Misled!

Today I was thinking about a popular thing to think about, that whole question of whether or not we're all seeing the same things the same way. Does the colour I call green look the same inside your head as it does to me? Is the thing in my head I'd label a triangle look like something completely different inside yours? Leonard Nimoy died today at I think 83, so sadly, probably one of the greatest tools for finally resolving that question about whether the little electronic signals in my brain would create the same thoughts if I wired them right into yours probably died with him. Nobody else I know of is available to perform the Vulcan Mind Meld.

But Leonard and what he should symbolize to every aspiring actor who just never seems to land that lead role is a topic for another day.

I bet many of the legions of devoted followers I just know are reading this post (a total of 88 views of the whole blog so far, probably about 55 of which are alllll mine) hear a kind of narrator's voice in their head as they read.  Remember the progression from reading out loud to mastering the very grownup skill of reading without moving your lips? For a lot of us our lips were moving because our desperate effort to not read out loud took all the concentration we had, and not silently moving the mouth was a level of concentration to be attained another day. The point is, we learn to read by hearing the sounds that the combinations of letters are supposed to represent. So, we hear our narrator's voice. I wonder how many of us hear a voice that isn't ours? How many think James Earl Jones is their inside voice? any Cindy Laupers? Winston Churchill? or does everyone just hear their own voice, the same as the one they hear when they just speak out loud? I've got to focus here, focus!

How many people have had the terrible experience of revealing the voice of their inner narrator to the outside world (a process often referred to as "reading aloud") and finding out that the voice they've lived so comfortably with, reading book after book, can turn out to be wrong? That there are some kinds of letter combinations that make a word whose meaning you divine correctly from the context in which it's used, but whose sound is one that...well, one that you failed to notice you never heard in the outside, real world? I bet it's happened to lots of people, and I bet there's something very revealing here about how our minds work, and how individuals develop perception and sort their place in the world, if only we studied this phenomenon.

Here was mine: in my Grade 9 English class, we were reading "The Red Badge of Courage", and as usual taking turns reading aloud. I was pretty comfortable with this exercise, because I knew I was a good reader and I enjoyed reading on my own. During my turn, some sentence came up with the word "misled" in it. I'll just mention again that I could have given a pretty good definition of that word if I was asked to, so I was surprised when the teacher interrupted me and asked me to read that sentence again, which I did. I was mortified to discover, right there in front of 25 peers, and at a very delicate social developmental stage, too, that that word was NOT pronounced "mys-eld" but was in fact the same exact word as the one I thought was spelled mislead and pronounced "miss led". My inner narrator was a nitwit! I'm kind of surprised I ever heard his voice again.

I've talked to others who had this same experience with different words. My daughter did the same thing with "awry"; her Narrator told her it was pronounced "orry" and she did not really know for certain what another completely different word she had heard but not read but which was pronounced "aw-wry" meant. I wonder what other ones people have had this with...I wonder if there are just particular words with particular vowel/consonant combos that lend themselves to this kind of thing? I wonder it's actually just a universal experience that not many remember?

I really wonder if it was worth this whole post to ask, too....

Paper route

So, at 58, I've finally taken on a job I have been dodging since I was about 12. I have a paper route. I may be the highest paid paper boy in Canada at the moment, in fact. Really, any job I can get at this age where I may be referred to as a "boy", I should be paying them.

All right, there may be some slight deviance from strict truth (my iPad corrected "deviance" to "Bianca"...I feel like I should immediately launch a class action suit on behalf of all those Biancas defamed by careless association. Actually, I'm not sure what a slight Bianca from strict truth is, but suspect it would be great to find out)  in there....it's not really MY paper route even though I do it very regularly, and my earnings are not from delivering thousands and thousands of papers, they're from my former job still paying me. Still, I'm dying for some smart mouth kid to say something to me about getting a real job, so I can hit him with my wallet.

Doug McKay delivered papers in my neighbourhood when I was a kid. It seemed like he did it for about 15 years, but that's probably a perception of time tinted by youth, when time moved very slowly and was in infinite, even painful, abundance. He probably did that route for about 8 years.  Where I grew up there were long winters, hot summers, cold and muddy springs, and perfect autumns. Doug McKay delivered papers through all of them, day after day, year after year, missing shinny games, getting his glasses all dotted with rain, not doing after school sports, lining up reliable sub contractors a couple of weeks a year when his family went on vacation, and acquiring a socially damning reputation as a reliable, mature young man. I remember he got a nice bike somewhere along the line, that he paid for out of a couple of years' earnings. I liked that bike...but Doug and his paper route taught me probably the opposite of the desired lesson. I LOVED playing shinny til dark, or shooting baskets, or riding bikes, or sitting around eating sunflowers, and even in Grade 8 missing out on all that didn't seem worth it, even though that was a really nice bike. I learned that hard work brings rewards, but that goofing off is pretty precious, too.

I don't know where Dougie ended up, but if there's a God of Industry he should be running a giant steel mill and driving a Ferrari. Me? I finally made it to paper boy. You tell me who got it right.

Cow Whisperer

I've recently been given access to a lot of free time, and so I thought I should start writing down some of the sure-fire get rich quick schemes that have crossed my mind lately.   As the title suggests, this one is about becoming a Cow Whisperer.

Everyone has heard of Horse Whisperers, and Dog Whispers, those guys whose special bond with and insight into the animals' minds allows them to promote and develop those animals' relationships with their owners and with other animals.  I've often wondered how that works, and I've often been amazed at what looks like evidence that it DOES work.  This isn't that...which could be another post, "CBC Radio's New Fall Lineup".  I digress.

