There's a sort of sin to suburbia.

What's the draw of fences and well-manicured lawns and the watered down colours of obscurity? What's the appeal of two cars and a 40-minute commute? Cookie-cutter houses and anything green landscaped into oblivion as traffic trickles along golf-course roads...

Even scarred through by paved trails, the heart of this city is wilder, so much wilder than that.

Is the sprawl an escape, then? Taking refuge in carefully laid-out streets and cul-de-sacs from the inexorable, inescapable river... I suppose some people prefer soporific domestication to the alternative. The breathtaking glitter of the alternative: sunlight on the river, neon on storm-puddles, moonlight on snow.

It could be any city — it isn't any city. It's this city. This schizophrenic collective, this glass and wire prism. This rustling of leaves and laughing of magpies. Nature covered in cement covered in art depicting nature. And the river as the undercurrent, the sub-stratum, the constant and changing foundation. The thing we can't tame or deny.

Even in the oversaturated false light of the 'burbs, there's no forgetting it. It haunts the faint music of wind chimes. And dusk, when it falls, is a river-twilight, carving a path like water beneath the endless Alberta sky.

Twenty-seven years ago today, my favourite person in the world was born. My partner, my confidant, my best friend, my wife. Happy birthday, learan. You make the world a better place just by being in it and being you. I love you!

Four years ago today, I married the most wonderful person in the world. It baffles me every day how I managed to be so lucky. I love you, learan!

learan is awesome. Just sayin'. :D :D

Cross-posted to wk_100 for the holiday drabble exchange! :D

Title: A Fraction to the Sum
Characters: Schuldig, Crawford
Written For: mainekosama
Word Count: 100


“Happy 18th birthday.”

Schuldig sneers at Crawford. “How did you know?” A stupid question, but there’s no chance of replay with a mind like Oracle’s.

Crawford smiles, his expression as impenetrable as his thoughts. He hands Schuldig an unwrapped box. “A gift.”

Opening it reveals sleek matte-black temptation. Schuldig lifts the gun, discarding the box on the floor nearby. “Nice. I thought only full agents could carry weapons.”

“I’m here to share the good news. You passed.” The sudden rush of success surprises Schuldig. He barely hears the rest of Crawford’s congratulations: “It’s not freedom, but it’ll do. For now.”

May have given self an early birthday present of mp3 albums from the FiXT store... the upshot of which being reinforcement of the conclusion that Bret from Blue Stahli is fucking adorable. And, in related news, this is my new favourite song:



And exams and final projects and book drive... Nope. Gonna go listen to some Edge of Dawn. :D :D

The fact that our (unelected) Senate just killed a climate-change bill which had already passed through the (elected) House of Commons with a majority vote is yet another indication of the way in which Emperor Stephen Harper's minority government is running this country. It's undemocratic, disgusting, and the reason why Canada now has the international reputation that it does. This. Is. Not. Acceptable.

This was gonna be a comment in response to a post totchipanda made, but it started to get more introspective than comment-y (and also super long), so I figured I'd post it all here instead.

I love reading about other people's creative processes. I find it interesting to compare the similarities and differences between the way they work and the way I do...

Anyway, I just read this awesome book called Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod, who is a cartoon artist. (You can find him right here.) He talks about the differences between being creative and making a living off of creativity, and what I found really interesting was that he stresses maintaining autonomy over your creativity and not selling it out just so that you can sell it. That what creative people get from sharing their work -- in whatever form it happens to take -- is something deeper than a paycheque.

I think that what gets drilled into us as members of a mostly free-market society is that money can be used as an accurate measure of success. That if you're talented creatively, it can be measured by how much money your creativity makes for you. And I really don't think that's the case. The whole emphasis on the "marketable talent" idea as being a given bothers me. I don't think it IS a given, and I don't think most creative people really look at their abilities that way. When it's there, it's there, no matter whether you plan to sell it, or share it, or just put it away in a box somewhere. You hear your characters talking, and you give them voice.

I think the satisfaction is more about having it come out looking or sounding the way you can see or hear it doing inside your head. We all know we can get a paycheque wherever -- the Mall, or Taco Time, or Starbucks, or Purolator, doesn't matter. Creativity is something so much more fundamental -- it's not what we do, it's who we are. And I've come to the conclusion that refining it is worth whatever time and effort I have to put in, not because I expect to be given bucketloads of money for it, but because I want to see what I can make when I take all of this raw creativity and refine it.

I want to lay it all on the goddamn line and see who and what I am.

Ah, I do love talking about my homeland...

