I SURVIVED

A fragment of writing found floating on the Internet Sea, from co-ordinates unknown, perhaps a Cyber Coast Guard rescue operation is in order:


"... am weak now but will continue writing as long as I can. It is quiet now, that almost eerie kind of quiet that follows the sound and fury. It is a silence of anticipation, as if the horrific events of the past weekend have not terminated but are merely in limbo and could erupt again at any moment.


I think the invaders have left, but I dare not depend on that thought. Sunday afternoon I heard the barbarian hordes start up their war chariots and scream away in fogs of carbon combustion and derision. I do not want to indulge in self delusion. They are crafty, these barbarians from the East. They are capable of the most insidious of deceptions. "We are not really hungry" they will tell you, "you don't need to cook much" and they will eat everything in your house, regardless of quality, like locusts in a wheat field, driving forward, devouring all ... oh, the dog was nervous and 24 hour grocery stores armed themselves.


Their weapons are devious. Beyond their truly terrifying ability to consume copious amounts of food and spirits apparently, they have powerful voodoo that can control the very weather itself. In order to placate them, we journeyed to the centre of our fair city to worship at our most sacred of institutions, known far and wide as the Beer Patio. Oh, a splendid day it was, with the sun shining and the bus exhausts blowing and goth girls gliding by on Queen St. West. Surely, the day ahead would be warm and sunny and filled with the froth of draft beer and the grease of chicken wings ..


Oh, but I underestimated the power of the horde. As we settled in against the iron rails of the Black Bull, with the sun shining upon the throng of Shoppers-With-Way-Too-Much-Money, the sky suddenly darkened and a strange kind of cold rain started to fall. I tried to brave out this ensorcelled storm but the power of the barbarians was too much for me. A sudden wind picked up, swirling amidst the colorful beer umbrellas and mini skirts on the patio. Finally we were forced inside this humble Church of Lager.


While worshiping my pint of India Pale Ale, I observed several members of the horde split off into small raiding parties, to sortie forth into my fair and vulnerable city. Two of the female members of the horde (amazons they are, the fiercest fighters of the army) returned with small colourful bags holding what elements of feminine sorcery I shudder to imagine. The youngest of the male warriors ventured into a local lair of wizardry and Geekdom known to all as the Comic Book Shop. He returned with a model of some dire weapon of destruction known as a "Ti Figher" Oh the horror .. surely he will return to his eastern domain with this model, no doubt to supply it to his Masters of War to replicate and use them to overtake our world ... of course, they are a literal people these barbarians and no doubt we will soon be assaulted by thousands of these Ti Fighters, all of them four inches long ...

Back at the abode, the restless horde satiated themselves on enormous piles or seared flesh and cold beer and mysterious concoctions known as Pickled Tinks ... don't ask. As the evening wore on and vegetarians everywhere trembled with dread, the barbarians erected a fire, like a funeral pyre that all that is decent and sacred and non alcoholic ...

So now here I sit in the eerie silence, relieved yet filled with dread. Relieved that the horde has moved on to their barbaric homeland and yet dreadful ... because next year I will have another birthday .... and my family will return.

I'M NOT GETTING OLDER, I'M GETTING HAIRIER

Yup, it is happening. I'm having a birthday this weekend. Again. It seems to happen every year. It is getting monotonous. The family is coming up so if you enjoy peace tranquility sanity and a sense of rightness with the universe I would avoid the Greater Toronto Area this weekend.

So, a few reflections on this whole getting older thing. Firstly, as I move further into my fifth decade, I don't know if I can consider myself middle aged anymore. For me, middle aged always implied a half way point. I may be beyond that now. Don't get me wrong, I feel fine and I ain't going anywhere but another fifty years? I was bad to myself when I was younger. I smoked so much pot that to this day I pee resin (Tapping the blog .. is this thing on?)

