A Rain of Frogs

Near sunset, a butterfly was happily flitting in the last rays of the sun before retiring for the evening when he spotted a pretty young butterfly behaving in a most peculiar matter. He watched as she would fly about a bright lantern until the candle inside would eventually dim, then frantically make a dash for the next brightest lantern. About this lantern she would loop and swoop till it in turn dimmed. She would repeat her unusual flight over and over. Intent on discovering the nature of her strange actions, he approached her.

“What are you doing?” he asked, still trying to puzzle out the strangeness of her actions. He was finding it difficult to keep up to her as she dashed madly toward the next bright light.

“Quicky! To the light! To the light!” she chortled as she approached the lamp and resumed her lazy looping about it.

He followed her, more puzzled than ever. “Buy why?” he ventured.

“I don’t know. I like the lights,” she answered, dodging the dull moths as they too circled the lamp, vying for proximity to its heat and glow.

Now the butterfly thought he understood. He admonished her. “I see. You are doing as the moths do. Flying from light to light, for no other reason than because it is light. You are smart and beautiful, and the moths are dull and stupid. Why would you act as them?”

“Because it seems such a simpler life than flitting from flower to flower trying to find nourishment. It is easy to see which lights offer warmth and comfort, while it is difficult to determine which flower hides something sweet!” she called back to him. She had spotted a light brighter than all the others, and was racing to get there before any of the moths.

The butterfly raced after her, amazed by her silliness. He was about to express his disapproval of her undignified behaviour when she reached the bright light and burst into flame, not having noticed in her haste that the flame of the lamp was unprotected. In a second there was nothing left of her, and the moths flitted around the open flame at a safe distance.

“It is a far better thing to live as yourself than to die pretending to be someone else. And the problem with burning out instead of fading away,” the butterfly mused sadly as he sought refuge for the evening, “is that you’ll not be around to wonder which is better.”

This marks the 100th entry on this website. That in itself is pretty remarkable. But not so much that I’m going to make anything more of it.

Proven

More people need to understand that if a court of law decides someone’s innocent, they are innocent. One must be proven guilty to be guilty. See how that works? Not proven guilty. Innocent. End of story.

Get on with your lives, maybe.

Debt paid

In a similar vein, there is a huge controversy in Canada right now about Karla Holmolka, the wife of Canada’s most notorious rapist and murderer. Instead of going to jail forever and a day for her rather significant role in the rape and death of her younger sister and two other teenaged girls, she cut a deal with the Crown.

In exchange for damning evidence which put Paul Bernardo in jail forever, Karla pled guilty to lesser charges and spent a sisignificantly shorter time in prison. She’s scheduled to be released in July.

Now the public is outraged. How could the Crown cut the deal? Nobody wants this monster, who was demonstrably beaten and abused by Paul Bernardo, to live in their neighbourhood. She’s a freak. How can anyone think of letting her out of prison?

Get over it people. Karla and the Crown agreed upon a price, and she payed her debt to society.

Small Government

What we need is smaller governments. Everywhere. Governments that do more governing and less telling us what we should and shouldn’t do. More laws make more crimes, and more crimes make more criminals. Less laws makes for less crime.

Dreamboat

I am now accepting donations to raise CDN$58,000 to buy the sailboat I have been lusting after for years. It is a Contessa 32, and you can look that up online to find out all you never wanted to know about it.

The Contessa 32 is the boat I eventually plan on sailing around the world. I just have to own one first. It’s generally considered one of the most seaworthy boats of it’s size, and is relatively easy to sail shorthanded. It’s also roomy enough to carry all that stuff you need to get around the world, like water and food, cigarettes and porn.

Remember, it’s only $58,000. Small potatoes to help a guy fulfill his dream, right?

Remember Cyndi Lauper? Not now, when she’s a little bit freakish but back in the 1980’s when she was weird but still perky? Girls just want to have fun, and so on. Her breakout album was called She’s So Unusual, and it went platinum in France, Germany, and Italy, triple platinum in the UK, six times platinum in the United States and seven times platinum in Australia and Canada.

And nobody will admit to buying the album!

This is a phenomenon we see time and again in popular North American Culture. Things are huge successes by all monetary standards, and nobody will admit to liking it. And it’s not just music. It’s television shows, movies, anything that someone can plausibly deny having ever liked but secretly enjoyed.

