Birthday Bash Pt. 1

I could hear the voices careening through the bush. I was trying not to lose the trail, but I kept staggering off. I could hear my buddy Lil Joe. It was his laugh. That cackle he had since we were little. Deeper but still the same. Earlier in the day, during lunch hour, he told me that he was going to have a fire at his place.

“My parents are heading to the PowWow at God’s, I got the place to myself.” He laughed then, there wasn’t anything funny about what he said, but he laughed. I laughed in agreement but without understanding. “Come one, man!” he said. “It’s gonna be for you.” I looked at him with the same blank smile. “What? Why?” I asked.

“It’s your funeral.” Then he laughed hard, like the joke was real this time and really funny. “What do mean, man?” I asked. “Come on, MAN. Your birthday party,” said Lil Joe, “what are ya, dense?”

“Dense.” That was Lil Joe. He used the same phrases as his old man, even though, nobody else our age did. “My birthday was last week,” I said.

“Who gives a fuck? Shit man, I’m throwing a party in your honour, what the fuck is wrong with you.” There was no laughter, now. No smile. He was actually hurt. What the hell? Little Joe. Lil Joe. He was always going to be a kid. What else could I say? “Fuck, MAN. Fucking Rights. Yeah. FUCK. Man. Fuck Yeah.”

Lil Joe was the first person I remember knowing. Everyone one else was distant and running away. The youngest memory I have is of my mother leaving. All my memories of her are a repeat of the very first. One day Lil Joe was there and he had been there since. Even on family days like Christmas he would be the first person knocking on the door.

“Boy, it’s Lil Joe, go tell him you can come out but he can’t come in,” My mother said with a huff. Smoke pouring out with her words. She was tired now of Lil Joe, I can’t remember when that started. I hold up my Super Slider Sno Skates, she nods and smiles. I take off to the porch drop to the floor on my butt and start putting on my boots. I can picture myself flying across the snow on my Super Slider Sno Skates. On the tv commercial that they played every Sunday during the Wonderful World of Disney, the kids were just flying over the snow. Just laughing and smiling. Their cheeks bright red against their pale skin. So fun and fresh upon the snow in their Super Slider Sno Skates. Now, I have a pair.

I stopped tying my boot. I looked down upon my brown fingers. I held them up before my eyes. I could picture Old Granpa’s hands, fat and sausagey and black brown from the tips of his fingers all the way up his sleeve. The door banged again. I opened up. Lil Joe is standing there. Eyes are red. Puffy. “My fucking dad is beating up my mom.”

I can hear Lil Joe laughing large as I get closer to the fire. My arms are all scraped up and hot from thorn bushes.  The torn skin feels injected by poison like a wasp but not as hot. “Hey, Man, why doesn’t somebody shut this fucking asshole up.”

“Hey Man,” says Lil Joe turning. “Bout fucking time. You fucking asshole. We are already running out of beers.”

“What the fuck, MAN!”

"Ahhahaaahahahahaha. Ahhahaahahahaha."

Everybodys’ laughing with him. What a fucking dink. No fucking booze. All these people. Drinking up my beer. Fucking Lil Joe’s gotta squeeze $20 bucks outta me. For my party.  Now “we already running out of beers.” He’s not gonna fucking burn me again. Last time. That fucking laugh. He’s really hitting that girlish part. He hates when I do that. Mocking that girlish part. Ahhahaahahhahaha. Fucking dink.  The scratches are burning again. Reminding me that they are still there. Still fresh. Open skin and poison.

Lil Joe is toasting up his bottle and everyone else raises their bottles and turns towards me. A semi circle now formed one side of the fire and me directly across from Lil Joe on the other. “Lets have a toast for the Birthday boy, while we still have a beer. Lana can you get the guest of honour a beer.”

Lana Lynxleg. She moved here this summer. Her mom was from up north. She goes behind Lil Joe and then is back with a Club beer. She’s smiling. The bottle is cold in my hand. I can taste it already. How many more? Not the half case I was expecting. Fucking dink. He’s a fucking scammer. That Lana is pretty. She is still smiling at me. Look at Lil Joe. Fucking dink.

