A difficult challenge for me to face was smoking grass. I started smoking pot with my friends when I turned eighteen. We had a lot of fun putting on the tunes and lighting up.
I was mostly in it for a good time, but it upset my mother. At the time, it was illegal. When it came time to go to college, I stopped, but I missed it.
In fact, I missed my friends–I was away from my home at school. I thought I would feel better. My first semester of college was challenging because I lived in a dormitory, and my friends got drunk often.
On the weekend, they would go out to the bars in packs, and while I was smart, I lacked study skills. I spent a lot of those weekends reading and writing for school. I felt left out and lonely.
In fact, it became hard for me to stay sober–I had to work at it. I was a little scared of ruining my chances for a career. While I had a general art & science diploma from college, I had emotional difficulties–back home in my parents’ house, the best work I could find was telephone sales work, which was disappointing after putting so much effort into earning a college diploma.
The jobs I got were boring and eventually disappeared in favour of lounging about, back on the reefer. While I made the decision to quit, I actually had to count the days until the habit dispersed. It’s said that it’s not a physical addiction, but I had trouble putting an end to it.
Smoking pot was one challenge I overcame–I liked partying with my friends, but no one stays young forever. I don’t have those same friends, as they went their separate ways. I can kind of guess the element that was the bond for all of us to keep thick as thieves.
1: to make as if for the first time something already invented and reinvents the wheel
2: to remake or redo completely
3: to bring into use again
Reinvention, in the year 2021, is one way to move out of our present circumstances. It is no mystery that the future will not be the same as was intended.
There is an undercurrent of happiness again these days. Just surviving has become like a triumph, and love may prove the order of the day.
A worldwide perception of a second chance come is rare, and the future is unwritten; here is an age of miracles. You should reinvent thoroughly and carefully.
Governance could at this time be set free by Big Tech, or it could be screwed down like a bench at a bus stop intended not to be stolen.
In Canada, it is debated whether Canadian media on the Internet could get paid, with Bill C-10 ready to put Canadian content front and centre on sites where it is not now automatically top-tier content, kind of a detriment if you don’t wish a Canadian flavour every time you want a user video recommendation. Nor should Canadian viewer recommendations get like the offerings of AI bots behind walls at HQ, or further like that, as I suppose they may already be.
Take the case of Canadian comedian and broadcaster Tom Green, who has lately been highlighting his YouTube channel with a vlog showcasing a drive he did from LA to Ottawa. It is a singular vlog.
Watching Green offer reflections alone in the US desert, about the planet getting back to to a pre-pandemic normal, Green, whom I remember in Road Trip directed by Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, raised the point of how adaptation, not the adaptation of literature to film, but the adaptation you can utilize, being how you could save the endeavours you want for yourself to succeed in the face of unknown days. You start confidently and your handle on what we are facing will strengthen your resolve. I think Green is going, possibly, from the field of comedy, into music.
Without being afraid of having dropped the ball, I am having some trouble relating to the concept of schools as we understand them now, leaving behind their classrooms on campuses without that experience. Goodness, excited about the future opening up for us, if it is not ultimately restricted by forces that we neither foresee coming nor welcome.
There must sometimes be a natural intelligent design for learning–that there could never be would be a very remote possibility. Intelligent design occurs frequently enough that I can not be discouraged from believing what we have is merely a happy accident.
I sometimes wish that, when I once considered affording myself some of the opportunities youth brings, I could have opted for hard work, in light of the big picture. At age seventeen I could have begun to become marketable for the reason, chiefly, of challenging myself to appeal to social norms. Opportunities most frequently available are now changing in nature, while content, as Bill Gates said, could well remain king.
Recently, last year and this year, my posts, each to a recollected song, under the nominal tutelage of Jim Adams, were rejected, when Adams decided he no longer welcomed my participation. That is fine, as my reflections helped me get better organized, and of my several posts for Song Lyric Sunday, even if the posts were finally met with dismay, most of them were useful in their own right.
Beginning again the last few weeks, with a new temperament, how now in the days of yesteryear, when I came up with observations that grew from insights that author Jeff Goins introduced, bestselling author of The Art of Work, with notes on Facebook about how to blog. They never demanded a lot of work, but by now with a little work, they keep my little readership alive.
I don’t mind resuming the approach with which I began in 2012. Without a proper book, or even trying to write a proper book, I might be accused of taking in a blog of this shape and style, mine, without effective longtime goals.
