BLEAK MIDWINTER

Two postings in one month - shit, you bastards don't deserve it! Sorry, that didn't sound too humble, now did it. And the language, right off the bat, was verging on the profane - although no more profane than you'd hear on prime time network TV shows like CSI Missoula: Cattle Mutilation Unit, or whatever the latest offshoot of those madly popular TAG * shows might be. (Sample dialogue: "What kind of sick bastard would rip off a cow's udder?") And I'm probably misusing the word profane. I visit Ted Baehr's Christian movie review page (link here) to decide whether a film can be viewed with my teenaged girls without embarrassment or annoyance. (Most of the mainstream reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes are far too cool to mention overt sexuality, homosexualist agitprop or other of the left-wing messaging endemic to Hollywood. As for the Alberta Film Classification department, it follows Ontario's liberal lead in under-restricting movies, so that a US "R" rating invariably becomes an Albertan "14a".)

Anyway, Baehr speaks of profanities and obscenities as separate entities. I'd always ascribed to the OED's second definition for a profanity: "an oath or a swear word." But Baehr srictly defines a profanity in its non-secular sense of breaking the third commandment ( You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God). Thus "Omigawd" is rated as a profanity, "cunt" as an obscenity, and "Jesus Fucking Christ" as both. Yet when I think of how almost reflexiively Goddammit, the aforementioned JFC, and the ubiquitous Jesus Christ! are used these days, it seems archaic to presume any intent to profane the Lord's name. As with most swearwords - or "swears" as the slacker generation slackly calls them - profanities are used for emphasis, or to indicate discomfiture or anger, or simply - as is the case on the construction site - to gain entrance into the brotherhood:

Fucking cold today, eh?

Christ, yeah!


Following a previous blog of mine in which I'd posited the demise - or at least the transmogrification - of swear words (link here), I read Down and Out in Paris and London, which was written by George Orwell when he and the 20th century were in their early 30s. The book was a non-fiction account of his experiences as a pauper in the two great cities. It is a great piece of gonzo journalism, written more than 30 years before the Baby Boomers "invented" the practice of a journalist becoming part of the action (I think there might be a book on the things we Boomers think we invented. ) It tells the story of the low-lifers Orwell - or Eric Blair, as he was known off the page - encountered while working as a plongeur (dishwasher) in the kitchen of a fancy French hotel, and then as a tramp in London. I bring it up because Orwell discusses the transmogrification of obscenities and/or profanities in England. To wit:

The swear words also change — or, at any rate, they are subject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the London working classes habitually used the word ‘bloody’. Now they have abandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them as using it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotch or Irish origin) now says ‘bloody’, unless he is a man of some education. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale and ceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes. The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ‘fucking’. No doubt in time ‘fucking’, like ‘bloody’, will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by some other word

The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic — indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret — usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. For example ‘fuck’. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use, this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morning till night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarly with ‘bugger’, which is rapidly losing its original sense. One can think of similar instances in French — for example ‘foutre’ [literally: semen] which is now a quite meaningless expletive. The word ‘bougre’, also, is still used occasionally in Paris, but the people who use it, or most of them, have no idea of what it once meant. The rule seems to be that words accepted as swear words have some magical character, which sets them apart and makes them useless for ordinary conversation.

Well, I'll be bougred! It always comes as something of revelation to learn that the F-word and its pals were being used in my grandfathers' heyday. English language books and movies, heavily censored up until the late 1950s, give the impression that such usage rarely occurred in pre-Boomer times. For example, Norman Mailer's first published novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), a precursor to Joseph Heller's Catch 22 in its lampooning of the American military brass in World War II, famously used the euphemism "fug" - a locution that was supposed to have prompted Dorothy Parker, upon meeting Mailer, to say, "Ah yes, you're the young man who can't spell." Incidentally, the 1960s underground rock band "The Fugs" took their name from Mailer's book.

