today I woke up from a dream about an academic conference or some other large event in a hotel where a bunch of people had gathered my friend Michael was there and we sat on a balcony and had some laughs and I don't remember much about it beyond that I woke up slowly so as not to disturb the cat who was sleeping curled up like a croissant by my feet as he often does in the morning and I checked all my apps while I lay in bed sent off a couple of jokes and enjoyed a good twitter thread then I took a shower and got dressed and made my first espresso and ate two oatmeal goldies and a glass of water at the kitchen table I normally take my breakfast outside but it's getting a bit too cold lately and I've been feeling off, strangely fatigued and achey then in the middle hours of the day it tends to disappear a bit I passed the time I know but I'm not sure what I did there was a walk and some cleaning and some administrative tasks and some texting and tweeting and sitting on my ass I take a late lunch these days usually somewhere around four it's my least favourite meal and it often feels like a chore today I warmed up a piece of leftover tortière which sounds a lot more comforting in a song then it was in real life I swear but now is when things start to really settle in I have a second espresso each day around five or six and for an hour or more I sit on the flowered sofa beside the bookcase and the cat sits beside and I follow whatever thought I want to chase today I read from Hadas Thier's people's history of capitalism a former student had written to me asking me if I had an opinion about bitcoins, and I do, and I told him but I wanted to check Thier's thoughts and I think we more or less agree, though we emphasize different parts you know how every get-rich-quick scheme is a scam and how there's all this buzz around bitcoins, save em up and you'll get rich well damn moving money isn't how we win, it's always a rigged game and bitcoin is no different, you know who's gonna make it rain the fucking rich, that's who, the hedge funds that are holding bitcoins right now letting the value grow while dumb fuck poor people like us try to figure out how we can beat the system, which we can't, and right when you're on a winning streak bam, they're gonna sell, the value will plummet and you'll be up shit creek anyway, what I'm saying is don't buy bitcoins man, you'll shoot yourself in the dick and like Hadas Thier points out the whole thing exposes how deeply our society is sick see bitcoins are codes generated by computers solving math problems so there are farms of servers using huge amounts of real energy to solve them think about all the issues we have around energy generation oil and gas and electricity and fusion and the amount of destruction and pollution we create to fuel this world, and think how many people go without basic necessities while computers solve puzzles to create soon-to-be-worthless codes using all that energy anyway I went deep on all that across the twilight hour of the day and then I worked on a bit of music, some drums for a song about John Le Carré but I get restless doing percussion I just don't have the patience so I texted my mother and I made some dinner and I ate it and then I watched the Canucks game on an illegal reddit stream it's a frustrating way to watch, it's slow and I constantly lose the feed but it's early in the season so I don't care too much and I texted with Sarah and Cory and laughed on twitter about how the team sucks and the second best part of the day is these last few hours I give the cat his last meal at midnight and then we play with some string until he tires and then some wonderful options unfold in front of me games on my phone, books I can read, great shows on tv I play Ascension on my phone or a strategy game called Scythe I recently read a Guy Gavriel Kay book about a kid who gets lost in time and now the Russia House by Le Carré and the space opera the Expanse and the show the Queen's Gambit about that girl who becomes a chessmaster and sometime before three am I finally turn out the light and in the dark I walk to the office where the cat sleeps until after midnight and I pick him up and he's so sleepy and I bring him to the bed and we get really cozy and on my hand he rests his head and that's usually when I clock out to the calming sounds of purring though sometimes he hops down to conduct cat business I don't disturb so then I roll over and put some piece of music in my ear usually something I've been working on, long and winding and weird and that's my day, some version of it, almost every day and it seems so normal now that in my head it's hard to separate one from the next and the next but what I realized this evening is that this moment will pass and this will seem like a strange dream and I won't be able to relate to what this year was like and for all the ways it's hard I think I'll miss the slower pace and the movement of time and the peace and quiet and space and freedom from social life which I miss, but which can also stretch me pretty dry and I'm lucky and I know it and a few different breaks and I wouldn't be here able to say that there's a nice rhythm to my life this year so this is a song of gratitude for what I've been granted and a reminder that the future may not look nearly so romantic

another day in a year that never ends waking up knowing I don’t know how I want to spend the next 12 to 14 hours most likely alone cos it’s isolation time in Toronto, my unlikely home I remember when I moved here in 2006 I said I’m gonna get this degree then get back to Winnipeg but there’s inertia to living in one place for many years and now it’s hard to picture myself living anywhere but here I don’t love this city but I love a few parts I love the Humber river and the lakeshore and High Park and I like Indian Road despite the terrible name where I’ve lived for seven years and where I became a doctor, a professor, an uncle and a son without a dad yeah on this street I’ve lived the very good times and I’ve lived the very bad I’ve battled two pest infestations and I’ve painted all the walls and I put up Christmas decorations that stay up all year because fuck it deck the halls and in this house I’ve got an old piano that I bought down the street it belonged to an old woman who died and her granddaughter was selling her things that piano was built at a factory about ten minutes away so for a hundred and twenty years it’s been in pretty much the same place and on my walls I’ve got Alexander Rodchenko collage art in the 1920s he was a figural member of the Soviet Avant Garde his collages were strange and post