But The Art of Work is the bestseller in Jeff Goins’ hand, about people who carved out singular paths for themselves, and it’s a wonderful book. I doubt it was written in the bathroom at parties.
If this does not work, then, let this be Finding Courtesies in Handfuls of Garden Flowers.
I follow a blog called Fandango, which keeps the custom of single-word prompts bursting at the seams, with the single word prompts WordPress once presented, having reached a conclusion around the time I began composing these. Tonight I looked in thinking I might benefit from such a suggestion, and I saw that Fandango’s word tonight is the word “collaborate.”
The word means work jointly, or, alternatively, cooperate traitorously.
I was taught both connotations to cooperate when I was in college. In the sense of collaboration with a distinguished painter, I learned that in Film 101, and in the sense of collaboration with the colonizers, I studied that in business law.
Film 101 identified for me a few ideas which had interested me since I was a child, like why did names of people run up the screen at the end of a movie.
That film professor was a young, tall, handsome man, who explained that those end credits identified that the film was the collaboration of those people’s work. He told us in the school auditorium that the film wouldn’t have been finished without the help of all of those people. I’d once inaccurately assumed that the most renowned people with their names on a film were the ones who chiefly ran the show.
Until college, I don’t think I’d considered that all of those people were important, not just the ones with star power. It was an advantageous exercise.
It is too bad that schools everywhere have closed their doors at present. Although I personally was only an average student, I think of the problems in the future created simply by making school unavailable at the present time. I have heard of school debunked, of course–Gary Vee, for one, I’ve heard on video overlooking school in favour of an entrepreneur getting started making a living. I’ve heard him say on camera, as he says so many things, that if a young person’s parents do pay for that individual to go to post-secondary, that person had certainly better make the most of it if it is at the expense of the parents.
In fact, I wouldn’t mind hearing what Gary is saying about the present catastrophe. I have seen GaryVee video titles on YouTube recommending that business enterprise on the Internet is as yet a practical road for what’s to come. Good luck to the young people of today, then–they need it.
My college business law class took some of the wind out of my sails at the time. There were a lot of definitions run past us that seemed important yet awfully complicated for beginning young people.
In a day in the classroom, the gentleman who taught us gave us a TV recommendation, of all things. “Watch Law & Order,” he said to us. For a long time I did, not having had such a title dropped on me in a setting like that previous to the day he did.
He was joking about the difficulty he was imposing on us. Thanks for that, I think now. Although for a while I was a fan of the show, you know you don’t get the time back.
There was just so much of it–when did I ever find time to work?
The synonyms for collaborating, both join forces and fraternize, were thus equally handled by the well-meaning but slightly eccentric business law teacher. Some business education is important.
I appreciate Fandango’s prompt tonight. Good luck with staying safe.
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Dedicated to a love of Star Wars, Celebration this month in Chicago flabbergasted fans. The assembly included panel discussions and all manner of Star Wars exhibits, and also celebrity appearances, a teaser for Episode IX, along with trailers for EA’s game Jedi: Fallen Order, The Clone Wars S7, and The Mandalorian. The celebration also took a look back at The Phantom Menace, embracing the sci-fi franchise once again.
I took in some of it owing to its availability on YouTube. Celebration, I recall, is nine years in the running, and in 2019 it highlights Episode IX. Celebration revealed the title of Episode IX, and a teaser trailer. There is excitement in the business sector of the entertainment industry, being the introduction of Disney+. Disney+ is making available animated features from Disney’s history of films, along with Marvel Cinema Universe titles from the last ten or eleven years, and the Star Wars films, of which by now there are several.
The reason I enjoy Star Wars is that when J. J. Abrams directed The Force Awakens, I felt the excitement that Star Wars was again back speaking to me. It seemed to again be a film series to be passionate about.
The response following Celebration did not completely line up with the positive outlook of the fortunate people who went to Celebration in person. While most everybody there loved what’s going on, some of the YouTube channels who discuss Star Wars have mixed feelings, to say the least. Geeks + Gamers criticized the teaser for Episode IX, The Quartering was dismissive, and a union of voices on the Internet ridiculed reactions that were exuberantly emotional. All that is best measured against the outpouring of support for the franchise.
It is almost as if there is a guilty conscience about being part of the Fandom Menace and hating The Last Jedi, but still wanting to see what Episode IX is about. I am sure the average fan does not feel this way. I waited for The Last Jedi to go to Netflix, but I enjoyed it.
