Unimproved Roads

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Gabriel...

I recently discovered there’s a road designation in Ontario called “unimproved road”. It basically means a trail wide enough for a car, but barely suitable for a horse-drawn cart or an all-terrain vehicle.

I had dinner with my friend Dean on Monday and afterwards we took a tour of the countryside, and there’s a lot of it around here. Basically the region of Canada I live in is the size of England but with a population which could fit in a medium sized airplane, so there’s a lot of open fields and forests.

Dean likes to go off on two or three hour drives and he has lived here for his entire forty years, so he knows where all of the unimproved roads are. Unimproved roads have basically been abandoned, they’re the original roads connecting villages which don’t exist anymore, or homesteads to their fields. The ones Dean took me down on Monday mostly started as dirt roads but soon after were virtually indistinguishable from the fields on either side.

Dean would spot one, even if it was the first time he had seen it, and just turn the wheel and start to explore. It’s a remarkable piece of the region that I don’t get to see often. We didn’t see any deer, which is what Dean was searching for, but we did see a young red fox who stopped when we stopped and didn’t seem to care about us in the least. It even posed for a picture.

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Posted in Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Classic, crazy people with no pants, Friends, Health, Intervention, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Ottawa, Poverty, Salted Truths | 10 Comments

Speeding Into A New Sunrise With Eighteen Gears Two Wheels And A Kickstand

Posted on August 30, 2008 by Gabriel...

I have a bike sitting in my apartment, it’s purple. A really dark purple. There was some confusion… when I pulled it out of my parents’ basement it was so dirty I thought it was green. Then the bike repair dude told me over the phone “you had the black bike, yeah it’s ready” and I said “you mean the green one”, there were a few heartbeats before he said “…okay. It’s ready.”

Then, when I finally got my hands on it this afternoon the sun let loose from behind a horizon-wide bank of grey clouds and the light hit my bike just so and… it’s a dark purple. Classy.

My last bike was a ten-speed tank. It literally weighed more than the combined weight of two of my friends bikes. It’s possible it could have weighed more than some of my friends. It was a brand-name bike, and it lasted a long time and it carried me a long way… actually, I can’t remember where it went. I do know it went a few thousand miles with me.

My little brother was bike crazy. He had a full-on racing bike by Bianchi. From what I remember he spent $800 on it back in 1988, I’m not sure what the exchange rate is now but today that’s like six quadtrillion Zimbabwean dollars. I know I didn’t have my bike when he bought the racing bike, so mine must have disappeared when I was eighteen or so.

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Posted in Bipolar, Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, crazy people with no pants, Everyday Stuff, Health, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression | 14 Comments

Two Weddings A Brunch And A Savage Beating

Posted on August 26, 2008 by Gabriel...

“Before I started my Recovery 3.5 years ago I watched, and helped, several friends try to recover from addiction. What I found by watching them and listening to them was there’s one essential tool needed to recover from an addiction and it’s the same thing we need as we recover from Mental Illness… what we need is Touch.”
“Maybe It’s Time For A Manic Depressive Anonymous”, Me; Feb. 28, 2008.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but every inaction has an equal and often undeserved punishment.

There was a wedding this past weekend. It made sense I wasn’t invited because I haven’t spoken to the groom in over a year, and I’ve never met the bride. But not too long ago, and for a few years, he and I were really close and we shared a large pool of friends. Most of whom I haven’t spoken to since I started my recovery. All of whom were back here in our little village for the wedding.

I found out by mistake. A friend wrote and asked if I was going. The initial shock hurt for a little while, but I rationalized it pretty quickly… we were friends, now we’re acquaintances and there’s only so many spaces available at a wedding. So not being at the wedding isn’t what still hurts. What still hurts is being reminded again that I’ve lost touch with almost everyone I’ve cared about and now I’m not even on the Reception lists.

I’ve thought about this before… a few weeks ago there was an unofficial College reunion that I also found out about by mistake, and more recently I found a Facebook group set up by the people I actually graduated with that had my name attached to it.

