my left and saw an SUV braking, because a second SUV was pulling onto Hester from a side street and had misjudged the distance – or perhaps the speed – of the first SUV.

SUV #1 immediatedly started tail-gating SUV #2, but then decided this rebuke was insufficient. SUV #1 put the pedal to the metal and roared forward, swerving to the left at the last minute into the oncoming lane.

SUV #2 would not be outdone and accelerated too. The two gas-guzzlers blasted down Hester, SUV #2 on the right, SUV #1 on the left. Oncoming traffic was forced to swerve to the side of the road to avoid SUV #1, who finally managed to pass #2 and then swerved back into the proper lane, immediately slamming on the brakes to avoid smashing into the cars waiting to turn at Hester and Upper James.

After some intersection jockeying where SUV #1 tried to interfere with SUV #2’s right-hand turn, they were gone.

What defect of character causes someone to risk the lives of children because someone made a poor right-hand turn? Would running over someone’s kid be an emphatic enough declaration that you have the right-of-way?

A year ago, I wrote a post criticizing the Discovery Channel for its lack of skepticism in an episode featuring John Hutchison, a Canadian who claims to have invented a variety of remarkable and inexplicable phenomena that are collectively known as the “Hutchison Effect”. Since then, the post, which is entitled The Discovery Channel is Bogus, continues to attract attention from skeptics and believers alike.

Yesterday, Tim Ventura from American Antigravity dropped by to defend Hutchison, who he has personally worked with. He wrote a rebuttal of some of the criticisms and asked that I post it. You can find it in the comments to the original post. If you’d like to leave your own comments, do so there.