Posted on by markusoreallyus

It’s been a while…

I haven’t updated this blog in quite some time… It’s been more than five years. That’s too long. I’m going to fix that.

Like most things in life, writing is a habit. Like mental exercise. If you don’t give your mind regular workouts, it begins to atrophy. And nobody wants that. At least, I don’t.

In the time since I last posted, we’ve seen the Covid pandemic wax and wane. We’ve seen governments come and go – in some cases because of how they managed (or mismanaged) the pandemic. In some other, notable cases, people have been re-elected, in large part due to the forgetfulness of the masses.

Two cats - Bill (a tabby) and Opus (a tuxedo), named after characters in Berkley Breathed's Bloom County

In my own life, I’ve changed positions at work multiple times. But work, for most of us, is the least interesting part of our lives. We’ve had to put down one cat, and adopted two others. I’ve focused a lot of my personal time on music.

The Bad Pennies Jeff Baker - g/v Francisco Bonilla - g/v Markus Milner - b/v Guenter Schulz - d

Since 2020, I’ve joined and left a few different bands. At least one of them is still active, which makes me happy. I’ve been playing with one band now, The Bad CatsPennies, for a couple of years. We’ve been active since 2023. We’ve played in bars, restaurants and legions around the Metro Vancouver area, and represented the Fraser Valley Blues Society at the 2024 International Blues Challenge, in Memphis. We mostly cover other people’s songs, but we have written and performed several of our own, including a couple I wrote. If I could make my living playing music, I would do that.

That’s enough rambling for now. I will try to post more than once every five years from now on.

Posted on by markusoreallyus

The Way – part 6: Balugães to Ponte de Lima

Walking is a very civilized way to travel. So much of our uncivilized, everyday lives is hurried, rushed, squeezed into ever-shrinking packets of time. So much is mechanized, digitized, quantized down to fractions of seconds; so much is performed at speed, on the go, ad hoc, toute suite. The idea of doing something slowly seems to run counter to everything society tells us we must do, must be, must achieve. Faster is better, even if it means skimming over the surface of things without absorbing much of it.

Walking is different. Walking is all about taking time, absorbing as much as our senses can manage, ignoring clocks and schedules to the greatest degree possible. The human is defiantly not mechanical in any sense that isn’t metaphorical – and even then, the metaphor is limited and imperfect.

Walking eschews skimming in favour of immersion. It happens at a speed that allows us – encourages us – to absorb the world around us.

We rose to the countryside sounds of dogs barking, cocks crowing, and a church tower announcing the arrival of dawn. We dressed and packed our things, ate a light breakfast, and then set out from the peaceful village of Balugães. Cobbled roads and tarmac gave way to dirt lanes between vineyard and cornfield, and beneath arching tree branches. The air was cool and the sky was bright and clear. It would be a longer walk ahead of us, but only by a fifth.

We walked, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence. We stopped when we wanted to rest, or to sit and drink limonada in a cafe. We didn’t hurry.

We met others on the Way. There were greetings of bom Caminho and bon dia. We met fellow perigrinos from Canada, South Africa, and Germany. We ate sandwiches at the roadside, and bought bottled water that someone had put out in a cooler for €1. We tried to coax birds and cats to come closer, and generally had the opposite effect.

About five hours after we first set out we arrived at our hotel in Ponte de Lima. It is near the entrance to the city, close to restaurants and bars. There is a market and a fair being set up nearby.

Tomorrow, when it comes, will be the most challenging day of our journey, with an approximately 400 m hill early in the 22 km walk. We may even have to use our trekking poles. I expect we’ll arrive a little later, as a result.

But we’ll deal with that in due course. In the meantime, we have more pressing matters to deal with. Soon we will go in search of dinner, and a bottle of vinho verde.

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 1 Comment

Odds & sods

Strange days in politics…. I mean even more than usual.

In the U.S., Donal Trump talked mostly about himself in relation to Black History Month, with a nod to the little known up & comer Frederick Douglass (oh, my!), apparently unaware of the 19th Century abolitionist and friend of Abraham Lincoln. Turns out the Donald threatened the President of Mexico with invasion and told off the Prime Minister of Australia before hanging up on him. I don’t think this bodes well for the upcoming visit with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau.

Speaking of whom, here in Canada our Prime Minister has abandoned his election promise to reform the electoral system his party subsequently benefited from to one that better reflects the popular vote. I guess when you go from third place to first, your perspective changes. Funny, that. I’d be more disapppointed if I’d fallen for the lie.

Add that to his ‘betrayals’ (utterly predictable though they might have been) of the progressive voters who abandoned the NDP for the Liberals in the last election, such as on oil pipelines, greenhouse gas emissions targets, pulling out of combat in Syria, and so on. Add all of that to his cash for access fundraisers, holidays with religious leaders whose charitable foundations get millions of federal dollars….

For those Bernie-loving Americans who think our Liberal Prime Minister is some kind of progressive poster boy, think again. He and his party are just as inextricably linked to big business as any establishment politicians in the U.S.

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Still too cold, in my opinion, to be out and about on two wheels. I just don’t like frost and ice. I can’t wait for the overnight low temperature to get up to 3C again!

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Reading Guitar Zero (which could be my new nickname) by Gary Marcus. It’s a fascinating book, even if you’re not trying to learn to play an instrument. (And reassuring if you are. It’s not so much that you’re talentless as that this really is difficult! Eventually, with enough practice, you’ll get better at it. Probably.) It looks at how learning a musical instrument rewires the brain, even later in life. Well written, well researched. If you’re interested in neuropsychology or music, or language for that matter, I recommend it.

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Cat is being high maintenance, so that’s all for now.

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Preemptive taxidermy

My cat is an asshole. I expect this is true of all cats, but I don’t wish to cast aspersions on every feline. Perhaps, somewhere, whether presently or in some distant time in the past or future, there exists a cat who is not an asshole. Don’t laugh, it could be the case. Although, it is not the case with my cat.

I have said in the past that cats are the best argument against the theory of intelligent design. This usually causes some deluded cat lover to suggest that feline intelligence is far more advanced than that of humans. I don’t doubt this for a second. After all, Zoe (my cat) lounges around while Adele and I go to work to get money to feed her. When, as happens more or less daily, Zoe wanders around the apartment vomiting, Adele or I follow her around like servants, ready to clean up after her. But then again, in 17 years, she has yet to work out the mechanics of door handles. So, who can say?

I will say, though, that it is not the creature’s intelligence that I am putting at issue here, but that of its supposed creator. But then, perhaps God is a cat. It would explain a lot.

But leaving metaphysics aside, I maintain that, her potential divinity notwithstanding, my cat is an asshole.

In addition to daily, random barfing, Zoe has the annoying habit of thinking it’s perfectly okay to wake me and Adele up several times a night. In some cases, she merely wants attention. How rude it is of us to sleep at such moments! At other times, she will drag a loaf of bread from the counter, through the living room, and into our bedroom, and then attempt to eviscerate it with her back legs whilst meowing at the top of her lungs. Every night it is something different. In fact, it is two or three different things dragging us out of our bed, again and again, in the dark. Is there any better word than asshole to describe such behaviour?

All I know is, she is lucky she’s so cute. As I tell her repeatedly, stuffed cats don’t do these things.