* TAG = Tits, Abs & Gore

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A couple of years ago, some British researchers identified Jan 24th as the most miserable day of the year. Apparently, the cumulative effects of the post-Christmas letdowns, the yuletide debt and the miserable weather peak on this day. For me, Jan. 24th carries further significance in that it's the anniversary of the Dolphin family's emigration to Canada. This year marks 40 years since that fateful landing of an Air Canada DC-10 at Toronto International in the rain of a January thaw - a thaw that soon gave way to the coldest cold and snowiest snow that this pilgrim had ever seen.

My parents' decision to emigrate took me from a fairly comfy English grammar school in the Midlands to a rural junior high north of Cobourg, Ontario, where they put us outside for the hour-long lunch break. It was during these breaks that I was assailed by farmers' sons who took personal exception to my accent and my funny English clothes. There were fights in the snow with the boys called "Wayne" or "Dwayne" or "Lorne" whose favourite form of provocation was to call me a "limey faggot" and hold out their cupped hands as if presenting me with their penises. And while sometimes I managed to land some punishing blows and even win a few of the bouts (I'd played rugby at Alcester Grammar, after all), I early on acquired a livid, purplish black eye that those coming upon me for the first time took as a hideous birthmark. This made it difficult to talk to girls. But gradually the mark of Satan subsided, the novelty of my alien-ness waned, and the attacks diminished. I made a few friends, and inevitably acquired the nickname Flipper, which stuck through high school in Cobourg and was later shortened to "Flip" . . .

But enough autobiographical indulgence. The subject was Jan. 24th and the miseries attending that date. This Jan. 24th - a Saturday - saw me on the Benchmark scaffolding crew helping to complete a tube-and-clamp scaffold at the Flint Engineering yard in Cold Lake, Alberta. And miserably cold it indeed was. The temperature when first we exited Tim Horton's after breakfast was minus 31 degrees C, with slight breeze. As the sun came up, the temperature rose, achieving minus 24 by noon - but the wind had picked up, reaching 40 km/h and creating a wind-chill effect of something approaching a feminist's sense of humour. "It's going to be fucking brutal out there," foreman Mike had predicted, and I guess it was. But not so bad as you might think. As the cliché goes: you dress for it.

I wore long underwear beneath lined ski pants; three pairs of socks inside felt-lined work boots; an undershirt, a turtle-necked shirt, two sweatshirts and a lined windbreaker. Over all of this, I wore the green Benchmark overalls and, over that, quilted, bomber style ski jacket. On my head was a balaclava that covers to the eyebrows at its top and the tip of the nose at its bottom (one of my crewmates refers to it as a "worker burqua"), the hood of one of the sweatshirts; the mandatory safety glasses; and the gunmetal grey Benchmark hardhat. Quite natty, as you can see from the photo.

In the Flint yard, there was a good number of other trades, similarly clothed, working on other aspects of the "mods" (modules) - platforms on which is bolted pumping and refining machinery for use in the oil patch. Our scaffold was built on the platform and threaded in and around the pipes and machinery, its decks positioned to facilitate the construction of the steel walls and roof. It took four of us two and a half days to build. (Picture below; click to enlarge.)

My humble role was one of "ground man" (a.k.a. "ground bitch") - getting the tubes and clamps up to the scaffolders, sawing and nailing the wooden cleats on the planks that form the decks, handing the planks and the plywood up to where they were needed ... It is mindless but strenuous work, keeping one warm, allowing one's thoughts to wander, and resulting in a kind of numb, almost blissful exhaustion at the end of an eight-hour day. The first two days saw us repair to the Western Budget Inn - where we were staying two-t0-a-room - for showers and a beer, before walking next door to the Boston Pizza for dinner and a couple of "Boston-sized" cocktails.

