June 5, 2009

There’ll be no casual “Hey, Dear Readers” this week. I must begin this rant with a very sincere thank you for all your support of my last Rant about achieving my first $1,000 day. First off, I thank all of you who do not demand that I cease and desist from sending you this “FNR!” Rolling from there, I thank you in particular for supporting my goal of achieving the “Thousand Dollar day,” this past Tuesday. So I thank you “RK” for calling me long-distance from another country to ask me “how’s it’s going?” before I’d even hit the snooze button on my alarm for the last time! And I thank you, “SM” for texting me later that day…Not wanting “to bother me” in the middle of it, just when it was going very bad And I thank all of you Dear Readers who gave me me your best wishes, and for showing interest in the mechanics of my business with your e-mails.

Before I report the $ amount that I actually earned that day, I must say that the title of my rant tonight is inspired by another two of you Dear Readers. One of you, CA, is the one who emailed in support… “May the spirit of Willie Loman neither haunt you nor vex your endeavors…but hover neath the firmament of lofty goals…ever warning of the shoals of hollow dreams.” And the other Dear Reader, LP, is the one who consistently, and for no apparent reason, eggs my writer’s “fuel” on by sending me website links (and even “snail-mail”) to all manner of writing sites like the one about the “72-hour novel” contest. So the title of my rant tonight is How and why, with your support again, I will not give up the “3^rd Act,” and write a novel over the 72 hours of this coming Labour Day weekend. (And this’ll be the last rant about me!)

Despite all of your best wishes, I only made about two thirds of my goal of my first $1,000…$655. I only closed 25 of the 46 sales that I needed to accomplish that goal. In fact, if it weren’t for the efforts of my gallant “crew,” who collectively closed another 8 sales between them, netting me that much more, I would only have reached just over half my goal.

On any other day I‘d be pretty proud of myself to make that much coin. But, because all you Dear Readers were cheering for me to accomplish my financial goal, and I had failed, I just felt a hollow sense of victory at the end of the day…sure I was happy that I’d made as much as I did, which was more than I’d ever made before in one day on this job, but it was a “hollow” victory because I’d only earned about two thirds of the goal that I’d vowed to achieve to you Dear Readers. And I was reminded with shame that, one day about this time last year, I closed 27 sales (two more than this day) in less than half the time and effort that I’d spent working on this “$1000 day,” but for less profit. And in fact, even though I had a “$655 day” this week…I still made about $150 less than I made last week!

Why is that? Because I worked harder last week and bragged less about what I would do this week. Last week, I consistently followed the formula. This week I nearly took Monday off because I was having a good, inspired writing day…And it was raining…And the next day I was going to make a $1,000 anyway! But then I felt too guilty to live by that rationalization (since I do have a client who supplies me with this great opportunity, who has certain expectations of my services.) And so I drove an hour to work at the end of the day to work for two hours before driving home another hour at the real end of the day. My income during those two hours only bolstered my ego, allowing me to forget that it can’t always be this good. Yes! I thought, I can have that $1,000 day. The day after that “Big Tuesday”…Wednesday…I was exhausted from my failed attempt to make that $1,000 after pitching 173 people (for a one-in-seven sales average, over the course of about 10 hours and God knows how many miles of walking.) And so my sales average went down to a below average 1 sale per 10 doors. Yesterday, I got up early for a great writer’s meeting that went long overtime, and I’m glad it did. Then I drove for more than an hour to work.

Holy Frack! I just went outside for a smoke and found the dark sky lightening to daybreak. Birds are chirping! All while I was boring you with details about how I failed you all. So let me wrap this rant up by saying that I won’t fail you all anymore by chasing “the shoals of hollow dreams.” I won’t walk two-thirds of the third act for money as I did this week. I won’t walk two-thirds of the way to Ottawa in order to gain the self-respect of knowing that I’m strong enough to join the Canadian Infantry as I did two years ago. But at the end of this summer season I will attempt to go all the way to prove to myself that I can be a true and honest writer by remembering what it is like to create a world in words under such a deadline that rapture comes to your heart by the time you finish. Because that is the pursuit, the craft, and the only ambition in my life that has any true meaning. And maybe all the failed dreams that I have pursued before will fuel the inspiration of this one. Because I have experienced so many wondrous and bizarre adventures in the pursuit of goals so fearfully and wrongly motivated.

I won’t make any promises this time, because, aside from my ego’s desire not to have to worry about “winning the bet,” it all seems too trite to do so. All I’m saying tonight is that I’m glad to have this medium to share and receive thoughts with you And if you have some idea for a personal goal that might have been buried for a long time because you know that nobody would support it…

Just frackin’ go for it this week! And if any of you have a story to tell as a result of your efforts, I’ll be glad to post it here next week, instead of some rant about how tough it is to be a Mexican these days.

Sincerely,

Ern

May 29, 2009

Hey Dear Readers, by western astrology, we’re in Gemini. Gemini is playful, quick-witted and resourceful. Gemini loves games, thinks hard and answers quickly to challenges faced. Gemini is a good complement to my own sign of Libra, which also loves to think, ponder, and basically deconstruct the events of the day. Which is why I am so disgusted with myself today. I was on my game at work. I made over $150 per hour this Friday afternoon. But I quit early and went to the gym after working for only two hours! All thanks to Libra’s (my) infamous laziness. (Radio CBC today asked how many of you confess your sins online—well here I am, doing just that.) So the title of my rant tonight is Next Tuesday, (with your support,) will be my first Thousand dollar day, to make up for my laziness today. And, on top of that, I will write the next chapter of my novel before next Thursday’s writer’s meeting.

Okay, I feel a bit strange, making the theme of my Friday night all about money, particularly about me being at the center of it. I had planned to write about our Governor General eating a seal heart, or about Clinton and Bush meeting in my city of Toronto. Or maybe I’d write about General Motors declaring bankruptcy, or about North Korea’s nuclear weapons posturing. There’s so much more important stuff that we need to deconstruct than my own personal goal. But I’m thinking that it could all be related. I think its safe to say that a Friday Night Rant can all be “deconstructed” to a personal experience which shares a commonality with all of humanity.

So, just to deconstruct again, it’s all about the ambition of the pure soul. So…In that context, I say, good on our Governor General for showing the world that our representative to the Queen of England can really earn her pay by eating the heart of an animal that was hunted down by the Canadian citizens who would respectfully make the most of their prey by using all of its parts, just as any hunter would. Good for the new CEO of GM to take on the job of saving one of the world’s mightiest companies at it’s darkest hour. And good on former U.S. Presidents Bush and Clinton meeting together in my hometown to have a rational discussion about the fate of our world, no matter how much money they made by doing so because I bet they both earned their pay. And good (in a twisted way) on North Korea’s insane leader for subtlety forcing the rest of humanity to face the fact that one insane human being is forcing the rest of us to face our immortality in a way that no pathetic dictator like Saddam Hussein, or Taliban fanatic like Osama Bin Laden never could. After all, Saddam was so arrogant as to think that he could invade his neighboring country without retaliation from the rest of the world. Doh! And Osama probably thought that knocking down an American skyscraper in New York would destroy Christianity, once and for all. Doh! Now we have a truly challenging global predicament. Saddam is dead. Osama might as well be. Neither of them ever had any potential to be truly detrimental in any “Hitlerian” way.* And the former war-hawk president who waged war against them is now put out to pasture. Now we have a left-wing American President, with a provocative name like Baraq Hussein, who has, as a goal, (and good for him!) to re-establish America’s standing in this world of nations, as a peaceful, rational nation through dialogue and diplomacy, who is suddenly having to challenge an actual, real and true enemy like Kim Jung Il who is just begging for another war-hawk Bush to put him in his place. What an irony!

So how does this all relate to my personal goal of earning a thousand dollars next Tuesday? Well…I make good money by doing a job which bores me to tears. Frankly, on the face of it, I hate it. I hate it just as much as I would hate eating a raw seal seal heart for the sake of diplomacy. Or as much as I would loath being appointed the CEO of General Motors just on the verge of that great company’s declaration of bankruptcy. Or as much as I would hate being Bill Clinton having to share a stage with George Bush. (Or vice-versa.) Or as much as I’d hate to have to be the American president who now has to solve the issue of facing down a nuclear armed fanatic like the Korean President, which offers no easy diplomatic or “peaceful” solution.

And why do I hate my job this much? Because, like all the aforementioned examples, it has nothing to do with what I enjoy, which is creating stories which will hopefully entertain all those who may read them. My job is all about reciting a 50 word script, to 80 strangers whose doors I knock on, 80 times a day, five days a week. Put in that context, it sounds horrific.

On the other hand, I’ve also noticed that when I do a job well, no matter what that job is, the personal satisfaction that I am rewarded goes a long way toward attaining the knowledge that “if I can achieve success by doing that, then just imagine what I might achieve by doing what I love to do!” I have a feeling that the CEO of GM would love to create the next great Chevy if he could just overcome that whole “bankruptcy” issue. Governor General Michel Jean probably imagines the peace she could bring to the world if she could just get past this irritating “seal hunt” drama. Etc. So, in that context, let me describe to you Dear Readers the details of my job, and how I plan to earn my first one thousand dollar day…

It began with finding a client, like this one, a pizza franchise, and convincing them to allow me to advertise their business for free by allowing me to offer residents in their business area two free pizzas and $400 worth of BOGO’s (Buy-One-Get-One’s) in a “Value Book” that I designed and had printed (at my cost of $1,100,) at my favourite printing house, which I would then sell for $25. So now my day begins by knocking on a door at a house (or opening the door to a business) at around 2 pm, and saying, “Hello, my name is Ernie. I’m promoting _______Pizza, in support of ________(the local charity which receives $3 from every sale.)” I then look them in the eye, point to my open “value book” and tell the person exactly how he/she can save $400 over the next year by giving me $25 now.

Technically, this business defines me as a “salesman.” But I think of myself more as a “statistics expert” who uses his knowledge for financial gain. A mentor taught me this formula over twenty years ago. (And this will be the only time I impart this money-making stategy for free, in writing, ever! So, Dear Readers, either cherish it, or destroy it now.) Step #1: Find an existing service-industry business that 1 in 10 people use on a monthly basis such as restaurants, golf clubs, hair salons, spas, auto repair, etc. Or collect an almagation of ten or more of these businesses who are willing to share one overall package. (Do not approach retail stores that buy product at wholesale and sell at retail for a small percentage of profit.) 2: Illustrate to that business owner that you will speak, mouth-to-mouth, face-to-face, with ten-thousand people in his business area, letting all those people know exactly where he is, and that he is ready and willing to get their business by offering upwards of $200 worth of discounts, and that you will do all of this ABSOLUTELY FREE OF CHARGE. 3: Get your client to agree to the printing of a piece of cardstock (again, at no charge to the client,) that offers at least 1 product or service for free, for which he/she would normally charge $10 to $20. (like a Pizza/Restauant meal/Oil/filter/change, Haircut, Spa service etc.,) and then ten or twenty more “coupons” endorsed by that business that are “two-for-one” or half price, etc. The total value of savings must be at least ten times the selling price of the “Value Book,” (based on regular price.) E.g. A book offers $200 in savings, sells for $20. The book must be valid for a minimum of ten months, and no single coupon in this book should be anything less than a “BOGO,” since all kinds of lesser deals (which clients must pay $100’s or $1,000’s for in advance, with no guarantee of success) can be found for free in junkmail and newspapers. For example, my current “value book” offers two free pizzas, twenty BOGO pizzas, 5 BOGO breadsticks, and 5 Free Chicken Wing orders with a Large Pizza purchased at the regular menu price, a total value of over $400, all for only $24.99 with a few bucks of that going to a local charity. So, like my novel-in-progress, (which you can read here at my website!) its all about numbers. Specifically, 1-in-10: Approach 1 to 10 business owners who’s service is used by 1 to 10 people and you will get at least one of them (smart ones) to agree to a coupon book that offers 10-times your selling price of $20 (minimum.)

Number 4 deserves its own paragraph. Because this is where the work comes in, where the “men are separated from the boys.” Step #4 means that you have achieved number’s 1 through 3 and you are now at the point where you are now at the point of holding your product in hand, knocking at door of a complete stranger door and saying “Hello Sir (If a man answers) or just “Hello” (if a woman answers—as you can never know with a woman if she is a Misses, a Miss. Or a Ms…) “My Name is_________. I’m promoting _______(business name,) in support of ________(local charity,**) then looking them in the eye and explaining how you can save them $hundreds with this “value book” (or whatever you choose to call it,) all for only $19.99 ($24.99—whatever.) If you can knock on, (or ring the bell of private homes, or just open the doors of businesses open to the public) and say that 100 times per day, 1 in 10 people will hand you a $20 bill. Talk to 15 people per hour for 6 hours and you will collect 10 $20’s per day. It is all just that simple. It’s not about salesmanship. It is simply a mathematic formula. That’s it.

On my current campaign, about 1 in 5 people hand me $25. ($3 of which goes to a local charity.) I won’t bore you all with the details about why this is double what the “mathematic formula” stipulates, except to say that it has much less to do with “salesmanship” than it has to with my faith in math x experience. (And the fact that I have suffered many 1-in-15 days over the past months.) Point of all this is this…To bring myself closer to the financial freedom that will allow me to devote more of my time to writing, on Tuesday, June 2^nd, 2009, I will speak to at least two hundred people, and work for at least ten hours, in order to sell 46 booklets. $46 x $25 = $1150. (- 46 x $3=$138 to charity.) Ergo, Tuesday, will be my first $1,000 day. I’m publishing this solely to prevent myself from quitting early, as I did on Friday, because if I do, I won’t just have myself to rationalize to. I will have to confess my sins again—online, to you Dear Readers. I’ll describe my day to you all next week.

May you all dream a lofty, but attainable goal this week, and share it, no matter the outcome.

Ern

*Be warned, Dear Reader’s, that I’m prepared to reply to all of your arguments against these last two sentences, with a shitload of evidence to support them.

**Having a charity organization on board can be good or bad. It’s good because people will be more willing to listen to you, out of guilt, or bad in that they can slam the door in your face after explaining that they already contribute to charity, or do the same because you are not giving “enough” of the proceeds to said charity. Personal expeience tells me that, although charity organizations are happy and thankful for my contributions, which net them $thousands, most people on mainstreet Canada either could care less about that part, or use that part as an excuse to say “I already give” or complain, when they ask how much, that not enough is going to the charity. On the other hand, naming a charity, like I said, often gives you a chance to explain your offer, before the door slams, (not that “slamming” happens very often. 9-in-10 people are as polite to you as you are to them.) And it gives you a good feeling of community when you know that your personal profit is also supporting someone in need of help. So, because its six of one-half and half a dozen of the other, I leave that part up to you.

March 20, 2009

Hey! Dear Readers…Happy Equinox! It’s springtime! New life. Or, to put it more for artists sake, (a.k.a., “rant writers”)…new inspiration! And it’s the only day of the year when our day is the same length as our night.* To celebrate the Spring Equinox, Ern’s Friday Night “First Spring” Rant is now available for the cash price of $0.** Yep! You read that right! Zero dollars! Or…you can finance your purchase at 0% …forever!*** So, Dear Readers, check out the brand new 2009 ERN.s FNR! Canadian designed and manufactured since 2005, This ALL NEW FNR’s carbon “footprint” is as tiny as most of our plebeian’s understanding of that phrase, and please note, Dear Readers, that the “ERN.s FNR” comes with a 12 month/unlimited reading train-of-thought limited warranty. **** Also, the Ern FNR is entirely Green-Eco-Friendly, organic, and “GBF.” (Government Bailout Free.)

*These last few sentences were manipulatively written in order to allow the author to suck all you Dear Readers in to his segue into the fact that he heard something this morning that book ended with something that he read tonight that allowed the inspiration for his rant for this current weekend of 20/03/09. **So long as this author’s words mean nothing to any publisher that might pay him any money. Otherwise, this author might demand something back from whoever downloads this “Ern Friday Night Rant,” if these thoughts ever earn any cash money from any said publisher *** 0 per cent interest to all readers who may incur expenses as a result of downloading the above brilliant words of this arrogant author if these words of his ever earn any money as per stated above. **** Manufacturer of the ERN.s FNR guarantees the Dear Reader for full compensation against any defect in the Reader’s sense of common sense. For example, if the “Reader” disagrees with the manufacturer’s model“FNR” due to his/hers obvious inability to understand logic and/or reason, he/she (the “Reader”) will be sincerely rewarded with the manufacturer’s complete sympathy. For more details, please do not try to find them at the manufacturer’s website at http://www.angelfire.com/psy/ernie-k/

Before I go on, I should let you Dear Readers know that I am pasting this entire rant in the body of this e-mail, rather than re-directing you to find it at my website (It’s been so long that I wrote a Fiday Night Rant that I can’t remember how to post it. And the last time I tried, it didn’t work.) So…If you have no desire to read my thoughts tonight, just stop reading and delete this message here and now, with my apologies for sending it to you uninvited. Otherwise, read on…(And please feel free to comment on my ramblings, or to submit your own rant for next Friday, as I have invited you all to do so in the past.)

This first sunny morning of spring (where we enjoyed a balmy single degree below the freezing point here in Toronto Canada,) I listened to the writer of a book entitled something like “The Life You Can Save” being interviewed on our Liberal-Left Wing CBC radio as I drove to work. And tonight I received an inspiring chain mail from one of you Dear Readers which extolled the virtues of the selfless acts of a soldier. These two items might sound like polar opposites in terms of the subject matter—the first being about the idea of citizens donating to charity, and the other reminding us of how soldiers risk their lives to kill bad guys in order to protect us.

But in fact, both stories revealed a common thread—“selflessness.” And the point that both stories made was that when we put aside our selfish needs, (and I don’t mean the word “selfish” in any negative way, anymore than our lungs “selfishly” demand air,) just because we are too busy to remember them, our own lives become more satisfying. For examples…(and I’ll get to my own last.)

May 22, 2009

…I never finished that rant. Sorry, Dear Readers, for sending you an unfinished work, (as though any of them ever are.) I remember that my inspiration that day was hard…But short-lived. But I am sharing (shoving?) that unfinished burst of inspiration with (on?) you all to remind myself to find thoughts again that I wish to share with you all during the rest of this year and for many years to come. ‘Cause I miss all those old arguments we used to have with each other when you, Dear Readers, so sincere and true, replied with your heart-felt thoughts when you agreed with my “correct” opinions, and your most passionate responses when you mistakenly disagreed with them.

So this flaky rant writer is officially renouncing his aforementioned retirement from spewing his thoughts out to the world again. But I won’t subject you all to another half-finished rant posted in the body of this e-mail. From now on, it will be just like in the old days…A Friday Night Rant reminder, with a sentence or two to tease you into the link to my website. And, as before, if you ask to be removed from my mailing list, you won’t hear from me again. Likewise, if you wish to post your own rant, you’ll be welcome to post it here, raw and unedited, without any editorial comments added by myself…

…Even if your opinion is “incorrect.” (Well…That is, providing it isn’t SO incorrect that I could have the Internet Cops knocking at my door the day after I post it!)

Sincerely,

Ernie Kosanyi

March 14, 2009

Hey, Dear Readers, The title of my rant tonight is, Guys are morons…but my doctor isn’t.

Three different subjects tonight inspire my title. 1) I got very sick this past week. 2) I received a very emotionally charged “Friday Night Rant” from one of you Dear Readers last week. And three,) I have the privilege of receiving the care of this planet’s very best doctor, who desperately needs recognition, if only for the reason of universal justice.

Starting from number 1...I got very sick this past week. I took a day off work on Wednesday, because I had a fever the night before. For me to take a “sick day” is a very big deal, as I am my own boss. I don’t get paid by any company-sponsored or government compensation if I don’t work. So I bite not only a day’s wages, but also the potential loss of a client’s entire contract that is worth $10k if I don’t produce. So, today, Saturday, March 14, I crawled out of bed to get to my doctor before he closed at 2pm, in order to get some anti-biotics, in order to be healthy enough to go to work on Monday. Even still, I had to work today, sick as a dog, to make up for taking Wednesday off.

Qualification: Nobody on earth “had to work today.” Because, as somebody once said, all anyone has to do is to “die, and pay taxes.” I only worked today because I don’t have the courage to play. But that is a subject for a whole other rant.

So I got to my doctor’s office at about 1:30pm. I had this idea in my mind that the “Walk-in Medical Center” was open until 2pm on Saturday. However, when I showed up, a big “closed” sign was at his door. Out of silly desperation, I yanked on the locked door. And then I walked away, cursing myself for not crawling out of bed in time to see my doctor. As I’m walking away, I hear the door unlock…My doctor calls out, “Ernie?”

He tells me that he closes at 1pm on Saturday. But he took me in, after closing hours, examined my asthmatic chest cavity and then gave me 40 bucks worth of free anti-biotics, as well as another script for inhalers for my asthma.

He had NOTHING to gain by opening his door to me, except for the fact that I edited his secretary’s notation for why his office would be closed on Monday.

I was tempted to just take his anti-biotic and go home today to recuperate. No, I was more then “tempted.” That was my plan in the first place. Go to Doc, then go home and be sick. But, because Doc opened his door to me, after closing, I felt the need to go to work myself, thanks to the generosity of another worker. So I went t work today. and on my first “pitch” I made a sale. (I make me living by offering $300 worth of savings on pizza for $25 up-front, (with part of that going to a local hockey team.) Now, I could have turned around right there and went home, since my first sale more than paid for my gas and time today.

December 7, 2008

Hey, Dear Readers, it’s been so long I don’t know if I remember how to do this. But please indulge my desire to write another Friday Night Rant, (Althought its really Saturday and almost Sunday,) entitled 2008, the year in review, from a personal perspective.

I notice that my last rant came back in September, and, like an old rock and roller, I keep on threatening to “retire” from writing rants, only to come back for one last “tour.” And so here I am, back once again, to spew my thoughts.

Let me start by explaining my lack of appearances of late. It’s been a very interesting year, one of reconciliation, I believe both for myself and for humanity in general. For myself, I’ve been forced…no…that’s too harsh a word…Let’s say ‘encouraged’ to clean up my act…A process that is ongoing at this time.

For me, writing my rants has always been a time of wild abandon…crack open the bottle and spew my thoughts to the world as they happen, raw, unfiltered, and posted online before I had a chance to review my drunken mess the next morning. Its been a lot of fun. And I’ve had a great time receiving and hearing your responses to my ramblings. And I will stand by most if not all of what I have written this past year. (Apparently I said some nasty things about Sarah Palin—which I don’t remember, but were quite inflammatory.) But the thing is, is that writing a rant is much easier than writing a novel, or a poem or a short story. Because when I write my rant, I don’t care. I just play.

I don’t care about my bad grammar or my leaps of logic when I write a rant. It’s just for fun! It’s a stress reliever. But you can get to a point where “having fun” can hinder the hard work of really exploring this life that we have been blessed with. And I think that that is what ’08 has been all about. I think this year has been put on the calendar to reel in our excesses, put them in a net and show them to our faces so that we can say…Ok…I guess its time to chill out and really take a good hard look at ourselves.

That is what this year has given me, and why my rants have been so infrequent. My year has been about…(I just cut a few lines here to replace them with a perfect army grunt phrase…)

“Hitting the dirt.”

For example, with the help of one of you Dear Readers, I’ve reduced my drinking to once or twice a month, which has meant not writing my rants whenever Friday night rolls around, because I only write them when I drink, which I haven’t been doing. So, most of the time I am jusk working, dieting, going to the gym, not reading enough, exploring enough, and keeping my opinions to myself. Now I’m filtering those opinions into the novel that I started writing two years ago. And I am not running to Ottawa for a “bailout” for my own failings. I am slowly but surely adapting to this economic crisis. But it’s been tough and pretty dull.

On a completely unrelated but hopefully related note…

You’ve all heard about the poor Walmart employee who was trampled to death when the doors opened. CNN had legal experts blaiming Walmart for their lack of forethought, the police for not controlling the scene, etc. Nobody (in the major news media that I witnessed) thought to question the mob of citizens about their own responsibility for this tragedy. Nobody thought to ask any of those Walmart customers, “And just why was your desire to get a deal on an X-Box worth running over a person?”