modern and exciting as hell in a society gripped by the idea that anything was possible and in my living room I’ve recorded dozens of songs when it was empty I came over and played my guitar and the sound echoed off the walls so beautifully, and I knew I would make music in here one day and I do, all the time, despite the sound of the rattling subway train and I love the orange cat who lives in the house across the street sometimes he comes over and sits on my front porch beside me and there’s a family of raccoons who live in the tree at the side of my house aometimes they’ll sleep on the roof next door and we hang out I didn’t know what this song was about until just now it’s about that tree, the neighbours are cutting it down there was an arborist out front today scoping it out at first I thought it was just a trimming but I heard them talking about getting the relevant permissions from the city and having hydro come out to make sure the electricity lines don’t get crossed because it could be really dangerous so I gather it’s going to be a pretty involved process I didn’t say much but I asked the neighbour why it’s a beautiful old tree with so much character and style and she said she’s worried it’s gonna fall on her car and for a moment if I’m honest I actually considered smashing her fucking car myself that tree didn’t put a driveway there it was fucking here first if you want to live in a suburb move to fucking Brantford don’t buy a house surrounded by trees and complain about the branches its leaves break the afternoon sun to keep us cool maybe you’ve got central air that doesn’t mean the rest of us do I depend on the tree to shade the front of my house who the fuck do you think you are to just cut it down do you ever even look at that fucking tree? have you ever sat and watched the raccoon family walking along it’s big old trunk in a line they stop sometimes by my window to take a look inside or the birds that settle in among the leaves there’s a woodpecker in the spring I sometimes see who pecks away at my porch and then goes back to the tree the more I think about it the harder it is to believe that they’re more concerned about their fucking Volkswagen Golf than a living thing that‘s lived longer than us all that is as much as a part of this place as any of us is man there has got to be some way that I can stop this I think what’s at the heart of all of this for me (besides the inherently fucked up idea that a car is worth more than a beautiful old tree) is that that old tree is rooted in this ground it’s literally above me and underneath me everytime I walk around this house to which I feel connected after less than ten years and part of that connection is the knowledge that so much of this was here a long time before I was and that I’m attaching myself to a system of roots that is ancient and strong and that can help help me to find meaning in my existence on this planet so to tear that all up I just don’t understand it what does it mean to cut our connection to the past and live in a permanent present building nothing to last? my old piano, the Rodchenkos, my grandparents pictures on my wall it’s all there to remind me that history is long and my time is small and that I’m just a tiny part in a massive endless story and I’m not alone because all these things and people came before me I’m not alone, I’m surrounded by people and pianos and old trees like the one Gareth sang about in the song Dutch Elm Disease he shared that song on the Conifera Records board I was like twenty years old and full of shit but that song still hit me hard and he became one of my very best friends in the world in the root system of my life his place was well earned and if there are qualities in me of which I can be proud that dude most definitely helped me to bring them out we were barely twenty years old and he knew something I didn’t trees fucking matter and not just as a symbol because if we don’t respect the trees tell me how the living fuck are we ever gonna learn to respect one another I’ve gotta stop writing it’s getting really late but from this spot in my bed where I’m laying I’ve got three pieces of art on the walls that I can see and in each one of them there is at least one tree and on my closet door there’s light coming in through the window and within that oblong shaped patch of light is a shadow swaying gently back and forth in the most calming way cos in between the streetlight and my window there’s a tree in the back lane we’re alone enough in this world without cutting down the trees trees are so old and they carry so many memories in every possible sense of the word they’re bigger than you and they’re bigger than me so that tree is in my heart tonight as I fall asleep

life is hard sometimes you try not to connect just live each day the same one after the next and it seems fine like you’re just chugging along and then you’re watching a Korean crime show and you hear a buzz on the phone and it’s Cory, and his cat Miika just died of heart failure out of nowhere, just like that, what the fuck mother nature and he says he’s got a headache from crying and I don’t blame him, I’ve been there, and I’m sitting here trying to figure out what to say but there’s honestly nothing no way to do anything that can heal or change something something so utterly awful and jarring, it’s total bullshit it hasn’t been an easy stretch for my old friend and now this? I’m sitting on the couch and my old cat is beside me and I’m googling cat heart failure and of course I’m uneasy because I’m feeling sad for Cory and Miika but also for me cos I’m aware that it was almost a year ago to the day that we lost our best friend and it was the hardest thing I ever did sitting on the floor of my office holding his paw while he slid over to the other side and our little family lost a member three became two and even that’s not forever cos this cat is old and diabetic and he’s got sinus problems we rely on each other so much so when I say that from the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry for my friend at this terrible loss it’s not an empty gesture it’s more real than I could possibly convey, and when I put down the phone I cried I don’t cry often lately but I pictured Cory trying to say goodbye he told me Miika looked really fucked up from the sedation and I know what he means and it must have been really painful but I’m determined not to end on such a sad note it’s been about six months since I sat on the sofa and wrote these words, and I can report that Cory is doing ok and his other cat Suvi is thriving with the additional attention they now place and I’m still chugging along with this funny old diabetic cat it’s not always easy and I know there’s only so long he’s gonna last but I was utterly blessed to get so many years with a cat with such fuzzy paws and a silly snout and furry little ears so thank you to this cat and to Miika and Joey and Gus you all made a mark upon this world and especially upon us the people who loved you with every fibre of our heart and put you in our songs and our stories and our stitchings and our art