It is in this convivial, alcoholized atmosphere that the boys tell their stories. Mike, a journeyman scaffolder and foreman in his mid-30s, is a farm boy from Two Hills who couldn't figure out what he wanted to do after Grade 12, and so got a trade. As a ticketed journeyman, he makes around $37/hr, and owns a house in Edmonton which he currently shares with Yin, the tough, little Chinese girl scaffolder we met in the last posting. He drives a two-year-old Honda Civic, takes tropical holidays every year or so, skis regularly in the mountains, and generally enjoys life. Maybe a little too much lately. He's getting a little doughy around the middle of his compact frame.

So Mike's on a diet, and has come to Cold Lake with several day's worth of salad-heavy lunches packed for him by Yin (a Tae Kwon Do blackbelt and a stickler for proper nutriition). The diet goes out of the window at night, though, with Mike shoveling in the grease, the carbs and the alcohol with the rest of us. He's also the only one us here who smokes. At least cigarettes. When the talk turns to the drinking and drugging that are common to the after-work lives of scaffolders and the other strenuous trades (drywallers, steel workers, pipefitters, etc), Mike observes, "When you do work like this, you've gotta have something."

I haven't met a scaffolder yet who gets much enjoyment from the physicality of the job - and Mike is no different. When a scaffold is done, he might lift his curly head, observe the structure, and say, "Well, gentlemen, we got 'er done," with just the slightest note of pride, but more of relief to have it over with. Like everyone else, he moans and groans about going out into the devilish cold of an Alberta January morning to wrestle with cold steel and aluminum.

Mike's sidekick is his first-year apprentice, Andrew, a tallish, spectacled, skinny, blond, 22-year-old Ichabod Crane lookalike from Brandon, Manitoba. Andrew is another bright boy who couldn't figure out what to do after Grade 12. He traveled to Thailand and Australia for a year or so, working construction in Perth before returning to Manitoba and landing a job a a cook in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant in Winnipeg. He followed his older brother - another scaffolder - to Alberta for the bigger bucks.

Although having lived with Thai girl in Bangkok for a while, Andrew has so far been unlucky with love in Alberta. Mike will encourage him to make a plays for women, such as the 30ish waitress in Boston Pizza who brings our drinks. "Ask her for her telephone number," Mike urges, but Andrew shies out.

Completing our foursome is John, a tall, husky, big-bellied journeyman scaffolder in his late 30s who, along with Jon and Danny (encountered in the last blog posting, but not with us in Cold Lake), is an owner of Benchmark and therefore the head man in this crew. He pays for the meals and the hotel rooms - one of which he shares with me - and is has the final say on the design of the scaffold. A bluff British Columbian from the interior smelting town of Trail (home to the BCHL Smoke Eaters), John likes to hunt, snowmobile, ski and boast of his exploits in these and other manly pursuits. For every story someone else tells, John's got one that'll top it. Having reputedly cut a swath through Western Canadian womanhood in his younger days, he's currently settled with a live-in girlfriend and a 15-year-old daughter from a failed marriage on an acreage north of Edmonton. Of all those I've worked with in my two months with Benchmark, John seems the most accomplished scaffolder.

John and Mike have both been working as scaffolders and carpenters in and around Alberta for the length of the boom (which, judging by the activitiy in the Flint yard and the booked-solid hotels, is still going strong in Cold Lake). They are thus able to swap stories about the big camps up north where the unions rule and the numbers are such that work can be shirked without detection. They tell tales of poker games and dope dens in secret sea cans (containers) at Syncrude or Suncor or Joffre. Of fucking strippers and rolling trucks and catching big fish. And if we think minus 30 is cold, try working up in McMurray when it's minus 50 ...

I manage a few stories from my several decades as an ink-stained wretch, but they are not nearly so picaresque. I think this is partly because I've not yet acquired the requisite skills of - er - embellishment. Like the puzzling business of correctly attaching a right-angled clamp to the end of a tube, I think the ability to bullshit is something that one acquires with time and practice. Similarly, I'm not yet that good at the badinage - known as trash talking - that is a constant soundtrack during the erection of a scaffold. These good-natured exchanges generally take the form ribbing one's colleagues for slow work with the implication that they are homos.