Mob Mentality…Such an easy excuse. “Yea..Ahh…’Cause like, they all did it first, and nobody stopped ‘em,…So…Like, I guess I can do it to.

Point is…Personal greed caused that person’s death. Just as my own greed for easy ways out has caused my own problems, personal greed caused the huge housing crisis. The whole “Sub-Prime” fiasco. Greed from above (People in government) created an artificial “good time” for those beneath (in the private sector) to make a killing for themselves by offering the same good times to those who should have known that they couldn’t afford to buy a house on minimium wage. And those at the bottom of the economic food chain mostly turned a blind eye in order to allow their fantasies to come alive. And why not? If a guy in a suit with a diploma tells you that he can get this great loan for you to buy a house, well…is this the time to get cynical? And that American housing loan crisis is just one easy example for me to use to paint this year in the human experience. In my humble, yet correct opinion, this year has turned everything upside down, all around for this human race of beings that we collectively are…(Kind of like a Friday Night Rant?!J

And if anything good can come from it…I believe the great climax of 2008 will be like a scene from a Steven Spielberg movie from way back in the last century, when all the people looked skyward, united in a gaze of utter bewilderment…

Because when something comes along to show us that we all have something new to learn despite all of our family soup recipes handed down from so many generations…well

…Someone above myself could finish that thought, if my words were worthy of reaching that high.

This year, I’d like to believe, has been put to us to answer questions that we’ve been avoiding; to recognize the loans that we have borrowed against the truth, and to pay off our debts to our conscience. If we can do that, then maybe ’09 will bring a morning when we can wake up and face the morning without caffeine, sugar, or alcohol and shower in the polluted waters of our past without fear of making the same mistakes again by answering to our true desires, instead of the easy ones.

I hope that you all have escaped the ills that I have ranted about here tonight, this past year, and…

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Dear Readers.

Sincerely,

Ern

September 13, 2008

Hey Dear Readers, I keep on intending to swear off writing my “FNR’s” because they make me drink too much. But then Friday night rolls around and I say “Frack it! I need to get this off my chest!” And after all, isn’t that what life is about? Risk? “Pushing the envelope?” So the title of my rant tonight is…Sarah Palin, Charlize Theron, Sex, (And why Charlize should be THE running-mate) and American Politics. (I just re-read this and it’s kinda’ weird. But aren’t they all? So I’m gonna’ post it anyway.)

The presidential race is captivating even for us non-Americans this year. Because, with all this “war-on-terror” and hard economic times, we have so many colourful characters promising so much from so many different points of view, promising to solve so many problems. We have a wise old Vietnam-War hero on the right, desperately trying to distance himself from his own boss, while still trying to remain loyal to the principals of his boss’s viewpoint. After all, it was his own “Commander-In-Chief” who caused him to get shot down in the first place by putting him in a position “in harm’s way” that caused him to become a “war-hero” so many years ago when he proved his courage by living through years of hell as a POW because of his own political party’s decision to put him in a (debatably) unjust war.

And then we have a black man trying to become the first black president in the history of this same nation that once “owned” his race like cattle. And yet this same man snubbed a very strong woman who fought against him (and against her own “gender-bias” racism) to be the first woman “Prez” in exchange for a “safe bet” by choosing a wrinkled old “White” guy in order to win over the “sort-of-undecided” Bible belt voters. Hell, he’s so boring that I can’t even remember his name as I write this, and I’m too bored with him to even research the web…’Cause I know you all know who I’m talking about anyway! (Oh yeah…Now I remember. Joe…Ah…Bidden?)

And then the Republican war hero, whose memoirs I’ve read and “awed” over, for his bravery and his cunning, chooses this hot little “Sarah” to be his running-mate. Yeah, she sure has “energized” the Republican campaign. But with what? Empty, but carefully coached chatter. Like, “What is the difference between a Soccer-Mom and a Pit-bull? Lipstick!” Welllll…Mam…You’re talking to a billion or more people on this small planet who don’t know the difference between “lipstick” and a “Pit bull.” They didn’t grow up in Alaska. Many of them eat dogs without any thought and have never seen or heard of “lipstick.” And if your boss kicks the bucket two years from now, what are you gonna’ do? Are you gonna’ go back to that cute suburban line when your cities are dying of poverty and your intelligence networks are begging for you to listen to them about the next 9/11?

This is where Charlize Theron comes into my rant. I just saw her tonight in the second hottest sex scene that a Hollywood movie has ever produced. (The first hottest sex scene was with her as well but it doesn’t relate to this rant…Sorry guys, but you’ll just have to research it yourself!)

It was shot in the film called “The Astronaut’s Wife.” In this movie, she plays the role of…well…the role of the wife of an astronaut…who vanishes for a few minutes while he is on a space walk. Her husband comes back home to earth just fine. (Or so we are supposed to think!) But her best friend’s older, wiser, husband (who suffered from the same “vanishing”) is all fracked up, and he eventually dies of a stroke in the middle of a “welcome home” party. And then her friend kills herself by dunking herself in a bathtub with the electric current from the radio that the “Alien Talliban” forced her older, wiser, husband to listen to. In other words, two patriotic Americans died because they tried to resist the enemy whom they recognized with their wisdom, but who were not clever enough to destroy because of their faith in the old ways.

But the strongest American survived, because, unlike today’s American presidential candidates, and the running mates that they have chosen, she (the character played by Charlize Theron) was intelligent enough to know when she was being cheated out of the life and liberty that her own country’s charter of rights promised her. Why? Because in the movie, her older, wiser, (and now dead,) American friend asks…”Why don’t our husband’s ever talk about what happened?”

When her friend dies, (Charlize) remembers her best friend’s question…”Why?”

“Why?”

Charlize Theron, (Playing the role of the wife of her American astronaut husband) demands an answer from her loving husband (played by Johnny Depp.) She demands the truth (through the character she plays in her role as the wife of an astronaut) by using all of her life experience as the artistic soul that made her become an actor…(Please don’t lose your patience and skip through the definition of her life as defined below.)

(From Wickipedia)… Theron was born in Benoni, South Africa, the daughter and only child of Charles and Gerda Theron, who is of German and French descent and took over her husband's business after his death. Theron's first language is Afrikaans. She is also fluent in English and speaks some Xhosa. "Theron" is an Occitan surname (originally spelled Théron) pronounced in Afrikaans as "Tronn", although she has said that she prefers the pronunciation "Thrown".^[1] The pronunciation commonly used in the United States involves two syllables, with stress on the first. Theron grew up on her parents' farm near Johannesburg (Benoni). She attended Putfontein Primary School (Laerskool Putfontein). At the age of 13, Theron was sent to boarding school and began her studies at the National School Of The Arts in Johannesburg. At 15, Theron witnessed the death of her father, an abusive alcoholic; Gerda shot him in self-defense when he attacked her. The police pressed no charges against her.

My point is this…Only a person who has lived through this kind of hardship, and experienced so much of so many cultures and ideas in this world could be so brave enough to pull off the hottest sex scene in Hollywood history…Which was when she (the actress) acted as if she was being fooled by the alien presence that had inhabited her husband’s body as he “answered” her question by fracking her into orgasm against a wall in a very public place, just to distract her from the logic of her human mind.

The artist (actress) allows her character to get raped, on-screen, by an intellectual power smart enough to trick her for a few moments…just before her character’s wisdom kicks in…

…In order to crush the alien enemy of her human soul.

And that is how American politics can save America (and this entire race of humans who live all around it.) Vote for the white war hero or the intellectual black guy. Doesn’t matter either way. Forget about their shallow choices of “running-mates.” Forget about CNN digging into the “scandals” of their families or their religions or their backgrounds.

My neighbour Americans, think not about what your country can do for you. Think about voting for the guy who is wise enough to choose a truly beautiful, smart, worldly-wise woman like Charlize Theron as his running mate in order to inspire you to think about what you can do for your country!

Hint…-gotta’ step out for a minute-

Okay. Now I’m back and I return with this thought….Charlize? If ever we meet, please let all my Dear Readers know that all my “humble yet correct opinions” could be deemed as just an “my own lowlyly opinion” by the god who created you. So I won’t tell my readers who they should vote for, either into the American office or our Canadian one, this fall. And so, Dear Readers, despite my sarcasm, I don’t mean to sound flippant with this rant because I want us all to be the way we were before we grew up and forgot to be like Charlize. So let’s all do our best to be pure and hot and smart by using the horrors of our history to teach us the best way to our future ascension.

Sincerely,

Ern

August 10, 2008

The title of my rant tonight, (and hopefully of a “real” piece of writing—of which this will be the first draft) is A Good Friend, a Porsche Boxster , and how I learned to love “Stop” signs.

One of my best friends invited me to “help” him drive a Porsche Boxster that he rented for his birthday present to himself.

This next paragraph was going to be a detailed description of all of the faults that I found in the $60k sports car that my best friend allowed me to “help” him drive. Like, “Okay...So it’s fast.” But both us us groaned with sounds like “Aauurrghhh” as our aching leg muscles tried to find a way to climb in or out of the beast. (Anybody remember the famous scene from the Big Chill? When Mr. tv star is challenged to “jump” into his 911 just to bribe a cop into dropping the “drug-charge” against the driver if he can actually jump into a Porsche like they do in the movies?)

It was one of the rainiest days of the summer when we drove our “convertible” Porsche Boxster. So, for the most part, we drove with the top up. That led to another complaint from my shallow brain. Looking back through the tiny plastic window that is surrounded by acres of black fabric soft-top, backing up was a battle between God on my left shoulder, reminding me of the words of the rental agent saying… “And there is a five-thousand dollar deductible,” and the Porsche Devil on my right saying, “Frack him! So you can’t see anything behind me that might cost you five K if you back into a ditch!!! Just wait for how its gonna’ feel when you thrust into my “g-spot!” (I’m sorry, was that out loud?) I meant to say… “into my gas pedal.”

And then I found myself complaining that the stereo is no better than the one in my humble little Suzuki. For $60k you don’t get even a six-disc cd-changer or a GPS. And what do those mysterious buttons on the centre stack do that don’t seem to do anything when you push them?

At one point in our drive through the scenic Caledon hills we found ourselves stuck behind a Mustang GT where we couldn’t pass, due to hills. I cautioned my adventurous friend/driver not to get too cocky about challenging that lowly Ford GT as it could give us a “run-for-the money.” I based that statement on my knowledge of automotive statistics which clearly state that these days, anything from a tricked-out $50k‘Stang” up to a $2 million Bugatti Veyron with 1000 horsepower can run within a couple of seconds of each other up to 100 kph.

But that Mustang had no chance against us even if its driver had tried his best to beat us.

I realized that fact later when I wrapped my hands around the wheel of the Boxster and learned to stop bitching about life. I learned in my time in the driver’s seat why it didn’t matter that this $63,840.02 car was equipped with a crappy single-disc cd stereo and with no more electronic toys than my own humble Suzuki. Not to mention buttons that made no sense and less rearward vision with its top up than I have without my bifocals. Because, when I got behind the wheel and hit gas pedal, I forgot about all that I thought I knew about “sports cars.”

I began my sports car lesson by pretending to think that I was as much of a jockey as the steed that I rode by gleefully playing with the philly’s “Tiptronic” five-speed tranny. “Tiptronic” is a kind of “automatic-manual” transmission. No need to find the clutch-pedal with your right foot, the shifter with your right hand, or to try to coordinate the two as fast as a race car driver. With tiptronic, you can become a racer just by tapping the shifter to the left; into “M,” which, I assume, means “Manual.”(Although I can’t be too sure as a switch on the stereo reads, literally, “Menue” which is a word that doesn’t exist in any English dictionary that I know of.) Then you just tap the steering wheel-mounted “up” and “down” gear buttons. It’s a wonderful thing to hit the gas and let the 245hp flat-six engine roar, only to press your thumb down on a rocker switch when you feel that its high time to shift up. A little tap of the thumb on the spot that it’s resting upon and…

Blam-oh! You rocket away from this earthly existence…If you have the talent and the balls to do it just right.

Thing is, I shift up in a Porsche just as I do as a timid commuter driver, shifting gears when the monster Porsche engine is only at a measly 4000 rpm. As much fun as it is, I found that when I left the transmission in “full-automatic” and just hit the gas, the Porsche auto-tranny had more guts than I, screaming up to its 7000 rpm redline in every gear without even blinking at the mortal driver who it trusted to hold its wheel steady as it toyed with the limits of human courage.

As my friend said at the beginning of the day… “It wants to go fast.”

And that is why I’m confident that we could have toasted that Mustang GT. Left to its own passion, A Porsche will smoke a lesser driver sitting behind the wheel of a faster car. Because if that “lesser” Mustang driver had tried to chase us around a corner? Fahgedaboutit!!! Haul the wheel around that switchback curve like the race-car driver that this rocket wants you to be and you’ll never notice how fast you’re going until the dust settles enough to allow you to look back and see that Mustang flailing around in a sea of twitching torque steer.

But that’s all just a male ego-driven fantasy. The truth of the matter is that I don’t know what ever happened to that humble pony-car. All I can truthfully say is that every RED stop sign that came before me was a GREEN light for fun in my friend’s Porsche Boxster. Because, long after the Mustang was gone, my singular delight in life was to be forced to stop at that infamous red octagon, just so that I could “hit the pedal-to-the-metal.”

So If you ever have the chance to draw back its blinding and deafening ragtop, even for a few minutes on a rainy day in the country, and you and hear nothing but the roar of its six-chambered heart, with no main of tiger-cloth to hinder your blue-sky vision of the winding country roads before you, and you cut a Porsche loose…

Then may you live the rest of your life so well. And while you are living so passionately, don’t forget to notice the world that Ferdinand Porsche let you enjoy…The small towns that you’ve never driven through before because they had no reason for you to find them except for the winding roads that only he would inspire you to explore. There you will find “Badlands” in the middle of a forest. You’ll sweep your Porsche around a street corner where you could just as well be in the south of France (if only for a split second.) You might even stop at a gas station in our own backyard where you could swear you were in the deep south (of the USA) as you haul your groaning ass out of this exotic sports car and find yourself face to face with a vending machine that serves up fishing bait instead of a Coke! No kidding. Toss your loonie in for a bunch of worms. And all the time out there, you’re only 50 kms, (20 “Porsche” minutes) from your home in downtown Toronto!

So what did I learn from Ferdinand Porsche last Saturday? May we all go fast enough, passionately enough, to stop and smell the roses…

Just before we blow their petals off!

Ern.

August 4, 2008

There is a documentary series on CBC called the “Passionate Eye.” I don’t see it too often because it is usually quite boring to viewers like myself who usually turn on the “boob tube” to watch some escapist drama/comedy or just to catch up on the exciting headlines that the daily news exhibits just to get us to watch them so that they can say things like “The most Trusted News in…” Tonight the CBC tricked this slobbish viewer into watching it by calling its two-hour documentary “One-day in September.”

They tricked me into thinking it would be about “9/11.” Instead it was about the attack by Palestinion terrorists on the Isreali Olympic team in the midst of the 1972 Olympic games in Munich, Germany. (It figures of course, with the Olympics coming up this week in the most controversial site—Beijing, China, since the games were reborn from Roman times.)

The documentary walked us through a detailed account of the tragedy, in which a dozen Israeli athletes were killed, due to the mistakes of German police, politicians, and the interference of the East German media, which allowed the terrorists to see the “West” German police crawling up to their windows during live television coverage. Luckily, the “West” German police discovered this coverage and called off the attack just before all their officers would have been killed by the Palestinions who saw them approaching their site on the tv sets in the Isreali dorm rooms.

But the most disturbing part of the documentary was when live footage of that initial day of terror showed Olympic athletes from around the world lounging by the pool at the foot of the building where their fellow comrades had machine guns pointed at their heads. They all knew that the entire Isreali Olympic team was being held hostage, just hundreds of feet away…And yet the news footage from that day clearly shows all these athletes sipping marguritas in the September sunlight.

Which inspires the title of my rant tonight…How to deal with terrorists. (The Spider rant!)

I believe, in my humble, yet correct opinion, that both the German police force and the world at large, (as represented by the “lounging Olympic athletes”) learned a valuable lesson that, if it had not been forgotten, might have prevented the far more horrific one on that other “One-day in September” in 2001.

First of all, lets all relate to each other on a human instinct level of communication. For example, we can say, in the western world, that we have tv shows, movies and “gansta rap,” (which is some kind of expression that is still called “music,” even though its vocalist “singers” never “sing” and its “instrumenalists” don’t “play” any instruments, and its songwriters never write any lyrics to a “song” that they weren’t hired to write—I’m sorry, that is getting into an entirely different rant,) that allow us to imagine what we could get away with if we didn’t have to fear the wrath of “our” god. When we admit that, then we can ask them if they are any better by subjugating their natural passionate and sexual desires by subjugating their weaker sex and relying on “their” god to repay them by being able to frack 47 virgin “Pamela Andersons” after a lifetime of refraining from their potential sins.

When most of us real human beings admit that all we want to do is frack as much as we can, ‘cause it feels so good, then we will all be able to identify the real terrorists. They are not Muslim, Christian, or any other belief in any other god. They are not religious, as much as they will always claim to be. They are not because any god that created this universe must be far too busy to worry about a couple of opposing ant-hills on one of his/her little planets to lend sympathy to one little swarm of his creation.

I know this because, Dear Readers, I have been a God of my own, while believing in the god that created me. Many times a god-created mosquito has landed on my skin. I have never thought to ask that insect if it believed in me before I smacked it’s guts out. I have never asked a mosquito if it was a Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu or an Atheist. It bothered me by pricking my skin. So I killed it. That is what we do as animals. We kill what we eat (at our best) and we kill what we fear for it’s ability to sting us with pain.

As humans, the only species of life on earth that god has gifted with sentience--the ability of self-awareness, the knowledge of our birth and of our impending death, the desire to be a part of something in our limited time on God’s rock, we need to find reasons for our being here.

Before I get too passionately abstract, let me try to wrap this up with “How to deal with terrorists.” 1: Never underestimate your enemy by labelling them as “terrorists.” This implies that they are necessarily wrong simply because they are not powerful enough to defeat the “righteous.” The past century of wars has proven this point. Two international wars were won, but several regional ones were lost when the “bad guys” learned from history how to fight from the hidden corners of the (literal and metaphorical, corners of the building.)

2: Never underestimate your enemy by assuming that your god is better than theirs. To the people who created this convenient excuse to kill devil-worshippers, God is God. (Of course, who am I to say that? ‘Cause I worship the God that “I” believe in? Just for example:…My God pities the human religions that created him with human-created names like Allah and God and Buddha and Jesus. My God created this entire universe for fun. He/she gave all of his creatures his joy of throwing a Frisbee across a beach.)

And 3: Never hesitate to kill your foe when you can plainly see that you are all that is standing between your spouse, your children, and their killer. Because all conflict that happens on this rock happens when two people don’t communicate with the brains that god gave us. When that fails, all we can do is kill the person who we can’t or don’t wish to bother knowing, who might also have a spouse and their own children.

When it comes to words like “War,” and “Evil” and “Terrorism,” and other rhetoric like that, I suggest that we respect the master of our universe by not disrespecting God by assuming that Our Creator has anything to do with our insect-based conflicts. ‘Kay? Let’s just do what we want to do and kill and love like we all do and stop making excuses for our “conscience—i.e.--rational thought, that we choose to ignore while we are killing, loving, and creating new life in the process.

In Conclusion: It comes down to this statement to create world peace among the human race, as might be written by the most evil of humans, as judged by humans; an attorney…

“I am a person who loves another person. Our love together has created another person(s). If you are okay with this, then my family and I will share with you when you come over. If you don’t like us for reasons that we may or may not understand, then you can stay away from us. If you wish, we will also respect your desire for us to stay away from you and we won’t judge you or bother you in any way. However, if you cannot agree with that idea, and you decide that you must kill us for that reason, then please understand that we will do all in our power to kill you first, before you kill us.”

But please, Dear Readers, for the sake of all of our human dignity, (and maybe our very survival,) please leave out the word “God” when we justify killing each other. Like the animals on this rock that God made, we live and die with or without nobility, and any words as I have written in this “rant”are no better than the preaching words of a religious fanatic. Except for one simple fact…

No person on Earth has ever ended a life with any blessing or justification from God.

Ern

P.S. Just as I was editing this rant a devilish-looking spider came crawling across my keyboard. I “fear” spiders with a deep and bitter fear. However, just to prove my point, I didn’t kill him. I chased him all around my room and begged him not to make me kill him in order to justify my rant, even though I knew he couldn’t understand the English language. I let him walk right up to my finger with his devilish eight legs of terror. I told him that I’d have to kill him if he threatened me. He walked back up the wall. He’s still alive…somewhere…Terrorizing me with the thought that he might crawl over my face in the night. On the other hand, I know that he can’t kill me. More importantly, I know that, clever as he is, he really is more afraid of touching me than I am afraid of touching him, since he turned me down on that challenge tonight when I put my naked skin in his path and “dared him.”

And you’re welcome, Dear Readers…’Cause I guess this means that none of you will get rained on today!

July 11, 2008

Tonight I wish to impart a message to you Dear Readers about personal communication in our “I-Phone” wired world…About how bizarrely ineffective it can be compared to old-fashioned ways. So the title of my rant tonight is… “How we can say so much, so quickly, and impart nothing.” My Friday Night Rant is inspired by two very opposite stories of personal communication that occurred in my life this week.

The first example is one of primitive but exceptional communication and the second shows a comical lack of communication in our modern communication age. The first example is so primitive that it is literally sub-human…

Monday afternoon my business client and I were feeding her “pet” seagull in the lot behind her business. This little bird didn’t have a cell-phone, not to mention any organized set of linguistics. There was not another gull anywhere in the visible sky when it began pecking at the crumbs we tossed. But within minutes, about a dozen other seagulls had gotten the message that this bird had found a source of food. Of course, that baby “pet” was none too happy when it found that the whole flock had received his unintentional message about food. But his message was clearer than a “text” or an “email” or even a…What do they call those again?…Oh yeah…a “phone call.” And just as impressive as the speed of that message is it’s clarity! In the simplest phrase I can think of in English it would read… “I found food. Stay the frack away so I can have it all to myself.”

Compare that to the story of my lack of communication with one of you Dear Readers that I only cleared up last night. She’d e-mailed me a couple of weeks ago about a terrible accident that she’d had. I e-mailed back last week to offer my sympathy and to ask for details. I received a reply over the weekend, but didn’t get around to answering it until Monday morning, (likewise with several other messages.) Over the past few days I received no return message and I began to get concerned. Finally she emailed me, expressing her own concern over the fact that she hadn’t heard from me…Had I had a terrible accident as well? (She missed my Monday-morning email.)

To make a long story short, we finally had a “verbal conversation” over a “phone” last night, during which she told me about how she wondered why I didn’t show up at her place last Saturday when I called her from my cell as I was coming back from London. She told me of why she was concerned about me being in an accident when I didn’t show up after I told her that I was on my way…

After a few seconds of stunned silence from my end of the line, she asked, “Are you there?”

After a couple of more seconds of silence I asked her what she was talking about. She reminded me of how I called her on my way back from London (Ontario, Canada.) I had to tell her that I was nowhere near London last Saturday and that I didn’t call her that day. So the long and short of it is is that this Dear Reader was called on a cell phone by some person who she assumed was me (and who apparently sounded like me.) These two people, my friend and who knows who, had a conversation about getting together that evening because they both assumed that they were talking to a friend, when in actual fact, they were talking to…well…who knows!?

This mysterious conversation led my friend to wondering why I didn’t show up last Saturday (after “I” apparently told her that I would be there.) And it probably led that stranger’s friend to wonder why he didn’t arrive because what he assumed were her instructions to her place were actually my Dear Reader’s instructions to my Dear Reader’s place. And she (the unknown person of the unknown caller who called my Dear Reader) could be in the same boat as me by saying to him… “What the frack are you talking about? You never called me from London, or anywhere else on Saturday!” …Even though he must have insisted that he’d called her and talked to her about how to get there… etc!

