The light follows wherever she goes. Constant. In each apartment
or home, the aquarium’s glow casts shadows into her days, and
her nights. Most times comforting, the hum of the pump,
its gentle bubbles rising to the surface, has become
the white noise of even her darkest days.

Controlled. There is life contained within the glass walls, fish
with a purpose, providing motion when everything else becomes still.
And silent. People come and people go. Some stay for a while,
becoming little more than lovers. She remained a convenience,
a receptacle for ego, anger, and lust.

She knew her demands would eventually push them away. She asked
for so little, and cared for so much. No exit from the outside,
survival requires time. The aquarium has few demands,
save fresh water, food, and oxygen. Simplicity.
Why aren’t all other relationships so easily sustained?

Men required more attention and could not respect who she was, or
accept what they were offered. Fools. She didn’t ask much, except
to be loved. And they moved on. Or she did. Another home,
the same furniture, anxiety and a few less memories, boxes of stuff
collected through the years, and the aquarium.

Loneliness follows her everywhere. Unrelenting. She thought she felt love,
and it destroyed all she knew. Stars now cry on hot summer nights and
the flowers simply stand there. Stillness. The aquarium provides the
only sign of life, the only beauty she continually acknowledges,
because it can be controlled.

©2014 j.g. lewis

Can certain images we often see, come only at night, and only in dreams?

You wake and wonder about a reality prompted by nocturnal scenes, and more so, by what we believe. By no means figments of your imagination, the dreams are real but require an imagination that happens while you sleep.

Through the day you have walked for miles, and thoughts have travelled far and wide. At the end of the journey the body is cold and tired of thinking, and moving, and doing. A good night’s rest can restore the body’s strength, but more importantly revitalize all that matters.

As the body adjusts to a horizontal plane, tension is relieved and joints become free of pain. Spread across the mattress, weight and mass is more equally distributed, your feet and shoulders now free of the burdens they carry. Comfort is important; lord knows you’ve spent enough time through the day adjusting to someone else’s needs, wants or orders. This time is all about your entire self.

Quickly you react to the new stationery position; the blood flows more freely and, finding its own tone or tempo, the chest rises and falls. Each breath shifts into rhythm with a lessening heartbeat. Muscles once constricted or contracted can expand as the body takes up a new space and shape. The mind becomes free to wander, your head feels hazy, and your now-closed eyes lapse into the head.

There is that slight dizziness as you notice the descent. This is the point where the mind realizes it is free-falling away from thought patterns, stupid questions, and the annoying idle chatter it is forced to contend with through the day.

Your mind may, briefly, seize the moment and try to react. We all have those one or two questions that demand to be answered at the end of the day, yet the solutions are not strong enough to hold you back, and are too weak to resist the pull of Morpheus.

With the blood slowing down to a nocturnal pace, all those emotions stuck in the veins and capillaries are now free to drop off the cell walls and circulate through the limbs and up to the head. Automatically you breathe in the still night air, releasing negative energy and feelings with each exhale.

It is while you are sleeping that the mind opens up and deep thoughts and memories begin drop in. Unpredictable predictions are released from the darkest crevasses of the brain. With the blood flowing smoothly, feelings and hormones shake themselves free and begin to travel through the bloodstream to the heart where they were born, and the brain where they were active.

The residue of days and years gone by, information forgotten or misplaced, along with people and places, are the things dreams are made of. Everything we dream is not imagined, and most of it is true. Or can be. Much of it is forgotten, or lodged in those hiding places we are often too busy to visit during our waking hours.

Dreams need not solve the world’s problems, and may only be mild entertainment. Depending on the stress or satisfaction of our daily lives, and ultimately sympathetic to time, there is nothing simple about dreams.

A dream is the result of what you know, or want to know. Dreams are not at all logical, but many times will make sense, if you don’t mind or allow it to matter.

The Canadian government has introduced a bill to protect transgender people against discrimination and violence.

Sad.

It’s sad really, not because it happened, but sad because it had to happen.

I feel blessed to live in a land respected for democracy, human rights, peacekeeping, and charity on a worldwide scale. We are recognized as a multi-cultural nation that, under our constitution, guarantees our rights to freedom of religion, to move around the country freely with equal and legal rights to life, liberty and security. Entrenched in our Human Rights code is protection for all citizens, regardless of skin color, gender, sexual orientation, race, or faith.

Still there is a need to further define who needs to be protected against discrimination and from hate crimes.