"When you two homosexual deviants are finished bumfucking each other up there," John might call up from the deck of mod, "Maybe you could grab this tube."

From up on the second deck, Mike shouts back: "I hear you're pretty fuckin' good at grabbing your own tube, John." And so on, back and forth, all day.

It kind of takes me back to the playground of Dale Road Junior High School and that first bleak winter of Canadian life. I'm an alien lifeform, but I'm sure I shall adapt.

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NEW YEAR'S MESSAGE

I'm probably not "posting" as often as I might, but you have to understand that birds may gotta fly, and fish may musta swim, but this fucking Dolphin doesn't need to write, doesn't have to write, and quite often doesn't want to write. After a day, a week on the scaffold, sitting down in my dark little basement office full of dogs and trying to compose something that will entertain and elevate the souls of you masses - well all seven and a half of you masses - is a chore. There's no money in it; I did it for love. But love fades in proportion to one's aching back, one's aching neck, one's aching shoulder.

Forcing oneself to write can sometimes be like forcing a hard, wide-bodied turd of the type engendered by Tylenol 3s. Yes, those painkillers that I take from time to time to leaven the aches of scaffolding and facilitate sleep, have the unfortunate side-effect of toughening up one's stool - sometimes to the point of constipation. And constipation can do mean things to a man. Martin Luther, I hear, was chronically constipated. Perhaps then it really was 95 "feces" that he nailed to the door in Wiittenburg - as per that old Kliban cartoon. Martin, having finally had a painful and prodigous bowel movement, felt moved to punish the recalcitrant little devils - to nail 'em.

But enough of turds; you may be eating your breakfast sausages.

As I was saying, it's hard to force oneself to write when one is physically tired. But then I do it for you, sweet reader, because that's the kind of guy I am. I give a damn.

Which is nonsense. I do it because writing is what I have always done and I would like to continue to do even though I'm humping and hammering cold steel by day and don't really like doing it.

During the past two weeks I haven't been humping or hammering; Benchmark has been on its Christmas hiatus. Good thing, in a way. A couple of days before the break we had left a lovely inside job at a theatre renovation and were back outside, building a scaffold at ATT Plastics in minus-22 weather with ice fog. ATT is a big Satanic sort of factory, circa 1949, with looming, half-blind buildings full of pipes, valves and the clang and hiss of pressurized petroleum derivatives. ATT turns oil into ethylene and ethylene into polyethylene pellets that are shipped out in hopper cars. It reminded my boss Jon Hokansen of something out of Ayn Rand novel. Although there were no Howard Rourkes or John Galts striding the grounds of ATT - just a bunch of middle-aged functionaries in blue overalls, blue hardhats, blue flameproof winter jackets, and blue-tinted safety glasses. Their job seemed to be walking from building to building making sure there were no leaks or safety infractions. It's a union plant, so there are more of these silent sniffers than is probably strictly necessary. I guess it was a leak that got by one of these sniffer dogs that caused the big explosion and fireball here in November. No one was killed, but a couple of people were injured by shrapnel, a bunch of windows were blown out, a bunch of pipes were bent, and a brick outbuilding was razed.

Benchmark is putting up scaffolding so ATT can do repairs - and on those days before the Christmas break it was cold work. Had we continued it would have got colder. The deep freeze has deepened over the last two weeks. This winter, like last winter, seems as cold as ever, if not colder. I'm sure the Global Warming ecclesiastics must have an explanation. Hey, Al, What the fuck?

Two weeks of unemployment could well have brought disaster to the Dolphinarium, but luckily I managed to get some contract work writing for the Alberta Government. It's kind of dull stuff, but it's warm, dry work that pays three times the hourly rate I get for scaffolding and has tided me over nicely and made Christmas, if not lavish, then at least possible.