Seriously, looking ahead fifty years is a kind of weird exercise. Because you are not just looking ahead to the status of your life (career, relationship etc) but the quality of your life, your health. My health, my body is not the same now as it was at 25. I'm a bit heavier, a bit slower, and even hairier ... ok, I knew that as I aged I would grow hair in new places but why does it come in grey? And the new gadgets I looked forward to purchasing did not include a wider variety of hair clippers/trimmers. But, I am happy to report that my health, my body, has not really changed in a true dramatic fashion from twenty five years to fifty .. but fifty to seventy five? Seventy five to one hundred? Yikes is the word that comes to mind.


If I live to be one hundred I have this vision of myself: A long grey pony tail and big mouth attached to a walker. Um, scary thought, sorry.


Besides the physical changes I am not sure what my personality is going to be like in fifty years. I like to think that I've gotten wiser over the years; I have certainly gotten crankier. Frankly, I don't think I'm old enough now to be this cranky. Collette's father is crankier than me but he is 84 ... far as I'm concerned, you have a divine right to be cranky at that age. I think I have an early developing case of "codger's disease" or something.


Maybe I will have some kind of sea change in fifty years. At one hundred and one, Vic will be this gracious, generous, munificent entity who spreads waves of love and understanding across the universe; like the Dali Lhama of North York ...... but let's face it, the reality is I am more likely to become the Troll of Toronto; a long haired grey bearded beast with a bum ankle who lives under the Bloor Street Viaduct, scaring children, berating members of the Progressive Conservative party but easily placated by an ice cold bottle of lager. Mmmm lager ... sorry, wiping drewl from beard and continuing on.


I wonder what I will know if I live to be one hundred. I will have accumulated knowledge, that is certain, but will I remember any of it? I am already having memory issues. I keep forgetting what it is that I don't remember. So I have this vision of 98 year old Vic waking up one morning, energized by an epiphany that would create world peace, feed the planet and prevent people from wearing socks with sandals. Only, on the way to the bathroom for my fiftieth pee in 6 hours, I would not only forget the epiphany, I would forget why I had gone into the bathroom in the first place. And wonder what the hell the yellow liquid on my feet was. Wow, another ugly image in one post, thanks for tuning in.

Fifty years just seems way too far away. I have no idea what the world will be like in fifty years let alone my own life. Maybe I will dedicate the next twenty years to doing nothing but sustaining my existence, you know, eating well, exercising, drinking seaweed-and-tofu-and-pigeon-beak smoothies and forgo red meat, beer, and cream filled donuts (you know, the stuff that pretty much sustains me now) only to find that the corporeal world has been replaced by virtual reality anyway; a bunch of meat tubes plugged into a communal Hi Def computer system.

So what is the point of all this musing? Wait, you still didn't think there would be any point to this blog did you? Silly reader. The only point to this post: I will be around next year, musing about the future yet not doing much about it, drinking an ice cold lager and sucking the cream out of a donut.

And, just because the thought occurred to me, the title of this post is I'm Not Getting Older, I'm Getting Hairier but that is what Vic would right. If I was a military general celebrating his 5oth year of blowing shit up the title could be I'm Not Getting Older, I'm Getting A Harrier.

I kill me.

THIS IS MY TIMELINE & I'M GOING TO RIDE IT ..

A timeline is a video editing term but this is not a post about video editing. Its a post about birthdays. Or both. Let me explain.

I am currently surrounded by people celebrating their birthdays (I guess spring/early summer is a particularly randy time). My brother Ed celebrated his birthday in May. My sister Susanna (the only of my four sisters who is older than I) has her birthday this weekend, as does my brother in law Dale. Collette's grand nephew Lucas turned a whopping one year old a few days ago. Damn, he's still under warranty.

They are an interesting thing, birthdays. (Also interesting that I wrote about my dog's birthday before anyone else's but that's my issue) We all have them, we are all getting older, yet we all co-exist together, at the same time, even as we move forward, at different rates .. or do we.

This is where the timeline comes in.

The timeline is where you assemble your project in video editing software. You import all your footage, you trim down to the clips you want and you drop them into the timeline, to assemble them into the movie you want. The timeline is also the place where you place your titles, effects, music, etc. All the elements that make up your movie go into the timeline. On the computer, it gives you a visual representation of the various elements that make up your movie.