(What if those two strangers are a new couple? Imagine the ramifications…Just over a wrong number!!!

Scene:

Deleted…my imaginary dialogue between these two strangers would have gone on all night.)

Anyway, my question is; how did the history of communication between “the birds” and “the peoples” evolve in such opposites, with the birds’ primitive communication so completely embarrassing our human communication skills, despite the intelligence of our human minds that has led to organized language and so many ways to communicate it to each other across the vast expanse of our planet?

Forgive me for skipping past our evolution from caveman paintings on cave walls and the introduction of written alphabets that we use to form words. That is for anthropologists and many other special… “ists” to teach us about. Let me just take it from my personal, anecdotal, experience…

A generation ago, we had something called a “telephone.” We used this device when we couldn’t communicate with our loved ones in person… Face-to-face…Mouth to ear. But we understood that this modern device was only intended to convey important messages like… “Please pick up a quart of milk on your way home.” Or it could have a more important purpose for teenage hormones. Like… “Ah…I was just like…kinda’ wondering if…ah…you’d like to ah…go to the dance with me Friday night?”

When a person used this “telephone” back then, he/she knew that everything had been done to communicate with the person who they couldn’t otherwise contact in person. That was that. When the other person’s phone rang in response to your call, you knew that if they didn’t answer, it was simply because they either weren’t in the room when the phone rang, or they were just too occupied with other (possibly exciting) personal things to get to the handset before you gave up listening to the ring tone.

June 27, 2008

Hey, Dear Readers. I apologize to many of you Dear Friends who I haven’t contacted lately. I’m so sorry and I hope to contact you all, personally, over this weekend. In the meantime, I need to write a rant entitled, Sex, passion, politics, religion and art.

It was a toss-up of which two words to begin my title—“Sex” or “Passion.” I chose “sex” on impulse, because this is the act that begins the life that inspires the mind that creates the last category of my title. But an impulsive thought in the human mind is what creates “passion.” (I was thinking of giving a crude example here, but I decided that it would cheapen my point by taking you out of the story by exhibiting any one of your fantasies that…well…would turn this into a porn site. You know what I mean?) Point is, our passion creates the sex that creates life. So which came first? The “chicken or the egg?” It is that debate in our minds that creates the idea of “Politics.”

Because we “think,” this “chicken versus the egg?” question inspires us humans to create an “us eggs versus those chickens” mentality. Out of the arrogance that our egos get from being “thoughtful” we create the “politics” of “us eggs versus those chickens.” One of us must be correct, right? Sadly for us, the “chicken versus the egg” theory is so far beyond either of our political minds to solve, we find ourselves killing each other just to defend the egos that our minds create in order to defend ourselves.

But when our egos must defer to the humanity that god gave us, and we realize that we are killing each other over a simple question, then we must create “religion” in order to defend our practice of killing each other over the “political” question of the “chicken versus the egg.” We need to create a higher power than us to explain our passionately thoughtful need to kill each other. We need to create a God, like I did at the beginning of this paragraph, to justify our sex, our passion, and finally, the politics that we needed to create to justify killing those who came up with a different set of “politics.”

And then comes along something that we have decided to call “art.”

I hope that our dear departed artist, George Carlin, would understand this last sentence, “God willing.” But if he doesn’t, who can blame him? After all, he’s probably got a thousand and one better things to do than read this rant at the moment. Point is…Be an artist this week, Dear Readers, and have a laugh at the fictitious “devil,” that artists like Sir George allowed us to laugh at.

Sincerely,

Ern

P.S. Okay…Some of you historians might argue that religion came before politics. But think of a “Carlin” joke—“If we evolved from Apes and Monkeys...Then why do Apes and Monkeys still exist?”

June 22, 2008

So one of you Dear Readers actually checked out one of the writing links on my website (at www.kosanyi.com) last week. (Playday--A work in progress.) And you actually read some of my “real” writing!

I’m flattered. And you told me in no uncertain terms, that I am… “not allowed to do any rants until you finish this story do you hear me young man!!!!!!” I was planning to honour that request until several bizarre events and conversations (with my cousin) took place in my life this past week. So the title of my rant tonight comes from a phrase that my Dad used to say all the time…Stops my brain!

A teenage girl, born and raised in Canada, successfully sued her faher this week. He disciplined her by telling her that she couldn’t attend a school-sponsored trip because she denied his ultimatum to stop her habit of posting pictures of herself on a chat-line website. The judge “over-ruled” the father’s disciplinary action and decided that the girl would be allowed to attend her school’s field trip. So a father who’s only wish is to protect his child from sexual predators has been denied his right to protect his daughter with a reasonable act of discipline by a “judge” who has heard a case brought to the court by a lawyer that his teenage daughter has hired with God knows who’s money!!!

All I have to say about this is, “Look out Mom and Dad, the floodgates are open now. You might want to call your lawyers because I’m gonna’ sue the pants off you for…well I don’t know yet…but I’ll find something! And my lawyer will be smart enough to allow my complaint to be retro-active to thirty-years ago.”

So go to sleep tonight thinking of how I am recalling that horrible moment when I was ten years old….

And the other story was just as bizarre. The mother of an autistic child has her daughter in a public school. And our system is so compassionate that we provide this daughter with a “teacheing aide,” to help her along. Suddenly the mother of this child is paid a visit by the Children’s Aid Society of Canada to investigate allegations of sexual abuse. Why? Because the teaching aid who helped her daughter visited a psychic one evening. And that psychic told the teaching aid that his/her student was being sexually abused. The aid went to the school principal with this info, and the principal immediately sicked the CAS on the mother. Finally sanity prevailed when the CAS agent decided that the whole affair was ludicruss and apologized to the mother for the stupidity of it all.

All I have to say about this is…well…actually….I’m getting a bad vibe about tomorrow. Dear Readers, don’t get out of bed in the morning. In fact, as they said forty years ago…”Duck and Cover!” ‘Cause…Somebody with the first letter of…Ah…”B” is gonna’ get it up the butt!

Another matter that my cousin inspired was about this whole gas price issue, Dear Readers. Stop whining and SUCK IT UP! (I’m not saying that to you Dear Readers in particular, but to the general western populace.) Back in the ‘70’s when we had the last “oil crisis” the country of Brazil decided to tackle the problem by becoming fuel-indepent from the rest of the world. They grew oil for gasoline for their cars from sugar cane. And now their cars are fuelled/propelled from their own sugar cane crops.

WE CAN DO THAT TOO!!!

No more wars we need to be wage in the Middle East. We walk away, cleanly and with a clear conscience, by saying “We did what we could. But you don’t want us here anymore, and we don’t need you anyway. So we’re outta’ here! From now on, instead of sacrificing our lives over here, and spending billions of dollars to wage a war that many your own citizens (not to mention many of our own and most of those of the rest of the world) don’t want us to fight, we’re going home now and we won’t be giving you our business anymore either. So By-by.”

“Oh yeah?” They might say. “Then we’ll just sell our oil to the booming Chinese economy.”

To which we can say…

“And so will we, for half the price per barrel that you are asking, because we have all of our own oil fields in Texas and Alberta, etc. And we don’t need 90% of the oil that we’re producing because all of our own fuel is produced by wind, sun, sugar, or hydrogen right here in our countries. We can do that because all of the millions of dollars that we used spend to supply our forces over in your country is now being spent on discovering ways to be as independent for fuel as Brazil did three decades ago. So be prepared to for a new sales tag on your oil barrel…’Going out of business Sale. $100 OFF per Barrel. BONUS!! $1 billion dollar reward for anyone who brings in Osama Bin Laden so that America will buy our oil again so that we don’t die of starvation.’”

Oh yeah…and about guns. The same Dear Reader that inspired me to write the above paragraph also inspired me to revisit the whole gun issue. He was bitching about the Canadian government’s “gun-registry” policy that has caused so much controversy and way more than expected tax dollars. The idea was pretty simple. If you own a gun, you must report it to the government. That way, if your gun is used in a homicide, the police have a jumping off point to begin investigating the murder.

If the Canadian government didn’t make it so complicated, and the fanatics didn’t get so upset, it could have been as easy and simple and logical as it is in Switzerland, which is the country that my cousin inspired me to write about. He was ranting about all of these government inspired ideas like “carbon taxes” and the “gun-registry” and then he challenged me to answer the question “where in the world is the most guns, with the lowest murder rate.?”

I thought about it for a moment and remembered that the Swiss Army has a mandatory draft for all citizens, and that every soldier is required by law to bring his/her weapon home after duty. So I answered…”Ah…Switzerland?” My answer was correct (according to you Dear Reader,) because every able-bodied Swiss citizen has a gun at home.

The country has no strict gun laws because they don’t need any, because Switzerland has a very low murder rate by guns.

Why? Because, as I stated in a rant I wrote a long time ago, if we want to stop people from killing each other, we must eradicate guns. Switserland proves it! Only soldiers in uniform can carry a gun in that country. Only a soldier (or police officer) has the mental, emotional and physical discipline to earn the right to possess such a weapon. As for the rest of us? Whether we be a middle-class home owner with a wife and two kids or a crack-cocaine dealer with a couple of girls that he’s pimping on the side, or a Friday night ranter like myself, none of us should be so arrogant as to say that we have a god-given right to own a weapon that we can use to, (as a psychotic caller on my radio station said this week,) “blow his head right off!” Simple fact is, if we all want the privilege of owning a gun, we better be trained how to use it by the military that we created, by joining it, or otherwise trust the military to protect us from the thugs that won’t exist in our society because of their disciplined force.

Please, Dear Readers, forgive the nasty tone of my last few paragraphs. Let’s all put aside fear and discrimination this week and just celebrate our own independence day, whether it be on the 1^st or the 4^{th (or on some other day away over there)}, and celebrate our separation from fear. Let’s celebrate our trust in ourselves, and even in the people who we vote into our government. ‘Cause, at the end of the day, its all good, if we honestly know that it is.

Sincerely

Ern

June 6, 2008

Its the anniversary of “D-Day,” the day, (64 years ago,) when Canada, England and America landed thousands of troops onto the German-occupied French beaches of Normandy to finally nail the coffin on the Second World War. It was a tough five years of fighting (three for the Yanks, who started late) before that day that allowed our allied nations to reach that historic moment that allows me to write this rant as a result of my forbearers courage and persistence. Ergo…the title of my rant tonight--Courage and Persistence. (Romance and American Politics—Part Two.)

A few weeks ago, I came home to find a birdnest seated in the base of the wreath that my landlady had recently placed on our front door. She introduced me to the nest by saying “we have a new tenant.” When I asked what she meant, she pointed to the door and waited for me to notice. It took a moment for me, because, like your average person, I look for what I am used to observing. I noticed the door. Then I noticed the “spring-motif” wreath. I’d noticed it before but, because I’m a guy, I never noticed it like the gay guys on those interior-decorating T.V. shows would notice—with the appreciation for detail. You know what I mean? So it took me a moment to realize that there was a birdnest built into the base of the wreath. But I was amazed at the architecture when I finally appreciated what gay interior decorators can appreciate immediately!

You see, Dear Readers, the bird built this nest in the time between when we left for work in the morning, and when we returned from work in the late (afternoon for my landlady,) evening, for me. And it took me a moment to notice it because this bird integrated the house so artistically with the wreath that I actually had to look for it. The wreath is a perfect circle of wood and straw, with a “wash” of straw hanging down from the bottom centre of the circle. The nest sat at the very bottom centre of the wreath. It is perfectly round, made of mud and twigs that closely match the colour and material of the wreath. And get this—the bird that built the nest took the time to drape loose bits of foliage down from the nest to blend into the loose straw that hangs from the bottom of the wreath.

I couldn’t believe the symmetry of this bird-brained architect. (Not only was it perfectly integraged with the wreath, it was even “cemented” to the door window with caked mud and “clipped” to the wreath with a plastic clip stolen from our eave’s trough!)

But the nest, with its perfectly round bed of hay, was empty. I cynically told my landlady that it would remain that way, now that the architect had realized that we had looked at it, and opened and closed that door several times that evening. The bird would be to affraid to lay an egg in it, after we had disturbed it so.

How I was proven wrong! The next day, there was a single blue Robin’s egg. The next day, there were three more. And now, the Robin that built it doesn’t even fly away in fear if we gently open the door at night. We respect its home and its young, and the bird has come to understand this.

How does this story relate to the title, and of the introduction to my rant? Well…because…let me think about that for a moment…

Oh yeah! This bird had the tenacity to gather up material and invade our front door with it. And then it found the courage to stay there, even after we surprised it with our overwhelming strength, just as our forefathers invaded the Nazi-occupied Europe, and stayed there, fighting against overwhelming Nazi counter-attacks, until peace was secured between us all. Once we found the courage and the tenacity to fight for the freedom of life, we stuck around for the duration until we all could come to an understanding. And it took until just just 18 years ago, (long after the end of WW II) when the Berlin Wall came down. Eventually we all came to the agreement that between the democratic west, and the communist east, at the end of the day, all we really want to do is to build a house and raise our young. And no political or religious ideology can conquer that basic instinct. So we humans, like animals, all have the same desire.

We mate, we build, and we raise our young. And that’s that. Christian, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Atheists, Communists, Conservatives, Republicans. You name it! Birds! Humans! We are all here for one purpose, to raise life on this planet. And, in my humble yet correct opinion, the only difference between us and the birds is that because we are aware of ourselves, we can hope that our offspring are better than us, and bring us one step closer to Godliness. But we can only be better by realizing that we all have the same desires…Kiss our mate with freshly brushed teeth in the morning. Bring food home in the evening. Make love at night to bring new life in the morning.

How does this relate to American politics? Well, an underdog has won the Democratic candicacy this week. He is a coloured man who could be the next president of America, in a country that once owned men of his race as a slave. Talk about progress! On top of this, factor in the fact that the world of humanity has never followed American politics so closely, or so overwhelmingly endorsed and wished for one single person to be the next ruler of this planet. Sure, in his home country, he’s about “fifty-fifty.” But if it were up to Canada or Iraq, or Germany or Japan or most of the 150 odd divided ideologies and countries of this humanity-stained rock, we’d all want him to build the next nest. Since we’re all in agreement, why not give him a chance?

Sincerely

Ern

May 2, 2008

Hey, Dear Readers, please disregard the first sentence of my last rant, from last year. As “The Birds” sang, back when I was busy getting born, “Oh…I was so much older then…I’m younger than that now.”

So…the title of tonight’s rant…”Romance and American Politics.” This title was inspired by three events in my life this past week. 1^st was seeing Barack Obama on CNN passionately rejecting the pastor who had been his friend, mentor, and spiritual guide for so many years. The second was when my co-worker accused me of being “too ro-maaaaaan-tic.”

And the third is a toss-up between two things. 1^st was a joke I heard—

“Question: Why can’t a woman find a great-looking man who is compassionate and sensitive to her needs? Answer: Because he already has a boyfriend.”

2^nd was a moment I witnessed in a documentary on PBS called “Carrier.” Briefly, it is about life aboard the aircraft carrier, USS Nimitz, one of the most powerfully armed, and most inhabited, (with 5000 people aboard) weapon systems on earth. While the ship and its aircraft are featured in glorious colour and rock music, the theme of the film is its crew and the tone is accordingly set to subdued grunge rock-folk. The 10 hour feature captures the most intimate moments of real people who get paid to “serve” their country. One such moment in this masterpiece goes like this…After we spend many moments with a particular sailor, (over several episodes) where we learn about his childhood, his “abandonment” issues (because he was abandoned at a circus—no kidding!) we learn about his youth as an orphan on the hard streets. We see his bulldog-like physique as he discusses his life with an always unseen, unheard, interviewer. And then we witness him reunited with his wife after a six-month deployment on the high seas (where nothing happens on the languid Gulf in this “war-against-terrorism.)

We see them dancing a tango. Not in a romantic, smoky nightclub, but in a brightly lit studio. Turns out that his hobby is Tango-dancing. He does the tango on the hangar deck of the Nimitz, with a female sailor, when he’s not busy slinging bombs and missiles up to the hardpoints under the wings of jet fighter aircraft.

Suddenly, as if in their bedroom, I witness two lovers re-uniting for the first time in six months. They are dancing a passionate tango, but it is completely “UN”-romantic. It’s as if they are Olympic athletes—two strangers merely practising a routine that will fool the audience into making us believe in their passion—Meanwhile, he scolds her for making all the wrong moves. She is defensive and “bitchy,” for all kinds of reasons, until the truth comes out. And when it does, boy, it blows “Casablanca,” out of the water. In this film, you watch a human man and a human woman fall in love. Right in front of a camera. Right before your eyes. I have no idea how they did it. But it’s breathtaking.

That must be the longest ever explanation for the title of all of the past three years of my Friday Night Rants. So…ah…I guess I should actually get to the story behind the title…

When I saw Barack defending himself, I saw a man passionately fighting to explain why he had to cut his ties with a another man that he once worshipped in order to defend his reasons to the people of this earth for why he shoud be the next King of the world. And that’s what we’re taking about. Because let’s face it, the President of the United States of America, really is the king of all of humanity. In front of the world’s judgemental eyes, he had to reject his best friend. He did that with anger and emotional pain. He did that unscripted, almost with tears in his eyes. Hillary did the same a while back, when she was accused of something that I forget now.

That is the “romance” of American politics. The three candidates eligible to become the next President of the Human Race, (above the English Royalty, the Dalai Lama or the Pope…or any other leader) must necessarily show their humanity. Because humanity isn’t just a “business” that needs to simply be run with “efficiency” any more than two sexual partners can raise an emotionally healthy child that they procreated together without something more than a business contract with each other. The next ruler of this planet will only succeed if he (or she) reaches out to our strongest desires--to be wanted, desired--valued as part of the whole grand scheme of life. Otherwise, some of us will go on strike, just like the “U” or “C” “AW,” when contract negotiations go wrong.

And that is the awe-inspiring thing about this presidential race. In my humble, yet correct, opinion, I believe that all three candidates are fully aware of the business side of being human. Republican, John McCain has had it easy, after soundly defeating his rivals. But that is as it should be, since his strength of character got him through years of hardship in a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam that easily compares to his own country’s “Guantanamo.” So if he becomes the next president, I’m sure he’d be just as capable as any other to manage all the issues of running the world while answering to all the anti-war activists who try to be the anti-biotics of our ailments. To all those who would protest against the “illegal detention” of the “enemy combants,” he would have the life-experience to say something like…Yes my fellow Americans, you’re right. It’s inhumane, what we’re doing. I know, because I’ve been there, on the other side…And I’ve done that. My captors put me through hell. I was a captive for years in a foreign country, with a foreign language. There was no “Geneva Convention,” or “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ without a lawyer” like you see on TV and it really sucked. And when I can find a way to make sure that that never happens to any citizen on earth, ever again, I’ll raise everybody’s taxes to implement that policy if I have to. And if I have to, it will only be because I have convinced all you people of the earth, regardless of your beliefs, that inhumanity is the costliest expense to humanity.

Hillary and Barack don’t have it so easy, in that sense. Neither of them have served in combat. And that may be a drawback, in this time of war, in the eyes of their voters. However, I presume, in my humble, yet correct opinion, that this may be the whole purpose of the battle between the two democrats. Rich, white-bred-but-female, Hillary is going up against the idealistic, charismatic Martin Luther King ‘wannabe.’ They are being forced into a war against each other that must, by its very competive nature, bring out their own survival instincts. One is practical, realistic and tough enough to say I can stand by my man even when his intern comes home with his cum-stains on her blouse—for all the world to see. I have the experience to see that as shitty as life can be, I’ve been there, done, that, and I will guide you through it!

And then you have Barack. Black. Last name--Obama. Rhymes with the first name of America’s worst enemy! I gave him no chance at all in the beginning, based on his skin colour, his name, and the same fickle populous that could make an “issue” out of his pastor’s stupidity. And that is saying a lot, considering how I predicted so accurately that the first Gulf war (under George “H’ W,) would be over in no time, compared to the shivers that ran down my spine when the second one was announced by his son. (Imagine if you were running for president, and your best idiot-friend from the third grade was found out by a major news organization?)

All three of them are right on. Thanks to democracy, all of them must listen to “polls” and media “experts” that tell them what they must do to win. And thanks again to the media, they will also have to show us that they don’t care about impressing us through “polls.” Thanks to this wired, global village, half of the population of this planet will see and hear the most passionate thoughts of the Chief. And, thanks to the media telling us so, the next ruler of the planet will have to be strong, bold, passionate, regretful and either non-white, non-male, or, at the very least, non-young-enough to be a cliché. So, no matter what our belief’s, we will have to adapt to a more romantic way of thinking under our next world ruler.

I’m not really finished but I’m too tired to go on. So I’ll end it here.

Sincerely,

Ern

December 23, 2007

This may be my last “Friday Night Rant,” Dear Readers, as I realize now that I must return to a more healthy way of living, one that is spirited by true spirituality, rather than by alcoholic “spirits.”

On this eve of Christmas Eve, I wish you all the best, a happy new year, and my request that you read my last rant entitled…My Christmas rant is inspired by a beautiful film---“The Thin Red Line.”

Yes, it’s a “war movie.” It’s bloody and brutal and it wouldn’t be a likely choice for a movie to be aired on TV, the night before Christmas Eve. However, it was on TV, and, having seen it tonight for the fourth time, I finally got it. I finally understood why I enjoyed it so much the first three times.

It is all about having faith in God. Isn’t that a great message at Christmas time? It’s not easy to see that message in this movie, but when and if you do, it can be so inspiring. So let me give you all a basic rundown of this story. It’s pretty simple…The Second World War. American marines invade the Japanese occupied island of Guadalcanal in the south Pacific. It’s a viciously hot, malaria-infested island and a bunch of soldiers have to live in inhumane discomfort while, at the same time, they have to charge head on into withering machine-gun fire. And, as they witness so many of their friends dying, they each must find ways to justify why they do this. Why they exist in this hell.

This is where the movie shines. It allows us to view the intimate thoughts of many different people, all of who are basically the same. They all have the same job as soldiers. They’re all American, all born and raised as decent human beings in the tradition of our western sensibilities. However, as their job forces them into the depths of hell on this earth, where they must kill in order to live, or risk being killed in order to save a cherished friend, or help a friend die without pain because no god will allow that person to go home to his family, then faith in a higher power becomes the focus of the story.

It all centres around one man who never explains his faith and who dies in the end. But that man rises to heaven, gladly with joy in his heart, while others die in this world, or continue to live on it. Whether they live or die is not the point. The message is that the saddest souls are those who exist without any sense of wonder for the world that God made. They are those who put their faith in nothing, or into romantic love, or into religious scriptures written by other men, or in pride, or in ambition…or in anything that doesn’t come from the pure heart that they were given by God.

The hero of the story is in the heart of a man who sacrifices himself to save another, only to rise to a higher level of life because he can see that in God’s eye, “all things shine.”

All things shine.

Dear Readers, I thank you for being here to listen to my thoughts for all these past few years and I hope you check in with me now and again. However, from now on, I wish to get back to writing fiction—short stories, novels, screenplays—the stuff that inspired me years ago.

I will post my writing on this site as often as I can in the coming year, and I will send you Dear Readers my “reminders” every once in a while, to invite (beg?) you to read my work. In the meantime, please know that your thoughts are always welcome. So, if you wish to post your own rant, my “Friday Night Rant” site will remain open for you to publish your thoughts and ideas to the great world-wide-web.

Finally, this night I need to say how much I owe to so many of you, for all the support and inspiration you have given me, that has allowed me to sit here every week or so, for the past two years, to spout my “humble, yet correct opinions.”

Sincerely,

Ernie Kosanyi

November 02, 2007

The title of my rant tonight is…The Robert Bateman exhibit. Or, how I learned to stop worrying and appreciate a true artist. (Inspired by the third best movie of all time—“Dr. Strangelove, or how I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb.”)