I enjoyed Christmas and New Year's as best as I was able. The season doesn't depress me as much as it once did, but still has its moments. There's the overspending, the over-eating and the over abundance of events in the homes of my (mostly) left-wing in-laws. There are the inevitable clashes with The Wife over what presents to get whom. There are those damned form letters from families whose children are paragons and whose substantial family incomes have allowed them to take lavish family holidays in expensive part of Europe. (I was considering writing a spoof letter this Xmas, involving a jaunty recounting of my year in detox and the girls' adventures in the flesh trade, but that will have to wait for another year.) The Yule season also brings a nagging, melancholic nostalgia for Christmases past, when the kids were younger, or when I was a kid myself and Christmas sparkled. But generally it wasn't bad this year. The three girls - aged 15, 17 and 20 - realize we've become poor and are so therefore are not too disappointed by their modest gifts. Besides, their stepbrother John, 28, single, living in a small downtown apartment, and bringing in around $60K p.a. from a software company, is there to buy them the flashier gifts that make Christmas complete: Wii and Rockstar and Ipods and cameras and the like. Johnny's the new Santa.

Christmas Day was its usual self: early preparation of the turkey (my job), toasted crumpets for breakfast, presents in front of the fireplace, Johnny showing the girls how to use the latest gadget, Pam fixing the vegetables, me picking up my mom at her seniors' apartment and having her her describe the Queen's speech as we drove along the snowy streets in the sharp December sunshine. She did look well this year. Then dinner at around 3 pm, with Xmas crackers and paper hats, Mom saying grace, and a brisk vihno verde to wash it all down. Then another present exchanging session with mom; phone calls from my sisters in Cobourg, ON (snow) and Phoenix, AZ (rain); some lazing on the couch with cake and chocolates and tea, followed by a short walk with the dogs in the frigid outdoors. Mother was driven home at 8 pm and those of us remaining - i.e. the nuclear fam - played this year's board game. This year it was Quelf, a crazy, acting-out game that, depending on the roll of the dice, involves singing, writing limericks, miming and obeying silly rules such as repreating everything twice or holding the hand of the person whose piece shares your square. The game would definitely be more fun if everyone was drunk, but it was fun enough anyway and Christmas ended on a happy note a few strokes before midnight.

On Boxing Day the family went to one of those in-law dos, this one at Pam's Auntie Grace's. She's a 70-year-old hippy whose ex-husband gave her an acreage and a 1960s modern house which crumbles and whistles in the wind in the picturesque foothills southwest of Calgary (a 4,5 hour drive from here). I forewent that pleasure so that I might attend Ted Byfield's annual Boxing Day party. This is an event that has been going on for 22 years, although there was a one year gap last year because Ted's house had burned down (see previous postings). With the house rebuilt and occupied last October, a lot of people were curious to see new place. A record of 160 attended.

A Ukrainian choir led us in carols, the Orthodox priest delivered some long-winded homily, and there was the traditional procession of food led by a boar's head. The black-eyed, pink-cheeked head, arranged with lettuce on a silver salver with an apple in its mouth, was carried this year by my scaffolding boss and Ted's co-parishioner Jon Hokansen (the biggest guy in the house carries the pig, is the rule.). Hokansen was followed by five other men in aprons (me included) carrying a selection of dishes from the potluck supper. I'm not quite sure what the boar's head ritual is all about - either a symbol of God's plenteous gifts or a way of pissing off Jews - but there was a hymn to the boar's head sung as we proceeded through the throng, with much flashing of digital cameras in the direction of the passing decapitation Then came lots of eating and drinking, though perhaps not quite so much drinking as I remember from previous Boxing Days. It is an older crowd and getting older every year. Most everyone had left by midnight when I grabbed a cab home, except for a cadre of Ted's grandchildren, most of them in their twenties, who were huddled in study near to the bar. Ted, who's usually in bed by 9 and up by 4, said, "I am really tired." And he looked it. Virginia, hooked up to her oxygen and helping clean up in the kitchen, looked it too. Will this be the last Boxing Day party at Ted's, I wonder? I'll bet it won't be.

