5Q5A: A Sort of Homecoming

And you hunger for the time

Time to heal, desire, time
And your earth moves beneath
Your own dream landscape …

Lyrics from the song A Sort of Homecoming, from the album The Unforgettable Fire, by U2.

The holiday time that I’m . . . enduring, so far, could be a lot better. It feels like a time where I really need to do some soul-searching. Anger and other anxieties have eating me alive lately, and I’ve noticeably been struggling to keep my composure. Peace has been hard to come by. 

The holiday started well enough, with a return to my old hometown, being amidst the territory I was raised and grew up around. I have not returned to where I spent my boyhood and teen years for a long time, and it was a sobering realization of how long a lapse it has been after a visit there to reunite for a birthday party with my extended family who remain there. I don’t visit there as often as my other brothers, or parents do.

The home where I grew up in is gone, only stuff of dreams and memories remain, and the landscape has morphed in subtly different ways, but still so familiar. It was a shock, and yet a comfort, to know that I’m not completely estranged and alienated from the place, and that in some ways I am still quite bonded to it. Just because I’m from Saskatchewan doesn’t automatically make me a Prairieboy (I’d be rather insulted if you called me one), nor am I a bush dweller. I’m a Parkland boy. The geography of the place is the beltline in between the prairie and the boreal forest. It’s interspersed with sloughs, deciduous groves, pastures, fields, and lakes which are no more than 10 kilometers away from any homestead situated in that region. The place where I grew up was even more unique in that we lived near the coulees. Traveling through them around the south and west of the old farmstead was always soothing to my senses. Trekking through the pasturelands in the coulees, before more bears repopulated the places, was enjoyable too. The rest of this I’ll shorten with 5Q5A . . .

Q1. How tolerable is the Ex this year?

A1. Someone broke into my building and tore open the mailboxes. Mine was untouched, thankfully. That’s the most drastic thing that has happened so far crime-wise. I hope that’s the worse it ever gets. Monday and Tuesday were sleepless, and by Wednesday I was so drained that I fell asleep early, and couldn’t even be stirred awake by the fireworks. The Strumbellas play tonight at the grandstand, and I should at least enjoy that concert from afar here on my balcony.

Q2. Fiction Book?

A2. An old sci-fi classic, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Knowing that Huxley was a respected colleague of his philosophical contemporary, Alan Watts, plus his experimentation with psychedelics and the curiosity as to how it impacted his prose composition was an angle that intrigued me to pick up this book. Feeling like I’ve been stuck in what seems like a dystopic atmosphere is probably another reason I’m giving it a perusal. It’s also to help draw out answers to that question of what my own personal form of ‘soma’ is: that mechanism or pattern I retreat to for coping with the insanity of this world. It's also significant because we've reached this point in history where it is technically possible to custom design people genetically. It’s next best novel to read after 1984 if dystopian philosophical classic science fiction turns one’s crank.

Q3. Non-Fiction Book?

A3. I haven’t gotten there yet. I’m just making it a point to regain some focus, so I’m just doing one thing at a time with intensified concentration. Writing like this is a good exercise for that too. I’m making it a point to avoid all forms of negativity, including watching the news . . . however . . .

Q4. Brad Wall announced his retirement today . . . thoughts on that?

A4. Mixed emotions, one being “Yeah! At long last!” with the reserve and caution of wondering how really buggered up things are going to be coming down the road, which he is tucking tail and running from, in order to distance himself further from whatever that is. It’s pessimistically suspicious, but that is what happens after working in healthcare and care facilities and living under the ridiculous dictates of this government for this long. It might be such that whoever takes over leadership in the Sask party may be even more incompetent, corrupt, and callous than he was. He claims that he has no immediate plans after he steps down. I don’t believe this for a second. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he automatically took an executive position with any one of the crony corporations he invited into this province through his anti-union privatization schemes shortly and soon after he steps down as premier.

Q5.  Next holiday at this time next year?

A5. As nice as homecomings are, I’m definitely getting out of this province. I don’t even care anymore if I have to go into debt to do it. One can’t expect stuff to change or be enlightening by doing the same thing over and over again; staycations apply to this as well. The political madness that might ensue after today might make it worth doing.