It has been a while since I’ve taken a look into our constitution. I did, when it was introduced in 1982, leaf through the document with more than a pedestrian interest, and distinctly recall the use of the word peoples.

Peoples, to me anyway, mean human beings. Humans, to me, indicate those of flesh and bone, and mind, muscle, ego, and id. Apparently it is not enough.

I know it’s more than a black and white issue; in fact, it is not any shade of grey, or even about the wide spectrum of color. It is about how people are treated on the basis of anatomy and psychology. It is confusing for some.

Why can’t we all just live together?

Instead of going into detail, wouldn’t it just be easier to be more general and treat people as people, following a golden rule that — despite its religious shadows — asks you to do unto others as you would have them do unto you?

Shouldn’t the Ethic of Reciprocity be enough? Am I just being naïve?

I honestly thought we had moved further away from the genocide and persecution that has stained global history. I seriously believed that stories about pink triangles would now only be lore to educate and inform future generations about what once existed, and how we — the big WE, the global WE — had changed.

WE, obviously, cannot think in big terms and, quite obviously, have to craft our laws around small minds that cannot view people unlike themselves as humans with the same rights and freedoms they have the freedom to enjoy.

WE should be allowed to live and work without judgment, and to make friends and take lovers of ethnicity, faith, or skin tone unlike our own. That, I believe, is the freedom our constitutional document provides. That is the kind of freedom I believed I was raising my daughter under, and that is the type of freedom I respect.

I know I am not alone, yet there is still the need to further define. Any time you have to define, you are actually becoming more exclusionary than inclusive.

Every timeWE add another definition to our laws, or further clarify what or whom can do what where, or with whom, it does not strengthen the document, but rather weakens our society.
© 2016 j.g. lewis

No matter, no matter what color.
You are still my brother.
I said no matter, no matter what color.
You are still my brother.

Everybody wants to live together
Why can’t we be together?
                       -Timmy Thomas @1972

I love bicycles. From the sheer freedom of the ride to the aesthetic of a purposefully functional design, I’ve had a lifelong love affair with the two-wheeled glory.

With youthful memories of careening down lakeshore paths and sidewalks on a rusty red CCM, receiving my first non-hand-me-down bike with a banana seat and butterfly handlebars, and discovering increased acceleration with my first 10-speed (Apollo brand; a thing of beauty), each of my bikes has marked another stage of life.

The first poem I remember writing in grade school began with the line ‘Bicycles, tricycles, velocipedes’. I can’t recall the rest of the verse, but I do know it was written about the time I discovered the thesaurus.

It has always been more than transportation for me. As a teenager, the bike served as off-season training for a competitive alpine skier. There is also a certain romance to the bicycle, exemplified by a high school girlfriend who shared the same affinity. I remained true to the two wheels, even after several serious accidents, broken bones, and more than a few outbreaks of road rash.

I didn’t bring a bike with me when I moved from another province, but this summer may be time to get back in the saddle.

There is a tremendous circuit of bike trails and paths throughout Toronto, and soon to be more. Maybe. City council is debating a long stretch of pavement, unencumbered by streetcars, which will further link existing routes. Unfortunately, the plan also seriously reduces on-street parking in the area, and will hinder traffic at peak periods.

I believe in bike lanes. More so, I believe bike lanes are necessary in this car-centric city (or any urban environment on this continent). It is all about safety, and it has been a growing concern for decades. Years ago cars and bikes could inhabit the same roads, quite easily. Then both cars and bikes got faster, and the numbers increased. At some point the animosity grew between the two factions. We now have far too much road rage. It happens all the time, and happens year round.

Now I have a lot of respect for those committed cyclists who pass on the gas guzzling vehicles the majority of us rely on to get to and from work. Bless the bastards who shun the environmental hazards and ride through the sleet and snow, navigating the ruts and drifts of a snowstorm, thumbing a nose or waving a finger to inclement weather (bonus points to those Winnipeg cyclists who take on the -40 prairie temperatures).

But curse the confused; the riders who, without a light or helmet or common sense, weave through traffic on the icy roads at night with a bag of groceries on each handlebar. Damn the careless souls who give cyclists a bad name; those who exhibit little care about safety for themselves or others.

The bicycle lanes being proposed here, and in others cities, address the need for safety that planners of the modern roadways of North America have been blind to. Quite simply, cars and bikes cannot co-exist on the roads they way they exist right now. There needs to be lanes that give cyclists a place, and drivers the space, without concerns.

