Waning Gibbous

Like clockwork, it happens - with a tick tock of beating hearts it never fails, two weeks a month, a beautiful visitor peeks the rays of desolate sun glare and lights our nights skies in the vast openness of space. La lune floats as a marvelous beacon radiating a connection to terra cotta that is vastly understood, yet eerily misunderstood...

Angularly Momented
It may have happened like the flash of a boiling pot - percolating and pinballing from corner pocket to parking stall - with chaos in full effect as static, dynamic and ultrasonicular forces bounce through the entropy of waves in gravitational crashes. The moon may have held the perfect amount of rotational and angular directions to graze the side of a new and forming earth, resulting in a spin of angular momentum that perfectly caught each others escaping masses to bond in a unison so delicately cherished - the impact leaving a pressurized core and molten spin in the the bowels of earth - almost like the moon had impregnated a special spin in the earth, one that locked the moon in a gravitational pull that would fertilize the world...

Spinning the chords
As the molten core spun, the earth pulled and waned... groaning at the pushing and pulling - the kicking and gases, the surging and swelling - the earth began to show signs stretch marks - scars of mountains rising high from the spin and spun of the molten core... And locked in tight - the moon held onto the gravitational pull of the pregnancy. But even more miraculous that all, the moon held on so tight, that tiny little molecules began to excite themselves, spark energies back and forth - and cycle themselves with the constant tidal pulls and gravitational tunings - these tiny molecules began to dance and twirl. Twisting with twine and tiny little ribonucleic textiles - the twists became more and more elaborate - as if every two-week dance with the moon turned gravitational pulls into tidal tangos of primordial soup and stew. We had some life. The bacteria were born.

The crusts, the clearing, the shield and the trees
Land masses cleared. Dusts settled and the air cleared. The molten core spun through the chaos and filtered the particles of entropy into tiny packets of magnetic energy and shield - and a livable atmosphere was born. So instead of soup and stew of the primordial slop being continuously stirred in the pot - some spilled onto soil and land. Textiles of nucleic acids turned into sun-soakers - the plants - our green-ness. They found some miraculous way of structuring their structures to program a beacon to soak the light of the day and the carbon in the air and turn it into energy and organic matter - and our greens fertilized the beasts.



Waxing Crescent - Step.. by step.. by step.. by step..
With the moon continuing to pull back on the masses, the calcinated creatures of the deep learned how to walk. It was a struggle at first - but they crept... they crawled... they clawed and they clunked their way to find newer, and well.. greener.. pastures. The beasts roared and clamored up the stretching trees - growing to heights and lengths and weights worthy of reaching the moons close touch - so close and a mere 370,000 km wave in the night's sky it would seem too close to be true - and the gravity was bountiful in these days. With the moon so close, our spinning core's pull of weight and tonnage easily offset with the gentle pull of the moon's gravity. So surreal the pull - that beast and birds of giant proportions could support the calcinated structures of bones against the spinning pull of the core. Until it started to drift.

Drifting to Sleep
At a snails pace of toenails spurt of calcinated creation, the moon has been drifting... a drift so slight and sleuth that 3.8 measures of a centimeter per year moves into the deep horizon. So when back in the day of giant beasts and large lizards the moon began to pull away, the beasts and large lizards began to feel the pull of the earth - the spin of the core. Gravity began to pull it's weight as it's forces were dimished - over the course of 145 million years - gravitational forces from the moon and earth reduced 6% - and the weight of the world came crashing down on the dinos and giant ducks - the calcinated structures so strong and sturdy could no longer hold their weights - the true death of the dinos could be the waning and drifting moon - no longer as close as can be.

So as we find the mammals and fishies and birdies and lil lizards now roaming with a wave now over 384,000 km away, the moon still flourishes us with constant gravitational pull and cycled determination. It will hold on tight from generation to generation. But as bones grow to great lengths, the pull of the earth is always increasing. We must always return to the earth. It is truly, our only real destiny.

1.6% of my life...

Stretched Thin

As my back tightens, and my shoulders feel the brunt of the long hourly grind of pushing little woven fabrics of pulped and processed bits and pieces of information through the highway of idiocracy, I find solace in my ultimate saviour - the intra-wide web. As my fingertips roll through the preemptive strikes on the keys, as if muscle memory for every nerve of my occular beings are transmitted through the clicks of a mouse, I find myself amused. Our national pride is on display as our nation prepares for it's future ride with another Prime Minister.

Circling the Wagons

Our candidates are well known - the massed presses of the media outlet won't skip a beat - they'll pound every story whether the material is soft, hard, woven, piece-mealed, clovered or rednecked - and clearly our country is full of them. But maybe what isn't quite being covered is their respective approaches to their tactics; one using Republican-style smack down with daunting voices and nervous contempt, another almost being a complacently terrible used car saleman, almost as if his half-crooked smile is repeating: "C'moooon.... this other guy's a crook", and the three others just trying to keep their pasted smiles from slapping the first two.

