That's all.
I'm not talking to any of you anymore. You can take your NIMBY, me-first, gentrifying, scare-tactic-buying, soulless selves and fold them into corners so sharp they can penetrate your ribs to prove that you literally have no heart. I'm nauseated by having to face the fact that the people in my province think cementing us as the national leader in child poverty and tripling the number people who don't have homes is something to be rewarded with another term in office and six-figure salary - proof positive that we haven't come past about age 10 as a society yet. We want to have our cake and eat it to, without ever facing the consequences. We shirk responsibility like it's math homework when we want to watch cartoons, denying the inevitable cycle of action and reaction. We are the ostrich with it's head so deeply in the sand we won't even blink when the lion creeps up behind us. We are guaranteeing our own demise, one term in office at a time, and seem intent on doing so until the gap between the rich and the poor is a chasm that swallows us all and there's no where to run to because every stream is an economic project, every building is privatized, and centuries of smog that our denial has yet to successfully dissipate suffocate us in our sleep.

My disappointment cannot be parted from my anger. Both sit in my throat like lava or embers, burning and choking.

... and if you're from my side of the tracks, he probably hates you too. Given the past 8 years and the number of ways he's come up with to have an extremely negative impact on my life and on the lives of those around me, I literally can't imagine another 4. I won't. I'm trying to generate faith (I don't have) in my fellow British Columbians so I can believe they won't sentence us to another term of...

- sky-rocketing tuition rates and claw backs of bursary and remissions programs such that the correlation between income and post-secondary education rates has increased sharply. This also directly impacts student debt rates - were it not for Campbell's policies, my own student loan could be nearly $20 K less.

- rental housing shortages and lack of protection for tenants; from his zero-residency requirements for residential property to renovictions to failure to fund social housing, Gordo himself guaranteed our current housing crisis would come to be

- even better, he ensured it would bloom into a homelessness crisis by reducing eligibility for social services and forcing people off of disability. Since I've been teaching, I've watched too many of my students be pushed from the margin literally into the gutter because of Campbell policies. Vancouver, your homeless population has been tripled by this man's policies.

- in the tradition of marginalizing those already facing barriers, Campbell has already done just about all he can to eliminate government services aimed at supporting equality for women, from closing women's centres to reducing avaliability of legal aid. At this rate, we'll be back to the 1890s in no time.

- in the realm of education, students now face more overcrowded classrooms and teachers struggle in "classroom impossible" where the combonation of student needs, special needs, and lack of support creates a ticking time bomb.

This list could go on (and on). I tend to the humanist side, so focus on policies and how they affectt people, but if I were a rocks-and-trees type, I could produce a similar list on environmental issues (all one has to do is look at the annual Squamish eagle count and everything unfolds from there), and then there's the entire realm of privatization, more than enough to warrant a post of its own.

Whatever this election is, it is not one where any person with a still-beating heart can justify apathy.

the older I get, the more I understand, viscerally, the closeness of my relationship to chimpanzees and nebulae alike. to my mind, both seem to have a more functional relationship with chaos and control than do we sapiens: while we pretend the latter to deny the former, i'd suppose they accept the former, doing away with the need for the latter. i know, it's not so comfortable a notion that, having no control, but that's only because of how much we do like to pretend. and what has any of this to do with age? it's a matter of perspective. as a child, the world of adults seemed like some kind of well-orchastared symphony, or at least a play with plausible stage notes. to take part in such a thing surely required some kind of secret understanding that only maturation could bring. you know where the story goes form here.

the older i get, the more i stay the same. i've figured out a few things, i hope, but if i have, one of them must be that the world is predicated on our willingness (urgency?) to pretend at control. adults, being those people over 18 or so, make the decisions in our world, yes, but i've realized now that the sureness and ultimate understanding that i'd hoped lay behind such undertakings is nothing more than consensual mythology, pretend. i must be an adult now, since it's only a matter of counting years to make such a determination, but no magic wand waved, and i'm still just muddling through. what's more, the more people i meet, the more i come to see that we all are. when you get down to it, we probably aren't all that much more capable than our 7 year old selves were. we're just more practiced at pretending.

I try to keep anxiety out of my heart,
which is, after all,
both the beginning and ending,
but anxieties must go somewhere.
I can feel them burning
my stomach as they pass
en route to the spine
where, ossified,
they become structural, not anxieties
but cornerstones of the skeletal foundation.
If I stop moving,
I feel myself begin to melt or,
more accurately, crumble.

BM, you said that panic is in many cases a product of our environment. What about when it isn't?

It is sunny in Washington and my eyes are wet between the lashes.

It is symbolism, and intellectually, I know how, informed by our cultural paradigms, controlled by our psychology, we are primed to react to symbolism, to make it meaningful. Perhaps it's a sign that our society is generally too well armored: my cynicism is still stronger. Beneath the calls for unity, I get snagged on nationalism, on individualism, on religiosity. Can politics ever be without barbs? Or do we need the reminders not to trust it, truly take it to heart?

Oh Obama, Mr. Justice, stumble through the oath, squint into the sun, foible visibly so you can regain the fragility of being only human - perhaps the only way to be free from that net of expectations and desperation, twined together with rhetoric as crisp as Crispin's day, to somehow evoke optimism for a tomorrow we need and fear, in roughly equal measures.

I am sitting at my big, wooden desk, which used to belong to my late great uncle Steve. Of all the brothers, my grandma says, he was her favourite.

Along the front edge of the desk, the varnish is chipping and has worn thin from the rubbing of wrists. It's the only indicator of this desk's trek into the 21st C. Beyond that, the pen scratches and white out stains, the simple cut of the legs, all defy precision temporal locating.

I remember wanting nothing on this desk but a wide expanse of writing space - how silly, to imagine that writing primarily occupies space not electrons. Because that was back when I wrote. Now, I word process and I do love processing words but it is NOT the same. Somehow, life was supposed to unfold into some new creature who had time for serious deliberation and wasn't prone to clutter. It didn't though. Still just me.

I remember new year's eves where my mom sat at this self-same desk, writing furiously as the clock struck 12. She said you had to do at midnight what you wanted to do in the coming year. I have tried this method faithfully but haven't yet gotten to spend a year at peace in the arms of a lover, a year focusing on simple blessings, or a year comfortably adorned by my own skin. Not a whole year. I don't even think I get to set the theme. And now, come midnight, I feel the pressure of yearning, the pain of the branches of my heart reaching for what I know cannot be reached. Midnight sometimes finds me with tears, hiding from the weight of the dream.

It has been a long time coming, and I still can't reconcile ambition with emotion. I feel the weight of responsibility, but in the dark corners of me, neglected aspects of self sit seeping cynicism. They had been promised a day, not even a whole year. The buried corners of my writing desk, hidden beneath papers dating back far too long and the accumulated cellulose of attempted pragmatism, remind me of what else is hidden, what may be lost, when we just can't make the space.