A Tinful of Talismans

All they are Saying is Give Peace a Chance

A few years back I wrote a Remembrance Day speech for then Lieutenant Governor Lois Hole. At her direction, I made sure that her speech included thanks to the veterans for their sacrifices and made note of their courage and valour. Lois also directed me to include a strong message of peace in the speech, and I did so. While most of the feedback received was positive, several people publicly noted that they were offended by the speech; they felt Lois had gone too far, as if calling for a world free of war somehow took away from the sacrifices of veterans.

At the time I was dumbfounded, but with that experience in my pocket I'm not surprised by the annual vitriol expressed toward those people who choose to mark Remembrance Day not with the red poppy of sacrifice, but the white poppy of peace.Social media is awash with people hurling the worst sort of abuse at people who favour the white poppy over the red, with a few peacemakers stepping in to say "why not wear both?"

That's not a bad solution, but it doesn't work for those who don't wear the red poppy because they believe that the symbol, intentionally or not, has become part of the cultural narrative that says war is necessary and okay. The poppy cannot be apolitical, as some claim, because it's become an integral part of that narrative. Wrapped up as it is in imagery of sacrifice, valour and blood, the poppy can't help but contribute to the central, garish appeal of war: from the outside, it's exciting. Conflict equals drama, which is why there are so many masterpieces that take war as their central theme; as a species, we can't help but be enthralled by it. I'm not immune; I love war movies and literature great and gaudy about war. 

Others avoid the white poppy not because they don't want peace, but because they realize there have been a few times in history when it seems pretty clear - at least if we trust the information we're fed by the custodians of truth and culture - armed intervention was necessary to save lives. The Second World War and various peacekeeping operations come to mind. In a heated moment several years ago I even wished that the UN would intervene to stop the Taliban from destroying ancient Buddhist artifacts, irreplaceable works of art. I might do so again if terrorists threatened the Louvre or the Guggenheim, come to think of it, even though I value human life more than artifacts - even when those lives are maniacal destroyers of art. And of course when people of ill will threaten the weak, I can't help but feel that intervention, even lethal intervention, can be a moral imperative.

But I do admire those who choose the white poppy, because if nothing else they are showing that a counter-narrative is possible. Perhaps a hundred years from now someone will invent knockout gas or stun beams with no side effects, enabling non-violent conflict resolution in even the most extreme circumstances. But that day won't come unless every human being values the life of every other human being, and in that sense I think those who wear the white poppy are performing an important service; at the very least, they're willing to be called some pretty horrible names in the service of peace (which of course is not the same thing as being willing to face bullets and bombs).

I have friends and relatives who have served and do serve in the military, who have risked life and limb because they believed it was the right thing to do. For that reason, I hesitated before expressing my feelings tonight about the poppy and the double-edged sword of remembrance. But I like to think they served so that I could express my views as a free human being, whether my views are right, wrong, or simply naive.

As for me, I wear neither poppy, because my feelings about war and remembrance are too conflicted to express with any one symbol. And perhaps because symbols - from soda brand logos to national flags to those poor innocent poppies - are like lit fuses themselves, just another trigger for conflict.

The First Decade

Ten years ago, my career as a professional writer was well underway. I'd written or contributed to a number of bestselling gardening books, I was selling short articles under my own name to a couple of different magazines, and I was the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta's official speechwriter. Things were looking good.

Earl and his notepad at the Bleak House of Blahs

And yet something was missing. Why else would I have felt the urge to start blogging, or to name this digital journal The Bleak House of Blahgs to reference a place (the so-called "Bleak House of Blahs) I lived only briefly - and that ten years prior to the blog's first post?

There were two reasons. I was lonely, and sharing my thoughts with the world was a way to feel a little less alone. And just as importantly, I needed a place to experiment. While writing for Lois and Jim Hole (and later a series of Alberta Liberal MLAs) was satisfying and challenging enough, the blog gave me a place to be as analytical or shallow or serious or goofy as I wanted to be.

Most of my early writing at The Bleak House of Blahgs centres on the mundane; should anyone struggle with insomnia, read a few of these early posts to learn what DVDs I was watching at the time, or whose birthday party I was attending, or what I was doing at work. Coming up with original content is a challenge for any writer, so I often filled the gaps with old material I'd composed years before, a sin I resort to less often these days. There are a few cryptic references to Sylvia peppered into these early posts here and there; I'd met her in late 2002, not long before starting this blog, but we didn't start a relationship until spring 2003.

Sylvia's presence, of course, informs virtually everything I've written since. While I'd had relationships prior to meeting Sylvia, they were short-lived and "unofficial," if that's the right word for it. Sylvia was my first real girlfriend, and that represented a sea change in my outlook. Suddenly I was responsible for someone, someone who in turn felt responsible for me in ways that parents and siblings cannot be; it was an entirely different kind of relationship, one I was discovering for the first time. It felt strange to be loved romantically, but it cleared my mind and freed me from many of the stresses that were preventing me from exploring the limits of whatever talent I might possess. Sylvia gave me the freedom and confidence to move forward on a number of fronts - personally, professionally. She made me a better writer and a better person, and that's given me the courage to publicly explore the questions that have always vexed me most:

Who am I, and why am I here?
What does the future hold for humanity?
Why do people suffer?
Are we alone in the universe?
What's the true nature of reality?
What does it all mean?

It's always bothered me that so many of my posts seem to focus on me, me, me - what's happened to me, what did I do today, etc. And yet this is the lens through which each of us experiences life, so unless I construct some kind of artifice I'm forced to write about myself, at least tangentially, to struggle with these questions. Better writers do this successfully all the time, of course, but I work with what I have, and blogging, for now, is the best way I know how to explore the subjects I care about.

Several years ago I changed the name of this blog from The Bleak House of Blahgs to My Name is Earl (J. Woods), a change made half out of boredom, half to capitalize on a sitcom I had enjoyed at the time. Today this blog endures its third and final name change, one that's not only shorter and snappier, but also contains a classical allusion, a bad pun and a more succinct characterization of the blog's nature: The Earliad. While I have no illusions that I'll join the ranks of Homer or Virgil, I've long thought that if I ever became famous The Earliad would be the perfect name for my autobiography. While I foresee no fame in my future, I still like the title, so I'm going to put it to use.

The desire to write often comes with some hubris, particularly if the writer hopes people will read his material. How large does one's ego have to be to broadcast his thoughts to the universe?

Pretty large, I guess, and sometimes - perhaps much of the time - without much justification. But in my defence, I write because, well, I find life interesting, and that includes my life - and yours. I write because I hope that my readers will discover something that touches on your own experience, that makes you think about the world in a different way. I live for the comments people occasionally leave here, many of them far more insightful and interesting than my original posts.

I think most people want to share their experiences, because through those experiences we learn to know one another. We learn how to deal with the universe's challenges together, and maybe we even learn how to begin answering some of those big questions. And along the way, if we're lucky, we have a lot of fun together.

I've certainly had a lot of fun writing this blog for the last ten years. So much has happened since that first post: Sylvia and I were married, I ran for office against Alberta's Premier, drove the Alaska Highway, made new friends, stood on the shore of North America's east coast for the first time, flew in a helicopter, dove in a submarine, had a post featured on Reddit, served as an online tutor at MacEwan University, bought two condos, met James Cameron and returned to northern Manitoba...twice.

It's been a heck of a decade. Along with the moments already mentioned above, here are a few more of my favourite posts:

Fitzpatrick's War
The End of My Double Life
The Killer Inside
Behold...The Barf Thing!
The Only Logical Choice
The Ketchup Katastrophe
The Walls Have Ears, the Doors Have Eyes
No Job Too Small...for Superman!
Earl Jumps on a VCR
Wisteria Hysteria
The Speculative Fiction Canon
Star Trek Season Four Episode Guide
The Answering Machine Message
The Art of Friendship
Farewell to the Legislature
You Seem Wise, for a Woman

It's interesting that this anniversary should fall at this moment in my life, a time of transition. I left politics behind, but discovered that I really enjoy teaching and reinvigorated my freelance career. While I would still prefer a return to full-time work, being home has given me more time to work on my novel and short stories, to spend more time with Sylvia, to learn how to fix little things around the house, to finish the library and theatre room. I feel like my life has some balance at last, and I can't wait to see what happens next. I hope you'll join me.

Of Christmas Parties Past

Nine years ago this month, Sylvia and I attended a Christmas party held for staff of then Lieutenant Governor Lois Hole. It was at this party I obtained the only and only photo I have of myself with Lois, and thankfully it's a good one.

I have several fond memories of this event: Sylvia in her Emma Peel-esque spy dress, Lois' very kind remarks about my work during her speech to the staff, chatting with Lois' aides-de-camp and administrators. In a way, serving as Lois' speechwriter was a queer sort of prologue to my work at the Alberta Legislature; I'd run into quite a few familiar faces after making the transition from Hole's to the Official Opposition.

Unfortunately this Christmas affair of 2003 was Lois' last; by Christmas of 2004 she was too sick with cancer to host another, and she passed away in early 2005. But her memory lives on in the many thousands of lives she touched during her tenure as author, philanthropist, gardener and inspirational political figure.

Still Nearly Famous

Back when I landed the co-hosting slot of the CBC pilot "If Your Parents Split," one of the actors gave me a very nice card and a simple button that read "I'm Nearly Famous." I wore that button for years and it remains in my collection, though I don't wear it around town anymore. I thought the sentiment was cute and it helped keep me grounded during those heady teenage days of near-fame. It was and is a good reminder not to take myself too seriously.

The pilot wasn't picked up, but it did earn a couple of awards, and since then I've had a series of medium-profile jobs and activities that haven't exactly catapulted me to fame, but have put me in the orbit of a few reasonably famous people. I've certainly never wanted fame for its own sake, but it some degree of notoriety goes hand-in-hand with the careers and activities I've pursued: acting, politics, writing. I'm drawn to these activities for a number of reasons. I like writing and other creative pursuits because, well, they're creative; I enjoy exercising my imagination and bringing something new into the world. I gave politics a try because I thought perhaps I could help people. I never pursued acting or the theatre seriously, but I did dabble from junior high school to university and quite enjoyed it.

My greatest dream has always been to have my name in print, something I technically accomplished back in 1997 with the publication of my first freelance article. Of course the BIG dream was to be listed as the author of a book - again, something I almost accomplished with Herbs & Edible Flowers, in which I'm listed as the co-writer with (the much more famous) Lois Hole. But that wasn't quite enough either. In truth, my biggest dream remains to finish a novel and have it published. It could sell five copies for all I care; I just want that book on my shelf with my name on it. Why? Well, for whatever reason I decided at a very young age I wasn't going to have children, and on some level I want to leave something of myself behind; a novel would fill the bill very nicely.

But given the slow demise of traditional publishing and my own lackadaisical habits, I doubt I'll ever see that dream fulfilled. I still have hopes of selling another short story, but a novel...well, that dream is more distant now. By the time I finish I'm sure traditional publishing will be dead and gone and I'll have to settle for e-publishing, which I'm not knocking at all...it's just not the dream I had in mind.

On the other hand, this blog hit a new high of just over 8,000 page views last month. When I started this project I assumed I'd be writing just for me and maybe a few friends; it was really just a way to experiment with new media. Now it appears I have a much larger audience than I ever intended, and it's frankly a little intimidating. Now I know how cartoonists feel, trying to craft something funny 365 (or 366) days a year. It's a grind and some days you know you're disappointing your readers.

Like tonight, maybe...some nights insight comes easily, some nights you ramble.

Fame? I guess I'd like just a little - just enough that maybe fifty or seventy-five years from now - it would be the height of hubris to hope for more - a few people will know that I existed. Why that should be important to me I honestly don't know, but there it is.

Farewell to the Legislature

Earlier today I drove out of the Alberta Legislature's east parkade for the last time, and as my car climbed the exit ramp toward the rising garage door, I felt a sudden absence of weight from my heart. Momentarily startled, I clutched my chest and realized that this was no metaphorical weight lifted from my shoulders; rather, my body had just acknowledged the disappearance of my lanyard and legislature ID cards.

For six and a half years, I'd carried those cards around my neck for eight to twelve hours a day, often forgetting to remove my lanyard in public, much to the amusement of my fellow employees.

Only when their negligible presence vanished did I really begin to believe that my tenure with the Alberta Liberal Caucus, until recently Alberta's Official Opposition, was truly over. As I drove past the Legislature Annex and the legislature itself, Al Stewart's "Time Passages" played over my iPhone. I couldn't help but smile to myself; how apropos. My departure unfolded as I'd somehow always imagined it: on a sunny day, without fanfare, quietly sliding over the horizon, the stony legislature dome receding in my rear view mirror. My arrival was similarly low-key...

I'd been interested in the career of Kevin Taft since reading his first book, Shredding the Public Interest. I'd been interested in politics since grade school and Taft's ascension to Official Opposition Leader prompted me to seriously consider joining his team. But at the time I was performing non-partisan public service, writing speeches for Lieutenant Governor Lois Hole. It wasn't until 2005, after Her Honour's death, that I felt free enough to apply for a job with the Alberta Liberal Caucus.

I originally applied for an outreach position in mid-2005, but that wasn't the right fit for me. Fortunately the Liberals held on to my application and gave me a call later that year, asking if I'd be interested in applying for their new communications coordinator position. I was and I did, and I started my new career in opposition politics in early January, 2006. I was pretty starstruck by Kevin and his caucus of 16 MLAs; here they were, the avatars of democracy, men and women from across Alberta (well, from Edmonton, Calgary and Lethbridge, anyway) chosen by the people to represent their interests in the legislature. I was just as impressed by my co-workers, young, well-educated, politically savvy up-and-comers who shared a passion for progressive politics and the desire to put an end to years of one-party rule in Alberta.

The day-to-day demands of the job left little room for idealism, however. I wet my feet with a few simple brochures, but soon enough I was writing speeches and private member's statements for all of the Liberal MLAs. I quickly learned to write in sixteen different voices - and even retained my sanity while doing so!

As the years went on my range of responsibilities grew. Soon I was writing press releases, managing the caucus website, producing advertisements and branding collateral, writing, producing, directing and editing videos, editing MLA newsletters, writing copy for handouts and learning graphic design on the fly. I tagged along with our outreach team at a number of town halls and forums, meeting with Albertans and learning about their dreams and concerns.

The job itself was enjoyable enough, and rewarding, too; I really felt as though I was helping hundreds of Albertans have their voices heard. But the true gift of the job has been the dozens of remarkable people I've been privileged to work with. Over the years I've seen dozens of incredible Albertans come and go through the caucus offices; in fact my one regret is that turnover remained very high through my tenure. Opposition politics is a bit of a meat grinder, I'm afraid; I outlasted all but two of my co-workers, and only two Liberal MLAs have been with the caucus longer than me.

It may have been tumultuous, but oh, what a time I had. While with the caucus I met two premiers (Klein and Stelmach), several cabinet ministers, ran for office (losing handily by 10,000 votes to Mr. Stelmach), married Sylvia (with none other than Kevin Taft acting as our officiant), met James Cameron and some of my favourite journalists, including Graham Thomson and Don Braid. I appeared as an accidental party spokesman on the eve of the 2008 election over several television and radio outlets, learned how to work with content management systems and thoroughly embarrassed myself with a truly awful video for the 2006 press gallery Christmas party. (If audience response is anything to go by, I redeemed myself with later videos, thank goodness.) At several points the departure of various media liaisons left me as the main contact for the media, and I'm grateful to Alberta's reporters, editors and news directors for their patience. No matter how many balls I was juggling, you were always classy and professional.

If a week is an eternity in politics, what is six and a half years? Well, probably a little too long, at least for me. Politics thrives on new blood, and I'm happy to step aside for fresh perspectives and new approaches. If my time in opposition has taught me anything, it's that the progressive left has to get its act together if it ever wants real change. The same old same old won't cut it anymore, and if that means saying goodbye to some cherished old brands and favourite colours, well, so be it. Politics isn't sports; it's not about which team "wins." It's about protecting civil rights, managing the economy for the betterment of all, protecting the environment, seeing to the needs of the vulnerable and less fortunate...in other words, building a culture and society that leaves no one behind as it moves forward to a better tomorrow.

As I prepare for the next chapter in my life, I'd like to thank all of my colleagues for their support, guidance, patience and friendship: the Alberta Liberal MLAs and their constituency staff, Alberta Liberal Party staff, volunteers and members, infrastructure, IT, custodial and HR staff of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, and most of all, my fellow staff members in communications, research, administration and the Leader's Office.

I will never forget you. In memory of the many fine people I served with, I'll close with some images of my favourite moments.

Earl's last day. Thanks to Avril McCalla for shooting the photo.

And that's all there is.