I was walking to the Go Train station yesterday when a black cat tried to cross in front of me.
I would have none of it, of course, and stepped up my pace to prevent this, ahem, cat-astrophe from happening. Unfortunately, the demonic feline would have none of it either and stepped up his pace. I was forced to break into a near run to do an end run around the foul creature.I succeeded. The black cat did not cross my path.
Seconds afterward a car pulled up beside me. The driver rolled down his window and said, “So obviously you’re superstitious.”
“D’uh,” I told him, throwing a pinch of salt over my left shoulder just to be on the safe side.
I’ve tried to be a scientific rationalist all my life, you see, but I’ve failed miserably. I cannot pick up a penny if it’s tails up. Well I can, but then I have to throw it over my shoulder for someone else to pick up. (It’s okay if it’s heads.) I’m queasy about open umbrellas in the house. You won’t catch me walking under any ladders, and I’ve been nervous ever since I broke a mirror a couple of weeks ago — seven years is one long stretch of bad luck to have to endure.
None of these superstitions rule me. I can and do defy them all the time (my wife insists on opening umbrellas inside the house to dry them — we’ll often have three, four umbrellas open at once, and the only bad thing that ever seems to happen is me tripping over them.) The bottom line is I don’t believe any of the superstitions that I indulge in.
So why do I indulge in them? A psychoanalyst could probably answer that question, but I can only guess. Let’s make it a multiple choice, shall we?
1. Joe really is superstitious and is just in denial
2. Joe was dropped on his head when he was a baby
3. Joe indulges in these superstitions because he finds them amusing
4. It gives him something to blog about
Whatever the truth is, I sure hope that black cat isn’t out again tomorrow…
People keep asking me: so how’s life on the dark side?
The dark side is looking pretty bright.
I don’t mind telling you that my first week in management I was a bit freaked out. No union to back me up, the workload seemed nothing short of back breaking, and what if it didn’t work out? Would I be out on my ass in three months?
But now I find myself enjoying it. Oh sure, I’ve made a few little booboos so far. But a couple of days in the management stockade soon straightens a fellow out.
What’s making it a little easier is the fact that the players are all the same, I’ve known most of them for years. It’s just the context that’s different. There’s tons of work to be done and new stuff to learn but that’s what keeps life interesting. And I would be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate the gold plated urinals in the executive washroom and the frequent joyrides in the departmental Porsche.
The best part is seeing how it’s all done behind the scenes. It goes without saying that there’s a tremendous amount of effort required to make a national operation like CBC Radio work. Had I ever stopped to think about it I might have had an inkling as to the extent of it. Now that I’m in the thick of it I’m beginning to understand it viscerally. It’s becoming pretty clear the calibre of thinking required. How do you configure a studio from the ground up? How do you make a new master control while the old one is still operating? How do you allocate your resources? What do you spend your money on when everyone’s clamouring for a piece of the pie?
The management team I’ve joined works quietly behind the scenes to make it possible for others to make the radio that Canadians enjoy every day. I’ve had nineteen years of being able to make radio with the best gear in the best studios thanks to the line managers that came before me; now it’s my chance to pay it forward by helping create a stable, invigorating environment for future generations of radio makers to create their sonic magic.
Here’s a blast from the past — an old post from Tuesday, November 30, 2004. It’s from an old blog I used to have that predates even my CBC Workerbee blog:
You know, I think of myself as a fairly grown up guy, reasonably mature, self sufficient, yadda yadda yadda. And maybe I am all these things in several respects of my life. Okay… two or three respects. All right, I can dress myself, that much at least I can do.
But recently I realized that I’m not at all mature or reasonable when it comes to chocolate. I have a secret addiction, a secret shame. When nobody’s looking, and I’m all alone… I dip into the chocolate chip cupboard. The cupboard with all the baking supplies. There’s a little cup with a cover on it in which we keep chocolate chips, the semi-sweet kind for baking. And it’s important to keep these chocolate chips, or there would be no baking, at least no baking with chocolate chips in it.
Which is why it’s such a bad thing when I dip into these chocolate chips. Which I don’t do very often, understand, certainly no more than eight, nine times an hour. Did I say hour? I meant day… yeah, that’s it. Okay, maybe I’m not quite that bad. But who am I kidding, it is bad. A sweet tooth that may well lead to NO teeth some day. But tasty, darned tasty, and better than smoking or alcoholism I would think. Except for the trans fats they’re probably loaded with… you know what, I don’t even want to look at the ingredients. As long as the chocolate chips have chocolate in them, that’s all I need to know.