In the world of the animals, God made everything so simple. Carnivores must learn to hunt herbivores by toning their muscles for the chase, while training their minds to learn to use a stealthy approach to gain a launching point from which to spring upon their prey. Herbivores must learn to find pastures upon which to graze, organizational skills to keep the herd together for mutual protection, and a sense of “clear and present danger” so that any one of them can make a clear command to “Run for your fracking lives” when one of them sees a blade of tall grass rustling when it shouldn’t be. And, in them meantime, they both need to sleep, piss, shit, and frack. Just like us human beings. It’s all so simple for them.

But when it comes to us human beings, God made it all so much more complicated. Because the fracking Asshole gave us a “mind.” It’s this irritating thing that makes us self-aware enough to wonder why we feel pain or love or angst, or fear or awe or…well it goes on and on. And, along with that mind, God implanted a stupid question in us all. It’s the same question that we all start out asking our parents when we are a few years old—“But why?”

We “People” do everything that those animals do. But at the end of the day, we ask “why?” Why do we do it? Some of us build cars, buses or planes because we need to travel to the hunt. Some of us become dentists to fix our teeth so that we can chew what we eat. Some become farmers to harvest what we chew on, and replace our need to become hunters so that some of us can become bankers, or financial consultants in order that we can pay the farmers for replacing our need to become hunters while so many more tradespeople support our need to…to create more jobs like bus drivers or plumbers or carpenters or spiritual leaders who all support all of our needs to get through a working day so that we can all come home to our families in order that we can all eat, frack, and then go to sleep with that burning question… “Why?”

And then Robert Bateman comes along. He paints pictures of diving falcons, preying vultures, cliff-chasing mountain goats, stalking lions, snow-swept wolves, and, as a human being who must ask “why,” he teaches us that there is a beauty and grace in nature’s black-and-white- world that only us human’s can appreciate.

He shows this to us with a skill and craftsmanship that only a good, trained, seasoned craftsman, implanted with that god-forsaken question, can do. His job is to ask us all to answer the question…Why?

That is the job of an artist. Artists give us the reasons for why we why don’t jump off bridges (that wouldn’t exist without artists.---No-no-no, Dear Readers, it’s not just engineering and clever mathematics that makes a bridge. Try gazing at one for a long time. You’ll see the artistry sooner or later.) At the end of the day, when everything we worked for was accomplished, it would all become meaningless in our mind if some artist didn’t give us a reason to look forward to something that only humans need to live for.

It was an artist that gave meaning to your life today. (Maybe through this rant?) No matter how “blue-collar” you think your life is, it was an artist that created the t.v show or the movie that you are watching, or the music that you are listening to if you aren’t reading this rant that an artist wrote. An artist created the paintings or photographs that you need to see on your walls that were covered in paint that an artist created. It was an artist that imagined the graceful lines on the side panels of the car that you chose to purchase. An artist designed the cool look of the cellphone that you bought, the building that you live or work in. Artists created the world in which you have chosen to live by asking you to answer your deepest question…Why?

Artists created the spouse you chose to be yours, by creating a person inspired by artists. Because artists made your lover the person who they are by inspiring he/she to ask the same “why” questions that you choose to ask, based on artistic questions that have inspired both of you throughout your life. They may have been very similar, or very different questions. But artists brought you together nonetheless. (I realize that reasoning might seem luxurious to people in the outer reaches of the third world where “Picasso,” “The Artist Formerly known as Prince,” and “Nike” may be as alien to them as electricity, but I’m sure that artistry exists in their human spirit in ways that I can’t know or appreciate.)

The problem for artists is that the very same reasons that art is so imperceptible in our daily lives, because it is so intangible, is that the rewards for being an artist are equally as intangible. Artists live by inspiration, which is a purely “mind” thing. And the reward for being an artist is simply a gratification of the soul. Which is also a “mind thing.” Artists feel rewarded if they know that what they have created has brought that question, “why” into the heart of another human.

This reward is so gratifying to the artist, to see that he/she has inspired another soul to say something like “Wow,” or to see a grin or a frown or a tear, or any emotion whatsoever from a fellow human being, that artists can become confused and disoriented if they don’t achieve the accepted reward of cold hard cash for their efforts even as all of the other successful craftsmen in this human race have come to recognize this cash as a reward for their efforts.

Artists live in a human world that has necessarily evolved, to this point, into a society that is built around a universally accepted commodity. Money. Tangible cash has been created by our race to be used as a tangible form of trade for goods rendered because most of us create hard, tangible goods or services, (like car-building or teeth-cleaning.) I would guess that 90 percent of people believe that 90 per cent of the things that we need in this world are things that we must touch, taste or see in order to prevent our certain deaths.

Nothing that an artist creates is tangible in any way that animals can understand. Sure, you can “touch” a novel’s page. You can “look” at a painting. You can “watch” a TV show, just as you can watch a sunset. But no dog or cat would pay money for any of that. And us human animals, observed from the point of view of a six billion strong human“bio-mass” are not all that different.

Would humanity die off if we used up all the earth’s oil tomorrow, just as the animal kingdom would die off? Hmmm…we probably would. But would we become extinct if no artist ever painted the Mona Lisa? If no Sculptor ever created “David?” No writer ever wrote “War and Peace,” or even “Romeo and Juliet?” If no director made “Citizen Kane?” If no great actor starred in “Out of Africa?” Frack! What if no automotive designer ever lived to create the shape of the Chevy Corvette? (Not to mention the Lamborghini Diablo. Or any number of Ferraris?!)

In my humble, yet correct opinion, I think we would die off. If humanity could have lived for all these thousands of years without art, there would be no such thing as a zoo today. Because all of us two-legged’s would be sharing all the wide-open spaces with all of our four-legged ancestors. And the only difference between us and the apes would be us asking ourselves, “How come those fracking monkeys don’t want to find a bridge to jump off of because nothing means anything?”

So…getting back to the point of why it is so different and confusing to be an artist. Well, let me put it this way…Artists are the people who write those cheesey movie lines, like when a macho cop says “This ain’t what I do…Its what I am..” (And it’s the artistic actor who makes you believe the line.) Cops can say that because taxpayers will let them. Taxpayers will pay for their schooling. Taxpayers will wish them all their best (for good reason) to become the cops that they “are.”

But artists write those lines that the cool cop actors get to say because artists create those words from their heart, because artists really, honestly, do what they do because that really “is what they are.” By their very nature, they can’t care if they are cool. Just as what they create has no tangible value, the reasons for which they create their product have no tangible justification. Very few taxpayers are willing to pay for “art” even though they’d die a slow, lingering death without it.

For example, I once advertised myself as an autobiograher in a local newspaper. I got one irate call from an old geezer who told me that he called some union writer who quoted him $20,000 to write his autobiography. Oh was he flabbergasted! Twenty grand to immortalize his life from childhood to old age. Although I would have done the job for far less, the price seemed perfectly reasonable to me. After all, the writer (artist) would have had to sacrifice a year of his life to immortalize this person’s soul in no less than a 100,000 words. It would be a history of this man’s soul, this man’s artistry, that could be passed down for generations of descendants. But all this man could see in his mind was probably a small, square paperback thing of paper. Hell, for that price, he could buy something tangible! Like a Honda Civic. Loaded! You can touch that. You can use that to get somewhere. But your boring life immortalized in words forever?…Well…what the hell is that worth?

And yet the true artist is consumed by the need to create a product that most human beings will never ask to purchase. So, Dear Readers, take a fresh look at something that has made you feel good to be alive for reasons other than what the five animal senses can process. If that something was created by a human, appreciate the fact that that artist lived his/her life to touch you in that way. It was his sole reason for living. And if he earned money by creating the thing that you are freshly looking at, then know that he earned his pay just as any brain surgeon or chartered accountant did.

The only difference is, the artist could not have earned that monetary reward, if that was his desire. Because, as lucrative as art can be in terms of this moneyed society, the most money can only be made by artists who only have the desire and ability to create the question, “why?” And they’re too busy thinking about the question to care about such silly things as boats and cars and mansions and…money.

Of course, I’d be thrilled if this rant made me some money…Now that I’ve finished creating art and can just look back on it all and…you know…imagine being on Oprah?

Guess I’m not an artist…Yet.

Take care Dear Readers. Please watch something and look in the background for things that you might never think to notice. For that matter, I invite you to check out the rest of my website!

Sincerely,

Ernie Kosanyi

October 12, 2007

Hey Dear Readers, tonight I want to speak of the virtues of open immigration, high taxes and stricter gun laws.

No! Just kidding! I just want to get your blood pumping the way I seemed to with my last rant. Boy, did that one stir up a kettle of fish! I had replies from some of you going out to all the rest of you, mostly telling me how wrong I was, with a few of you supporting my views. I received verbal replies and at least one of you Dear Readers replied to other Readers replies! Got pretty hairy there.

I enjoyed all your responses, Dear Readers and hope that I receive as many from my rant tonight, which will simply be titled…Hmmm…How about, Questions that I would like answered?

I’ll start simply, with a question that one of you posed to me years ago. Why do we drive on a “parkway” and park in a “driveway?” From here I will drive gradually into deeper, darker thoughts. For example, speaking of driving, why do drivers wave a “thank you” to me when they force me to waste my brake pads when they cut into my lane without warning? Know what I mean? I mean, if somebody to my left signals their intention to merge into my lane ahead of me and I slow down a little to let them in, then I can understand why they wave a thank you. But why do they wave a “thank you” when they didn’t signal and gave me no choice but to slam on my brakes? I mean, I didn’t do anything but waste my brake-pads to avoid slamming into the back of that driver’s car due to his/her lack of consideration for time and space and planning ahead. So what the frack are they thanking me for?

Of course, it’s not like I’m the perfect, considerate driver. There have been times that I’ve thought, “shit, I have to get off the highway at the next exit!” And therefore I’ve jumped in front of other drivers without offering them an ample warning. And if there could be such a thing as an “apology” wave, I’d have waved it. But, since there isn’t any such thing, I just make sure to be quick enough that I won’t get slammed in the ass and go on my way like the asshole that I am.

Continuing with the automotive theme…my car has power windows. This switch is ergonomically logical. You push it down to make the window go down. You pull it up to make the window go up. My passengers automatically push the button down to make the window go down. But then they push it down again to make the window go up. Why? Why do they push something down to make something go up? And why does it perplex them so when the window doesn’t go up even though it was their illogical thinking that caused the predicament? Why don’t people who ride in my car think as logically as the people who designed it by naturally pulling the switch up, to make something go up?…

(Yeah…That’s what she said.)

Now some of you smart Readers might ask me what I did the first time I tried to raise my window. Did I push the button down to make the window go up? Luckily, like a good politician, I can honestly say that, “I don’t recall that moment.”

Why does a car worth $20K in Canada cost $16K in the United States when the Canadian “Colour Back” is now worth two cents more than the U.S “Greenback?”

Why does the US of A allow Japan to import their cars to us when they won’t allow our cars to be exported over there? (Is it just because Japanese cars have logical window buttons?…No. It can’t be that simple.) I can just picture some clairvoyant Yankee soldier stationed in Japan back in late 1945, after the Japanese lost the war, talking to some distraught Japanese business person…Might go something like this…

”Hey buddy, don’t cry. Don’t be afraid. The war’s done now. We’re not gonna’ rape and pillage your country even though you killed so many of us over the past four years. No sir. We believe in free enterprise. Now that we whipped your ass, we’re gonna set you free to rebuild your country. And you know what, you slanty-eyed freak, fifty years from now, my liberal frackin’ descendants are gonna’ be driving cars that you assholes designed right here in your country after we conquered you at the cost of tens of thousands of my best buddies that you killed.

“Oh sure, we’re gonna hang a few hundred of your top military brass to punish you for your evil treatment of our POW’s, but after that we’re all gonna go home and leave you alone to rebuild your country after we bombed and nuked the shit out of it to teach you a lesson…’Never, EVER, attack our country.”

“But then, over the next half century, we’re gonna’ get kinda cocky, just like you ‘Gooks’ did back on December 7, 1941. We’re gonna’ start a few scraps of our own back here in your territory, in countries around here that we isolationist Yanks will come to learn as “Korea” and “Vietnam.” And you guys are gonna whip our asses! What difference will it make?”

“And you know, buddy, once you and I have humbled each other by kicking each others asses, your grandchildren in Tokyo will get rich building the cars that my grandchildren will be driving in Detroit. And fifty years from now, we’ll all be equal businessmen, wondering how this all came to be when you and I swore to kill each other a few days ago!”

How the Frack can two different civilizations that nearly annihilated each other for four years, sixty years ago become business-partners decades later when other opposing civilizations can hold grudges for THOUSANDS of years?

How can so many loving gods be so fearful of each other as to ask their mortal children to eliminate the competition? How can a God that is so powerful to create the universe have any need or desire to ask his children to worship him, let alone destroy the other children of his who don’t believe in him?

I tell you Dear Readers, any “God” that is such a wimp that he needs a child like me to stand up for him against any “non-believer”is, as Shania Twain sings, “No (God) of mine.”

So why do so many people kill in the name of God, when God can so easily take care of himself? If Allah is all-powerful, it should be so very simple. There will be no Christians tomorrow. Right? If Jesus is the Son of God, and he died for our sins, then everything is taken care of. Right? So why are we all so arrogant to think that the greate creator, who constructed the entire universe, needs Us to fight his battles?

Stops my brain! Us little beings here on this little planet that he created need to to fight each other in His name? This reminds me of my childhood, when I acted as God many times as I looked down on an ant colony engaging in city-building…or warring against each other. That was years ago, when I was a massive child-god. When I got bored of being a god looking down at my thousands of subjects I…well…I crushed their planet under my shoe.

So…Why can’t we all, around the world, as human adult beings who all want to reach out and be reached out to, come to an agreement that there is an existence beyond our understanding that put us all here to feel the joy of this creationist that we can all agree to call “God?” (Or Allah or Buddha… Or, for Atheists…”Nobody.”) Maybe, if God is about to become bored of our usual patterns of building and conquering our puny empires in his name, he/she won’t get bored enough by our pathetic existence to crush us under his shoe while we fight blindly over our egocentric ideas of ourselves.

Why can’t we just jump into the joy of an existence that is, by its very unexplainability, completely magical and unexplainable, and let that simple fact give us inspiration to be as magical as that Great Being who created us?

Can any of you Dear Readers explain to me why this simple (in my humble, yet correct opinion) hasn’t been accepted by all of us?

Why is Autumn so gorgeous when it is the season of the harbinger of death? Why are the leaves so colourful as they die when they are so blandly uniform green during their life? Why is the crisp, smoky nightime air so intoxicating when the season means the end of life for this past year?

Why do I sit here asking these questions on a Friday night? What do I hope to accomplish or to achieve with this “Friday Night Rant?” Is there any connection between this column and my desire to have my novel, “Visions of Icarus” published, for which I began this website in the first place?

Or is my connection with You Dear Readers the end result of my writing the novel that caused me to create this website that created this connection between us that has created so much fun for me over these past years? Could it be that my two years of toil to write a story that may never be read except by a few of you Dear Readers was all for the purpose of creating this forum where this same author could just shoot the shit with all of you?

If that is the case, then I will allow that possibility, since it has given me so much in return. In the meantime, I will continue to send my novel out to publishers while I run the business that makes my dollars until I rise above this trap, and I will continue to ask you Dear Readers for your wisdom. Does that make sense? Is it a smart idea to make money by doing something that you can’t give a shit about while you force yourself to do what…

You know, Dear Readers, the music I’m listening to right now, by the Almond Brothers, says it all…

”And if I had those golden dreams…of my yesterdaysssS…I would wrap you… in the heavens….”

Sincerely,

Ern

August 24, 2007

Hey Dear Readers, my blood’s boiling tonight! I’m pissed off about two completely different issues. One is a local animal/human rights issue, and the other is about the King’s speech this week to his warriors. My goal is to make it all related. So, to follow my last historically romantic title of a “Mid Summer Night’s Rant,” I think I’ll follow that up with the title tonight of…Tearing a Strip off a Hot August Night’s Madness.

So let me start with the first issue. The animal-versus-human rights issue. It’s all about a story that happened this month in my ex-hometown of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. An officer of the Humane Society came across an unfortunate dog that was boiling to death in its owner’s vehicle.

FYI, for you non-Canucks, the Humane Society is Canada’s official protection agency for animals. They’re the people that take stray pets to the “pound” and who prosecute people who are guilty of cruelty to animals. Which is all fine and good, of course. As a former pet-owner, I’m glad to live in a country where respect for all life is important enough to create a government agency for the protection of non-human life.

Aaaaaanyway…This officer, so the story goes, found the negligent pet owner, as well as the dying pet. The poor dog was apparently on the verge of death, having been locked in this car for far too long on a hot summer day. So the Toronto Humane Society officer decided to take the poor dog away from the scene and get it to medical attention as fast as possible. Good for him, right? However, he didn’t want the pet owner to escape prosecution for the horrible act that the pet-owner had done to his pet. So, before the officer rushed the pet to safety, he handcuffed the pet owner to his vehicle so that the asshole couldn’t run away before other officers came to arrest him while said officer, (named “Tre”) went off to save the animal.

So “Tre” handcuffs a person and then abandons this man, leaving this person in a public place, in plain view of any and all passersby. So, of course, the “bad pet owner” got the shit kicked out of him soon after “Tre” left him alone, chained-up, in a public place, by a lynch mob of other humans who were pissed off at this negligent pet owner.

So what happens next? Well, the Toronto Humane Society takes “Tre” off the street and “handcuffs” him to a desk-job pending a review of the incident.

Good for them.

Then what happens? A bunch of animal-rights activists stage a public protest in front of the T.H.S. office to protest the fact that their “hero” has been suspended by the T.H.S. for having saved the life of a dog.

I found all this rather funny (since there are far more serious issues that require our attention) until I saw this “Tre” on a local TV news station the other day. He was proudly talking about his responsibility to save animals in need. I waited for him to speak of being caught between a rock and a hard place—between saving the animal while showing concern for a fellow human being, you know? Like, maybe he’d say something like…”You know, Ann…(Ann Rohmer, the “cougar” news anchor who was so obviously enamoured by the young “Tre’s” good looks.)

“You know, Ann, I was really torn. I needed to save that poor dog, but I couldn’t allow that asshole get away with it. So I made an impulsive decision to handcuff him to his car so that he couldn’t get away. Now that I look back on it, I wish that I had just taken his licence plate number, let him go, and then tracked him down later. But I didn’t think of that at the time. I was too impulsive. I made a mistake that caused this asshole (in my humble, yet correct opinion) to be assaulted by an angry mob.”

But that didn’t happen. In fact, just the opposite happened. “Tre” was quite proud of his actions. And he was obviously happy to brag about his love for animals and the support that he had gained from people “around the world.” And the local media was only too happy to make him a local hero by inviting him to be a guest on their show!

He had no remorse for his actions during that incident. He didn’t care that the person in his custody had suffered pain. That person whom he had handcuffed wasn’t even an issue to be discussed! Not even on a public television NEWS program. Oooooohhhhh.

That’s when I got really pissed off…When this officer of a Canadian law enforcement agency, who is paid by our taxes, was branded a “hero” not only by the stupid people in our society, but by the media as well, for exacting vigilante justice against another Canadian citizen.

And that’s exactly what it is, vigilante justice. And our media allowed…no…Encouraged…him to be proud of himself!

Dear Readers…(Let me take a deep breath before I go on.) We Canadians are supposed live in a society of “law and order,” where suspects are “innocent until proven guilty.” You know? Even murder suspects are only “apprehended,” by law enforcement officers unless those suspects threaten the officers with deadly force. They are taken into custody and kept safe from harm until a jury of their peers find them guilty. Only then, when the suspect is found to be guilty, do we punish them for their crime. And even then, we try to “rehabilitate” them. We incarcerate them and help try to help them see the error of their ways.

We don’t hang them out in public to be lynched by an angry mob as this “Humane Society” officer named “Tre” did.

And yet we chastise our soldiers, and protest against them for going “over there” to protect those against the “Tre’s” in foreign countries who proudly kill people in those far-off streets without the due process of law and order that we are supposed to be so proud of in our own country.

Indeed, I ask you, Dear Readers, what do you think would happen if a Canadian soldier handcuffed a “Sunni” Afghani citizen to a post in a predominantly “Shiite”city street because that soldier knew that that person had planted an “I.E.D,” (Improvised Explosive Device,) and then that soldier (a Canadian “Tre”) abandoned that person that he had “unilaterally” incarcerated, to go and find a bomb-defusing expert in order save people from being blown to bits?

And when I say “people,” I don’t mean only people who hold a similar belief-system as that soldier. That soldier might be trying to save the life of a young child who might be taught by his/her parents, someday in the future, to blow himself up to kill that very same Canadian soldier who is now trying to save that child’s life. And that soldier might be completely aware of the fact that he is trying to save the life of a child who might want to kill him in some future scenario.

But that is the job of a soldier…to save lives, regardless of beliefs, politics, or other rhetoric. A soldier is paid to protect the people who pay him/her. And if the people in a democratic country like Canada, who pay that soldier with their tax dollars, say, “we need you to to this for the people of your country” then that soldier obeys that order, just as you do when your boss tells you to do that for your company.

However, I bet that the “Ann Rohmers” of our country, who jump at the chance to make a hero out of a man who’d gladly let another man die in order to save another man’s dog, would jump all over the “unprofessional conduct” of that soldier.

And that is a sad and ironic pity, since Ann’s father is one of Canada’s most decorated and heroic Generals.

Dear Readers, I got so caught up in being “right-wing” tonight, I don’t have any energy left to go to the “left.” And that is also a sad and ironic pity, as I really wanted to because I was so equally bemused and disgusted by the American president’s “historical” speech this week to the American Veterans. When he got to the Vietnam comparison, I just thought, “you Frackin’ hypocrite!

I was just as pissed off by his hypocritical bullshit as I was by the above-mentioned “Tre” story. Indeed, I really wanted to write a new speech, as if I was suddenly elected to George W. Bush’s office, in order to save humanity from his innocent, naïve, stupidity. But I don’t have paid speech-writers to whom I can say…”Hey guys, write this drunken rant in my head so that it sounds intelligent for my press conference at nine a.m.”

However, since I don’t have “speech-writers,” I’ll have to leave that one for next week. In the meantime, I hope that all you Dear Readers get pissed off about something. And I hope that you speak about it, rather than hurt somebody because of it. Because that is why we are human beings, as opposed to animals that need to be protected from harm.

Sincerely,

Ern

August 3, 2007

Hey Dear Readers, right off the top, I’m going to title this one…A Mid-Summer Night’s Rant. The Shakespearean reference is intended for a want of poetry in my life. Now of course the Bard was a playright and not a “poet.” But the point is, is that he wrote about great passions that emanate from a true heart. And that’s all that I want to express tonight.

So…without “further ado…” let me spout, for no good reason, everything that I may feel embarrassed about tomorrow.

I feel good when children want to play with me. I savour the light in their eyes. I am a pebble in God’s universe, put here for them to toss about. Unlike a common stone, however, I am granted a soul with which to acknowledge the joy that I create, as they toss me around.

And I feel free when I stand by a mid-summer night’s fire and know that I am in the company of friends. It’s just that plain and simply that simple. I can be in the middle of my life, standing in a sandbox with a friend, and feel no more angst than when I was twelve years old. Indeed, I feel even less pressure due to the saving grace of adulthood.

I feel bad when I confront my demons. When a mid-summer day blinds me with sun and pain and alcohol, only to throw me into the darkness of a hot summer night of confusion and passion, I find a strange comfort in asking simple questions…

Why is this the way it is? Why have I done the wrongs that I’ve done? Or do I focus on those failings because it is easier to do that than to dream upon the midnight stars in the northern sky the way I used to do…When I had no idea how many problems I that I believe that I have today? Should I punish myself? Should I release myself? How many apologies do I owe to the people I love? How many do they owe me? Should I even ask such questions?

This is what I love about this summer in my life…The passion of the wonder of the desire of the need to just…

To just ask a question that I don’t know how to answer.

I always like to end my rant with a request of you Dear Readers. Something profound that might give us all hope. I’m not going to do that tonight. I’ll just leave that up to you.

