gossip

Just heard the news that my previous company, the one from whose decks I leapt when I switched to my present employer last fall, has just closed its doors and suspended its operations indefinitely. I called the president, my old boss, to offer my condolences, as it were, and my moral support. He seemed to appreciate that. I'm sure if I was one of the employees who got laid off yesterday I'd feel angry at him, but having been out of that rat race for so many months has made me detached enough from it to feel compassion for him. I'm sure he's pretty wiped out right now, physically and emotionally. He sounded that way on the phone, anyway, and he sounds a bit resigned to his fate with this business. Namely, that he's out of business, and probably personally on the hook to his creditors and the bank for a lot of money. That kind of feeling can't feel anything close to good. He's probably having terrible sleeps, if he's sleeping at all. He was a night owl and workaholic before this happened anyway.

I caught up with a few fellow ex-employees today to compare notes about the whole thing, and we all agreed how relieved we were not to be there anymore. It felt like it was a sinking ship even before I left, and I'm sure it has only come to feel worse in the past few months. Always unfortunate to see the little guys get taken by surprise and laid off without any notice at the last possible moment.

politics, and state of mind

The political system in Canada is in quite a state of disarray at the moment. The leader of the official opposition party, Stockwell Day, has had many members of his caucus resign in the past few months due to non-confidence in his leadership ability, and the party as a whole is suffering greatly from the PR wounds it has sustained this winter.

Bearing this in mind, I was quite interested to listen to an interview on our national public radio station, the CBC, with a couple of pundits who were discussing the merits of "direct democracy" system, or "participatory democracy," which has been bubbling to the surface in recent discussions regarding parliamentary and political reform in general. (The official opposition party, for whom Mr. Day is presently the leader, has always considered itself to be a so-called "populist" party, developed and run by the people, for the people - a truly grassroots affair.) The concept of providing a means for any and all interested individuals in the general public to participate directly in the democratic and governance process is initially quite attractive; it would seemingly decrease a growing sentiment of political alienation that many of us feel with respect to the effectiveness of our elected representatives to accurately support our interests, and it would ostensibly engender a more pervasive, inherent form of accountability directly into the political process. All would agree that this would be a positive point.

Eventually, after listening to this interview for a number of minutes in the car this morning, I lost all interest in the topic and switched to a CD instead of the radio. I had suddenly become aware that the interview and the ensuing discussion that went on in my head were pretty much a play put on for my own mental occupation, and that I wouldn't ultimately be able to hold onto any of those concepts discussed for much longer than a few more moments. This is a recurring pattern with me lately; as soon as I become aware of a specific emotion or interest, it sort of disappears and floats away. It's making me feel pleasantly disengaged from my surroundings a bit, but I think that too is probably a similar play upon my mind.

It's more about detachment, I guess, in the continually interesting and evolving forms it takes on in appearing before myself. Detachment to the thought even of detachment, is impossible to hold onto as a mental concept, and even harder to maintain in awareness.

See? Now I'm starting not to make any sense, because I'm not really saying these words and none of them can really mean anything specific when they're strung together like this. The words come out, they come out, they come out, but I don't write them or even think them ahead of time. I just sit here at the keyboard and feel my fingers move across the keys, watching the words appear like game pieces in perfect order across my monitor.