Five things I love about Edmonton and/or Alberta:

1. The North Saskatchewan River valley. It bisects the city (actually two cities, once upon a time -- Edmonton north of the river and Strathcona south of it, which is how we ended up with both the Alberta Legislature and the University of Alberta and Calgary got... well, Calgary shouldn't have gloated so much when it got the railroad through it, back in the day), and parts of it are protected wildlife areas. There are places where, if not for the noise of cars on the freeway, you'd never know that you were in a city.

2. Fort Edmonton Park. There's a full recreation of the old fur-trading fort that eventually became the city, along with the massive house that Chief Factor John Rowand built. It was expensive and ill-advised, but it was also huge and showy -- which pretty much sums up Alberta's attitude towards things. The park also has recreations (and occasionally refurbishings of original buildings) from 1885 to the 1920s. I never get tired of that place.

3. The Rockies. Part of the wider Alberta-love. We used to go camping up in Jasper when I was a kid, and there's something about waking up surrounded by jagged-toothed mountains, smelling that hint of dwindling glacier on the air, even in the middle of summer... It's amazing.

4. Being as far north as we are. Around the longest day, the light never entirely leaves the sky, it just travels around the northern horizon from dusk back to dawn. And in the deepest parts of winter, there's less than eight hours of daylight. For some reason, I find that wonderful. Really, the whole sky up here is an awesome sight -- layers upon layers of clouds, or with trees dark shadows against that vast brightness. It makes everything beneath it seem small and not worth any great amount of concern.

5. Saskatoon berries! Delicious prairie fruit. Mostly I love that they make excellent pies, and you can pick pails of them for free, if you know where to look. Nom!


And then, of course, there are the five things I like rather less...

1. The politics. Alberta is notorious for voting in the parties it likes in massive sweeping victories that devastate all opposing parties. Which means there's very little preventing the government from doing exactly whatever the hell it (or its Big Oil masters) wants. Currently our Conservative government (which has been in power since well before I was born), is spending taxpayer money to take out ads in American newspapers about how misunderstood the tar sands are. Rather than committing that money to environmental studies to see whether all that stuff the Pembina Institute and First Nations groups are saying might, in fact, be true. Ass-ocracy.

2. West Edmonton Mall. I realize that it's the big tourist money-maker for our town, but sheesh. It's huge, hideous, and invariably full of morons. I try to avoid it, except for the occasional trip to the Asian supermarket.

3. The tar sands. It's such a loaded issue -- bring up any opposition to it with most Albertans and you'd better get ready to defend your point against such talk-radio staples as "It's necessary for our economy!" (right, because it's completely impossible, not mention a terrible idea to, say, diversify our economy so that it doesn't function EXACTLY like a boom-town) or "It doesn't contribute as much to our greenhouse gas output as car exhaust!" (technically true, but I fail to see why that makes the tar sands okay). Or how about the classic, "Global warming is a myth!" (Ugh. Just ugh.) It's become one of those issues that's so overloaded with emotion that it's almost impossible to wade through the mythology that's piling up on both sides. Bottom line -- it's a problem, and there's plenty of scientific evidence out there to back up that statement. Is it a problem that could be fixed without putting a moratorium on development altogether? Possibly. But so much money and energy is being put into fighting publicity battles against legitimate research that it's difficult to tell. It's entirely disgusting, on pretty much every level there is.

4. Edmonton Transit. It. Sucks. Though I will say that the bus system is better than it used to be. It moved up a slot from "wretched" to just "bad". There is seriously no excuse for our bus fares to be nearly as high as Toronto's (which has a decent bus system, from what I've heard).

5. The alcoholism. It's epidemic here. You won't find many Albertans who don't have issues with alcoholism among their family and friends. Ah, the joys of living in a province-wide boom-town...

Sunshine and the promise of storms, the contrast of dark spruce trees against a brilliant sky, the sound of the wind through poplar leaves like the rushing of water... Summer in the North-lands is a song all its own. Brief beauty brings a fierce joy to the heart, like the wind before a thunderstorm.

In a land-locked place, rivers flow like veins, connecting and dividing. Tonight there will be fireworks over the North Saskatchewan, reflecting in the drowning waters. Tonight we are celebrating. We are fractious, regional folk, identifying ourselves by our cities, by our provinces, and finally by the nation to which we all belong. "From far and wide, O Canada..." From L'Anse aux Meadows to the Haida Gwaii, mountains and muskeg, tundra and badlands and boreal forest, and all the things around and between them. It has been said that we Canadians are shaped, not by our urban centres, but by the spaces between them, and I believe this to be true.

No matter where I go, I will always carry this place within me. I will spend my life attempting to put the living poetry of my homeland into words. I will never entirely succeed, but the striving for it is a journey in and of itself, and that is a joyful thing.

So happy Canada Day, everyone!