post-turkey miscellania

Here's an illo for the first chapter of the (long) short story I took to (writing) group last night. It went over okay (much better than last week's anyway). There are thirteen chapters all in all, although I may read some smaller ones in bunches.

This is the invitation we had printed for our open house, some 450 copies. I'll be happy if we get fifty people. (To those of you reading this in Kingston, I'm getting one to you personally.)

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x} Thanksgiving was fine, thanks. C got to shop (while I had a surreal experience in the Apple store ... as in look at all the rich people) and on the way home we took the Gardiner Expressway, which was actually quite pretty, flanked by hillsides full of trees turning their fall colours.

x} When we got back on the 401, we noticed it had been renamed the Highway of Heroes. What bullshit. A fly-past of my reasons for saying so: it's tacky verging on kitsch (at least past memorials have had some kind of quiet dignity to them); glorification of soldiers is just one salute away from glorifying war (and war should not be glorified); the tragedy of these deaths is re-packaged as something heroic (satisfying our consumer-driven need to wrap everything in a slogan); the mission in Afghanistan is an ill-defined mess (explain to me how Canada's national defence depends on the pacification of Afghanistan ... if you can't do that, then explain why having thousands of troops there is superior to giving greater resources to security agencies like CSIS who can actually stop terrorist attacks); the mission to Afghanistan is doomed to fail (see: British and Russian history, the economics of opium production, etc). Of course, saying this immediately opens one up to the charge of "So you don't support our troops?", and trying to argue with people like this is almost always an exercise in futility, because they take it so personally, in a you're-either-with-us-or-against-us kind of way (which, come to think of it, is how we got into all this mess to begin with).

x} Spent the better part of two days on a painting that went nowhere. This is how it goes, sometimes.

x} Two recent movies: The Good German and Alpha Dog. The first was a disappointment, somehow empty and flat, someone's cool idea that has no heart. The second one was surprisingly good. The characters (with the exception of the victim, ironically) are so narcissistic and vacant that they make you want to scream at the screen.

x} Sarah Jane Wilde has a new website, full of great drawings. You can see it here.