0 Hours 0 Minutes 01 Seconds

...the time has passed

...the chords have begun

...the wait is over

...the end is here

...goodnight, and thank you, Rheostatics. Your enchanted sounds will be so severely missed.

0 hours 30 minutes 0 Seconds

Pensive moments await; imagining the celestial sounds that I am not to hear....

1Hour

The literary pivot; the one hour mark.

Prepare well yon musical soldiers, take away your legacy with pride.

1Hour 38 Minutes 57 Seconds

It has come to this: me, sitting in a chair in British Columbia, etching thoughts in my mind as I stare at the clock and tick away the moments until it is over. A painful pursuit, absolutely.

The vigil continues...

1 hour 58 min 32 sec

The only music I truly love and never bore of is dying.

The only music that take me away, has been taken away. Is being taken away.

Moments away, the first note, the first chord, the first word; strung into the last. Then silence.

No more voices to bide my thoughts and contemplative serentity.

No more. Ever again.

2Hr 2Min 22Sec

"I followed the road map...the horizon was empty and dry"

Memorial Day, Rheostatics

Musical horizons seem a touch meeker, and a touch weaker, today, as they step back from existence.

2 hours 6min 33sec

Nothing to do but wait, be merry, and compensate my thoughts with memories of yester-concert, when the thought of the disarmament of Rheostatic creativity was absolutley impossible.

Tears well, memories pound, thoughts drift....I will miss you Rheostatics. We all will.

2h 22m 22s

With an Ontario beer in hand, I await the inevitable declining dearth of recorded music and slip to the metacognitive realm of self-satisfying thoughts of standing side by side with the myriad sounds of Rheo permeating my skin.

2h 56m 04s

A decadent authority of creative art and musical proficiency is about to take a bow out of existence. The moments are slipping away...

3h 31m 20s

http://www.rheostaticslive.com/index2.shtml

I just want to stop the clock - I can live with them putting it off, but the finality of

having them play the final notes just seems unbearable.

3 Hours 47 Minutes 53 Seconds

Saddness is encroaching upon my shoulders. The dichotomy of a sunset parallels the feeling at hand; the glory and beauty of seeing the last "shard still glisten in the laquer" of the mountain tops, the inevitable pain of never being able to see it again. The Rheostatics will never rise again, and in their setting moments, I fear that their shard of glinstening beauty will be witnessed by only a few. Not me. Not my ears. Never again will they hear the woundingly pensive moments of the Rheo's creating music, never following music.

7h 21m 30s

Beginning to say goodbye....so stunning the loss of such a momentus movement in canadiana.

10 Hours 22 Minutes 51 Seconds

...until the Rheos play the first chord of their last show.

"Never to be seen again..."

27 Hours Remaining: The Rheostatic Conclusion

Frantic double checks with the airlines have ended with the resolution that I simply cannot make it. Evading the self-doubt that there may have been more I had done to get there, I now watch the clock check of each second until they hit the stage for the last time and I sit enthroned with regret and tearful memories.

Tears are not enough.

Memories sweetened by ale and reverberating sounds of the boys' past performances.

31 Hours Until the "End of Music"

Never again will the whispering melodies of these artisans grace our ears.
Never again.

The Rheostatics are playing their last show, ever, in less than two days. Friday night in Toronto, they will strike their last feverish and decadent chords and sing their last melodic notes. I will never again get to see the creativity that rekindled my love of music; I am in BC and they are in ON. It is impossible for me to get there....and it only hurts more that there are still tickets available.

I hope they end in peace.

Bags Bagged

If there was a god, I would thank her - but there isn't, so I won't.

The law, passed by a 10-1 vote, requires large markets and drug stores to give customers only a choice among bags made of paper that can be recycled, plastic that breaks down easily enough to be made into compost, or reusable cloth.San Francisco supervisors and supporters said that by banning the petroleum-based sacks, blamed for littering streets and choking marine life, the measure would go a long way toward helping the city earn its green stripes.

Now there is a great deal to be said of this initiative, but it can be equally suggested that individual choice can bring about this on its own. We can choose to not use plastic in our everyday lives; many times this is an easy choice, many times this is a cumbersome and labourious choice. This law promotes the limitation of waste while also limiting the challenge of not using bags. Compostable bags, not new on the scene, are an optimal choice and an obvious one for a solution to our thriving dependence on plastic - it just takes a government to hold the reins of public use and take them on a different tangent. No matter how many bags one or two people refuse at the supermarket, or how many people choose to even reuse those bags once they are used, the problem continues to propagate.