Sincerely,

Ern

July 7, 2007

Hey Dear Readers, last week we celebrated our nation’s birthday. This week we mourn the loss of six of our servicemen in Afghanistan, as well as an Afghani interpreter who died with them in the same horrific explosion. Last week I wrote a flippant little rant about Pamela and how time flies. This week, I don’t even know if I’ll finish this one, thanks to the darkness. So, in case I don’t get around to it, let me try to sum it all up in the title of my rant tonight…Why do we use people; their lives, their deaths, their families’ pain, for our personal agendas?

Okay, so, let me organize my thoughts for a minute so that I can let you Dear Readers understand why I am so pissed off about the public reaction to these tragic deaths…

Okay. I think I’ve got it. Let me explain from my personal experience. I’ll go back to when I was eight or nine years old. I was at the beach one day. I really wanted to be there and was thankful that I was. I paddled my raft out onto the water, baked in the sun, and then jumped in the lake in order feel the great rush of adrenaline that I knew I would feel when I hit the glistening ripples of cold water. And, Dear Readers, it was as wonderful as I am trying to make it sound with simple words. Except, when I came up out of my dive and rose up out of the cold expanse to take my first breath, my toes couldn’t reach the sand.

And I didn’t know how to swim.

My first breath wasn’t one of joy and happiness, it was one of desperation, gained only by the fact that, when I sank beneath the water, I had enough strength to leap above the surface for just long enough to drink in a breath. And then I repeated the process. Sink...nearly drown…hop…gasp for breath…sink…nearly drown…hop above the surface…over and over again. Eventually my dad ran out to save me from drowning.

The point is, I nearly died that day because I did something that I wanted to do.

July 1, 2007

Hey Dear Readers, we celebrate a couple of important birthdays today. First of all, our great nation, Canada, is only 140 years young today. Think of that. An entire country—the second largest sovereign nation on the planet that we call Earth, full of heritage and history—is only 18 years older than the Guiness Record longest living human being. But here comes an even more staggering fact that should make us ALL stop and think…to ponder how our days are passing us by…Pamela Anderson, who was born on this same day, in this same country that we call Canada…

Is the same age as our country, minus a hundred years.

Think about that for a minute. (Unless you are a Dear Female Reader…In which case my point will probably be lost on you. And I know that that is truly MY loss.)

Pamela Anderson…In case you didn’t hear me the first time. PAMELA ANDERSON….

Is 40…Forty years old…Today!

Ten minutes have passed while I tried to think of some way to impress that fact upon your intelligent minds. Like how the world’s most universally acknowledged “sexiest woman” is Canadian….And how, today, we must accept the fact that she is FORTY YEARS OLD!”

Good for you Pam! You’re the Marylin Monroe of our modern world. No Paris or Lindsay, Britney or Ashley, will ever compare to you. But just think of the facts…You…the hottest cover-girl on the planet..the “Baywatch Babe,” is FORTY.

Ahhh. I think that I will be twenty today. Since Pamela, and all of the beautiful ladies that I know, and all of the youthful dreams that I have, are all as sexy as the youth in my heart.

Happy Birthday Canada!

Today, let’s all celebrate our 20^th birthday!

June 9, 2007

Hey dear Readers. I saw a show on TV today that taught me that the furthest distance that a Grizzly Bear can stand from a road in “the Lower 48” (States) is twenty miles. This fact reminds me of a day when I was stopped on an “Interstate” highway in Colorado when I, along with many other travellers, was compelled to come to a dead stop in the middle of a four-lane, 60 mph road because a family of Dear waited on the right shoulder of the road, while a young one mustered up the courage to cross the deadly path from the left shoulder. This frightened creature looked across the road to its parents for encouragement, then looked to us humans for reassurance that we would continue to halt our mad dash to our destination in order to assure its safe passage across the 20 metres of Interstate pavement, in order to rejoin its family.

He crossed the road, scared…but reunited.

So the title of my rant tonight is, why we all let the young Dear cross the 20 metres.

Could that be a metaphor for all our lives? I know some of you Dear Readers like to believe that the “environmentalists” are totally fracked with their tree-hugging ways. You claim that their claims are fracked because they all thought the world would be uninhabitable by now. After all, the whales still swim the oceans. Okay, so maybe the Blue Whale is extinct. But most of the other ones are still around, right?

We’re not walking around in gas masks, as the radicals predicted. (On this continent, at least—but who cares about the other ones anyway?) Those old sci-fi movies never came true. DDT, “Agent Orange” and Thalidomide were all abandoned before all those chemicals destroyed the planet. (And most of our babies.) So why should we worry about “the environment?”

The fact, in my humble, yet correct, opinion, is that we shouldn’t worry about the environment at all. Because we can’t kill it. We just don’t have the power, with our limited numbers, versus its size and adaptability over time periods in the thousands of years that we humans just can’t understand. I realized this twenty years ago when I sat on a train for twenty hours and saw nothing outside my window but trees. We just can’t “clear-cut” the entire planet in the amount of time that our Earth will allow us to exterminate ourselves while we blindly see our fortunes come true at its expense.

Hell, I can just relate my own experience in my own lifetime to back this up. I can still travel across Lake Huron in my gas-powered boat, to get to the same beautiful beach that I went to twenty years ago. All the crayfish that I collected way back then are gone. I, and one of you Dear Readers, scooped them all up into a plastic bucket. All the Perch and all the Bass fish that my Dad caught by the dozens back then are gone as well. But I don’t care, because the fouled water that supports my little boat is still there. And the sand on the beach is still there. And the oil in the ground that powers my little boat is still there. And the gas that comes from that oil costs me less dollars than it did twenty years ago (after adjusting for inflation and cost-of- living and other economist-invented factors.)

So I still live in the same world that I lived in twenty years ago, even though the truth of my life is only twenty miles away, at its furthest point.

The point is is that we don’t build the road that the natural environment must try to cross. It builds that boundary for us.

So why did we all screech our brakes to allow that young Dear to cross the road? Because we all realized, by the look in his eyes, that we all live within a day’s travel of our most noble crossing.

And I’m not talking about the environment.

Sincerely,

Ern

May 25, 2007

Hey Dear Readers, this time last year I was thrilled to be swept away by a major life transformation. Or maybe I was experiencing the infamous “mid-life crisis.” Whatever it was, it was exhilarating. Every week I found inspiration for a rant. But, without any further ado, the title of my rant tonight is…”Let’s keep dancing.”

That phrase is from an old Peggy Lee song. She sang of how all the childish dreams of her youth fell apart. In her song, she tells us of how, when she was a little girl, she saw her house burn down. At first, the sight of the fire excited her. But in the morning all there was was the smouldering remains of her home. She asked, is that all there is? Is that all there is to a fire? As she grew older, many wonderful things happened in her life. And they all collapsed. Until she thought she would die. And then comes the best line of her song…

“But I didn’t.”

And at the end of every disaster in her life she sings…”If that’s all there is my friends…then let’s keep daaaaaancing. Let’s bring out the wine…and have a ball.”

That’s where I find myself today, Dear Readers. I began my “Friday Night Rants” back when I found the desire to have goals and ambitions in the middle of my life. Over the course of all this time, all the dreams that inspired me to write these rants have imploded in one way or another.

And yet, in these past few weeks, I’ve found myself “dancing” again. I don’t know why. But my life has rebuilt itself for no particular reason that I can think of. Not completely. Because it could all collapse again tomorrow. The only difference between today and yesterday is that no matter what happens, I know that tomorrow I’ll still be dancing to the beat of this life’s mystery.

The only problem here is that I now have to face the fact that all my “humble, yet correct” opinions may be incorrect. Maybe we really should all carry a concealed handgun. Maybe (contrary to my last full rant dated “April 13, 2007”) the Earth is actually a globe, instead of a flat plate. And maybe God did create it in six days, six thousand years ago. Maybe the “Creationists” are right. Maybe Darwin was a fool, along with all those silly scientists who came up with that stupid “carbon dating” technology. Maybe George W. Bush is the most intelligent President America has ever known. Maybe the history books will teach children of the future to compare him to Winston Churchill.

All I know today is that I just want to keep dancing. And if I have a whim as I spin across the floor that I wish to share with you Dear Readers, I’ll write it next week. And if I don’t have a thought worth sharing, I won’t share it.

Here’s one thought that I’d like to share with you tonight. I met an interesting person recently who asked me tonight, “not to tell anyone about me.”

I’m conflicted here, because, in my humble yet correct opinion, everyone should want to know this person.

Maybe this is a good point to end this rant. Let it all end with the fact that we all want to be hunted down, yet never captured.

April 27, 2007

On April Fool’s Day I promised God, and you Dear Readers, that I would write a “rant” every week. So what did I do two weeks later? I broke my promise and went to a beach for the weekend to bake in the spring sun. People have asked me where I went on vacation to get my tan! That is the beauty of Stokes Bay, Dear Readers. Two days there can rejuvenate your soul, not to mention changing your skin colour.

It can also inspire a rant.

For example…in my last rant, I taught you Dear Readers that the Earth is flat. Judging by your lack of responses (to prove me wrong,) I feel that it is safe to teach you the lessons I learned last weekend (and many previous weekends)…the title of my rant tonight… in Stokes Bay.

In my last rant, I preached about the fact that the earth is flat. Last week I learned that cloudy skies are caused by the “smoke” from jet airliners. So let me explain to you as it was explained to me by a long time resident who will remain anonymous…You know when you glance up at the sky just as an airliner streaks across the blue, trailing its white streamer of “smoke?” Anyone of us who is a student of aviation has been taught that that white trail is a “contrail.” Not “smoke.” We assume that it is simply water vapour formed by some scientific conspiracy that trains us to think that high-speed, high-altititude, metal wings can cause an atmospheric disturbance that can cause water vapour to form in the wake of an airliner’s disturbance of the air, much like a high-speed boat causes a “wake” in a lake.

But my Dear (anonymous Reader) who has all the time in the world to look at the sky and absorb the magic of Stokes Bay, has discovered a different reality. He has taught me that the “smoke” from those airliners has a detrimental effect on the environment. Because whenever those “smoke trails” cris-cross the Stokes Bay sky, clouds are sure to follow.

That is a fact, Dear Readers. And here comes an even more shocking fact from what I have learned in Stokes Bay…The British Royal Family…Queen, Prince Harry, and all before them…are reptiles. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that they really are reptilian. They hide this fact because they are also “shape-shifters.” They appear as “human” when they appear in public, to keep us all fooled. But behind closed doors…watch out! Indeed, it was one of you Dear Readers who taught me that fact.

I’m not kidding. And I can’t discount either of these “facts” for two reasons. First of all, I love to imagine. After all, it`s these kinds of ideas that great sci-fi scripts come from. And second, I have enough of my own magical experiences from Stokes Bay to believe that anything is possible.

(unfinished)

April 13, 2007

Hey, Dear Readers,

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of comments I received from last week’s rant about “The Secret.” All of your “Dear comments” were entertaining and very well thought out. Even the comments that didn’t agree with my humble, yet correct opinions, were a joy to read. One of the most interesting comments from you Dear Readers was the suggestion that I use the phrase, “Dear Readers,” too often. You, Dear Reader, even suggested that my use of referring to you Dear Readers in this way might be a deliberate act of manipulation on my part. As if my flattery of you, Oh-So-Dear Readers, might make it difficult for your wonderful selves to disagree with my rants because you might feel a pang of guilt for telling me that I’m wrong when you are so “Dear” to me.

Well rest assured, Dear Reader, because if I am being manipulative…(“If I Did It”)…many of your fellow “Dear Readers,” haven’t fallen for this dastardly deed. Indeed, many of your fellow Dear Readers haven’t hesitated to call me a “fracking idiot” (just an example to summarize the creative words that have been used to describe this rant writer) when my correct opinions conflicted with their incorrect ones. And that’s okay by me. Because any time I receive a reply from any of you dear, sweet, wonderful, jewels of Readership, no matter what you say, I’m flattered beyond belief simply because of the fact that my thoughts inspired a reply from you.

However, Dear Readers, from now on I will try to take the advice of this particular Dear Reader, and not refer to you Dear Readers so often in my writing, by using this aforementioned phrase. Because the last thing that I want to do is manipulate any of you…Ah…people.

No sir. Not me.

However, if, by chance, any of you…people…cherished the idea that you were “Dear” to somebody out there, and you don’t feel that way anymore because you will never see yourself referred to as a “Dear Reader,” and I was the only person in your life who made you feel special…and cherished…and “Dear.”… In this world…

Please don’t jump off a bridge.

You will still be my “Dear Reader,” even if I can’t remind you of that fact whenever I want to, just because of the concerns of another of you…Ah…Well…you know who you are and what you mean to me.

Because I would never consciously attempt to manipulate any of you Dear Readers…No. Not me.

Aaaaanyway…This week’s rant of mine might seem hypocritical after my last one, since this one has to do with faith in a philosophy that appears to stretch the boundaries of scientific logic. But the Title of my rant tonight is “The Don-Ho Flat Earth Society Museum.” It’s inspired by another museum that I discovered on CNN last week. The morning after I posted last week’s rant, I awoke to a “CNN Special” entitlted, “What is a Christian?”

One of the first items in this “documentary” was a report on the “Creationist Museum.”

www.answersingenesis.org/museum/

I supplied you Dear…Oops, with the website in order that you may judge for yourself, as I had to. I had to make sure that this was not some “left wing” propaganda that some “right wing” news media was poking fun at. But no. It turns out that the “Creationist Museum” really does exist. It is about to open to the public, this June. In America. In the most progressive and powerful nation in the world, a museum as powerful and as influential as the New York Museum of Modern Art, the French “Louvre,” is about to open this June.

This is the “Creationist Museum.”

Before I go on, I do not wish to dispute anyone’s faith in God. Whether one worships the Bible, or the Koran, or whatever…One’s belief in a benevolence beyond ego—beyond the self, is always a belief in God, in my humble…well…you know.

This “Creationist Museum” blew my mind. This is a real complex of concrete and “zoning by-laws,” located in the heart of the world’s most powerful place, in a territory that places freedom of thought and speech behond all else. This museum, as rich and well-planned as any amusement park in America, exists solely to teach people the “Laws of God” just as convincingly as students in school are taught the laws of physics…or mathematics. For example, when I was a child, I was schooled to believe that two apples, added to two more would add up to four apples. This museum will exist to teach us that the Earth was created, quite literally, six thousand years ago, in six days.

By a Christian God.

This museum will display huge dioramas of an “ancient world” populated by children who wear clothing to cover their “private parts,” fearlessly carousing next to ferocious dinosaurs beside a lush, tropical pond. This is how the world was before Eve ate the forbidden apple. School-kids who will someday run this planet will be treeted to lecturers who will teach them that all of the scientists all over this planet, who exist beyond politics or ideology, are WRONG. “Carbon dating,” “Neandertal’s,” “Fossils…” All of it is bullshit. And now there is a “museum” created just to teach us that.

It must be a great humiliation to all those people, past and present, who have devoted their lives to find out the “truth” as they so narrowly understood the concept. It must be as devastating to learn the error of their ways just as it would be to the mathematician who discovers that for all of the thousands of years that humanity has spent trying to understand that 2+2=4, he/she realizes today that it doesn’t equal anything but what somebody else says it does.

But that is the way truth comes to light, Dear Readers.

And that got me to thinking about a high school club that I (and a couple of you Dear Readers) used to belong to—The Don Ho Flat Earth Society. I won’t get into details except to say that our “God” was the great Hawaiian singer, and our position was that the Earth is flat. (And our rituals included wearing lays (Sp?) and blowing soap bubbles.) It was all pretty tongue-in-cheek, back then. But now I believe its time to let you readers in on the truth of this universe, just as the “Creationists” have done with their “museum.”

So here’s the “secret.”

The Earth REALLY is flat.

Before you laugh, let me make my case. Lets go back to 1492 when that idiot Chris Columbus first tried to prove that the earth was round by sailing all the way “around” it to come back to his home. Well…if this silly continent of ours (North America,) didn’t get in his way, what would have happened? Obviously, he and his ships would have fallen of the Great Cliff at the edge of the Earth!

So you might ask, “Okay, Ernie, then where exactly is this ‘Great Cliff?’” Well…Before I answer that, let me continue on with some more proof of this vast flatness. Now of course, there is no documented proof of the Cliff. But there are many other cliffs on this planet that act as beacons of the truth. The cliffs that line the Grand Canyon, and those that mark the heights of the Bruce Penninsula are just two examples. And then there are the great Waterfalls. Niagara, for example. Many vessels have fallen over the edge of this great metaphor for the edge of the earth. You see folks, God teaches us like we teach our children. He shows us the danger of these smaller cliffs so that we will never fall off the “Great One,” just as we teach our children not to play with fire by allowing us to burn our fingers on a relatively harmless match.

Our world is a metaphor of proofs of the flat earth. I mean, c’mon! Everything important in our daily lives is flat! Our counters, our tables, our chairs, the bottoms of our containers, the surfaces of the very keys that I type this rant on are…FLAT! Why? Because the thoughts that create these inventions are tuned to reflect the shape of our planet. Flatness. And while there are many “circular objects” in our lives, all the important ones are, like the earth, circular but flat! Plates, for example: Round and flat. Wheels: Round and flat. Most of the world’s hard currency? Round and flat.

And here’s a great metaphor for the rejection of the spherical earth theory. The Ball. Whether it be a baseball, a soccerball, or a basketball, think about the ball. What do we do with a ball? We throw it away. Just as we should throw away the silly idea that the earth is a sphere!

Well now you may ask about space exploration and the apparent proof that it provides us of the spherical nature of all heavenly bodies.

Well…first of all, lets remember that NASA, and all other space exploration agencies, are run by scientists. These scientists were taught by all of their ancestors over the past six hundred years that the earth was a sphere. And they, in turn, have taught all us laypersons, the same idea. The world literally “revolves” around the silly theory that these scientists have put forth over the past six centuries--That the world is a globe. How could they now tell us that they were wrong? Imagine if a top NASA scientist had a meeting with George W. Bush to say, “Uh…Mr. President…Ah…We’ve just discovered that the world is flat.”

Actually, I’m sure that the first scientist to make this discovery would have had to consider walking up to the Soviet Premier, back in 1957 when they launched the “Sputnick” the first artificial satellite of this planet, into what they called an “orbital” flight around the Earth. To make a long story short, scientists have had to engage in a massive conspiracy over the past half century to cover up the fact that they have been wrong for the past half of the millennium. So all those satellites up there today? They zip back and forth from one edge of the earth to the other, every few minutes. And every few minutes, some ground controller has to check the flightpath of any given satellite to prevent it from actually taking a picture of the Great Cliff at the edge of this flat earth.

So if you really want to know where the edge of the earth is, convince a NASA employee to tell you. Just understand that if that employee actually reveals that information, he/she will be forced to kill you in the interests of national security.

Indeed, this conspiracy is so vast that scientists have had to fabricate an entirely false physical law of the universe to explain away the obvious fact that, if indeed the world is a ball, we should all be rolling down hill right now. They call it…”Gravity.” Ooooo…Fancy stuff. Not only do they write textbooks about this alleged gravity, scientists go so far as to call Hollywood effects teams and hire them to hang astronauts from invisible wires, give them bad hairdos, and completely insult their dignity by asking them to smile for the cameras as they carry out their mission. All this to convince us that there IS gravity, by trying to show us what would happen if there WASN’T gravity.

People, all I ask is that you use a little common sense. Ask yourself why you aren’t rolling downhill and falling into space. Don’t just come back with the “gravity” answer. ‘Cause I don’t buy it. You can’t hand me a pile of gravity now, can you? What colour is gravity? How much does it weigh? What does “gravity” look like? You can’t answer any of these questions. You know why? Because there’s no such thing as “gravity!” Why do things fall to the flat earth if there is no gravity? The answer is so staggeringly simple that you might be embarrassed for not ever having figured it out…Things fall to earth because nothing is holding them up.

Doh!

Now that you Dear Readers have learned that the Earth is flat, we need to band together and build a museum. A “Flat Earth Museum.” Lets build it right across the street from the “Creationist Museum.”

Lets fill this museum with flatness in order that future generations will finally know the truth!

So spread the word this week, Dear Readers. And don’t let anyone convince you that you’ve gone insane. They’re just jealous.

Sincerely,

Ern

April 6, 2007

Hey, Dear Readers, the title of my rant tonight is…”This big ‘SECRET.’”

One of you Dear Readers introduced me to “The Secret” last summer, just after my world came apart. And now, tonight, I’d like to “spread the gospel,” so to speak. “The Secret,” is a look at life, from an atomic point of view, a perspective that could also be called “The Inter-Connectedness Of All Things.” As this is a theory that I have always innately believed in, “The Secret” only served to put scientific analysis to something that was always, in my heart, a mysterious yet innate truth—that what we believe to be the truth of our life becomes just that.

If you believe, deep in your soul, that you are burdened by debt, then you are. If you think that you need to defend yourself against a threat, then you are right. If you believe that that threat will destroy you, it will. If you know that you are rich, in wealth, in spiritual love, in the love of life, then, guess what?

You are.

Now before I go on, I don’t consider myself to be a “new-age” kind of flake. I don’t jump on ideas like “Channelling,” or “Past-Life-Regresssion” or “Scientology” or whatever belief system comes my way. My one weakness in this regard is Astrology. Because, like “The Secret,” Astrology is based on a scientific principle—gravity. Gravity, like “The Butterfly Effect,” is based on the idea of the interconnectedness of all things. The idea that a heavenly body millions or trillions of miles away has a gravitational effect on your life when you are born is a bizarre theory on the face of it. And yet, when I observe those of you in my life, and relate my observations to your astrological sign, I can’t help but notice the truth of this wacky concept!

For example, while all of us humans have our idiosyncratic traits that make us individuals, all of you Virgos have a tendency to be strait-shooting, hard-working, sure-of-themselves, no-nonsnse, kind of people. You Geminis are always exploring your thoughts and coming up with a way to prove the argument that you know you can win. You Capricorns can always be counted on for a deep thought because you will never be distracted from your own personal knowledge of right and wrong. All of you Pisces have an irritating way of making the rest of us explore our emotions by asking us with a penetrating look, “how do you feel?” I won’t get into us Libras. Since I, as a Libra, would rather talk about all of you and impress you with my knowledge of you, rather than discover myself.

That is a typical statement of somebody who hasn’t learned the truth of “The Secret.” I caught myself doing it just now, in this rant. With the statement I just made…”rather than discover myself,” I have set myself up to be lost. That’s because I am forgetting the fact, as “The Secret” teaches, that our thoughts are our world.

So…let’s get into the science of all this flakiness about Astrology, gravity, and, most of all “The Secret.” What is it all based on? “Quantum Mechanics.”

The definition of quantum mechanics below is sourced from the following website address, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Mechanics

“Quantum mechanics is a fundamental branch of theoretical physics with wide applications in experimental physics that replaces classical mechanics and classical electromagnetism at the atomic and subatomic levels. Quantum mechanics is a more fundamental theory than Newtonian mechanics and classical electromagnetism, in the sense that it provides accurate and precise descriptions for many phenomena that these "classical" theories simply cannot explain on the atomic and subatomic level. Along with general relativity, quantum mechanics (actually relativistic quantum mechanics, called quantum electrodynamics) is one of the pillars of modern physics.”

In other words, it’s all about the “fundamental” aspect of…EVERYTHING.

The “atom.” The atom is the smallest “Lego” block that builds up the entire universe. And all atoms are the same. As you might remember from your high-school lessons, an atom is a bundle of energy created by a “proton,” a few “electrons” and some space that keeps them apart, yet unified by attraction through their need to try to connect. All of these atoms gravitate toward each other to create this universe and this star that we call “the Sun” that burns bright enough to light our sky, hot enough to keep us alive. These very same atoms build the clouds that cause the creation of the rain that nourishes the atoms that create this planet and everything that inhabits it. This is the power of the atom. And because every atom is just like every other, every atom is just as powerful as the atoms that my above examples illustrate. There is no racism among atoms because they are all the same. Atoms that comprise a rock are the same atoms that swirl in fire, boil in water above the fire, and inhabit and therefore connect the rock to the fire to the pot to the water to the steam to the sky to the rain to the earth to the animals to us to our skin, to our bones to our organs to our thoughts…

The same atoms that create the power of the sun also create the pumping action of the atoms that get the atoms that create the atoms of our blood coursing through the veins that are created by those same atoms. These same atoms also create the electricity in our brains that allow us to experience the atoms that make up our mental awareness. These same atoms are our thoughts.