So the other day I dip into them when Lynda’s downstairs. Suddenly, uh oh, she’s coming up stairs and I’VE STILL GOT THE CHOCOLATE CHIP CUP IN MY HANDS! There’s no time to put it back. I clutch it to myself, turn my back to Lynda, and kind of huddle in the corner of the kitchen. Lynda says, “So Joe, I was wondering… hey, whattaya doing, what’ve you got there?” And she comes over and I sheepishly show her the chocolate chip cup. And of course I’m still kinda chewin’ on a few chips. It was like I was a little kid again, caught red-handed. But she’s a good wife, a good friend. “Don’t eat them all,” she said. “I don’t want to be all out when it’s time to make chocolate chip cookies.”
And if that isn’t reason enough to restrain myself at least a tiny little bit, I don’t know what is.
Crowds of tourists streamed past Edith as she stood sweating under the hot July sun wondering just how long she was going to have to stand there wearing what amounted to a pair of ridiculous purple pajamas. The pajamas in public were bad enough; now the artist wanted her to pose, too.
“Lean forward, please,” he said through his thick handlebar moustache, the words twisted nearly past recognition by his Slavic accent. At least she thought it was Slavic. “Put even more anger in the eyes. Such beautiful eyes, they sparkle so in the sunlight.”
How did the Slav know she was angry? Probably it was obvious. Richard and his bizarre fetishes. He would hang this sketch in their bedroom, along with the others. This one wasn’t as bad as the ones they’d had done in Nova Scotia, but still it was degrading. Almost as degrading as what Richard had… Edith pushed the thought forcibly from her mind. Why did she put up with it? With Richard and his…? Except that she knew perfectly well why she put up with it. The veil Richard had convinced her to wear for the Slav’s sketch covered up at least two painful reasons why.
“It’s amazing,” Richard said, circling her. “You actually look dangerous in that get-up. If I didn’t know you…” He broke off into a laugh, because, Edith knew, he did know her.
Edith knew herself, too, and her anger turned into another all too familiar emotion that made her feel sick to her stomach. She hated that feeling. Not only did it make her feel sick, it made her want to –
“Whoa,” Richard said, as next to him the Slav chuckled.
“What?” Edith asked.
The blood had vanished from Richard’s face. “What you just did with the knives…”
Edith looked at the curved daggers in her hands. They felt good, if a little light. What had she done, she wondered? She had a vague sensory memory of having moved her arms rapidly in some complicated pattern. But that was absurd.
“Finished,” the Slav said. “Would you like to see my picture?”
Edith nodded, and the Slav turned his easel toward her.
The shock of recognition was instant, and left the woman who had been Edith breathless. She looked from Richard to the Slav. Who was not, of course, anything even remotely resembling a Slav.
Richard stared at the two of them, oblivious. “Take off the costume,” he told Edith. “We’re done here.”
The man who was not a Slav executed a stately bow. “I know what he’s done to you, Your Highness,” he said. “I can kill him, if you like.”
The woman who had been Edith wondered how many times she had wished for just that. “No,” she said, speaking the same language her liegeman had just used. “You awoke me for a reason, I take it?”
“It’s time. Your realm needs you.”
Her Highness sighed. “Then Richard is right. We’re done here.”
Her liegeman nodded, ever so slightly. He didn’t understand. A lifetime of death and disappointment had made a stone of his heart. He couldn’t see that more death wouldn’t make things right.
Like many others, I can never let a Remembrance Day go by without chatting briefly with a veteran, making a donation, and picking up a poppy. Now you might think I’m about to wax loquacious about the evils of war and how important it is that we remember the sacrifices so many made for the freedom we enjoy today.
I’m not, because you know that already.
The thing is, I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about the poppy. I’m well aware that my concerns about the poppy are trivial in the extreme compared to what the poppy represents, but still…
…within two hours of pinning a poppy to my jacket, the darn thing is invariably gone. So I have to pick up another one, and within another hour I’ll (for example) find it on the floor of my van with the pin missing. So I have to pick up another one, and I never get around to it, and everyone around me probably thinks what a jerk, he doesn’t care about Remembrance Day, and the sacrifices our veterans made on our behalf.
But I do.
I just can’t get poppies to stick to me with any degree of committment. They stick around maybe a hair longer than my first two or three girlfriends, then they split. At least they don’t take copies of my favourite books with them.
This is what I don’t understand: we’ve been making artificial poppies for over eighty years. Okay, when I say “we,” I mean veterans. And it’s been good for the veterans; they make a bit of cash, the work is therapeutic, and so on.
But if all these veterans are going to go to the trouble of making all these poppies, why not do it right? Why not make one that can stick to your shirt for a reasonable amount of time? I’m not asking for much — just a fraction longer than a really quality network television show manages to stay on the air would be nice.
I know what you’re thinking. That maybe if I pinned the damn thing on with even a minute amount of perspicacity it would stay on. Yeah — like that’s going to happen. And I just can’t believe that I’m the only moron out there. Why, there must be dozens of us. We simply must find a way to permanently pin poppies to the lapels of morons.