He cheers. Everyone cheers. The beer is good. So good. Throbbing scrapes on arms are cooling off. Fading. This tastes so good. He’s laughing again. At me, again.

“Look at this guy suck on that beer. Enjoy it. Ahhahaahahahaha.”

What a fucking dink. Lil Joe begins to wave his arms like Charlton Heston commanding the Red Sea to part. Lana steps to one side. A little closer to me. Just a little closer. Everyone moves. Lil Joe is now doing one of Showcase Showgirls from the Price is Right. In the parting of the semi-circle are three 2-4’s of Club stacked like an Olympic podium.

What else could I say? “Fuck, MAN. Fucking Rights. Yeah. FUCK. Man. Fuck Yeah.”

Language creates reality. Canada's Redskins.

You can see the debate over name Nepean Redskins in very simple terms. It is racist, change the name and logo. It is not racist, change nothing. In truth this is much more complicated and in many ways is the tip of the iceberg. What the people of Nepean should have realized when they changed the name of the football team is that the name Redskins represents the most racist tip of that iceberg.

Those who don't want to change it can make the claim that the name honours Native Peoples. There is truth to that side of the argument. It is one of those examples of stereotyping where other nationalities must think, what are they complaining about; I wish they would name sports teams after us. Afterall, no one wants to name a sports team after something that is weak.

In football, the most physical of all sports not called hockey, you want to have a name that is fierce. Undefeated.  In 1981, the Barrhaven Buccaneers decided that that the name would be the Nepean Redskins. The logo makes it obvious, that the choice was done to emulate one of the oldest NFL franchises and one that would be dominant in the 1980's, the Washington Redskins. The Redskins have been around since 1932 and had won two national championships in it's storied history before winning two Super Bowls in the eighties and one in the early nineties.

The Washington Team has also been public enemy number one in a decades long movement in the United States to end the practice of derogatory Native American sports team names. In the 1960's during the height of the civil rights movement, the National Congress of the American Indian began to call for an end to racist and demeaning team names and mascots. Little changed in the beginning but the work commenced. In the decades since the NCAI and tribal advocates worked to remove or change thousands of sports team names in the United States. In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) the governing body of college athletics, formally condemned the use of disparaging mascots and banned the use of Indian names, logos and mascots during its championship tournaments.

It's hard to believe that the good people of Nepean were completely unaware that the name they had chosen was considered completely offensive and racist. It is not a name like Warriors or Braves where the argument can be made that this is a name based on power and strength, Redskins is literally about the color of one's skin. It also not possible for the people of Nepean to claim some kind of ignorance based on isolation in some backwater hinterland. Nepean is located in the National Capital Region. It is essentially a suburb of Ottawa. The capital of Canada. These people had cushy jobs and access to the best education system in Canada. Yet, they did not know that the name Redskin was unacceptable.

A recent petition to the United States government co-sponsored by respected Lakota publisher Tim Giago calls it our "N-word". The petition submitted to the U.S. Senate and the House of Representives states, "To most American Indians it is absolutely abhorrent for a professional football team to use the color of their skin as their team mascot. As a matter of fact, we oftentimes refer to the mascot of the Washington professional football team as the R word because to us it is as hideous as the N word is to African Americans."

Language creates reality. What is acceptable in language is accepted in reality. In Nepean they have to face up to the reality that they have a racist name and nothing they can say is going to change that.