New Year's came without quite the occasion of previous years. It had been traditional for the Dolphins to host a New Year's Eve party for Pam's brothers and sisters and their children (my siblings do not live close). Much gaming and feasting was the practice, with champagne and barbecued ribs at midnight, and, sometimes. fireworks in the backyard. But - tempus fugit - all our children have reached an age where they have their own parties to attend. So this year's Dolphin event was toned down. Just two of Pam's brothers and their wives joined us for a movie followed by drinks, snacks and a midnight bottle of cheap Aussie bubbly by the fire afterwards.

The movie - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - stank. I'm beginning to hate Magic Realism, both in novels and movies. There's something precious and condescending in the flaunting of unlikely events and unreal characters. This one, of course, centres on an unlikely event and an unreal character wrapped into one precious package - i.e. the character of Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt), who is born an 85-year-old "man" and ages backwards through his life until he grows to be a baby and dies of, I suppose, birth. It might have been bearable if the story was told in an hour and a half. But it was almost three fucking hours long, filled with platitudinous Kahlil Gibran-style pontifications, a tedious (and of course demographically doomed) love story, and gushing music reminiscent of The Titanic (admittedly a worse movie than this one). The women seemed to like it better than the men, although even Pam thought it was a tad too long. I can't believe it was directed by the same guy who directed Fight Club. That was a good movie.

Back home with our scotches, waiting for the last year of the decade to dawn, my brothers-in-law Brett and Grant and I considered what the Zeroes or the Oughts or whatever this decade is going to be called will be remembered for. Probably terrorism and its offshoots: the war on terror, the aftermath of 9/11, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the Great Satan squaring off against the Lions of Islam.

It is doubtlessly a more definable decade than the 1990s. None of us could figure out the defining characteristic of that final decade of the 20th century. Most other decades in the century seemed to have vivid identities - the roaring Twenties, the Dirty Thirties, the wartime Forties, the prosperous, grey-flannel Fifties, the hippy-dippy Sixties, the Me-generation 1970s, the Greedy, 1980s. But what were the 1990s? Grant suggested it was the Internet decade, but then dismissed that idea because the Internet really didn't become commonplace until the current decade. Ditto cellphones. So although it is true that the digital communications revolution got started in the 1990s, I don't think you can say it defined them. The final decade of the millennium should have something to define it. I welcome your thoughts.

As for 2009, your guess is as good as mine. Economically, the predictions are dire and there is a perverse part of me that says, Bring it on. Let's see what a Depression is like. Give us the kind of privations with which to bore our grandkids that our grandparents inflicted on us. We can't afford meat this month, Ma. Let's cook up the dogs. I hear reports from the rurual fringes that the moisture levels are at record lows. So maybe we'll have ourselves a dustbowl. Not sure if there are still enough horses to pull our Bennett Buggies (or whatever we'd call them these days. Harpermobiles?). Maybe we can hitch our gas-less SUVs to teams of unemployed Newfies ... Sorry, this is starting to sound like Magic Realism.

I have no idea how long it will be before the US meltdown will seriously affect Alberta. The expansions planned for the oilsands are mostly on hold, housing starts are way down, and the Christmas retail season was slower than in 2007. The assessed value of my house dropped about 15% over last year. But the scaffolding business seems to be going strong and there are still "help wanted" and "now hiring" signs everywhere. Thursday I got back to scaffolding. For how long, I'm not sure. I have an idea for a business and 2009 seems as good a year as any to get it started. But more about that later. Meanwhile, Happy New Year.


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Again, thanks to those who have sent me cheques for The Book of Ted. If you haven't got them yet, they are in the mail. I still have a box or two left of these seminal volumes. (A must for any right wing library). If there's anyone else out there would like a copy, mail me a cheque for $50, along with your address. My mailing address is: 15916 Patricia Dr, Edmonton, AB, T5R 5N4