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Posted in Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Clinical Depression, crazy people with no pants, Friends, Granny, Health, Living With Manic Depression, Manic Depression | 12 Comments

No Post Day | No News Has Been Good News

Posted on August 21, 2008 by Gabriel...


“Eve Of Destruction”; The Forgotten Rebels
Let me know if the YouTube isn’t available.

Like a large chunk of my generation I grew up almost convinced we were all going to be dead by 1990. But then the Wall came down in 1989 and all of my hopes, dreams and aspirations were crushed by the promise of a new, safe and friendly planet. Thanks to the East German army’s unwillingness to fire on their own people as they chiselled away at that Wall, I believed I would forever be condemned to living a full life free of radiation fuelled zombie’s.

But evidently I gave up on my childhood dreams of Global Disintegration too soon, because thanks to Vladimir Putin’s threats to reinvade Poland, I can once again see the possibility of a second sun rising in the West.

Leave it to the permanently-nostalgic Soviets Russians to want to relive the past sixty years in the hope that maybe, maybe they can get it right this time and the dictatorship of the proletariat will finally lead to a communistic nirvana. Because if there’s one thing a Russian likes to talk about more than how much better everything would be if only they adopted the ways of the past, it’s talking about how bad the present is.

When it comes to nihilistic and self-destructive tendencies the Vikings were tiny fifteen year-old girl Olympian gymnasts jumping around in brightly coloured leotards compared to the Russians. This is a State which pulled out of Afghanistan because they thought the job was done… the job having been killing tens of thousands of their own people. Historically Russia seems to have been so bent on self-destruction that in times of war its leadership actually considers killing the other side as collateral damage.

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Posted in crazy people with no pants, Health, Humor, Humour, No Post Day, Politics, Punk, YouTube, Zombies | Tagged | 8 Comments

My Red Neck And The Demolition Derby

Posted on August 16, 2008 by Gabriel...

It’s the annual agricultural fair this weekend. My village doubles, and sometimes even triples in size for three days of sheep shearing, horse and tractor pulls and, of course, the demolition derby.

I’ve only ever gone twice mostly because I hate running into most of the people I know. Tonight is the demolition derby, and I can hear the cars going at each other from my apartment. Twenty, even fifteen years ago the cars were still made mostly with steel. But they’re all gone now so the derby’s are mostly made up of 90’s mid-sized plastic cars.

Years ago, like back in 1987 and 88, we’d get more than 3,000 people come to town just for the Derby, which is the population of my village plus a whole lot. I did a photo essay on it for college. The organizers set up a ring of huge cement blocks, then a fence about twenty feet further out so the cars don’t careen into the crowd.

The firemen let me inside the fence to take my shots, but at one point I was actually inside the concrete… I did get an A, so totally worth the risk.

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Posted in Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, crazy people with no pants, General Tao's Chicken, Grand Theft Auto, Health, Living With Depression, Living With Manic Depression, Memories | 15 Comments

Making Strange Requests

Posted on August 14, 2008 by Gabriel...

I’ve been getting some strange requests over the past few months. Mostly from people wanting to pay me so they can use this blog to sell their stuff.

Since March four people/agencies have contacted me about inserting products into my posts for cash. So far the offers have been basically the same, fifty bucks for referring to a movie or book in a post or actually writing a favourable review.

Actually, I just checked and last month I would have made $250. But I mostly wrote about diabetes, a few ways to recover from manic depression and some general family tragedy. I guess I could probably mention my new iPhone in there somewhere… if someone were to give me an iPhone for mentioning their product.

There was something else weird about the ‘getting paid per post’ offer. Along with a request for my services one of the agencies included a list of other bloggers on their payroll… it actually included a blogger in my blogroll who I really enjoy reading.

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Posted in Bipolar Disease, Bipolar Disorder, Blogging, crazy people with no pants, Health, No Post Day, Publishing | 20 Comments