In other words, atoms create the power of the sun, just as they create our thoughts. Ergo, our thoughts, by definition of the atom, are just as powerful and influential as the rays of the sun.

Our thoughts, our desires, our passions and our fears, are no less physical, or substantial, or weaker in influence than the rays of the sun, the current in the river, or the chair that your atoms are sitting on. Our beliefs are as true and real as the physical world that we believe to live in. The atoms that create the sun provide us with our lives. The atoms that create our belief in God give us the God that created these atoms. Or our belief in the devil gives us the devil that will destroy the life that we have chosen to believe will be destroyed. Or our belief in believing in nothing will cause nothing to happen.

As you read this, Dear Readers, you will decide whether or not I am full of shit. Yes, or no? Either way, you are right. Just as I, in my humble, yet correct opinion, can know that my words are as true as I decide that they are, as they are created from the same stuff as that which makes the world go round.

So, Dear Readers, you will have a great week, this week. I’ve decided that for you. I hope that you decide to believe me, and enjoy it. I say “I hope” because the only thing that “The Secret” can’t rectify is the fact that “your” thoughts are just as physically powerful as mine. So if you choose to have a bad week, even though I’ve decided that you will have a good one…well then, my water will meet your oil. And never the twain will mix…

Unless we decide that they will, since oil and water, (in “quantum” terms,) are one and the same.

Sincerely,

Ern

April 1, 2007

So I got out of bed this morning only to find myself standing in three inches of water. I live in a basement apartment and was subjected to a flood because of some broken water pipe or something like that. Luckily, my pc is loacated a few inches above that, or I’d really be fracked!

So I slush around in the water for a few minutes and think to myself, “I need coffee.” I pour water into the coffee pot, spoon some coffee into the coffee-maker and hit the “ON” button. Well…I’m instantly electrocuted. So the title of my rant tonight is…Wait a minute. I haven’t thought about it yet.

Suddenly my world is white brilliance. Just like the stories we’ve all heard about “near-death experiences,” I found myself walking down a tunnel toward this brilliant light. As I walked, I heard God’s voice. She asked questions of me in a sexy, but monotone voice…”Why haven’t you born a child?...Why did you only send “The Mirage Effect” (one of my screenplays) or “Visions of Icarus” (my only complete novel,) to only a handful of agents and publishers?…Why have you held back your heart from so many who wanted to love you?” Why haven’t you exploited the talent that I gave you? I didn’t know how to answer any of these questions, except to say, “I don’t know, God, but if you give me another chance, I will try to answer these questions.

And then she said, “Well that’s what you know I want to hear you say. But if I grant you another chance to live, you must continue with your Friday Night Rants, every Friday night, so that the world will know of the spiritual journey that I have allowed you to continue living.”

Toward the brightest point of this white brilliant light I replied, “Yes God, I will continue to answer your questions, and I will report them through this earthly website, every week, so that you will know that I am working to answer the questions that you require your earthly subjects, like me, to answer to.”

With that vow, I found myself walking backwards, over snow-capped mountains, through forests of green, until I saw my chest being pounded on by a beautiful woman. And when I awoke, it was from her lips, pressed against mine as this lovely nurse performed C.P.R on me in a hospital room after she heard a “Code Blue” in the middle of the night.

I woke up this following morning to the moist touch of her lips and her long dark hair brushing my cheeks.

I was in heaven on Earth when she asked me if there was anything that she could get for me.

I asked her for a coffee.

A few minutes later she showed up with all her curves preesing out against her tight-fitting nurse’s uniform…and a “Tim Horton’s” coffee in her hand. Now, here in Canada, “Tim Horton’s” is the coffee god. And every spring they have what they call a “Roll-Up-The-Rim” contest in which you roll up the rim of the coffee cup to win anything from a free coffee to a million dollars…

Well…Just as I promised God to fulfill her wishes I rolled up a “$million-dollar” cup!

So I looked at this beautiful woman and said, “I’ll give you half of this if you share your heart with mine.”

She bent down over me and whispered in my ear…”I will give myself to you if you title this rant…”

“Happy April Fool’s Day, Dear Readers.”

Sincerely pulling your leg,

Ern

March 10, 2007

Why? That’s my title tonight, Dear Readers. “Why?” Why do we argue about guns? About abortion? Or about Politics? Why is it that we need to ask why? Why do we claim to trust in a “higher power,” or an “inner strength” or a “soul mate,” only to question our faith in God, or throw out our Tony Robbins “motivational” videos, and stab our “soul mates” to death when we have a shitty day?

Why must we always cling to the idea of there being an “enemy” to ourselves?

Why do we need to ask why when our lives should be so easy to see so clearly with our human brains? I mean, we all need to breathe the same air, eat food from the same earth, and then put it all back where it came from, just like all life forms. And then we must make more of ourselves by producing children to love and nurture.

Please, Dear Readers, feel free to let me know if I “got out of the boat” with my thinking, here. But I’m struck with the wonder of the idea that if all of us cried out with the hunger of a wolf, “I want…”

March 03, 2007

I got to sleep in this morning, due to the great lion of winter invading the month of March. I eventually awoke to a phone call from the calm and casual voice of a police detective who wanted to speak to me regarding a murder that occurred in my town. He asked me some banal questions over the phone—My date of birth, address, next of kin, etc… He and I arranged for me to come down to the station for an interview. I put on a pot of coffee, splashed my face and planned my day. Just like any other day. So…I guess the title of my rant tonight is…What happens when your day’s events include work, eat, sleep, and a murder interrogation? (Sorry. Replace “interrogation” with “interview.”)

Before I go on…No, Dear Readers, I didn’t kill anybody. I just want to get that out of the way so that you can read the rest of my rant without the distraction of speculation while you fondly remember the “Rock-Star” lyrics that you will find below…

I guess what I really want to explore tonight is the danger of letting the banal surface of our existence take over our spiritual lives. I mean, I think its safe to say that we all have a desire to live our lives like a Hollywood movie, or a great novel. We wish to feel as though the life that we live today, no matter how mundane and boring it might be, is all for the greater good of the breathtaking morning to come.

However, as John Lennon sang, “life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.”

This is how I’ve found myself looking back on this Friday, March 2^nd.

You’d think that the experience of being put in an “interview room” to be asked questions about a homicide would be a challenging, perhaps life-altering experience. On TV it is always that way for mere mortals like us. It’s only the hardened criminals that fluff such experiences off. On “Law & Order,” they sit back in their chairs and act all tough, like it’s nothing. But the regular folk who never had a criminal bone in their being, like us, always face the mortality of their souls under the brow-beating of good cop-bad cop tactics. They get nervous and always get caught in some lie that might make us wonder if “they did it” just because some incisively brilliant cop plumbed the darkest secrets of their heart, and made them so nervous by doing so that they had to admit some deep dark secret that could destroy their lives because it meant clearing them of the murder. (“Alright! So we were having an affair! But I didn’t kill anybody!”---For example.)

And yet, my experience today was neither dramatic, nor (on the banal surface) was it a life-altering episode. Maybe because I already knew that “they” knew that I was innocent, and that the person that they would question me about was also innocent of the crime, my first concern of the day was finding a place to park where I wouldn’t get a ticket. I worried about getting a “soaker” from all the puddles and slush on the street. Then, when I made it into the station house, the person at the desk didn’t seem to know the name of the detective that I was scheduled to see. Was I at the wrong station? I thought about the hassle of getting this over with in time to get a workout at the gym before going to work tonight. Not about the importance of this event. Not about the fact that something about this day might have some bearing on justice being brought to the killer of a good and worthy person.

When it was all sorted out, the detective rushed out from somewhere in the back as if he’d just come out of the bathroom when he’d heard his name being paged for a “clean-up in aisle three.” Unlike all the TV shows cops, he was no more charismatic than your dentist, no more attractive than your accountant. He was, just like the police station itself, about as dramatic and fascinating as your average doctor’s office. And, as for the police station, there was none of the dramatic lighting that seduces us into the wonderment of humanity’s darkest depths. No closed doors behind which some captain is having a heart-to-heart with some overzealous beat-cop on a mission. No “bad-boys” in handcuffs being brought in in full view of stunned civilians. There was just a long L-shaped counter under sterile fluorescent light, behind which a few officers sat around like bank tellers on a coffee break.

The detective asked me to “meet him around the side over there.” I entered through a plain door marked “interview room,” into a bland white space with a table, two chairs, and a plain old window. (Not one of those one-way mirrored glass panes where the suspect knows that people are standing in privacy on the other side, watching for his slip-up and debating whether or not to “book’im.”) In the TV shows, the detective always looks perceptive. He cocks his head to the right (which shows a genuine interest in you—as opposed to the left, which is a display of boredom, [Body Language 101]) and disarms his subject with a gracious “Thanks for coming down. I’d just like to ask you a few questions…”

But not in my case. My detective fumbled with a little gadget as he informed me that he was recording this interview by sound and video, via the little recorder that he was holding. He pressed what I assume to be a “rewind,” button, stopped the rewind at some point and began to play a portion of some previous recording. I heard a passionate female voice wailing and screaming for a few seconds before he fast-forwarded to a blank space to begin recording our session. Then he fumbled through his notes. He didn’t fumble like “Columbo” always did, as if to make you think that he was a bumbling idiot that you could easily get the better of. No, he really did fumble. And as he began his recording by stating the time and date of the interview with “Ernest Kosanyi,” I had to correct him on the date, to which he replied, “I stand corrected…March 2^nd, 2007.”

(Of course, who am I to say? Maybe he really is a modern day Columbo! More likely though, he’s just, as Joe Walsh once sang, “An ordinary, average guy,” who just happens to do an extra-ordinary job.)

At this point I have to say, Dear Readers, that I can’t get into details, lest I interfere with the investigation. All I can say is that I was asked a number of pointed, well thought-out questions by this detective over the next half hour. However, for the purpose of this essay I will admit to two of the queries. 1^st, “what is your relationship with (so-and-so.)” To this I had to come up with a dull, banal statement that encapsulated a very intense year and a half of my life, because his focused words forced me to reply with blunt, sad facts that made me see my life in clear, antiseptic terms.

And 2^nd, “Is there anything else you can think of?” (Pertaining to any question that he didn’t think of to obtain some fact that I might know of that he could use to close the case.) Suddenly I found myself really nervous as I wracked my brain to think of any little factual tidbit to ensure that my detective had every bit of information to clear my Dear Friend of any suspicion. That’s when his brilliance shined through the sterile, antiseptic, totally un-ambienced setting of that slushy March day. He saw through my false reply…“Ah…No…Not that I can think of…Ah…aside from the fact that I never imagined myself being interviewed about a murder.” He witnessed my gruelling self-examination and coaxed me by asking me, “Well…What about this?…”

Somehow this detective knew how to coax me along just gently enough to make me think of something else to say.

And then he shook my hand and I left the station, went to the gym and completed the second third of my day. Then I went to work to finish my day. Just like it was any other day…you know what I mean, Dear Readers? You line up the events of your day and organize them in your mind…”Wake up, put some coffee on. Catch the news. Shower and dress. Brush your teeth. Go to 17 Division to be interviewed about a murder and display your life to a total stranger. Go to the gym. Go to work. Come home. Have a drink. Post a rant. Go to sleep.”

Even your most bizarre, dramatic day can appear to be routine if you look at it as though you are “busy making other plans.” So, Dear Readers, I guess what I’m suggesting here, tonight, is that maybe we should look back on this day that we just lived and ask ourselves how much of it we missed because its sterile, bland façade, caused us to dismiss its intense meaning while we dreamt of tomorrow.

So here’s to hoping that we appreciate the importance and the potential of this day in our lives, Dear Readers.

As Neil Young once sang…”Toooo-night’s the night…Da-da-Da-da-Da…”

Sincerely,

Ern

February 24, 2007

It is winter in the city. Life is all slushy, messy, wet, and bitterly cold. Aside from the week-or-two tease of summer that some of you lucky Dear Readers may get when you jet off to some tropical resort (where you will still worry about your tax return or some other hindrance of your life back home until you’ve downed your 4^th umbrella-topped drink,) many of us will be afflicted with SAD...

Seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, also known as winter depression is an affective, or mood, disorder. Most SAD sufferers experience normal mental health throughout most of the year, but experience depressive symptoms in the winter or summer. SAD is rare, if existent at all, in the tropics, but is measurably present at latitudes north of 30°N, or south of 30°S.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder )

So the subject of my rant tonight is truly SAD, Dear Readers. Sorry. You wake in the morning to an icy, blinding sun that burns your retinas from all the reflections off the white snow, or to the dim, shiftless cloud that diffuses itself throughout the brown slush and the cacophany of honking car horns and the nauseating “grrrr’s” of deisel-engined buses struggling to pull away from stoplights. You’re in a rush to get to work, without any good reason to find yourself in a rush. The glory days of your life are gone and the future promise of spring feels like a cruel joke cracked by some long-forgotten dream.

What a picture of hopelessness this winter of SAD paints upon our lives, especially when, as now, “Mercury is in retrograde.” Astrologically, that means that all our plans are in dissaray and communication is at a standstill. For myself, personally, this past week I have experienced the emotional agony of a dear friend’s life, the chronic physical agony of another’s, and the despair of feeling helpless to help either, because of my own afliction of SAD.

I’m tempted to end this rant here, just to rub in my point---that sometimes it seems that all there is is the hopeless, dark winter of depression.

Except for one irritating problem…Damn! I hate to find a silver lining just when everything could be so comfortably gloomy…The problem is, when we face the utter despair of the permanent gloom and doom of our lives…

Well then up crops this irritating little fruit of inspiration. Its this little muse (muse—mysterious source of artistic inspiration) that inspires you to feel like you did when you were an innocent child, when you thought winter was a “wonderland” because snow was slippery and could make you speed across it on skates or skis or toboggans. And the stars above your exhilarating journey were so inspiringly bright because you were out in the forest and the blinding sun had set just an hour after you got home from school and all the problems of your day had no consequences in terms of ruining the rest of your life because they were all swallowed up by the crisp night air.

Now, as SAD adults, we can race across what once seemed to be a minefield of danger, because no mine can blow us apart any more than we’ve already been blown away. Know what I mean? You can be late for work and be secure in the fact that you can say, with total freedom, “Go ahead and fire me. I had no desire to work here anyway.” And then you can go back to pursuing the dream you had of being an astronaut back when you skated across the thin ice of life.

You can accept the fact that you don’t care how long you sit in rush-hour traffic, because it doesn’t matter any longer how long it will take you to “get there,” since “There” is no longer a place that you care about getting to. So now, thanks to SAD, you have another hour to sit in commuter traffic and dream about where you really want to go!

You can eat peanut butter and not worry about the “anaphylactic shock,” that will probably result in your death due to an allergic reaction. Your reward will be one of the greatest treats of life’s pallette, even if you die a second after that. Because you know that an honest death can’t be any worse than a false life is right now.

You can put your gear in “park” in the middle of the rush hour and appreciate the beauty of all the different shapes that peoples mouths form as they scream at you to “Move your fracking car,” or “Get a fracking life!”

You can say “I love you” you to someone whose rejection can destroy you, because you can no longer be destroyed any more than already have been. Or you can say “I don’t love you” to somone who may be killed by your honesty, because you know that their death will also be their renewal to a new, honest life. One where, inevitably, they will hear those words, “I love you” spoken back to them. Either way, you can take the time to be as gentle and loving as you can be, to be honest with yourself, as well as the fellow commuters on life’s freeway. You have all the time in the world to do whatever you always wanted to do because you don’t give a frack about fear.

And at the end of this dark SAD tunnel, we see things in a new light. We feel invincible because we’ve survived our destruction.

Because, as God, (Bruce Springsteen) once wrote, “…everything that dies, someday comes back.”

So have a good week, Dear Readers. Thanks for putting up with this darkly self-centred rant. For those of you who are all happy and fuzzy with contentment, I pray that you open your fracking eyes! And for those of you who think you could write an even darker, more depressing rant than this…get a fracking life!

That’s a really harsh thing to say, particularly since I have no right to say it. Sadly though, the truth, in my humble, yet correct opinion, is that no matter how SAD we might be, I just can’t help but know that somewhere, deep down in every living soul on earth, there is a spark of inspiration that holds the power to transform an icy February in the prairies into a sultry, dew-soaked morning, where life is fresh and anything is possible.

Sincerely,

Ern

February 17, 2007

Hey, Dear Readers, tonight I present a guest rant for you, written by one of you, for all of us. It refers to this site as the “FNR.” So now my site has an “acronym.” And I like it! My Friday Night Rant is now the “FNR.” That reminds me of how that hip TV-show, Saturday Night Live has become universally known as “SNL.”

I’m getting delusions of grandeur over this, fantasizing about how my lowly “blog” could one day be as famous as that TV show. I picture conversations around the office water-coolers around the world…”Hey Bob, did you catch Ern’s FNR last night?” Hell, maybe my site will even become referred to as “Ern’s F-Ner!”

Kinda’ sounds like “Hugh Heffner.” Y’know what I mean?

Anyway…Without further ado, here it is…Tonight’s Guest “FNR…”

“Having missed Ern’s FNR for the last three episodes, I will now comment on all three subjects rolled into one.

An abiding principle behind the Nuremberg trials was the concept of unprovoked aggression. International law states that common rules of self-defense apply to nations just as clearly as to individuals. Countries that attack without being themselves directly under attack are branded illegal aggressors.

Statesmen have been executed based on this law. I’m sure Slobodan Milosevic, had he been found guilty and lived long enough, would be a case in point.

After we were done hanging the “culprits” of WWII and formulating the international law body, The United Nations, the world settled into another kind of war.

Cold war was, for the most part, a war of words and saber rattling. The sabers had gotten too big to do anything grander than rattle without killing everyone.

This didn’t stop unprovoked attacks. Through Korea, Suez, Viet Nam and other acts of barefaced aggression, it seemed we had learned nothing and could always find an excuse.

In 1967 Israel attacked six Arab nations without any formal declaration, just as Japan had attacked the United States decades earlier. Of course world opinion has a lot to do with her decision to become an aggressor. If a nation is generally perceived to be an underdog it helps to mitigate the crime. Egypt did the same thing to Israel in 1973, but because Egypt lost again it was generally regarded as tit-for-tat.

On and on it went. Nicaragua, Falklands, Granada, More African killings than could be counted.

The upholders of international law are, on paper at least, the General Assembly of the United Nations. The enforcers behind the United Nations are the prevailing superpowers. Currently we only have one, so it falls to the United States to meter out the bulk of justice on behalf of mankind.

All the above has one thing in common: politics. Politicians are only at risk if they lose an aggressive act and incur the wrath of the United States. The rest of us are at risk all the time. So, assuming this to be true, the only statesmen not at death risk are the superpower leaders and their staunchest allies. No one censures the enforcers.

In the 1980s Saddam Hussein was a good guy—at least in the eyes of Western superpowers. The US Congress perceived the conflict between Iraq and Iran as a positive action and, despite Iran-Contra, secretly backed both sides through the CIA in an effort to keep the Mid East destabilization process humming along.

When Saddam became too big for his boots and attacked Kuwait, something needed to be done. Operation Desert Storm was the result. Kuwait represented a consummate act of unprovoked aggression by Saddam and punishable under international law.

Instead of dragging Saddam into court, it was deemed that destroying his military machine and a bunch of ignorant troops, with new hi-tech weaponry that needed testing anyway, punishment enough—leaving him free to turn his lethal attention to the Kurds inside his own country.

September 11^th 2001 changed everything. A corrupt, ailing US administration was given the kiss of life. Now the enforcers had been attacked it seemed anything was possible. The big excuse could be used anywhere in the world and Saddam was squarely in the US gunsight.

The new action against Iraq proved one thing: international laws are open to interpretation only by those with enough clout. Attacking any sovereign nation under the sanction of the United Nations seems to be okay, even if that nation has not directly attacked you. So much for the laws of self-defense as applied to nations.

It all translates into basics. Power is the only rule of law when it comes to humans. As a species we have displayed this from the earliest beginnings of so-called civilization. Winning is everything and justice is merely a point of view. When Saddam took his last fall was he thinking: if only those WMD had been real?

I will now attempt to dovetail all of this into the concept of love.

We have to turn our attention to religion, national pride and patriotism; for this is where we find love on a grander scale. Duty is a concept born out of love—love of country and the defense of hearth and home. When we are unjustly attacked this kind of love swells into national pride and a willingness to die for our neighbors.

The key word here is “unjustly”. On 9-11 virtually all Americans felt this way. Secret intelligence and world history might have persuaded them otherwise, but on the surface it was pretty cut and dried. Nasty foreigners had attacked and now Americans needed to bond as a nation. Patriotism swelled. Leaders were loved once more as they made rousing speeches and condemned the enemy.

Love is one more tool in the arsenal of politics. Used skillfully it can be the most powerful tool. Where would organized religion have been without the excuse of love, as it rooted out and castigated idolatry in the name of God? Politics paid attention and soon took up the cause. Straightforward brutal behavior became unfashionable. It now had to be packaged and sold as love.

The average primate having sex is, for the most part, a sweaty, grungy, fairly ugly business. Don’t be confused—this is not love. Going to war under the banner of truth, justice and the (insert nation of choice) way, is. Glory in victory. Praise the Lord.

Humans are the only primates that kill for reasons other than defense and sustenance. We are complicated creatures, so the word love is also complicated. At times it seems to mean the opposite of what we intended—cruel to be kind and so on. A love triangle can result in murder. A one night stand, a baby.

Love as a pure emotion is tied directly to other feelings. Self image, insecurity, pride, lust, envy, persecution, delirium, despair. Love and protection of our offspring is programmed into our DNA. It is seldom contentment, even though this is its main billing.

For the most part politicians want you to love them. It’s a one-sided arrangement at best. It has nothing to do with the physical attraction between strangers of opposite or same gender when they engage at close quarters. Political love is an arms-length deal where big arms enfold an entire nation. Loving on a grand scale. Hippies in the sixties tried making it a lifestyle, but found themselves fiscally disadvantaged to those with an education and sold out to the lure of corporate success or lapsed into obscurity. Burning draft cards became politically incorrect in the post 9-11 era.

Love often has a hidden agenda, so when you find it in its purest form know it is rare. Like Coke, the real thing tastes great, but too much of it can kill you.

My favorite line from Apocalypse Now: “Accusing someone of murder out here is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

Have a “GFW” (Great Fracking Week,) Dear Readers, (DR’s,) and remember that any and all of you are more than welcome to submit your own “G-FNeR” (Guest-Friday Night Rant.) Just so long as your words don’t promote hatred toward any particular Race, Creed, Religion, or Sexual preference. (“R-CASS.”)

I will post it, unedited, and Without Personal Critique (WPC) on this site, ASAP.

Sincerely,

“EJK” --- (E-JeKt!)

February 10, 2007

It’s Valentine’s Day this coming Wednesday. So the title of my rant tonight is…Hmmm…Why I, as a single, divorced, “forty-ish” guy, still appreciate this day. even though I will give no flowers this year.

Adult Human Love is as romantic as a bowel movement. It happens because it has to happen, in order to procreate the human race, just as a shit has to happen to relieve the body of waste. (Hmm…How would that go over on a Valentine’s card?)

But the shit that a man must relieve in order to procreate is very complicated. Unlike an animal that has an actual “bone” in his penis that allows him to get a “boner,” a human male must rely only on “blood flow” in order to achieve an erection. And that pumping blood can only be inspired by thought. So, a human male must be “mentally inspired” by a human female in order to be able to “rise” to the occasion that allows the creation of another human being.

Now, being a human male, I know that I can be “inspired” to rise to the occasion based on animal instinct. A simple mathematical equation of female curvature, designed by God to be mathematically enticing to the eyes of the strong but ugly male, can make my head turn in mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-breath, and make me think, “I’d do that!”