Quantum Activist

Just saw a wonderful documentary about Amit Goswami called Quantum Activist. It is a biography about a quantum physicist who came to a spiritual crisis in his life and not only found God but proved it. He was raised in a very spiritual family where prayers and offerings to the creator were made everyday. Like many of us when reaching a certain age of independence he rejected his upbringing and began the process of becoming his own man. He pursued mathematics, science and ultimately the highest order of all these pursuits, quantum physics. Quantum physics is the study of the universe at the sub atomic level and conducting experiments within this realm. What physicists have found is that within this universe the rules of reality, the laws of physics that we all accept no longer apply. A particle can appear in two places at the same time, an object can revolve in two different directions, or disappear in one location and reappear in another, and on and on. It is said that for some scientists the results of their experiments were such an affront to everything they believed, they would be driven mad. I certainly can't explain well enough to anyone what this is all about, only that in the years since I have learned about it's existence and what these physicists discovered I have found it fascinating and in many ways comforting. I found it comforting to know that science operating at the highest level in the entire history of mankind was becoming more and more lost, confused and closer to the realization that there was much in this world that we would never understand. In fact in an earlier blog, I had wondered why the study of quantum physics was not informed by spirituality.
http://nativewritesnow.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-is-what.html
Which last night led me to discovering this documentary "The Quantum Activist". In the film, Dr. Goswami details how he had reached a certain degree of academic success within his field and he was being invited to speak at various conferences. At one particular conference he couldn't shake the notion that he was overcome with jealousy, "why was this speaker so popular, why are so many attending his presentation," and so on. At the end of the day he was shaken and as he stared up at the sky another thought had come into his mind and it wouldn't leave, the words returned in a loop over and over again. "Why am I the way I am? Why am I the way I am?" He knew that he was experiencing a spiritual crisis. It was from this moment that he realized that his work should be dedicated towards using quantum physics to prove the existence of God.
There are a number of other significant moments where Dr. Goswami is directed by coincidence and dreams to further his work which he conducts within the strict limits of science and quantum mechanics.
Here is what he has to say regarding the existence of God.

"You can call it God if you want, but you don’t have to. Quantum consciousness will do. Nonlocality, tangled hierarchy, and discontinuity: these signatures of quantum consciousness have been independently verified by leading researchers worldwide. This experimental data and its conclusions inform us that it is the mistaken materialist view that is at the center of most of our worlds problems today. To address these problems, we now have a science of spirituality that is fully verifiable and objective."

And from this study he has created the movement of Quantum Activism which is asking more from us than to simply understand that science proves the existence of God.

"So let’s walk our talk, and make brain circuits of positive emotions. We just do it. We practice. Let some of us be good, do good. Be with God some of the time, be in the ego some of the time, and let the dance generate creative acts of transformation. With this resolution, with this objective in mind, I invite you to become Quantum Activists."

I was reminded of a quote from the book "Touch the Earth" which is filled with quotes from Native American Chiefs and Spiritual Leaders. A quote for Okute of the Teton Sioux describes the traditional Native American philosophy of life and the universe that to me describes ideas that are just beginning to be understood by quantum physics. In 1911, Okute stated.

All living creatures and all plants derive their life from the sun. If it were not for the sun there would be darkness and nothing could grow - the earth would be without light. Yet the sun must have the help of the earth if the sun alone were to act upon animals and plants, the heat would be so great that they would die, but there are clouds to bring rain and the action of the sun and earth together supply the moisture that is needed for life.

A relationship between the sun and the earth for the mutual benefit of life upon the earth is a level of understanding of the universe that is still rejected by science and most rational thinkers. What scientists such as Dr. Goswami are beginning to prove is that our people have always known much of what should be known.

Lifting the Leafs Curse

As I watched the Toronto Maple Leafs stumble around the ice, choke on the open net and skate around with such timidity it looked like the Glee club playing against a prison team during last nights 6-2 loss to the Vancouver Canucks, I thought to myself this is how it must be to be living under a curse. It was like Wizards of Waverly place or any of those kid shows that are like broad slapstick humour and a laugh track. That's how bad it looked at times. A lot of "you gotta be kidding" type plays. But what is it a curse? If we can't even recognize the curse that must be broken how can we ever hope to cure it. Through out sports history we needed to first identify the curse before we could find the cure. First the curse then the cures.

The New York Rangers broke the curse of 1940 when Mark Messier brought the Stanley Cup back to New York in 1994. The Boston Red Sox finally overcame the Curse of the Bambino, when the Red Sox were said to be cursed in 1918 for selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Despite fielding a top notch, high priced team year after year, The Boston baseball team did not win the World Series until 2004.

In Chicago the Cubs have been trying to overcome the Curse of the Goat which was laid on them in 1945 by a bar owner who liked to attend games with his pet goat. When he and his goat were given the boot the bar owner cursed the team. The Cubs had already been in a championship drought since 1908 and that continues to this year 104 years and counting. And this is from a guy with a pet goat.