This idea came to me on the way to a tasty dinner on Commercial Drive.  My friend and I were walking towards the restaurant and happened to pass by a popular local butcher's shop.  There was a small but passionate group of animal rights activists holding a protest in front of the shop, led by a dynamic young woman with a bullhorn.  As usual, I attempted to pay no attention, but then my attention was caught by this strident declaration:  "THERE IS NO HUMANE WAY TO KILL AN ANIMAL THAT DOESN'T WANT TO DIE!"

I was amazed - I had always kind of half thought that there were two main issues: either that the way beef and other meat is raised and brought to market makes it very unhealthy to eat, or that it's simply wrong to eat other animals.  In a flash, here was another alternative, maybe even one that dealt with both those concerns in one heavenly stroke:  only eat animals that WANT to die!  Then the question becomes "How can you tell whether an animal that seems healthy enough to eat might actually want to die?"

Enter the Cow Whisperer...or the Sheep, or the Chicken, or the Pig Whisperer.  Enlist the aid of the Whisperer, someone blessed with the ability to look deep into the bovine soul and determine that a given animal would rather die than be bossed around by Farmer Brown for even one more day.  Given that this wouldn't be a training or obedience exercise, there would be pretty much no way for a layman to detect the outcome of the whispered communication - only the Cow Whisperer could convey the animal's secret wishes.  It might turn out that whole herds of animals that happened to have reached the right size and age for human consumption might share a collective wish to die.  Only the Cow Whisperer could really know.

Think of it!  Farmer Brown could look the purchasing company in the eye and declare that the cows he's selling can be consumed without scruple or guilt by anyone, because they've been certified as Wanted to Die.  Packing plants would be sure and print that declaration on the wrapping, just like when Mars Bars were labeled as having "No trans fats!".  Imagine the giant cloud of guilt and angst that would lift from the world, knowing that the meat they eat was once an animal that was okay with being killed and eaten.  Imagine all the fields in all the countries currently growing lentils and bulgar that could be pressed into use for new Walmarts.  Imagine if this were your idea, and you had cornered the market on turning terrified, oppressed, abused farm animals into willing participants in the modern Circle of Life, and made a couple of bucks for every animal certified by one of the people YOU certified as able to make that determination.

Because of course, that's what you'd do.  You'd develop and copyright a secret training process that turns ordinary people like farm owners into Certified Cow Whisperers.  You'd patent the symbol that becomes the standard for recognizing whether it's morally okay to eat something.  You'd branch out, and develop similar yet different programs to certify people as being able to Whisper to every form of animal that people anywhere want to kill and eat, or even just eat.  In time, to be thorough, you'd branch out into plant life, certifying Wheat or Corn Whisperers who would be trained on how to stand in front of 500 or so acres of plants and sense from their collective life vibration that they're ready to be made into bread or pizza dough.

I'm pretty sure that this would end up as a bio pic starring Jeff Bridges, too.  I don't think a Nobel Prize is out of the question, for The Relief of Human Suffering.

So, what's IN here, anyway?

So here we are, threshold of a brave new world, ready to unveil magnificent yet somehow, for decades, completely hidden talents to a loving yet unsuspecting public.  I can feel the excitement building already.

Do people explain in their posts whatever it is that makes them do it?  Do they talk about goals and aspirations, the greater good, a message of depth and significance that the world needs to hear?  If that's normal, I'm already in trouble here.  I'm writing this because a friend suggested I do it, and because it might be fun, and it's called "From the Mental Basement" because as much as anything else it's yet another attempt at decluttering.  I don't have a Big Message.  No doubt there are things in the basement that someone else might find useful, but it's equally certain that there's a lot of stuff in there that is just junk. Either way, diamonds or dirt, I need to get it out of there before I lose track of Nixon's hat size, or forget how to put pants on.  What you take and what you leave from this garage sale is your business; it's always nice when someone turns out to be very happy to take something off your hands that you were dying to get rid of anyway.  Just don't sue me when you run out of storage space and suddenly forget how to drive.  When you're on the freeway.  Probably the best way to get even, just like in a real world garage sale, is to trade me stuff that you don't need and I can't resist...so the basement is still full of miscellany, but at least there's now different stuff down there waiting for me to either get rid of it or find a use for it.  In fact, clamouring for me to do something.

I'm pretty sure most of the stuff I'm peddling doesn't have a lot of hard practical value.  If it did, I don't guess I'd be trying to get rid of it, would I?  Who gives away sterling silver cutlery at their garage sale?  No, it's more like the things you hung onto because you had some half-baked idea you never acted on - that hubcap from a '68 Volvo 142 was going to go on the wall of some kind of never-gonna-happen man-cave as a momento of the terrific crash you walked away from a thousand or so years ago.  The electric barbecue briquette starter, the one that looks like a stove element with a handle on the end of it, that you kept in case you ever went back to briquettes rather than propane, the one that's now so old it'll probably set your house on fire if you actually try to use it.  Whatever the mental equivalent of that kind of stuff happens to be, that's what I expect to see here....but it's not like I actually know.  Did you know that the Bellini, that tasty pink slushy-like drink that usually comes in a cocktail glass with an amusing plastic animal stuck in it, was invented in Venice and named after the shade of pink of a robe in a painting by Bellini?  I read it in a novel by Louise Penny.  That's a useless yet mildly interesting bit of stuff that's taking up space near the furnace.

Okay, that must be enough to start with.  I'm interested to know how this all works, or what it looks like if it actually is working.  Worst case, I at least put a bunch of stuff into boxes with labels on them, so they're easier to deal with next time.