However, I am influenced by thought, even at the most primal level, when it comes to sex. No matter how “mathematically perfect” a female may be, in terms of her physical body, I must always entertain some kind of fantasy scenario to really get the blood flowing. For example, the other day I gazed at a “sunshine girl.” Pound-for-pound, inch-by-inch, she may have been far less appealing to me than the girl from the day before if it wasn’t for the clothing, the pose, the dispassionate look in her bespectacled librarian eyes—the fantasy that her picture made me imagine--when the photographer snapped the shot.

But that’s the difference between “sex” and “love.” In the animal world, all that is required is lust. In the “Human” world, that same instinct will create another human being. But the human baby that is created only by that “instinct” will always struggle through life to be “human” because, as a human, he/she needs to think. However, since that human wasn’t created from the beauty of thought, he/she will always be encumbered by the struggle of fighting to be more than an animal.

And that’s the beauty of Valentine’s Day. Animals don’t have it. They don’t need it. Animals just need to frack, to create more animals to frack. But people need to create thinkers, in order to perpetuate wonder, curiosity, ambition, spirituality.

When a man embraces and celebrates this day by giving in to all the corporate cheesiness to make his woman happy, he is saying “I celebrate this day because something about you makes me want to create a person who makes me feel as human, as passionate, as driven to explore life, as you do. I know by the understanding between us that, while I walk through a dark forest of mystery, I can have faith in the fact that a woman beyond my dreams truly wants to hold on to me, share my dreams and yours, trusting that you will always hold my hand, because you know that I will never let go of yours.”

So have an honest, romantic week, Dear Readers.

With all my love,

Ern

January 27, 2007

The title of my rant tonight is “Why my rants are shorter and more infrequent.”

A great writer once wrote a story called “The Heart of Darkness.” A great film director turned that story into a great movie entitled “Apocalypse Now.”

Sincerely,

Ern

January 13, 2007!

Happy New Year, Dear Readers. I know it’s a little stale already, but I’ve been trying to figure out how to write a new year’s rant for so long now. Until finally I decided tonight to just ramble on after the title…Rambling and Ranting Over ’06.

Lets start with…Oh…Iraq. What did O6 accomplish for the war in Iraq? Hmmm. Well first of all, it continued to be a war, long after it wasn’t supposed to be one. In fact it became more of a war last year than it was before G. Dubbya’ proudly stood on the deck of that aircraft carrier under the slogan…what was it again? “Mission Accomplished,” or something like that? What else? Oh yeah. Saddam Hussein was finally laid to rest. But even that has strangely become an odd little footnote in this savage war that was supposed to be all about him in the first place. Take out Saddam and you take out the threat of “WMD.” (Remember how that was such a “buzzword” when the war began? Funny how that household military term was replaced with “IED” over the years.) Take him out and you take out the safe haven for the Al Qaeda that he was supposed be allied with. Take him out and you end the ruthless slaughter of so many innocent civilians. In the end, the controversy inspired by the illegal phone camera recordings over the actual execution, with the suggestion that Shi’ites were openly taking revenge on the Sunnis, (Spelling?) only served to paint a picture of the mess that Iraq has become since he was taken down. I don’t profess to be an expert on this subject, but I think it’s safe to say that as many or more people are dieing violent deaths in Iraq today than when this pathetic dictator ruled the country.

“WMD” and the idea that Saddam was a threat to the world had turned out to be a fallacy before ’06. Links to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda also fell away before last year. But ’06 brought the tally of American lives lost in that conflict to about 3,000. The same number of those lost on 9/11. Not to mention all the additional lives lost by member nations of the “coalition of the willing.” My point is, is that George W. Bush spent as many of his citizen’s lives up to last year, fighting the wrong enemy, as those who died in the original attack against his country on 9/11. And the last bastion to fortify his defence for waging this war—the fact that Saddam was a murderous dictator, who slaughtered his citizens and ruled them with an iron fist of oppression, has also fallen away. Because slaughters happen all the time today in that country, even with Saddam dead and buried. And the iron fist of oppression has been replaced by chaos and outright civil war. Woo-hoo! What a trade-off!

At least good Ole ’06, can be credited for one thing. It will open our eyes to a new way of thinking for ’07. For example, I am open to the idea of Bush’s “new” plan of pouring a shit-load of new troops into Iraq.

Me…agreeing with George W. Bush. You see? Now that’s a totally new concept for this New Year! (Hell, I might just go and join the NRA!) Seriously, though, If I were the Prez, I might just say to the world,

“I fracked up when I engaged in this war. I know that as your Commander-In-Chief, I’m never supposed to show weakness by admitting to my mistakes, for that only serves to lower the morale of those under my command. However, since most of the world’s population is not under my command, my troops will have to answer to a higher power to boost their morale while I fix this problem. Those brave men and women of our armed forces will need to find a way to understand that every individual action that they have taken was noble and honourable, as that is the heritage of our people. Every soldier should understand that he/she is helping to bring the world together by wielding force against those who attack the defenceless.

“However, the problem is that we don’t have enough force on the ground in Iraq today to fix the big fracking frack-up that I created. So the only thing I can do now is to pour so much firepower into that nation that I “liberated” so that nobody can initiate a violent act against anybody else lest they find the muzzle of a gun against their head because they twitched. In the meantime, I will create new laws insuring all humanitarian aid organizations free and safe passage throughout this country. And any recognized aid-agency individual who is injured or killed in Iraq has a life-insurance policy, paid for by the U.S. Government, (The citizens who elected me.)

“And it will stay that way until somebody wiser than myself can help all of us get out of this mess that I created, because I made a mistake in judgement.”

Of course that’s not the answer either. Because how can I expect those citizens who have lost their loved ones, and those warriors who lost their friends, to find any peace when the guy-in-charge who put those courageous souls in harm’s way, who caused their deaths, can do nothing more than say…”Well they died because I made a mistake?”

So all I can go on is history. Vietnam was lost because America never committed enough forces to win it, probably because too many Americans correctly thought that it shouldn’t have been fought for in the first place. Ergo, maybe America should forget about whether it was a good idea to “liberate/invade” Iraq, and just get on with the business of winning the war. And to those who say that sending in more troops is the equivalent of using soldiers as “cannon fodder” for terrorists to shoot at? Well…at least soldiers with guns have a chance to defend themselves, unlike people riding to work on a bus in Chicago who have no idea that a suicide bomber is about to push the button. Maybe that soldier wouldn’t be on that bus if he was too busy sniping at American soldiers “over there.” So if one soldier dies because another soldier shot him, instead of flying to America to in order to get on a bus kill scores of civilians? Well, then the first soldier won the battle, even though he/she gave “the ultimate sacrifice.”

Maybe the eyes of the world community will someday be able to see the eyes of a soldier who can see the eyes of a mother or a child when he declares an oath to them, “I am here to protect you.” And no political agenda will ever force that warrior to renege on his/her word.

However, in my humble, yet correct opinion, what the frack do I know? If I review my own life over this past year, I can honestly say that I can’t recognize the man who began this space over a year ago. I could look at the “glass half empty” and face the fact that I failed at all the resolutions I proudly posted last year, with the possible exception of one, which is still in question. I could tell you Dear Readers that that is the reason that I haven’t posted (or even made) resolutions this year.

Or I can look at the “glass half full” and remember what a roller coaster of experiences 2006 brought my way because of the resolutions I attempted to achieve.

In ‘05, my soul was dead. ’06 Gave me dreams and goals to live and fight for. And those goals caused me to experience joys that I never could have imagined and agonies that I never thought I could survive. Now I sit here writing this, and I realize that my soul is still here, even stronger and more confident than it was this time last year, even though nothing that I so desperately wanted in ‘06 came true. I guess this opened my eyes to the old cliché that “it’s the journey, not the destination.”

So I guess I will make one resolution this year…Bring it on, baby! “’Cause,” as God sings, “Honey, I’m tougher than the rest.”

Take care, Dear Readers. May this year bring you inspiration to make a dream come true again.

Sincerely,

Ern

December 23, 2006

The road. It’s a beautiful thing, especially at night. It supports our journey with a clearly defined pathway through the darkness with an assurance that our ancestors could only dream of. Where once a traveller had only a compass and faith to guide him through the forest, we now need neither. The pathway is there already, our direction chosen for us. Hell, we can even glance behind at the past that we are leaving behind. Our journey is that comfortable.

And the automobile, wonder of wonders, may be the greatest of all things, next to the airplane, in terms of transport. Whether it is a twenty grand Ford or a two hundred large Ferrari, they all give so much to us simple creatures. Indeed, they are much like us. Feed it some fuel, and its heart will rev without a thought or a thank you, up to seven thousand revolutions per minute or more. Such an achievement by a machine may seem archaic compared to the complexity of the device that I am using to write this. But then, how often to we think about such things as simple as the automobile and the path on which we steer it?

A needle on our instrument panel points up to “6” as we shift gears. We glance at the moonlight brushing an ivory wave across a cornfield. And, though we might let a sliver of God’s art touch our souls for a second between thoughts of “when will I get there?” or “Is there a hole in my sock? Will my tow be sticking out when I take my shoes off?” We never think about this simple chariot that whisks us through the night. Oh sure, we do when we purchase it. Or when we pimp it. Or when we proudly parade it (or slink it away with shame) under the watchful gaze of a sex machine.

Most of the time, we just hold the wheel with one hand, press a pedal with one foot, (and not even that if we are using our “cruise,”) and drive. We don’t think about facts like how hot or cold it is outside even if we have a vehicle equipped with an outside temperature gauge. Or that our ass is as comfortable as it is in our living room chair as it moves at seventy miles an hour. Think about that. While we sit in a chair, we traverse seventy mileS across this rock that we call “earth” in one hour. Do we ever think about how long our ancestors would have taken to WALK that distance? I do. Because I did it last fall. With a good road to walk along, without obstructions, it takes THREE DAYS. Without a road? If our feet sink four inches into snow or mud while our hands push tree branches aside while our eyes look up to the sky for direction and our souls look to God for the faith to continue the laborious journey…that seventy miles could take MONTHS!

But we do it every day, while sitting in the lap of luxury. We travel to work or to wherever, without feeling the sun beating down or the icy wind whipping at us. We listen to people on the radio complaining about taxes or other idiots like us who don’t behave properly as we embark on this daily journey. And we complain about this daily odyssey when it takes three hours to move seventy miles, or two hours to move fifty. Not because we are going to freeze to death, or die of starvation if we don’t get there by then. But because we have to pee. Our coffee is getting cold. Our boss is going to be pissed. Most often though, we complain because our minds are just too lazy to allow us to love our lives while we sit by ourselves in these wondrous automobiles with nothing to do but hold the wheel and sit there.

That’s what I was doing this yesterday morning at five-thirty a.m.

Oh yeah, before I forget…the title of my rant tonight is, “Why we need to appreciate the mechanics of our life.”

Anyway, like I said, that’s what I was doing almost twenty-four hours ago. Driving along highway #89. I was warm and cozy, listening to music. All of the luxury in my life allowed me the time to worry about things. Personal issues. Meanwhile, in the heart of my car, metal pistons were leisurely rising up and down in their cylinders two thousand times a minute. Think about that for a minute. TWO THOUSAND TIMES PER MINUTE. Try counting to two thousand in one minute. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. It probably took me more than a minute to write that sequence of numbers. Now in an automobile engine, a spark fires a small explosion in a metal cylinder, blasting a piston down, while another piston is blasted up in another cylinder and so on down a bank of four, six, or eight, or even up to twelve cylinders. This is all down in perfectly timed, split-second unison, all in order to spin a crankshaft, at least two thousand times in less than the time it took you to read this sentence. All that, just to roll you down the road so that you can complain to yourself about how you’re not getting where you need to go, fast enough.

Would I get to my dear old Dad’s before the sun rose? What should I listen to next? How could I have forgotten to take the price tag off that gift? These are just a few of the thoughts that rolled around in my perfectly comfortable mind as I drove up north in the wee hours of the night yesterday. Until the great machinery that I have taken for granted for almost two hundred thousand kilometres all of a sudden transformed from a purring, benign lamb of comfort, into a screeching monster.

In the middle of a country nowhere, hundreds of kilometres from home, swathed in the human arrogance that is afforded by mechanical comfort…of a car…lulled like a baby suckling…BLAM!…SCREECH…KLUNKBERPLIOIN ILHGHUILN..AHHHH.SCRRREEEEEEKKKKK! Horrible noises come from the front right side. And with them, vibrations hit me through the foot that rests on the pedal that connects me to my stricken beast. The wheel in my hands quivers in pain. My own engine pounds in and out, probably 120 times a minute, pumping that much more blood to my brain just in order to snap me into the realization that I have to deal with this situation.

But my engine is still humming. My car is still moving along at one hundred kph. (62 mph for you Dear “Yankee” or “English” Readers.) So what do I do? I slow down to the speed limit of 80 kph, as if doing that will make the problem go away. Of course, just then, from out of nowhere, another speedy traveller comes up riding my ass. Because the Dear Road’s centre-line is a solid yellow, this driver won’t pass me. All he/she can do is express his/her frustration by tailing a few feet behind me with alL his/her lights in my mirrors, blinding me, while my car screams…AHHHHHH.SREEECHJ…GFFHJO….FJIOASGRIOJ…GJJ…

Finally I pull over to the shoulder of the road, catch my breath and wonder, “what do I do now.?” After a moment I begin to recall the warning signs that I should have taken seriously days ago…A strange bulge in my front right tire sidewall. Maybe the steel belts in my tire were shifting like tectonic plates before an earthquake! Maybe my tire was about to explode! As dramatic as that scenario might be, the solution could be very simple and inexpensive. So I drove a few more miles until I found a flat parking lot at a convenience store in some hamlet. There I changed my tire, took off my stock wheel and replaced it with my spare “donut,” all the while remembering how Bill Cosby’s son was murdered on the side of the road while performing the same action. (I kept on looking over my shoulder while I spun the lug-nuts at five-thirty in the morning in the middle of nowhere.)

Get back on the road, drive a mile or so, congratulating myself for fixing the problem, thanking my lucky stars that all I need to do is to spend 80 bucks or so for a new tire, keep my speed down while I ride on my “donut” and then BLAMMMMM!!!...B!!!XDASSHJGFUIO…SCREEEEEECH…BLUEYYYYYYY HHSDFH…

Again I pull over to the side of the road and wonder what to do. Obviously the problem wasn’t my tire. This led me to wonder if something was wrong with my transmission...Gears grinding away into slivers of tortured steel! What do I do? I’m over a hundred miles from home but nearly the same distance away from my Dad’s hometown where I might be stranded for weeks while parts get shipped from Japan. Will I even make another ten miles before my car explodes? Finally I decide to turn around and try to make it back home. I call Dad with my cell phone to let him know that I won’t be making it up there for Christmas and limp back home at or under the speed limit, remembering how my brake light has been going on and off for the past few weeks. And I think to myself…Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe my front right brake is seizing up to the point where metal is grinding metal, forcing the wheel to turn under this pressure, which has in turn caused the metal fatigue in the steel belts in the tire to cause the bulge.

I made it home, slowly, with my hazard lights on and other travellers honking their horns to express their frustration at having their journey blocked for a few milliseconds as they passed me. After more than 5 hours of driving, starting at 3 am, I wound up back where I started, in my garage, at 8:30 yesterday morning.

From all this, I realize that I am my Father’s son. He drove a pick-up for five years and 220,000 km without ever doing anything for his vehicle but oil changes. No brake jobs, no “tune-ups” or radiator flushes or anything in the way of “scheduled maintenance.” When he finally took it to a shop to check it out before selling it, his mechanic took one look at the original, burned-up spark plugs and asked, “how is this thing still running?!”

I’m not quite that bad. I did change my spark plugs once, (myself, since, as each of the four plugs cost $25, I wasn’t going to pay labour on top of that $100!) And I did have the front brake pads replaced once, 100,000 km ago. Replaced the air filter a few times. And that’s about it. After 200k.

But maybe I should appreciate “regular maintenance” as I sit here, alone, this Christmas, waiting to find out exactly why my car is going kijlkjklhjkghyu…screeeeeeechh… Maybe I should appreciate the fantastic job that my heart has done, beating consistently, without ever taking even a two second vacation, for over forty-two years. Maybe we should all do an overdo scheduled check-up on the organs that feed the fuel to our souls over the next few days, so that our gears are well-oiled.

So that we may appreciate everything that is healthy in our lives in order that we can clearly see what needs to be fixed.

And have a very Merry Christmas, Dear Readers. I thank you for reading all this crap over all this time. In fact, I’m almost happy that my car broke down so that I could come back to write this!

Ern

December 16, 2006

Hey Dear Readers. My recent theme of “religion,” along with last week’s “Guest rant,” has inspired some of you to reply with such gusto that I have asked permission from two of you to use your replies as “Guest rants” this week.

Mind you, not all of you agree with me. And of course you are perfectly entitled to your wrong opinions. Indeed, I welcome your comments as much as I love to hear from those of you who are correct. In fact, sometimes your incorrect opinions are more interesting to read because they force me to realize that I actually enjoy working that brain muscle. You guys make me question myself…Make me wonder…Force me to analyze why I am right and you are wrong. I could go further with this, but then we’d be getting into the territory of ego. And, like most of us who proclaim to know the absolute truth, (And so many more of us who pretend that we don’t, even though we secretly know that we know the truth,) I’m not prepared to go there.

(That last group of bolded words might be the most humble phrase that I will ever write in this space.)

I mention all of this only because the two rants below reflect what I perceive as “correct opinions.” But that is not why I asked those authors if I might post them here. You find them here because both are more than “replies” to my rant. (And/or my “Guest’s.”) They are both “self-contained” rants. (Aside from the opening greeting in the 1^st one.)

Both could be considered inflammatory, yet neither violates any Canadian law pertaining to “hate literature.” (I don’t want to be dragged away in handcuffs because I posted a guest rant that contained words like “Those fracking insert ethnicity, race, or individual here, should be fracking shot!”)

I will, however, post any of your Dear Readers’ rants just as long as they meet the above-mentioned criteria…Even if your opinion is incorrect. I have done so in the past, and will do so again. Assuming that this site remains undiscovered (and therefore easy to maintain,) I will post your rants, unedited, warts and all, (just like my own,) within three weeks of your email submission.

Now. Without further ado…The title of my rant tonight is…Below, please find TWO Guest Rants, in order of when I received them…First Guest…

“Hi Ernie

I'm finally getting round to commenting on your rant and I believe two words sum up your point:  Holy War.  Anyone who fails to see the irony in those two conflicting words just doesn't get it.  Furthermore, is in serious need of help, preferably from above.

I had an interesting argument with someone just last week, a member of the Salvation Army, an organization I have known and respected all my life as a wonderful charitable organization, but, the more I learn about the church end of things, the more I am convinced that they should not dabble in religion.  This person told me that the bible declares homosexuality to be an abomination.  When I pointed out that it is not a choice, and in fact many gays struggle with their feelings until they can no longer deny them, she didn't want to hear it.  When I also pointed out that too many people who label themselves as Christians take it upon themselves to put words into God's/Jesus' mouth. she didn't have an answer.  I argued that Jesus turned a blind eye to no one, nor a helping hand.  No human being was ever labelled an abomination by him and I left this person wondering what she would do if one of her children or one of her young charges in the church turned out to be gay.  Would she be right and the person she professes to be her saviour be wrong?

I have trouble with all the fanatics within organized religions - the bible, koran, talmud thumpers who take the book literally, or worse yet, put their own particular spin on the words and spew them out like bullets.  I don't believe in blind faith; for the biblical version of events to have any credibility, it must coincide with historical truth.  Although I was raised a protestant, I like the Jesuit creed of spirital awareness - examining every aspect, of your faith - and then "seeing the light" at the end of your personal tunnel.”

Next Guest…

“My Very Own Rant.

Religion is a topic very close to me. I spent the first seventeen years of my life indoctrinated into a religion that for all intense purposes, removes ones identity and creates childhood physiological trauma by having you "separate" yourself from your peers. Public school is the most important social interaction learning curve their is. All your basic fundamental skills you need to exist in society are groomed there. Forcing a child to "stand out" creates many difficulties in social adjustment later in life.  After several years away from this cult, I started searching all religions. Surely one has to be right. What I discovered is that all religions were started by man. It is man who has traditionally formed all associations aimed at controlling the masses, and suppressing the rights of anyone who disagrees. Religion was formed by men who wish to use it as a power base, who disagreed with their current leader, or who simply wanted to marry someone that the current group of old men said he could not. (Henry VIII) Along with that power base comes control. Control can be exercised by excommunication of dissenters, or if the dissenters are a large enough group, murder. No one religion is exempt. We have contempt in the western world for what the Muslim extremists are doing in the middle east, that is nothing compared to what the Catholic Church has done. Entire civilizations have been wiped out in the name of god. The Crusades are a prime example. The Inca's, the Aztecs, all in the name of the Spanish arm of the Catholic Church. (OK it was really about the gold, but read about the conquest of South America, and the Spanish claimed they were doing it in the name of the church)

Tolerance is preached in every religion. But tolerance allows dissension, and that defies control. What has always seemed odd to me is that all Christian based religions, who claim cleansing is on behalf of god, do so with the bible in their hand. Read the bible (and the Koran for that matter) nowhere, and I repeat NOWHERE, does it say rise and form a religion to me and go out and kill those who disagree. In fact Jesus, nor any of his followers belonged to any religion. Sure, Jesus was Jewish, but that was an ethnicity not his religion. After all these years away from organized religion, I believe in the simple truths of both prophets, Jesus and Mohammed, who both preached a similar message. Love one another as you would love oneself.

And if you don't believe this I will have to kill you,...”

Have a great week, Dear Readers. Let something overwhelm you with the need to say something to somebody. Something that is so important that it makes you wonder who you are, even when you are positive that you already know.

Sincerely,

Ern

December 8, 2006

Hey Dear Readers, I have to go up north and see my Dad this weekend as he just turned three quarters of a century young. So I won’t be able to provide much of a rant tonight. Below, however, please find a “Guest Rant” written by one of you. And please remember that any of you Dear Readers are always welcome to do the same. Send me your rant, and I will post it here.

Before I get to that, however, I’d like to expand on my rant about religion and “killing,” from last week. In fact, Dear Readers, I wish to make an important counterpoint tonight. First of all, last week I spoke of the circumstances that might make me kill in order to defend. I just wish to make it clear that I have no desire to actually kill anybody for any reason and I pray that I am never put in a position where I have to make a life or death decision. The deliberate act of taking a life, no matter how necessary it may be, is always a tragedy. And it is always the worst result of a simple failure to communicate. Either with another, or with one’s own self.

As for religion…Last week I pointed out the worst aspects of it. And indeed, over this past year I have personally encountered many reasons to loath the most fanatical aspects of organized religion. The “personal” aspect has come from friends and some of you Dear Readers, all of you whom I respect and love, who have gone out of your way to teach me how Christianity is good and certain other religions are anything from misguided to downright condemned to have their followers burn in hell. I have been preached to in so many ways. Of course the “impersonal” influence comes from all the media that reports on the fanatical actions of those religious followers who are totally alien to my experience. “Suicide bombers,” “Jihadists,” “Fatwahs.” And so on. That’s pretty scary stuff if you don’t happen to be a close personal friend of somebody who happens to worship the faith of Islam.

I’ve lived on both sides. I’ve known many Muslims who would who would never dream of hurting a fly. They’ve worshipped God, faithfully, and led good loving lives because of it. And, having been born and raised a Catholic, I’ve known many of my own faith who have led the same kind of life. And I have attended many church services that made me feel at peace in a house where peace and understanding led me to shake hands with strangers. In both cases, I felt none of the twisted rage of “fanatics” that become suicide bombers (in the case of Islam) or the sickness of priestly “pedophiles” that are so infamous in my own religion.

So please don’t led my last rant make you Dear Readers believe that I believe that religion is a bad thing. For, (as a character that Jon Voight once played in a movie whose title escapes me) once said, “I believe in love, whether that love be romantic, paternal, maternal, carnal, or religious.”

