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Backing and forthing

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything on this blog. Being busy isn’t really much of an excuse. It’s not like there haven’t been hours wasted each day that I could have spent doing something productive. If this is, in fact, productive. For the most part, I think of it was talking to myself on (virtual) paper – a way of sorting through the flotsam of my mind, and trying to make some sense of it all. It’s been a strange few months.

A good friend of mine, who I’ve known for more than 30 years, has moved more than 7,000 km further away than he was previously – from Calgary to St. Petersburg, Russia. While I’m excited for him, and support his decision to leap into the unknown, what I feel mainly is loss.

In the past 25 years, since I moved back to the west coast, we’ve really only seen each other two or three times a year, at most, and rarely spoken on the phone more frequently than that. And yet, I’ve always felt a closeness, like kinship, to Scott. He was the best man at my wedding. He’s always been there when I needed him, and I’ve tried to do the same for him.

That he’s no longer an 80 minute flight, or 11 hour drive, away feels strange. To visit him now will not be as simple as booking holiday time and a flight. It will require planning. I’ll need to get a visa, for example, and won’t really be able to book anything until I have one. None of this is insurmountable, of course, and I can’t help feeling I’m being entirely selfish in focusing on this as a problem rather than an opportunity.

And yet, it still feels like loss. Scott was the first of my close friends to ride a motorcycle, and one of the last, too. Most others had given up already. My first long road trip on a bike was with Scott. We rode down the west coast and into the desert. We rode through eight western U.S. states and two provinces in twelve days. By the end of it, motorcycling had become part of my identity.

I’ve done two long trips since then, and numerous shorter rides. One trip, with another friend, who later gave up riding after a crash, expanded on that first adventure. Twelve states in 21 days. And then last year, I rode solo around Ireland and the UK for three weeks.

Since that last trip, though, I’ve barely ridden at all. A handful of short rides last summer and early fall. Nothing really since then. In part, it’s likely to do with not having many people nearby to go out riding with. But mainly, I just haven’t been motivated to do it. Riding in traffic has become a drag, and there just aren’t that many good routes nearby that I haven’t already done, in many cases multiple times. There’s certainly nothing on the level of the roads in Ireland and Scotland. And so, with all that, I’ve put my bike up for sale.

This, too, feels a little bit like loss, although it was entirely my own decision. Seeing my bike in the garage every day, and not really feeling the urge to ride it, was beginning to bother me. Keeping it insured and maintained, but not riding it, seemed like a waste. It’s a great bike. It deserves to be ridden.

I think, more than the annoyances of traffic and the declining number of fellow riders in my circle, my identity began changing last year. I started to think of myself more in terms of playing music than in terms of riding motorcycles.

I’m not very good (yet) at playing music, but I’ve improved quite a bit over the past year. I’ve now got a collection of five instruments – two bass guitars, an electric guitar, an acoustic, and a keyboard synthesizer. Where my YouTube stream used to be filled with motorcycle videos, it’s now full of music-related things.

Are my motorcycling days done forever? I don’t know. It’s entirely possible that I’ll want to do more long trips in the future. Or that a period away from it will reignite the passion I used to feel. We’ll see. For now, though, I’m indulging other interests.

And of course, Adele and I are preparing for our pilgrimage. Dates in calendar are often closer than they appear. We’re just over two months from flying off to Portugal, and then walking to Spain. If I weren’t me, I’d be jealous.

I expect a lot will happen between now and then. Locally, Bard on the Beach has begun it’s 2019 season. We’ve seen Taming of the Shrew (which was brilliant!) and have two more plays coming up this month, and one in August. We’ve also recently seen the Claypool Lennon Delirium – one of the best rock shows I’ve experienced – and have tickets coming up for The Raconteurs, ZZ Top and Iron Maiden (although Adele has already said I should find someone else for that one). Add to that the walking we need to keep doing, the songs I want to learn, the books to read… And… and… and….

Well, this has been a bit of a pointless ramble. My apologies if I’ve wasted your time. But it was your decision, as much as mine, to keep going. If you expected there to be a point to all this, whose fault was that? But I’ll tell you what: I’ll try to do better next time.