The television show J.A.G. for example. It’s in it’s tenth season. Seriously! And yet nobody watches it, if you believe it when they say they don’t. Nobody watches it, but the network makes enough money to continue to produce it for ten years?

You just have to love the guilty pleasures.

Only tangentially related, there is a Mr. Big tape (yes, cassette tape!) that I never bought. It was in my BMW 320i when the car was broken into and everything single thing stolen out of it. Except that Mr. Big tape.

It was in an Olds Cutlass Calais International when the car was stolen and everything in the car was spread out along the 401 for 100s of kilometers. Nothing was left in the car.

Except that damned tape. That I never EVER bought.

Eventually, when I had an accident in my 1987 Jetta and the car was written off, I left the tape on the floor of the passenger foot well, in hopes that the demon tape would finally be gone, it’s evilness and the evilness of the insurance company that now owned the car canceling each other out and making the world, in some small way, a better place.

Of course 9 years later, I found it in a box in the basement. Sometimes we cannot hide our guilt, no matter how hard we try.

First, allow me to stress how very much I hate the term “blog,” especially since it has become commonplace to use the term interchangeably with “website.” Is this site, A Rain of Frogs a blog? Probably. I just consider it my personal website. The fact that it is indeed a “web log” is irrelevant, because I plan on it being more.

But that’s not the point. The point is that those of us who have sites like this (or blogs, if that makes you feel more special), sometimes the sense of obligation to write is overwhelming.

Sometimes we’re just not inspired to write. And on those days, we probably shouldn’t. There is no way in hell the quality of the product is up to snuff if we’re disinterested in the topic.

Other times we are inspired, but lack the time, (or in my case the skill) to coax the required meaning out of our words. Concerns over offending or disillusioning our readership come into play as well, further crippling our ability to produce quality entries.

As I approach the 100th post on this site (this is post 98), I’m starting to feel some of these pressures, and that’s counter to the original reason this site was created: to be a creative safety valve, to allow me to blow off steam on something that doesn’t matter. Somewhere along the way it become important to me, like all things I have a part in creating. I know what’s coming, I know what’s involved in getting there, and I know there will be days (weeks!) where I am not really inspired to contribute to this site.

I’ve got some major creative goals ahead of me, both in terms of my larger community site and this one. Much of it requires me to drag myself out of the creative slump I’ve been in for such a very long time, a feat I’ve been finding very challenging. Much of what I see in my head will require more than just writing my thoughts.

That said, I refuse to let this site bite back, to make me feel like I have an obligation to it. I’ve been very consistent in writing to this site, posting something every weekday, and I plan on continuing so. If I have a day in which I have nothing to say, I won’t say anything. My obligation isn’t to this site, it’s to myself.

And to both of you, my faithful readers.

Negative thoughts lead to negative reality.

Read that line again. Now read it again. Don’t bother asking yourself how that meshes with what appears to be my typically cynical nature.

The fact of the matter is that I am not referring to the world outside (which offers plenty to be cynical about). I’m referring to the world inside. Inside our heads. You’ve all heard of the Power of Positive Thinking, a feel-good book that does nothing for anyone except the author and the publishing company. I’m not talking about the book, I’m talking about the way we view ourselves.

Friends often tell me I have a very active imagination. And I think I do. But then they compare (or should I say contrast) their own opinions of their imagination. “I have an underactive imagination” they say, sometimes with a frown and more often with a puzzled look on their faces. Puzzled because I think they themselves know it’s a lie, and they’re trying to hide that truth from themselves.

I am constantly stunned by how unwilling people are to admit their strengths. It is almost like they hope that by denigrating their abilities, they hope to avert attention from themselves, trying not to stand up and be counted. I certainly don’t understand it. Yet I digress.

When someone asks you how you are doing, how do you answer? “I’m fine, thanks” or “A little tired” or” I’m okay.” Probably something very similar, if not exact. It’s almost a preprogrammed response to what is effectively a preprogrammed question asked in the interests of politeness, not genuine concern.

Ever asked yourself why you answer that way?

You probably answered that way because it’s the truth. But that in itself is an interesting thing. What if you were to answer “I’m doing great, thanks!”

Magically, it becomes true too. Think about it.