A Rain of Frogs

Right after your finish work today, pack up and leave, but on your way home, stop at your local flower shop. Not the one with the big storefront and the FTD logo in the window. The other one, that gets its organically grown flowers locally and is run by the interesting hippie girl. Act locally.

Stop there and buy a flower. Not a dozen flowers. Not a bouquet of flowers and a vase. Just a single flower. Not a red rose, either, something else. Something pretty. If you’re not sure what, tell the hippie girl you just want to make your partner smile, and she’ll adjust her kerchief and find you something appropriate. She’s also likely to wrap it in some recycled hemp-based paper or something, but that’s good, not bad. Then go home and give the flower to your partner.

You’ll thank me tomorrow.

An Historical Downpour is a featurette of Rain. I am trying to aggretage all my writings into the one often incoherent package that is A Rain of Frogs.

Originally posted as “Stupid Canadian Boy” at 9:05AM on October 5, 2004.

Many years ago, my grandfather, a round old man with a thick East European accent used to waddle around the house muttering. Often he was muttering in his native tongue, but sometimes it was in English. It didn’t matter either way, really, since it was unintelligible in whatever language he chose to speak. Curiously, it usually followed a session of him yelling at the television while watching the news.

“You! Boy!” he would yell at me, “Tell me why if there is God, children die in bus like that, but he no stop Germans in old country!”

It was never a question, always a demand. And you have to understand, I was maybe 10. I was seriously in awe of this man, who is still the single most internally powerful being I have ever known.

“I don’t know Dedek,” I would stammer, hoping he wasn’t about to throw the apple in his hand at me. Instead, he waved his hand in dismissal.

“Stupid Canadian Boy.”

That was me. And all my male cousins actually. We think it was actually a term of endearment in his mind.

This was a man who had defected with a family of 12 children from behind the Iron Curtain in 1954, travelled across the ocean to America, where he was refused entry to the country because he had been a “member of the communist party” in Yugoslavia. And he had been. It was the only way he was allowed to have his job there, which was operating the town’s communal tractor. He signed the papers (my grandmother had to show him how to write his name, he was illiterate) and in turn got his card, his tractor, and enough money to feed and clothe his family.

So they came to Canada, and in 1956, settled in Toronto. For that I’ll thank Mr. McCarthy.

Years later, he could be seen sitting in his enclosed balcony on the 17th floor of a condominium in the West End, a telescope swinging back and forth slowly as he looked for potholes in the road. When he spotted one, he would dial up city hall and yell at them till they sent someone out to fix it. He never owned a car or got his drivers license.

He was a man who believed in justice. Believed deeply. Not Justice, with a capital J, but justice, the small, everyday kind. The kind that makes someone turn a wallet in without skimming the cash out of it. The kind that makes young men give their Subway seats up to the elderly.

He died a long time ago, but I think about him a lot. Though I miss him deeply, I am glad he didn’t have to see the world as it is now. He’d have been screaming at the television, apple in hand, asking my children how there can be a God with all this stuff happening. I am sure he would have been on the phone to the president asking him what the hell he thought he was doing.

But I’m just a Stupid Canadian boy. I don’t let the world keep me up at night any more. I don’t worry about whether there’s a God or not, or why he/she would let the world be the way it is today. I just try to worry about the small justice. Helping the elderly, giving to charity when I can, and teaching my children to be accountable for their actions, and to view the world with their eyes wide open.

Maybe I’m not such a Stupid Canadian Boy after all.

So.

Someone asked me why I occasionally post lyrics to songs I didn’t write on my site. It’s a really good question, and deserving of an answer.

I have posted the lyrics for a few songs I wrote on this site. You can poke around the Rains of History and find them yourself. They’re there. Some of them are even kind of okay, if I do say so myself.

But why would I post lyrics to songs I didn’t write?

Because the songwriter said it better than I can. I want to express the thought, or emotion, or idea, but it has already been expressed in a way superior to my ability to say it. That’s why.

Excluding today, I believe I have posted a Tragically Hip song, a Simon and Garfunkle song, and a Gorillaz number that was more story than song. Today I posted another Tragically Hip song. New Orleans is Sinking, specifically. Duly cited.

If you haven’t had a look at a satellite image of what’s going on down there, I highly suggest finding one. It’s Bloody frightening. New Orleans really is sinking. I feel awful for the people there. They were evacuated from their homes and may return to a pile of rubble beneath ten feet of water.

So I posted the lyrics to a song I felt captured how I am feeling about this, instead of waxing ineloquently about their tragedy. I guess I could have made a joke about it, or ignored it altogether.

Neither felt as right as posting the lyrics I posted. And that’s the point of this site. Expressing internal things externally. In a way that feels right.

Bourbon blues on the street loose and complete
Under skies all smoky blue-green
I can Forksake the dixie dead shake
So we dance the sidewalk clean
My memory is muddy what’s this river I’m in
New Orleans is sinking and I don’t want to swim

Colonel Tom What’s wrong? What’s Going On
You can’t tie yourself up for a deal
He said” Hey North you’re south shut you big mouth
You gotta do what you feel is real.”
Ain’t got no picture postcards ain’t go no souvenirs
My baby she don’t know me when I’m thinking about thoes years

Pale as a light bulb hanging on a wire
Sucking up to someone just stoke the fire
Picking out the highlights of the scenery
Saw a little cloud looked a little like me

I had My hand in the river
My feet back up on the banks
Looked up to the lord above and said hey man thanks
Some time I fell so good I gotta scream
She says Gordie baby I know exactly what you mean
She said, she said I swear to god she said

My memory is muddy what’s this river I’m in
New Orleans is sinking and I don’t want to swim
—
New Orleans is Sinking – The Tragically Hip.

Here’s hoping Katrina spares them all.

I have been looking over the new A List Apart Redesign and finding myself…bored. It’s the same as everything else out there. Do I really care that it is now running a CMS built of Ruby on Rails? Do I?

Not at all. Not one tiny mote of care.

This is a site that has built its following by providing cutting edge ways of doing things on websites that allow those involved in webcraft to create sites that are visually interesting without alienating visitors.

Now we have a site that looks like a zillion (not just any zillion, a metric zillion) other bloggy-type sites out there. Innovation? Clever underlines on center aligned headings. And t-shirts. Of course.

But they’re running Ruby on Rails, right? And they have cool t-shirts, right? And room for advertising? Woo. Yeah. Do you really care?

Hopefully the content, which has been scarce and less than heavyweight of late anyway won’t follow the layout into sameness.