You dont need bags for each member of the produce family; nature allows them to be together, they wont hurt each other, lets just do away with the bags and let them roam free in our carts.

This law may change that trajectory, but we will have to wait and see. I believe this to be a good change, but I am not holding any stock in it until it proves to have staying power and political transparency.

Eye got perfect on my latest exam

....they couldn't even invent a problem with my eyes. I lack colour perception.....whatever.....but 20/20.

And I was petrified that I would have to shell out my life savings (I obviously don't have a great deal of savings...) to embrace ocular support.

Peculiar, though, that one of the questions on the information sheet was 'what do you do with your eyes". I realize now, and did then, that they wanted to know what I do most that may strain my eyes, or if they are a pertinent and/or overused item (reading the bible and thus causing eye bleeding....not to mention brain malfunction - the anathema of religion and faith itself; computer tech; pilot;...) but it was a frantic jostle in my mind not to point out the obviousness of the question.

I should have said that I usually use them everyday for almost everything....but I thought sarcasm a poor choice when they could just slap me with a $500 lens fee at their discretion. So, I played it polite and said I only use my eyes for reading and hiking - me keeps them closed otherwise.

They did tell me I had a big head, though. I think she was trying to be helpful...

Happy Tuesday.

Redefining "Top Predator" ideology

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7004909622962894202

Check out this link (it is a google video link, so you may need to make sure you have appropriate prorgams running on your computer...if you use a Mac, I am sure it just simply wont work as nothing ever really does work with a Mac...heh heh....).

I have seen some amazing Octopus videos in the past that have rendered me speechless, and this one does not let me down.

Nepal VI: Tsampa and Yak Cheese

At then end of this day we reached higher up the Himalayan valley, quickly approaching the test of stamina. The day ended at a teahouse set among a village of 'relocated' Tibetan families. More on the politics and cultural decimation later.

This little village was the first we saw that boasted any educational infrastructure; it had a school, but it had not a school teacher nor school child to fill its seats. It was built through funding of the government and private interests (Nepalese interests, not jesuit interests...) but there was simply no further infrastructure to start an actual school. So, it lays bare witness at this point to a revolution of education that lost its toehold early on in its life. For now, at least. The village was not unlike the others in its construction and plan view. Structures built of rock and yak dung, with much more wooded furniture and structure that I though possible from the lacking of forests at this altitude. It was true to needs, not to wants. The village was rather large through the perspective lenses of other villages we passed, and probably had the largest year-round population. The temperature was dropping noticeably, but we were still able to find heat in the completely cloudless sky.

Us, sitting on the crest of a hill overlooking the village. This was taken just before sunset which allowed a great clarity of distant mountains and interesting shadow plays of the crags and folds of said mountains.

This is the school that is yet to operate as such. The village was 'Langtang Village', hence the school name. Inside the school were wooden row-desks and concrete chalk boards painted black. It was a beautifully constructed school, as this picture can attest to, in the stone works.

Himalayan sunset; frigid and beautiful.

This is a daytime view of Langtang Village. All of the visible houses/teahouses/stores (of which all houses were a part of) were field stone constructed with yak dung. In the far distance is a ghastly 7200 m.a.s.l. snow covered peak.

Yaks. The integral part of the Tibetan (Nepalese, now) lifestyle and stark reminder of the intricate symbiosis of nature. Yaks provided strength, milk, cheese, dung (construction and fires) and the high mountain villages were replete with them; and their succulent and decadent cheese.

Me, thinking. And watching a baby yak.

Tibetan Buddhism is the normality here - as pleasant as it is (whenever possible) to avoid christian mythology and hatred, there are some 'strange things done...under the sun' in the name of Buddha. However, and this is a huge and dramatic caveat, there is no internal comparison between Buddhism and christianity. None. The Buddhist thought of life is filled with self betterment and peaceable actions. True to nature and to best interests. This is a prayer wheel where you pass along and spin the wheels in hope of bettering your, and others', future.

This is a boy playing on the roof in Langtang Village; we watched him and his friend play along the pathway, chase each other along the rock wall and up and over the roof. I couldn't imagine how a western authority figure would have reacted in haste to such 'horrible' activity. Perhaps there is a commandment against it that Jesus tried to tell us about but was unable to enunciate clearly. Hmm...perhaps.

Nepal V: Ascent to thin air

Leaving the teahouse early in the morning, bellies content with tea and tsampa, we reached for the peaks ahead.