The influence of Star Wars is hard to comprehend, but there is a war indeed between the feelings a fan has for Star Wars in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and equivalent satisfaction with the new trilogy, however much it taps into your experience of Star Wars and however deep it runs within you that the original films were perfect.
Rian Johnson directed The Last Jedi, and while that film was a commercial success, the popular response to the movie, as, for example, those voices on the Internet made known on Rotten Tomatoes, divided the fans.
None of this will be settled until December, but there will be a lot of excitement that grows this summer and fall. As is typical of hot takes, animosities, apprehension, and outrage for Star Wars will be evident in the backlash that is going, “to battle,” for whatever reasons.
Publishous this month presented the Where’d You Go writing prompt. Publishous is an 11,000-strong Medium newsletter which presents and highlights Christian writers who seek to make it, in the sense that they are writing because of the compulsion they feel to do so. Although I’m not a member of Publishous, I look over articles they present, which provide some inspiration to blog in light of their writing prompts.
I am also a volunteer at a cemetery, Maple Lawn Cemetery, and I am their SMM. You can find out more about us here: http://www.maplelawncemetery.org
Thank you, and please feel welcome to “like,” “follow,” and/or comment. All the best.
Bruce Wayne decided as a boy that he would honour the memory of his mother and father by inventing himself as Batman and challenging many criminals in Gotham City.
I watched Justice League when it went to Netflix this month and I enjoyed it. The camaraderie between the members of the Justice League comes off as solid and the plot of the film is enjoyable. It is curious to see Superman return to life.
Some of the cool moments from my life were opportunities to see films, in movie theaters. In 1989, cinema fans filled movie houses to see the DC superhero Batman on the silver screen.
Photographer:
Bruce Mars
I had a good time. Actor Michael Keaton’s role as Bruce Wayne, with its heroism, detachment from wealth, and indifference to romance makes the character of Batman a reinvention. I suppose Keaton was a surprise star turn, and the subplot of Gotham City TV news anchors unable to appear beautiful on television, owing to poison in beauty products deliverered by The Joker, is clever.
Jack Napier’s transition to The Joker is memorable. In other scenes from Batman, Billy Dee Williams of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and subsequently in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, appears as Harvey Dent.
The climactic confrontation of the film, at the Gotham City parade beneath a cathedral with the height of a skyscraper, is wonderful.
Photographer: Yi Ling Tan
When the creepy little video store in the shopping plaza near my home began renting to customers Batman, the store displayed tapes of the film like a phenomenon. Shelf after shelf were full of the Batman video. The format was VHS, the cassette for running a film with a VHS player.
I’d been to see it, but I wanted that VHS. Christmas came, and family placed hand-wrapped videotape-shaped objects under the holiday tree.
They were VHS tapes, but what titles were they? Us kids wouldn’t know until Christmas morning. At the appointed time, I opened mine, and to my delight, the tape inside was Batman.
As the family opened our presents, a second tape of Batman under the Christmas tree emerged. My mother’s brother and his wife had arranged for the gift of the movie Batman as well. Two VHS tapes of the same film–a double.
What did my dear mother decide, you might ask? This was a bummer. She would quietly return a copy of the film to its retail store.
As a twelve-year-old, the price of a brand-new edition of a blockbuster film must be extravagant, I reasoned. The VHS copy of Batman we had would belong to us all.
I suppose that taught me a lesson, like not to count your chickens before they hatch. It was as if my uncle and aunt had felt I deserved my own copy of Batman, and Santa Claus did not. The VHS tape of Batman was a gift, what I wanted and what I was losing.
In 1989, fate unfolded for Batman mobster Jack Napier. The criminal mastermind falls into a vat of burning acid. He loses the pigment of his skin and becomes molded with a permanent smile on his face.
I hadn’t earned my own copy of Batman, and I suppose the real lesson was that I should share. It is a state of becoming tantalized by the promise of something gold and being humbled by the requirement to give it up. Maybe we didn’t know that doubles of the Batman film were under the tree, but no contingency plan was in place.
I was cheesed.
Batman fans typically embrace the trilogy of Batman movies years later directed by Christopher Nolan, but I didn’t get interested in them.
You’re welcome to like, comment, or follow if my recollection of dealing with a hot trendy thing like the above resonates with you.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 