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 1 Comment

So long, Facebook (redux)

A few months ago, I went into a Facebook hiatus. After a month away, I decided to go back, because it was easier to keep in touch with people that way. Now I’m off again. Only, this time it was Facebook’s decision.

For many years, on many platforms, I’ve used the nom de plume Markus O’Reallyus. My friends know me by this online. My reason for doing this is to maintain a degree of privacy. Advertisers, trolls and other online snoopers, don’t need to know too much about me. Everyone who I feel has the right to know more will know more. On Facebook, pretty well all my friends are – were – people I know and associate with in real life.

But today I received a note from Facebook that ‘someone complained’ about my name. (Just the day before, someone had flagged my repost of a CNN Facebook post as ‘fake news’. I replied that it clearly wasn’t, they agreed and restored my post.) As a result, Facebook now requires I send them identification to prove my name is my name before I can access my account again. That isn’t going to happen.

I’m not sure who would have complained about my Facebook name. Certainly not someone on my friends list. Probably someone who didn’t like a comment I said somewhere. All my posts are set to ‘friends only’, so it would have to have been a comment on someone else’s post. Interesting that it occurs in the context of a provincial election here.

At any rate, I’m off Facebook again. I’ll be dammed if I’m changing my name or providing them with ID. Transnational companies don’t get to know any more about me than I choose to tell them. I’m the one who calls the shots on my public personae.

Posted on by markusoreallyus · 1 Comment

Post-ethnic post

Today is St. Patrick’s Day. The majority of Canadians, regardless of their ethnicity, will pretend to be Irish today. Most will wear green. Some, alas, will drink beer dyed green. I am not Irish, although some of my ancestors were, if you go back far enough. Others were Scots, Welsh or English. I am none of those things. I am Canadian.

I do not say that out of patriotic pride, and I’m not in the least ashamed of the cultures and countries my ancestors hailed from. But they came so long ago now, I have no claim to their cultures. My Irish ancestors, for example, emigrated here sometime in the 18th or 19th centuries. I’m not even sure which. Was it my maternal grandmother’s parents or grandparents who sailed across the Atlantic? Or was it their parents, or their grandparents? I don’t know. I’ve heard that the Irishness, or at least the Catholicism, still clung to my great-grandmother, who I never met, but my own grandmother had no hint of it. My mother, her sister and brothers had none, either.

Similarly, on my father’s side of the family. Tradition has it that my grandfather’s roots were in Scotland. But he was born in Nova Scotia, with an English name (albeit one that is not uncommon in Scotland), and I have no idea how many generations preceded him. He didn’t even give a strong sense of the Maritimes, never mind of Scottishness. My father liked bagpipe music, and scotch, but he also liked Southern Gospel, jazz, blues and country music, so what does it really tell you?

Some North Americans cling to the cultures of their ancestors – whether Polish, Chinese, Indian, or whatever – long after I would have thought it still mattered. In some cases, this likely stems from growing up in enclaves – Italian neighbourhoods, or Greek, for example. When everyone you meet hails from ‘the old country’, traditions are more likely to be preserved. Language is one of the motivations for such enclaves. It’s hard to learn a new language, especially when you’re older. And English is one of the more difficult to pick up, being so full of inconsistencies and irregularities.

As time goes on, though, ethnic identity becomes more or less notional. Children grow up as Canadians, even if, in some cases, they still look Asian, or Italian, or Nigerian, or Swedish. But they cease to be those things. Generation by generation, they become part of the fabric of Canadian, and it in turn becomes part of them. Intermarriage hastens this. In my opinion that’s a good thing, although I may be biased, having married a woman who immigrated from Belgium at a young age, and whose own ethnicity was a blend of Flemish and Algerian, although after 50+ years here she is at least as Canadian as me. Maybe moreso. Certainly, she is more patriotic.

So, on St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll be just as Irish as my fellow Canadians, wherever they or their ancestors hailed from. No more than any, and much less than some. You can keep the green beer, though. I’ll have a Guinness, thanks. Slainte.