All religions that I’m aware of worship a benign God. And all of their worshippers read their bibles with that in mind. But, in all our religions, some of us mere mortals give in to the fear in our hearts and we use our religious beliefs to spread that fear and to inspire others to wage war against other faiths. We find words from their “bible” or point to the worst of “their” actions to justify finding an “enemy” to fight. This past year, for example, I read a part of the “Old Testament” that made my skin crawl—tales of “five days” of torture before their deaths, for most of the population of God’s green Earth who are “sinners.” C’mon, people! What “God” could be so weak as to create a wonder such as this earth and its life of wonder, just to torture most of it to death?!

And just this week I received an e-mail from one of you Dear Readers who always want to convince me that we are right and they are wrong with this horrific headline…”Somalia Town Threatens to Behead People Who Don't Pray 5 Times Daily.”

It’s fanatics like these “Somalians,” just like our fanatic Christian leaders who “pray” for forgiveness for homosexuals while they “frack” gay prostitutes in secret hotel rooms, who give all religions a bad name.

My personal faith is in a God that created all souls…Just as it created all atoms, indiscriminately, without preference. God created existence just because, without it, there would be nothing. Its very hard for me to follow this faith. For it comes with no bible, no church, no flock of like-minded believers. But I’m stuck with it. For, in my unbiased, yet correct opinion, one God loves us all equally, since this entity created us all with equal care. And so I have to try to love all of these fracking people who have their own incorrect…“unbiased, yet correct opinions.”

Now, without further ado, please find my Dear Reader’s “Guest Rant,” posted below…

“Faith – Taken straight, with a twist

In life there are things that require faith and things that do not.

Take seeing the light:

A light switch will turn on the light. Usually faith is not required. The switch always turned on the light before, so it will again. The act of turning on the light proves certain physical laws whether the person doing it understands them or not. Generally we do not pray that the light comes on.

The same person may state: God and life after death exist. This requires faith, because, unlike the light switch, stating something that has no proof element is an opinion. Faith, by definition, does not require proof.

Conversely another person may say: There is no God or life after death. Again this is simply an opinion. Unlike the light switch, neither party can categorically prove their opposing positions. They may agree that the light will come on, but on little else.

Then is one faith-based opinion more valid than another?

Taken purely at face value—straight—the simple answer is no. But there’s a twist—the twist is life.

Life is anything but simple. We humans are influenced by everything around us. Life shapes who we are. We can control some of it, but most of it is beyond our control. When life hurts us, we tend to turn inwardly to find reasons for the hurt. We want comfort and understanding, not hard logic.

There are very few people that will not agree—who we are at birth is one of the things we cannot control. Our gender, race, hereditary traits, environment, health and survivability at birth are none of our doing. Others make choices for us. We get what we get.

Unfortunately this also extends to faith. As infants, often faith-based opinions are thrust upon us. We get born into faith. At our most vulnerable stage of development along comes opinion—although not presented as such—and we are enrolled into something that has no provable value one way or the other.

This is supposed to help us go through life. Fitting-in is also important. There’s no comfort in being an outcast. Who cares what is provable? You are looking for a good life.

The catch should be obvious to anyone who has read this far. We are being indoctrinated into the opinions of others. And like gender and race, we don’t get to choose—the choice is made for us. Very little of what we absorb as infants will ever leave us.

On the rare occasions when we do change, we call it “seeing the light”.

Of course light can come from any direction. There’s a plethora of religions out there, plus atheism or agnosticism—lots to chose from. But very few of us chose to chose.

Like baby pabulum, the faith-based nourishment we are fed is just fine to see us through life. Spread the word. Have kids and do the same to them. Proliferate. Perpetuate.

Mostly we get through life by agreeing to differ, but then there’s sometimes the extremist view. If people disagree strongly we can always kill them. It has happened many times before. We call it conflict based on differences in ideology. Why be a wimp about faith? Let’s get out there and kick ass! You now see one advantage of fitting in with our birth environment—our own kind doesn’t shun or kill us—it’s safer.

Of all the animal species on Earth, only humans have the brainpower to concoct ideology. Our imaginations are unlimited. Clever as it is, the electric light switch is nothing compared to notions of life, death and faith. That’s because we pass it on, not through dry textbooks, but through indoctrination—generation to generation—up close and personal. Don’t you find it strange how opinions with no factual value are prized above all?

Is this what makes us human and able to see the light?

Please, God, I hope not.”

And there you have my guest’s rant.

Have a great week, Dear Readers. Reach out to someone who you know is totally wrong and ask yourself…Oh just ask a question that doesn’t come attached with your own correct answer.

Ern

December 2, 2006

How do I get pissed off after a dozen straight days of work? How do I preach when all I want to do is pray? Last week I preached about all that was wrong with this world. And I vowed to do it again this week. Because the situation is getting out of control, as I predicted that it would years ago. The West and the East, Christianity and Islam, are coming head to head, because each religion knows that they are the only one worshipped by their maker. We’ve gone back to the Middle Ages, when nobody respected logical thought.

So why don’t we stop pussy-footing around? We’ve got the nukes! The power! Why don’t we simply eliminate the “gene pool” as one CBC caller once asked days after 9/11? Every week I get assaulted by e-mails and print editorials that try to convince me that Islam is a terrorists thought pattern. That I should join up to defeat the enemy.

I do want to “join up” to serve my country. But not to destroy something that I know is as foolish as my own society’s ideology.

I live on this earth to love somebody else. We all do. I know all the “Dr. Phil’s” in this world preach that we must love ourselves before we can love somebody else. But they’re fracked! Because until you find yourself loving someone else, you don’t find yourself asking why they might not love you back! Everything I do is to further that goal. And everything I do that doesn’t try to reach that goal is a failure on my part.

It is a total lack of courage in my heart when I feel possessed by the need to say, after hearing about another “suicide bombing in the Middle East...”

“You frackers are totally frackin’ fracked’ to want to teach your children that they will be blessed by God for killing themselves before they have had the chance to love somebody who wants nothing more from them but to be loved in return.” Why? Because I have come to know people who…whoa…Let me think about that for a minute…

The title of my rant tonight: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Atheism, Zen,..Scientology. Whatever! God created us all. But if you’re an atheist, then fine, don’t believe me. I don’t care.

God created us. And the people who hurt us the most, (from my experience,) are the same people who believe in the same god that we believe in. They’re the people who swear to love us, yet attack us when we lose our faith. Or who assault us when we lose our faith in them. So, in my humble, yet correct opinion, “religion” is the bearer of the devil. Religion causes division. We use it to attack our loved ones who don’t believe in our faith, and we use it to attack outsiders when they don’t believe us.

Like plants in a pot sitting on a global windowsill, we all bend toward the sun. Whether we are born Christian or Muslim. In America, or Canada, or Russia or France or Australia.

It’s that simple. We all bend to reach love. “Bending” is the true war. That’s when we really fight to protect the ones we love. For example, if you are a Liberal who believes in everything that I believe in, who believes that everything that I’ve said in this rant is true and you’d love to have a beer and shoot the shit with me, then I’d join you. But if you happened to be down on your luck or bitter for whatever reason and you put a gun to the head of any one of my Dear Readers, I would beg you to put down your weapon. If I failed to convince you, I would kill you in order to save my Dear Reader.

Despite how much we agreed about everything.

On the other hand, If you were a devout religious fanatic of any kind, if you thought I was totally fracked because of my ridiculous beliefs, if you were convinced that I was going to burn in hell, or whatever, no matter how fracked-up you might be about this whole rotten religious fanaticism, I would kill any person who tried to harm you or your family. Just so long as you meant no harm to myself or any of my loved ones.

I know now, today. that I would bend over to shield any of you who would bend toward a full life, as I know that you would do. For that is all that any of us would be asked to do by any god.

Sincerely,

Ern

November 24, 2006

From 9/11 to the world reaction, to George W. to Colin Powell, to Iraq. The title of my rant tonight is… The chain of events that has become a global tragedy.

September 11, 2001. America suffers its worst act of aggression since Pearl Harbour. And, worse than the Japanese attack of December 7nth, 1941, America hasn’t suffered a defeat at the hands of a huge military assault that had been planned by a brilliant and respected Admiral with thousands of men, a fleet of ships and an armada of aircraft, torpedoes and bombs under his command. No. This time, the world’s most powerful nation was brought to its knees by a fanatical religious zealot and a handful his disciplined disciples.

David slew the Goliath.

At first, the world mourned for Goliath. The outcries against this horrific terror method--guiding civilian vehicles, full of innocent passengers, into the paths of buildings filled with innocents, were heard around the earth. For a time, even America’s worst enemies sympathized with the tragedy that had befallen Goliath. And, understandably, Goliath vowed to “smoke out” the evil man that had killed so many people.

Sadly though, that evil man could not be found. We thought we’d find him in Afghanistan. We probed that country well and found many reasons there to fix things that still need to be fixed to ensure the safety of this world. (Which is why Canada is both a fighting sword and a helping hand in that country today.) But that evil Osama couldn’t be brought to justice. Not in a day or a week or a month. And all the while, the people of this great nation of America were demanding retribution.

Collectively, they don’t have patience. After all, they are the people that could destroy all life on this planet forever if they wanted to. Just with a few well-planned and ethically-researched commands…and the pressing of a few buttons. So how can they not destroy one single evil man named Osama? That paradox must be infuriating! More important than that, the leader of that great Goliath nation is just a normal guy who happens to be the King of the World. So he, understandably, feels great pressure to do something to appease the need for justice that a quarter of a billion of his subjects so desperately desire.

So what does this man named George do? He finds somebody that he knows he has the power to destroy. Somebody who he can convince his subjects should be destroyed. His name is Saddam. This name has the same alien-sounding name as Osama. Same culture. Same region. And this man has undoubtedly deserved to be punished for all kinds of reasons. And with the most skilled “spin-doctors” working for him, George can paint this Saddam character as not only “evil,” in terms of his acts toward his own people, but also as much of a threat toward “Goliath” (and the rest of the world) as “Osama” proved to be.

So let’s “smoke ‘im out!”

So how do we do this? Well, first of all, we use all our intelligence personnel to forward any incriminating evidence against this man to the head of our Joint Chief of Staff (Colin Powell.) And we ignore any evidence to the contrary, so that we can fool our general Powell into making a false case to the rest of the world (represented by the United Nations) for waging war against this evil “Saddam.”

(After learning—to late--that he has been duped, this General Powell will graciously bow out of the scene.)

This General’s position will be eyed with scepticism by most of the world, whose leaders will say something to the effect of “Hey wait a minute. Sure this Saddam character may have done many evil things, and maybe we should do something about him, as we should do about Kim Jung Ill, as we should have done about August Pinochet, etc…but that’s not the point here. The point is seeking justice against the man who caused 9/11. The point should be to seek justice by hunting down the man and the organization he leads. And only them.

So most of the world community bowed out of this misdirected need for vengeance. And for good reason. Because the vengeance that America’s King sought toward a random bad guy would inevitably result in the deaths of tenfold numbers of innocent victims. A Hundred thousand of “there” civilians would die. Equally as tragic as this, is the fact that America would be made to look as hypocritical as all its enemies hypothesized. After all, if Saddam was guilty simply of being a murderous tyrant, then why didn’t America fight as successfully to take out Pol Pot, or Pinochet, or Castro, the African “warlords” in Rwanda and Somalia, or the far more deadly and equally ruthless leaders like Kim Jung Ill or Mao Tse Tung? Both of these latter mentioned possess (possessed) true “W.M.D.” and massacred horrific numbers of their own population. They make Saddam look like a bully in the kindergarten sandbox!

So naturally, all of America’s enemies could jump on the hypocrisy bandwagon with this deadly attack on Saddam’s Country and say “Oh America is just looking for an excuse to invade the oilfields…to control the Middle East…to exploit foreign cultures by getting rich from erecting a MacDonald’s and a Coke machine in the dessert…and blah blah blah.

The ultimate hypocrisy of George W.’s, in terms of taking out Saddam, as opposed to all the other bad guys mentioned above, however, goes back to WWII…Back then, an American President named Roosevelt was in power. That man had the wisdom to see what needed to be done to preserve America. When his country suffered a horrific attack from Japan, he focussed his nation’s war effort against Germany! (Sure, he fought back against Japan as well…but he knew long before his country gave it’s blessing to fight the war he knew had to be fought, that Germany was the main threat against America.) And, to ensure that America would prevail against Germany, Roosevelt made an ally with the most ruthless, most tyrannical, most ideologically opposite leader of the Twentieth Century…Joseph Stalin. Stalin. The communist dictator who would have eaten Saddam for breakfast. Stalin. The man who made countless thousands of Russians disappear just because they didn’t agree with him. The man who despised the concept of “individuality” and “free enterprise.”

And, in the end, Stalin’s U.S.S.R.’s strength in courageous sacrifice, combined with Roosevelt’s U.S.’ industrial might naiveté, and idealistic resolve, and with Churchill’s patient, understated strength as their mediator, they won the war together. Together, they “liberated” France, China, the world.

My point? A true President is wise enough to focus on the true enemy of his country. That truth saves not only his nation, but also his nation’s integrity.

Roosevelt was that, and made his small nation great. (So was J.F.K.—But that’s another rant).

George W. Bush is none of that, and is contributing to the fall of a great nation. I pray that the next administration, whether it be Republican or Democrat, can save the land that can save humanity.

Have a great week, Dear Readers. May we all think, wonder, and ponder, with great egos, as though we are all Kings and Queens; free to spew our humble yet correct opinions at anybody who dares get in the way of our thoughts!

Sincerely,

Ern

November 18, 2006

“At the end of every hard earned day, people find some reason to believe.” Bruce Springsteen wrote that, and that is the title of my rant tonight. When everything goes wrong, when all your hopes and dreams explode before your eyes, what happens?

A much older song than God’s (“God” being Bruce…for you unenlightened) sang, “Don’t let the sun catch you crying.” That’s a nice sentiment; appropriate for the shallow dreams of youth. But how do you not cry the morning after your life has been destroyed? How do you wake from a dream to realize that your real life has become a nightmare and then go and “smile” at the morning sun?

You don’t. Not the first morning, after your house has floated away in a flood, or your wife or husband was murdered. Or your child was abducted. Or the life of your dreams has proven itself to be an utter charade in one blindingly clear moment.

However, if you survive all that, you are born again one morning to see things that you’ve never seen before…or that you should have seen a long time ago. And you see your life for the first time, again. And you realize that nothing in your past will ever allow you to doubt the endless possibilities of today.

Sincerely,

Ern

November 11, 2006

….Thank you.

Sincerely,

Ernie Kosanyi

November 4, 2006

In the bible, aren’t we all sinners? The title of my rant tonight, Are we all just sluts in heat?

Isn’t it a thin line between love and hate? Don’t we all just want to be understood as a person who hungers to be wanted by another? I mean really? If you discovered that you were the Son of God tonight, and that you could save the world, unite all of the world’s peoples/belief’s and religions within this human tempest, can you honestly say that you wouldn’t desire some kind of recognition, by some other desirable presence, for saving the human race?

Maybe that is what makes us slutty. We will prostitute our beliefs by slamming airplanes into buildings, by dropping bombs from our airplanes into other buildings, by fighting in the name of whatever God we believe in, wage war for whatever reason, all for the hope of finding somebody, some god, some lover, who will walk hand-in-hand with our righteousness.

Could it be that in the core of our ego, we decide that we may be willing to kill other people just to make a stand that will attract somebody else with a similar belief to sire/bear our similar “belief-system” child? Or, should we die for the cause, to be rewarded by a God that will reward us with eternal bliss?

Hmmm…

What I wonder tonight is, when and how do we get beyond our hunger? As Human hearts with consciousness, how do we reach that point where we can love something that we cannot understand, and which may be unattainable? To love something that will never love us back. Should we want too? Or should everything that we love be required to requite, or at least understand our love, lest we threaten it with death and damnation? And, if that is the case, do we really love what we love? Or are we just waiting for some kind of pay-back for our devotion to that mysterious country that we are too busy to explore (whether it be a human or a culture or a religion?) Do we kill a hundred people, or break a single heart, to prove our worth to ourselves or to our belief in our God? Or to whatever faith we have?

And, if that is the case, are we any more evolved than animals that piss on their territory in order to be the “King”of the herd? (Or, for you female readers—the honour of being the bearer of that herd.) Or do we just piss our pissy thoughts, rationalizing them by some noble cause, while we deny ourselves the truth of the matter…

That we desire the same result as that of the animal kingdom? If that is the case, is that a bad thing? Or are we carving through all the bullshit to surrender to the truth that we can understand today, so that we can evolve beyond it tomorrow?

I hope, with all my heart and soul, that these words mean something, if only to myself.

Ern.

October 28, 2006

Hey Dear Readers, the title of my rant tonight is Stop.

Stop. Before we think another thought, feel another emotion, make another accusation, or try to right another wrong, try to prove our point to justify our action, or tell someone that they are wrong because we know how right we are…I ask that we all pause for a moment. A long moment.

Now…I want to suggest something without resorting to a cliché. The problem is, is that clichés are cliché because they have been used so often that we don’t take them seriously anymore. Isn’t that the irony? We don’t listen to them because, since they are so true, they have been repeated so often as to become clichés. They’re words we look for on Birthday/Christmas/Wedding/Anniversary cards to convey what we think we should express, as worthy human beings who are, worthy as we want to be, too lazy to come up with our own ways of expressing what the truest hearts said a long time ago.

So I’m not going to suggest that we stop and get down to “the heart of the matter.” Or that we try to “reach out and touch someone.” I’m not even going to ask you Dear readers to stop and “be true to your heart.”

My goal tonight, for myself, and which I’d like to share with you Dear Readers, is to simply stop and “smell the roses.” Really...Put down your fork, spoon, hammer, blackberry, palm-pilot, hatred, frustration, angst, complacency, acceptance, newspaper, argument, political viewpoints, and whatever else that matters in your life as you read this.

Just STOP and think…what am I sending out there…

To the world. To God. To the life he gave you?

I hope you all have a deep, introspective moment this week, Dear Readers. And, no matter what you think of my rant, I thank you for being there to read it.

Ern

October 18, 2006

Wow, nearly a month since my last rant. That’s terrible! Sorry Dear Readers.

A new movie is coming out this week, “The Flags of our Fathers.” Based on an excellent book by the same title, that I highly recommend. In that vein, the title of tonight’s rant is “My Father’s Deep Insight into the Irony of Our Respective Walking Journeys.” (Lousy title, I know.)

Over half a century ago, in 1950, my father embarked on a journey through the northern section of what was then Yugoslavia. Like me, he went on foot. And, like me, his odyssey was inspired by his nation’s military. Also, like his son’s journey, he walked for days, experienced hardship and adventure, all because of the army. As Alannis sings, “isn’t it ironic?”

Although my Father’s walk covered far less distance than mine, (about 1/6^th the km’s) his journey was far more adventurous than mine. His adventure began as a train ride across the northern expanse of his country, from the eastern city of Subotica, where he was training as an apprentice, to the western town of Maribor. Like myself, he was on a mission inspired by a military calling. But the similarities end there. For example, when I began my journey, my boss happened to drive by me when I was walking out into the country. He honked his horn as if to say, “Hey Ern,! How’s it going?” My Father, on the other hand, discovered that his boss, purely out of coincidence, was on the same train as him, in the very next section. If his boss had discovered him, it would have been game over in so many ways. So My Dad had to spend many hours and hundreds of kilometres hiding his face, until he reached the western town of Maribor. Back in August, 1950.

When he got off the train, he began a thirty-kilometre hike to the Austrian border. Unlike me, he had no roads to walk along. He had to hike through the wilderness. He didn’t have friendly drivers stopping to offer him rides or the provincial police coming to his rescue and patting him on the back for his passionate cause. All he had was a “fish preserve,” short pants, and leaves to cover him from the cold night. And, unlike me, my Dad would have been shot dead on sight if he had been discovered. So, like me, his journey, though far less in distance than mine, took nearly as long—three days and nights—for many reasons. He walked through the forest. I walked by the side of a marked road. He had to sit stock still for most of a day for fear of a farmer discovering him behind a bush. Or for fear of a couple of border guards turning around and discovering him when they were chatting and having a smoke while he was stuck lying in the grass a few feet away.

My Dad’s journey was fraught with the threat of death, every step of the way. Mine was a cake-walk compared to his, even though I wondered, several times, if I would survive the day. And yet both of us decided to get up one day and embark on a perilous walk across our respective countries of Yugoslavia and Canada, during a late summer, fifty-six years apart, for the same, but completely opposite reasons!

The army.

And here’s where the irony comes in. My Dad walked for days to escape his tour of duty in his nation’s army. More than half a century later, I walked for days to prove that I could, would, and was able, to join my nation’s army.

My Dad decided to escape from his communist country because he was about to be called up for service. That would mean, in his case, that he would be called to officer’s training. This would mean that he would have to declare his allegiance to the communist party that held power over his country at that time. However, since the Soviet communist takeover of his country resulted in the murder of his father, and the destruction of his family’s life and livelihood, not to mention that of his entire country’s well-being, my father swore to himself that, no matter what, he would never live in a country that forced him to swear allegiance to an army that followed an ideology that was so wrong as to have killed his father, simply for the crime of not being a communist.

I, on the other hand, willingly enrolled to become an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. I spent eight months of my life trying to prove myself worthy. I passed three of the four tests. And then, when I failed the last one, I took matters into my own hands and embarked on a cross-country trek to try to convince my nation’s army to accept my offer of service. (If you haven’t been following my story, please read my last rant.) I wanted to be an officer of the 48^th Highlanders. And I still want to. Because such a position would force me to be the best citizen that I could become, in one of the most well-trained, under-manned, under-gunned, and possibly one of the least appreciated armies in this world.

Canada has never fought an unjust war. And when we have been forced to defend ourselves, and been left to take charge under our own command structure, we have never lost a battle. We forced the Americans back home in the war of 1812. We took Vimy Ridge in the 1^st World War, when everyone else failed. We drove further into Normandy on the first day of “D-Day” in the Second World War than either the British or the Americans. Likewise, we took the Italian mountain ranges by scaling cliffs that weren’t supposed to be scalable. We liberated Holland almost by ourselves. We get the job done, as we are doing in Afghanistan, today. We do it because we have no other choice.

So I can’t blame my nation’s military for rejecting my offer of service because I must rely on a device to control my asthma, although my offer still stands. Because in our military, every individual must be in perfect condition, in every way, in order to carry on our tradition of excellence.

But isn’t it ironic? My Dad succeeded in escaping from an unjust force in Europe, by going on a long perilous walk, when his own son, fifty-six years later, failed to convince a righteous force in Canada, that he could be a worthy part of an honourable military by doing the same thing?

Irony is just another road to freedom. So I hope all you Dear Readers will latch on to whatever dream comes your way this week. Have a great adventure. And don’t worry about the end result. From my experience, we don’t find that out until years down the road. But in the end, it always makes sense.

Ern

September 24, 2006

Well, well ,well, Boy oh Boy. What a week it’s been! Just like Forrest Gump, I put on a new pair of runners and left my home last Monday morning, bound for a DND (Department of National Defence) office in Ottawa where I hoped to meet a military officer who had decided that I was medically unfit to serve this nation’s army. Unlike Forrest, though, I didn’t run. I walked. With a back-pack. Contents: Several more changes of socks and underwear then I used, four shirts and one pair of jeans (aside from the pair that I left wearing,) a “family pack” of cereal bars, two bottles of water, digital camera, groundsheet, compact sleeping bag, my (theoretically) last two cigarettes, flashlight, rain-jacket, chewing gum, sunglasses, “Team Canada” baseball cap, “Mapquest” maps, $60 cash, Bible, toiletries, keys, cell phone, Visa, bank card, license, OHIP, plastic bags and lunch baggies to protect paper maps, bible, etc. from the expected rain that was forecast for much of my trip. And, on my back-pack I carried a laminated sheet that read, “Walking to serve the Highlanders…kosanyi.com”

Also, because of you Dear’ Reader’s protestations of my stupidity, I brought my Symbicort asthma inhaler, though I vowed not to use it. Originally, I was not going to bring this device, in order to prove to the Canadia