An early morning view of the road to be travelled.

A close up of the same photo.

Me, taking a break during the mornings section.

Subindra (left), Bishnu (centre) and Crystal (right) taking a break at a teahouse and enjoying the sun and air.

Me, at the same teahouse.

Nepal IV: First night in the mountains

These are pictures from the first day of our actual hike. We landed in Kathmandu, slept one night in the city and then left the next day to drive up to our starting point. After a night there, we set out in the mountains with Bishnu (guide) and Subindra (porter); the going we good - the sky was clear, it was warm and comforting in the sun, but the air was parched of oxygen. Tough to breathe, only to get tougher. We made it to our destination the first night with a thirst for tea and a desire for a chance to stop moving up! We we early enough to rest by the river and drink in both our tea and the nature that cloaked us. It was a stunningly beautiful place - and we had yet to see the white caps of the traditional Himalayan peaks that adorn myriad (if not all) Nepalese images in ones mind. The next day we were in the midst of the giant peaks, the draggy points of rocks, jutted up through millions of years of constant geological pulses. But for today, it was the valley and the river that caught our minds and our (non-theist) spirits in a gleaming embrace.

These are, unfortunately, out of order and I dispel any thoughts of rearranging them. My words will clarify their meaning.

This is actually at the end of our first day hiking. This is the view that welcomed us as we set down our bodies on the river bank and drank tea and mused about just exactly where we were and exactly what we were doing. Nothing could have been further from our minds than the truth to come of Maoists, bombs, excruciating hikes and civil uprising. For now, our minds and bodies were at peace.

This is the alternate view of the one above. This is the village where we stayed that first night in the mountains; just around the corner of the valley would grant us the first real views of mountains worthy of Himalayan nomenclature. The snow can be seen in the distance, but not the mountains themselves. A close up will reveal a beautiful and sedate rock construction of all the houses....quite remarkable.

A view of a river crossing early in our trip. The bridges are of bamboo, strung together by thatch. The apparent bankful flow is higher than the bridge height; not sure of the reality of spring floods but I am sure that the bridges would be obsolete during a surge.

Crystal taking a ponderous moment in the rocky valley bed. This view is up valley, the direction we were hiking.

Crystal again, this time crossing an impromptu bridge across some water. This material is relatively new, brought here by a landslide the last season - so, to ford any waterways, new bridges had to be formed.

Me taking a moments rest in a shard of sunlight as we passed through the shadowed side of the mountains during the afternoon. Tea, rest and nothing else. A moment of beauty and peace.

Macaque. Mountainside. Sun. Together.

Nepal III: Leaving Kathmandu for the mountains

Clambering into our jeep early in the morning, we left the profanity of the city and stretched our day into the periphery and extensive uplands of Nepal. By day end we were in a small village, resting assuredly by the banks of a river and contemplating our next days intimate beginning of our walk up the valley. We made it through about 100km or rural Nepal roadways to the village that cradled our bones, preparing us for the days ahead.

A small(er) village where we stopped for breakfast.

The scenic and majestic blood thinning roadway that took us most of the way from Kathmandu to our trailhead.

Physics. Simple really, but seemingly not so. We managed to pass this bus, the details of which I am unsure of still today. But we did it.

Ahhh. The place that was completely nondescript on the way in, but so pivotal on the way home. We stopped here for lunch on the way in. Nine days later we were forced to start our tenuous walk home to Kathmandu through the back valley's and hinterland of Nepal from here; it bellied our hopes of a bus, jeep or anything and did nothing but feed us and point us and our feet in the direction of Kathmandu, some 100 km's away.

Nine days after this picture was taken, we started walking what would be about 100 km home. More, much more, on this in further posts.

Rest, sleep. This was the village that we slept in before starting our hike into the mountains.

At this point the experience and the wonder filled us to the brim. It was excessively amazing and eye opening; the culture and lifestyle alone was graciously different. In this picture the man is wearing traditional (and common) clothing of Tibetan heritage. More on this later, but this rural area dilineated the boundary between Indian-influenced culture and Tibetan-influenced culture. It was quite an interesting and harmless (sort of) boundary and mixing of cultures and religion that Islam and Christianity could take a lesson from. However, not too many lessons because the history is bloody enough to keep any religious text well filled with stories. At least we didn't have to suffer through the obtuse imposition of christian missionaries like Taiwan graced us with. Jesus has not yet succeeded at killing this culture; I hope that it forever stays this way.