In any regard, the opposition has been careful not to tread too deeply into a taboo topic of tankers, trucks and sticky ol' bitumen. Alberta, and ultimately Canada, have sunk our nails deep into the breadth of the beast - Washington, DC. We've sent our finest diplomats and ministers, all to act as our people's voice for our precious product. We're selling our resource - not just to the highest bidder, but to our closest neighbour.

Not quite Tar... Not quite Oil... Is it Chicken!!!?

So the Oilsands, tarsands, whatever. It's actually called bitumen. Not quite tar. Not quite oil. It's bitumen, stuck in sand. The Natives used to use it to patch their boats with. You see, when cold, it acts like a water repellant, and you can almost make hockey pucks out of it (no wonder us Canadians must love it eh?!). But what it needs to pump and separate from sand is a bunch of heat. Steam to be exact (or hot water, really hot water). So to extract it, we plug in the kettles, sort of - anyways, we burn a bunch of energy - clean natural gas really - or sort of clean if you remember to count the carbon. And then to make sure it doesn't refreeze into hockey pucks, it's mixed with oil. Yes - oil is used to make other oil. Or condensate to be exact. Not quite oil. Only the lightest of oil. Olive oil, almost - well... not quite. Anyways. to sum up, a bunch of wood is chopped down and rivers are polluted - I digress; that's my summary of the oilsands, or tarsands, or bitumen, or oil user, or gas user or tree chopper or river polluter. It's kind of under the spotlight by the US as a not-so-squeaky-clean product.

A Choice of 1.6 Concerns

So in order to make it a squeaky clean product and get the seal of approval to ship it across to our good ol' neighbour, what does our government do? I'll provide two options:

1 - Immediately address elevated levels of pollutants in the waterways by reducing the point source; address climate change by adopting Environment Canada framework for reducing oil sands carbon footprints; develop a strategic outline of responsible resource development through planned, orchestrated production increases

or

2 - throw millions of dollars towards monitoring equipment and never really stopping the water pollution, scrap the climate change plans, cause hey; what Canadian doesn't want our winter to be a little warmer right? and finally, we'll green light every project that plans to produce bitumen, jam a pipeline down the US's throat by sending a bunch of our best oil saleman (i mean government officials) to lobby on behalf of an industry we own no part of.

Whew....

I find myself flabbergastroided (kind of flabbergasted, but mostly feeling gastrointestinally haemorrhoided) - instead of a government that will keep our air and water fresh and clean, we have to settle for one that's willing to lobby for an industry that employs 550,000 (2006 statistic), or 1.6% of all Canadians (again 2006 statistic). When did 1.6% of us represent a majority? Our statistics are telling us that climate change is real and effects all of us - should our government not be focussed on all of us instead of 1.6%? For myself, I've planted into my leftwinged attitude into a conservative stronghold, left stuck to wonder how so many blindly choose to check a name for fossilized principles - and fossilized truths... we don't own any of it, but we are definitely paying for it.

Bastionated Bastards

So here it is, a return to the ignorant, jackanape interpretations of the spin columnists, press quotationists and news-junked loyalists.

I’ve sat in a desk over the past years attempting to dodge my counterparts as they heave oil-slung messages of hope for the Great White North’s bastion of barrels. One was quoted as saying: “why don’t we trap the environmentalists with cheeseburgers from McDonald’s and fling them off a tower”, which was my favorite. And although I am temped by delicious cheeseburgers and would gladly consume one even in the face of danger, my interpretative nature questions how an old dinosaur could possibly be so idealistic with a pave and produce mentality that a hatred develops towards anyone who hugs a tree? In any regard, the idealists have come out in force over the years, and are proud and loud of our economic stranglehold.

One such case; today an article published words on the intraweb indicating that our Great White North’s slew of slimy succulent synergistic soup was being hailed by the US President as: “open for business”. Obama was quoted as saying the US would slash US Oil Import by more than 30%. He continued by saying Canada and a handful of other countries would keep the taps open. The spin columnists were able to manipulate the text and identify that can Canada was singled out as a preferred supplier. But I ask, how can we be single out when there are a quote: “handful of others”. We aren’t singled out. We supply, others supply. We are foreign and the US must import our oil. So how did a speech about reducing foreign oil imports and a speech indicating a move towards renewable energy and acceptance that oil will run out an approval to open our taps further and all is peachy-keen in the bastion of bubbly bitumen? It wasn’t. I read the opposite. But maybe I’m full of cheeseburgers…