The way the timeline works is that you drop your clips into it in the order they will appear. So, the establishing shot of the house first, the house interior, then a shot of the party in progress, then the close up of the fetish gear .. no wait, this isn't that kind of movie. This is the Birthday Movie.

I have all my clips assembled. Lucas, Ed, Dale, Susanna .. all the birthdays that are swirling around me. Being an editor, being a writer, my compulsion is to assemble them all together, lay them down in the timeline and make that movie of out of them. But how do I go about this? What is the proper sequence?

If the movie is actually about birthdays, do we go along the calendar, picking the birthdays as they occur: Ed, Lucas, Dale, Susanna ... one after the other going down the line. Logical, but looking at the timeline, something weird occurs; the youngest (Lucas) follows the oldest (ED). That doesn't seem right. In our linear world, that is certainly out of sequence, because we would normally factor such things in ascending order. Youngest to oldest. It seems to want to supersede even the sequential calendar dates, especially in the visual world of the timeline .. the baby comes first, our brains tell us, and the grey haired old guy last (sorry Ed, you are still a sexy and powerful man)

In the timeline, each little clip has a different size and that is determined by its length. So a five second shot, on the screen, has a visual icon much shorter than a one minute shot.

So baby Lucas' clip would look like the second one in the timeline above. Ed's would be ... bigger (I'm not picking on him, I'm taking him to a show, get over it). So my Birthday Movie timeline would be nicely staggered out, the icons growing larger as we move down the sequence. One clip after another. Edited that way, the movie would start with Lucas, jump to Dale, cut to Susanna .. but that's not right either. Lucas was not born first, he was born last, so shouldn't he be down at the end of the timeline? This is the advantage of non linear editing, you can move the clips all around.

So now we have Lucas at the end of the sequence and Ed at the beginning. And the length of the clips diminish as we move along it. That seems logical, but its still not right. Sure, you can start with Ed, but his clip ends then Susanna's begins, and that isn't how it happens. Ed, thankfully, has not ended. I'm pretty sure I've seen him and our sister together. There may be pictures. So what we need is a timeline that represents something closer to reality; where all the clips exist at the same time. We call this a multiclip timeline, where several clips can be on the screen at the same time.

So now all the clips, all my family, are onscreen at the same time. Damn, you'd have to call this production The Rideau Heights of Babel (inside joke and Google may be of no help, sorry) So now we are set, here is everybody existing at the same time ... but still not working. See why there are so many re-edits in my biz?

Because while they all certainly co-exist, but it seems to negate the whole point of the birthday. They weren't all together at the same time, that would make them the same age, and it would save on candles or something. They were born on different dates, in different years, just like the calendar that we started with. So that is the linear part, the beginning of their lives, but as the clips (lives) are added, each one lengthens, grows longer (grows older) they kind of caught up to each other. In a traditional timelime the clips would push each other along as they extended but in the multiclip environment we can start each clip at a time, and let them catch up to each other.

Birth dates are a fact of life. You were born. Boom. There you are. That's the date. Birthdays are something else, I think. We are not just acknowledging the date of your birth we are celebrating the event of your birth. Or as often stated, celebrating your life. So by date of birth we have the calendar, the linear timeline with each clip layed out in a row. But by birthday, even if the clips are staggered, we need the multiclip sequence, where the clips grow on, get longer, join up, side by side, one on top of the other, co existing. I like the way the birthdays are working these past several weeks, kind of all grouped together, all these people of different ages but all the celebrations happening so close together. Separated by years, united by a number of weeks.

That is the kind of timeline I need to make the Birthday Movie. Linear, multi faceted, organized, mixed up ... all the clips moving on and filled with noise and color and sound and motion, yet all linked together, making one movie from all these diverse elements.

So, this isn't a post about editing. It isn't really a post about birthdays. It's a post about something big and noisy and straightforward and complex, something with a past and a present, zooming ahead into the future, each part alone but each part needed to maintain the whole.

That's right. This is a post about family.