Sports is an incredibly superstitious pastime. Players have rituals small and large that they are convinced have an impact on how they or their team performs. Recently, the Leafs were playing a game in which their goaltender was under two minutes from securing a third shutout in five games. The announcers said exactly that. To those who have been involved in hockey at any level it is one of the oldest and widely held superstitions in the game. When a goalie is nearing a shutout you never say the word. Shutout. Within a matter of seconds of saying that which shall not be named, the shutout was broken. Two games later the Montreal Canadians goaltender was also looking at a shutout with just over a minute left in the game. The same announcing team was doing the play by play and the announcer stated that he had been lit up on twitter and other forms of social media for speaking that which shall not be named and ruining a perfectly good shutout for the Leafs. He boldly states that there are no tvs near and no live feed anywhere that Montreal goalie Carey Price can see or hear but he is moments away from securing a shutout. Within seconds the shutout is broken. As I told someone once when talking about signs, I'm not telling you what is going to happen, I am telling you what happened.

Which brings us to the question of what is cursing the Leafs and what can be done to lift it. The Leafs are cursed with one thing that most agree is the worst thing to complain about. They have too much money and are way too popular. They are like the New York Yankees without the success. Money and unwarranted success make anyone lazy and make any organization weak. I have seen an organization with way too much money operate up close and all I could think was, "money makes you stupid. You don't have to solve the problem. You don't have to stop the bleeding because you can plug the hole with bags of money."

The most successful franchise in hockey was also granted the top viewing radio and television coverage ever since the technologies were invented. Overfead, de-sensitized, whatever, I don't nnow. During a home game, Leaf fans sit on their hands. While the fan who might see one game in their lives is cheering in homes, and towns and cities all over the country. Corporate weasals they say buy the best seats and give them in graft. In a town like Winnipeg the fans tear the roof off, the vast majority knowing that they can afford this luxury only a couple times a year at the most and once a year for many. And they scream their hearts out in appreciation. And a corporate weasal in Winnipeg is going to be cheering right along. Is it the Curse of Entitlement?

The Leafs last won the cup in 1967, since then the most notably shocking event in modern hockey history is Darryl Sittler ripping off the captain's C during a game. Sittler who would one day be enshrined in the Hall of Fame was the most beloved Maple Leaf at the time, perhaps of all time. The Leafs had the most talented team since the glory days of the 1960's. If any team was going to bring the cup home it was this one. But bad management, disrespect, disputes and internal battle rotted the team from the inside out. Sittler felt he was being disrespected in numerous ways. His personal war with the management at the time hit the apex when Lanny McDonald, Sittler's linemate and good friend was traded away. In protest, Sittler ripped off the C. The action has all the symbolism of a curse. Is it the Curse of the ripped "C"?

The last time the Leafs got close it was in the 1993 when the team was one game away from going to the Cup finals. Hockey Golden Boy, Wayne Gretzky blatantly high sticks the Leaf's Doug Gilmour. Everyone sees it and awaits the inevitable call. There is no penalty on the play. Gretzky scores on the next play. Is it the Curse of Gretzky's Slash?

Is that what it is? Is that how it works. Sports is the place where magic, superstition and reality collide, quantum physics alive before our eyes. I cannot believe what I just saw. I cannot believe what just happened. That much is true.

The curse excuse is just a ruse. Another first excuse. The Curse of Entitlement. They have the talent to make a hard run but they don't to play like it. They didn't play with any pride on Saturday night, just like they did on Mats night. Play with pride. What's that you say? Once you get paid it's no longer play. They,ve got to play like they played when they loved to play when they first started to hit and you were hoping that someone would come your way. When you never wanted to come off the ice? When you never wanted to hear your mom or your dad calling you off the ice and all you thought about was getting on the ice again. Put that with everything you know and you go.

Champions and challengers are men standing together shoulder to shoulder will to will trust to trust heart to heart a unit a team. Carried hard with heart. This is what is done. The will of the many is the will of the one. And a miracle. I've seen it done.