A lot of talk centers around the dangers a car presents to a bike, but there needs to be greater caution on the part of the cyclists as well. Yes, bicycles have the same rights to the road as a car, but they must also operate under the same rules. A rolling stop at an intersection is the same for a car as it is for bike; it is not a stop. It is, technically, illegal. As is weaving through traffic, or not signaling turns and lane changes (a problem with both bikes and cars).

Bike lanes, on so many points, go a long way towards reducing both concerns and the conflict. Yes, the lanes might slow traffic slightly, but they will keep people moving safely along the path.

It was only a bagel.

Well, not a real bagel; it wasn’t a Montreal boiled bagel, or one of my favorites from Winnipeg’s City Bread, but it was what was available. It was one of those franchise bagels, one of the many baked items available 24/7, from the outlets that dot this country.

It was ‘bagel-like’. It did have a hole in the middle (not to be confused with the many styles of donuts offered) and it was soft in that chewy sort of way, flecked with sesame seeds, toasted lightly, and slathered in cream cheese. Often a bagel is my breakfast or lunch default; a convenient item to take away hunger pangs.

I will pop into one of the outlets on my way to the office. It is convenient. It satisfies. It will do. It is, however, a continual source of irritation as it is never done quite right.

I usually order on the fly, with big cup of take-out coffee. You have to wait, yes, but not too long before they hand you a crisply folded paper bag. While waiting you even have the opportunity to watch the employee with food-safe plastic-glove-covered hands spread portion controlled cream cheese onto the bagel halves, close the top, cut, and then fold up the envelope in the tried and tested method trained to each employee.

Sometimes I’ll eat at one of the tables on location, occasionally in the car, but most often back at the office where I unwrap the well-wrapped item and sit with my coffee.

There the frustration begins, for as much as each step in preparing the bagel is seemingly followed precisely to franchise quality standards, they never (well hardly ever) cut the bagel properly.

Yes, it is sliced down the middle, but the cut never goes deep enough. One edge, or one piece of one side of the bagel, remains affixed to the other side, so when you go to pick up the half you intend to eat, the other side comes with it.

Of course, then it gets messy as you take the other hand, the one you hadn’t intended on using — the one that is often brandishing a pencil or steadying the page of a book — and you have to use it to pull the item into two pieces. It never comes apart easily, often the top half will slide off or the cream cheese dabs a finger, and you need to pull harder with each hand and the bagel splits into three pieces. Or four.

It is no longer convenient, nor as appetizing, as you have to lick any stray cream cheese off each digit, or wipe it away with the conveniently provided napkin. What a waste.

Now, the knife used to cut the bagel has to be sharp enough, the other 7/8ths of the slice is near perfect. And the employee doing said slicing seemed to do it right; steadying the bagel with one glove-covered hand, assuming the firm ‘gotta-slice-this-correctly’ posture, and then committing to a full motion slice. But it never (well hardly ever) works.

It’s not until you sit down to eat that you realize the slicer was simply going through the motions, and the job is not complete. It’s not one particular employee that does this, for I have been to several locations, which leads me to believe it is a systemic company-wide issue. It’s like they are so busy getting on to the next order that they rush through all that needs to be done. In this case it does not get done, not completely. It’s like the goal of providing a quality product dies on the cutting table.

I know many of us multi-task, and we often have so many things on our plate at the same time, but I also know that if the tasks at hand are not done properly, there are always ramifications.

We can’t simply go through the motions and expect our inadequacies will go unnoticed. If something is important enough to do, it should be done right, or well . . . or not at all. It should be up to the expected standards, but mostly up to the standards expected of oneself.

It’s only right. It is about taking pride in what you do. Whether you are working in a donut shop, installing windows in a magnificent glass and steel condominium, producing copy for your website, or selling stocks and bonds to a valued client list, you’ve got to care more about what you produce. Doing something right, or just rushing through a task, is the difference between quality and inferiority. It is only right to do the best you can do with what you are doing.

There is a major difference between something done right, and leaving something almost done. It might be a case of not formatting something correctly, or leaving that last little bit for later and then never getting around to it. We all know what it is like to rush through something.

We all should slow down, just a bit. Sometimes you only have one chance to make it right. If not carried out properly, you will be remembered not for how good you were, but for how difficult you can be.

© 2016 j.g. lewis
“A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality”
                                                                                                                                                      ― Robert M. Pirsig
                                                                                                                                     Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance