a blip in the fog.
this was a mid week, falun gong parade that rerouted traffic along queen street.
i can't seem to get a straight story on falun gong. not that i've exerted a load of effort.
a couple years ago, on our way to a dim sum lunch, i asked a chinese friend of mine what falun gong was. i'm a long time half assed follower of qigong and wondered if there was a gong connection.
they're all a bunch of flaky spiritualists he told me. he said i was their primary target type western girl and that the group were causing havoc in china.
the falun gong wiki page describes something resembling that description but with a little more detail. ah the journalistic integrity of a one stop wiki read.
wiki says it
is a spiritual discipline first introduced in China in 1992
that
and that
practitioners of Falun Gong aspire to better health and, ultimately, spiritual enlightenment
apparently,
by 1999, some estimates placed the number of Falun Gong adherents in the tens of millions
eventually,
on 20 July 1999, after three years of mounting tensions between the group and the government, the Communist Party leadership initiated a nationwide crackdown and multifaceted propaganda campaign intended to eradicate the practice. In October 1999 it declared Falun Gong a "heretical organization"
and now,
hundreds of thousands are believed to have been imprisoned extrajudicially, and practitioners in detention are subject to forced labor, psychiatric abuse, torture, and other coercive methods of thought reform at the hands of Chinese authorities
so there we have it, first paragraph wiki research complete, i can go back to my crossword now.
a reflection of the changing sky.
when you sit on a bar stool for longer than should legally be allowed, the day grows up before your eyes.
dusk turns to night
little girls should be home by this hour
root beer paradise
chalk drawings
the littlest onion that ever was
this thing was being tossed around my local a week ago. folks were like pagnotta, this is for you. next thing i know, baby's being fried into a sweet little asparagus and creme cheese omelette for two.
this was a chance meeting. i got to see lori twice within a couple weeks. the guy beside her is ben, he's gill's husband, he's hilar.
cal and i went for a brief walk last weekend, partly so i could feel like a normal person doing what normal people do. cal's sweet to me about indulging these needs.
i thought lily's name had been drawn from a hat. cal thought gus and lily were not real people. always a realist that calvin.
these days are black and gold, black cause i'm sitting in my room in darkness, gold for the sliver of sun seeping through my curtained window.
this soup kicked my vegetarian arse all the way from here to tokyo.
not quite but it was yum central.
this is the new tom on the scene. partly cause his demeanor reminds me of tom but also just cause his name is tom and he's from vancouver (via calgary which suggests steve - all the more reason to suggest my long, lost family). he gave me a feeling of familiarity right off the bat but i might have issues with that kind of thing, you know, feeling like i know someone i've just met.
but maybe everyone else just holds back too much, tries to control things that can't be controlled, misses out on really meeting people.
david foster wallace said it best:
the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you.
so get to know people. move past the bullshit. that's what i say anyhow.
so get to know people. move past the bullshit. that's what i say anyhow.
and this my dears is a toy grasshopper half encased in glass. i wasn't out of focus, it was my camera i swear.
as our late friend paul used to say, PACE.