Did I mention that they hurt too, when you accidentally prick yourself?
There is something to be said for driving up donations by requiring morons to constantly shell out for new poppies, I suppose. But it’s not like us morons can keep up that sort of thing forever; we only have so much earning power (we are, after all, morons).
So I implore veterans and veteran’s associations and all the sundry organizations responsible for making poppies to rethink the entire concept. Here are a few simple suggestions:
1. Provide poppies with a little thingie that you stick on the end of the pin, on the other side of the lapel, to prevent the poppy from falling off.
2. Provide poppies with two matching rare earth magnets, one for either side of the lapel
3. Provide really big poppies that you hang around your neck
4. Provide edible poppies. I’m thinking raspberry flavoured. Ideally, these would not come with pins.
(Oh, and I get that I’m completely missing the point…)
If anybody had told me this time last year all the stuff that would happen to me in the next twelve months I’d have said, okay that’s interesting, but if you can really tell the future what can you tell me about lottery numbers?
One year ago I was happily toiling away on radio plays, content in the knowledge that I’d probably be doing so the rest of my career. Then Q came along, totally turned my career path on its ear, and this past week I started a job in management. My head is still spinning.
Q finished nicely with a trip to Moosejaw and Regina, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Hey, I doubled my money at Blackjack in the Moosejaw casino (turned twenty into forty using a friend’s ”system”). The folks at Q were far nicer to me than I deserved, what with me abandoning them and all. Jian bought me a spiderman mug shortly before the end… lugged it all the way from London, England to give to me. The Q gang bought me a cake and made nice speeches about me. In return I told them what I thought of them… to wit, that they are an amazing team, all working at the top of their game, making terrific radio often under the most stressful conditions.
It’s no secret that I wasn’t too keen on moving out of drama… but in the end the Q experience was a positive one. I recorded some amazing musical artists (my favourites were the indies like Kobotown, Basia Bulat, Patrick Watson, Jully Black and more). The best shows for me were the Friday Lives… the Friday Live with Blue Rodeo topping them all.
I want to make something perfectly clear… I have been asked a number of times why I left Q, if it was because (insert reason here). So here’s a brief Why Joe Left Q FAQ:
Q. Was it because you didn’t get along with Jian?
A. Absolutely not… several people have pumped me for info on Jian, trying to get some dirt on the man. Well, I worked with him closely, often under highly stressful situations, and I have nothing but good to say about the man. We got along great, the three of us in the studio (me, Matt Tunnacliffe and Jian) worked really well together. Jian and I parted company as friends, and I think the reason why the show worked so well out of the gate was largely because Jian made it work. Hey, the man got me a spider man mug. ‘Nuff said.
So I’m one week into my gig as a manager. And I’ll tell you the hardest part so far… having my soul sucked out of me. Man that hurt. But you get over it.
People say, so you joined the dark side. The dark side just got a whole lot lighter, I tell them.
I’m enjoying it so far. That’s not to say there weren’t a few anxious moments… after 19 years in the union it’s a helluva change. There will be a few challenges ahead, I’m sure.
My apologies to those folk who used to populate my blogroll. Since the near immolation of this blog a few weeks ago I’ve got the gist of it back up and running, but I’m still missing lots of stuff.
So if you’re missing don’t worry, I haven’t deleted you deliberately… I just haven’t gotten around to putting you back in.
Recently I gave an interview to the Ryerson Review of Journalism. They wanted to know my opinion on the new blogging guidelines laid down by the CBC. A few friends advised me not to give the interview, but it seemed churlish not to do so… Ryerson is my alma mater (although I took radio and television arts, not journalism) and the Ryerson Review of Journalism is about giving students practice in their chosen field. So to me it was more about helping out a student.
Apparently budding journalist Emerald Austerberry approached several CBC and CBC related bloggers and a few of us consented to give interviews.
And it appears some of us came down on separate sides of the fence concerning the new CBC blogging guidelines…
Apparently the rights belong to Global TV, but I can’t imagine they would mind this video getting around:
Posting a video like this might make you think that I’m completely behind the mission to Afghanada. I am certainly of the opinion that there are issues worth fighting for, but I have serious reservations about Afghanada.
In this video a veteran remarks that if you ignore your history you’ll have no future. He’s right about that. And the history of Afghanada is one of foreign power after foreign power invading and getting nowhere. Or worse, getting virtually wiped out, as in the case of one famous British misadventure.
It may well be that an intelligent effort by a group of wealthy, well-meaning first world nations could turn things around in Afghanistan. There’s always a first time, I suppose. But that’s not what we’re seeing here today. Not enough of the world cares, and Canada can’t do it alone.
And we’re not going about it particularly intelligently either.