today something caught my eye when I glanced at my bookshelf and before I time to think better of it, I found myself reading Richard Pipes’ Communism: A History and laughing at the margin notes I had written in fury Pipes was one of what used to be called Sovietologists and yeah their analysis operated on about the level of today’s Scientologists they were anti-communist cold warriors who brazenly lied to keep the American public obedient and capitalist and terrified of the supposed evils of communism and before I circle back to that Pipes book that I’ve got sitting in my lap I just want to take a moment to appreciate the names of these Cold War relics Richard Pipes, Robert Service and Robert Conquest I had to read these guys when I started in university and I’m not gonna lie there were moments when it occurred to me that they maybe made these names up, because they were too perfect big old Pipes leading the Conquest of communism in lady liberty’s Service anyway ok in the first sentence Pipes says his book is an obituary for communism of course and I underlined that and wrote “we’ll fucking see” “it’s rout has been so complete” wrote Pipes with flair “that we may only ask if it was human error or flaws inherent in its nature” but Pipes is only warming up here and my favourite line which you can tell from how heavily it is underlined is when he says Marx’s Capital is so dense that few have ever read it so the fact that it’s been so influential may be confusing to many beside this in my own scrawl it says lol omg dude didn’t read Capital he’s built a career as an expert on communism but doesn’t know it’s most basic principles imagine writing a book about the history and practice of rock n roll and admitting you’ve never actually listened to the White Album by the Beatles which certainly explains how Pipes is able to say with credulity that Marxism is hostile to new evidence or information, as a theory as if Marx hadn’t pioneered an entire social scientific method called dialectical materialism which was all about synthesizing new data with existing theory to test it but look theory can be hard, I won’t be too rough on pipes for that but the next underlined section is really unforgivably bad beside it I just wrote "lol you can’t be serious" he said “thus virtually all of Marx’s predictions turned out to be wrong, as became increasingly apparent during his lifetime and incontrovertibly so after his death” the reality is that there are few social theorists who got nearly so much right which is why Marx is a foundational piece of half of the social sciences and at the core of it, his most straightforward claims are demonstrably true and these aren’t even controversial, in many places they’re widely accepted too one: that capitalism creates great wealth for the rich and poverty for the poor and that inequality means two: that people will eventually demand more and three: in trying to crush those workers movements, capital will create four: a crisis where people can’t afford to buy the things their exploited workers make this is only the beginning of the things that Marx accurately predicted but poor old Richard Pipes would have a hard time knowing that since he admits he didn’t read it and it seems around this point I got bored of his inane propaganda because my margin notes abruptly end and fair enough, who has the stamina who has the stamina to read the empty ravings of a guy who worked for Reagan in the 80s and had multiple homes in Massachusetts and New Hampshire paid for by the CIA presumably, since he headed a team there in the 70s and of course serious scholars have long since shredded his books to confetti but of course as Marx pointed out in the German Ideology the ideas of the ruling class are widely spread and framed as common sense in any society so as idiotic as Pipes work certainly was a lot of people would have read it and would have nodded along because it sat neatly alongside what people were taught as basic truths communism is evil right, come on, you know this, you do and there are plenty of Richard Pipes still bleating away today because the ruling class and its ideology hasn’t yet changed

I wrote and recorded over 70 minutes of music when my other cat passed and now my remaining cat is sick and at this moment I don’t know how long he’s gonna last I don’t want to burden the world with another cat album cos it’s heavy so I’m trying to find other ways to manage the situation and get myself ready for what will inevitably be among the worst experiences of my life for as much as I loved the other cat it was always this one I was bonded to so tight we’ve got similar personalities including the fact that in the face of physical pain we collapse and we like the stay home quiet life and we both love music and in the evenings we like to stretch out on the sofa and relax or so we did until ten days ago, when everything was interrupted and he spent nearly a week at the hospital and when he came home he was profoundly altered he’s like a ghost of himself, he won’t meow for food or purr in my arms or chase the yellow ribbon after we cultivated it for sixteen months, nothing now remains, of our beautiful pandemic rhythm I’m not gonna be selfish about this thing, we’ve had fourteen years and so many good times and we’ve orbited one another in this house like two souls impossibly and irrevocably intertwined losing him will be like losing a piece of me and frankly one of the pieces I like the most and this house without that cat will be a beautiful rose garden without a single rose now I’m not someone for whom hope is a ready available resource for whatever reason for as long as I can remember my instinct is to expect the worst and this was reinforced by the horrible seven weeks at the end of my other cats life so the fact that I’ve felt so heavy and hopeless in these last days is no surprise but I have to admit that a tiny bit of belief has been starting to set in this cat's doing better and he’s more like himself he’s even letting me rub his chin there’s still a lot of trouble and he’s a long way from being out of the woods but the trees are further apart and we might be finding a path and that feels good