Edmonton's Latest Poet Laureate, "Tickled Pink" About Relieving Title From Former Cadence Weapon M.C., Rollie Pemberton

A light smattering of rain is no match for the covered side walks in this part of the city - the lush leafy canopies, fast approaching their seasonal fullness now, and seeming to grow ever more green with each passing equinox. A low grumbling was I hearing from the not-so-distant mass of clouds, a dark, pearly grey, forming spires in the sky due south, caused me to quicken my pace. The murmuring thunder, coupled with the atmospheric brew, was conjuring notions of heavy sheets of the type of instantaneous puddle-making rain that can soak one to the bone in under a second.

No sooner than two dogs could divide a rabbit between them, what started off as a light, early summer sprinkler seemed destined to fast become somewhat of an ominous pelting... the kind of rain that grows rapidly colder and indicates, “hail-stones soon to follow.” Given the two excessively furry beasts I had in tow, and the fact that I was fully clothed at the time, I wanted to boogie-woogie home double-time- keep myself and my double dogs dry!

Edmonton's a tad more humid than is usual, given recent trends I've personally noticed over the last several years. Maybe I'll thumb through 'The Old Farmer's Almanac' next time I'm down at the butcher's. I do know that arthritics and asthmatics have been known to move to Alberta to ease their joints and loosen their phlegm in the typically arid climes found throughout much of our province. Subsequently, this is the first summer in almost ten years since we've had a noticeable contingent of pesky mosquitoes to contend with. West Nile Virus producing gulleys and mud pools everywhere! Run for your lives!

Aside from Edmonton's reputation for having dangerous streets and being totally lame throughout much of its downtown core, there's all kinds of great shit happening in the Capital City of Canada's Most Westerly Prairie Province. I capitalized all that very purposefully, and I can't wait for the Canada Day fireworks. We have the best fireworks because Alberta's so awesomely rich as a province and we know how to have more better fun here, eh?

I'm a Friendly Outdoor Cat

Just got in after taking the shepherd dogs for a little late night to-do around Ezio Farone Park. To enhance the outing, I also brought along with me a notebook that I will never write in, and a couple of T*N*T Strong Malt... beer? An inexpensive malt, and at least one can of which I'd be sure to drink before returning to my home office to tell you all about it in this here blog.

Dear reader, are you an expert on brewcraft? I dunno. I thought beer was beer, malt was malt, and ale was ale, but I must digress... I'm no aficionado, but rather a drink-to-get-drunk sort of drunk-type drinker who really shouldn't drink anything fermented at all...  no matter how good I feel about myself that day. Even when it comes to having a nice glass of port with a Cuban, or even a Champagne at brunch with close friends. Even a glass of Shiraz with a Swiss Cheese fondue is off limits for a hammerhead like me! You just don't know where it might take me!

Entering the park's perimeter, I headed straight for the dimly lit Gazebo that almost overlooks the river valley. I was thinking that I might write a stanza, make a few clever late night footnotes, or just tepidly sip at my peasant brew -  a freshly sharpened Staedtler (UK) pencil tucked purposefully in my left ear for just such a purpose. I wanted badly to look as pretentious as a professional blogger in case any chicks happened by.

Since it was late and there was not hide nor hair of the usual spandex clad "I work out in public" set so common in this park during the daytime hours- nor the usual buxom hussies out strutting their apartment-sized dogs around, I decided it was safe to unleash the unwaveringly obedient wolves and let them roam free. It's certain people's understandably anxious reactions toward larger, wolfish-looking dogs that I fret over when unleashing them in the city.  They're really, really, good doggies who will even cease chasing a rabbit upon command. Stalwart companions are they!

After unhinging them, the co-ed pair of inseparable K-9s immediately trotted around one of the concrete flower planters enshrining the gazebo, and then stopped... ears and tails up, dead still- staring intently at something behind the ferns. I parked my beer bag on the bench and went around to see what it was that had captured their undivided, symbiotic attentions. It was... a cat!

Not just any cat, but an eggshell coloured feline who was groomed-up just like a show poodle! Closely shorn midriff with poofs of fur on its head, tail, and feet! I'd seen this strange cat not two weeks previous while sauntering about in my neighbourhood well after midnight, and at that time, felt very much inclined to take it home with me to my urban cabin to eat tuna and listen to my nonsensical oratory.

Erring on the side of caution, I re-hitched my two gentle beasts, and implored for them to sit. More reluctantly than usual, they did sat, thus giving me an opportunity to reacquaint myself with this wayward kitty, much to the dogs' chagrin.

This fearless and handsome little house cat had tags affixed to its collar, one of which read - I kid you not:

"I AM A FRIENDLY OUTDOOR CAT"... and that was that!

It was my turn to sit, and so I sat, on the gazebo's bench, and contemplated all sorts of stuff about the universe and my place in it. Holistic stuff. Chaos theory and stuff Stephen Hawking goes on about. The little cat didn't budge the whole time. The dogs maintained their vigil, intent on the bushes where they knew the fearless feline was lingering. Weird me out, man!


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Addendum:

I'm a real lazy sort (if by happenstance a future employer is reading this, keep in mind that the precise opposite is true whenever I'm on the payroll) and have a strong disliking for any sort of unnecessary busy work.

When my computer's main hard drive crapped-out a while back, I was forced to install a non-Microsoft operating system on my PC. Imagine my delight upon the discovery that my repository of digital pictures and video were left unscathed - entirely intact within my desktop computer's secondary hard drive! The files were unadulteratedly accessible- even though I was now running the machine with a Linux O/S!

I couldn't congratulate myself enough for having the wherewithal to keep my video work on a physically separate drive all this time! Bravo, moremoreenough!
I plan to rock on into the near future!

Feeling depressed in one's place of Work? Impossible!

I wasn't born in the U.S.A., but I have attempted writing a protest song or two. As a somewhat amateurish musician without many paying gigs – stage performance or otherwise, I spend a great deal of my time, sitting around, contemplating what to do next.

As a dog-sitter, I can afford to sit out the searing mid-day sun from the comfort of my heat defying apartment with a cross-breeze blowing through it, and pretend I'm a serious blogger – something to tell the ladies.

As an aspiring producer of great works, I need to practice good home economics and spend an appreciable portion of my day preparing meals for myself to ensure my nutritional requirements are met so that I might live a long life and be able to continue my practise of putting my foot in my mouth at every fleeting chance.

A coupon-clipping bachelor, with limited accounting or book-keeping experience, I'm certainly no expert when it comes to making financial decisions for commercial enterprise, however, I am fully capable of taking two away from one: 1 – 2 = -1.

The solution, -1, would of course be deemed correct under certain specific number systems in practical mathematics. To get to the point, I could easily apply all my acquired penny pinching techniques that I practise at home on the microcosm, if you will, and apply or extrapolate my sophisticated frugality to business and industry some day.

Much like my own great national leaders of the day, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the The Queen of England, the philosophers, astronomers and arithmeticians of olde worked tirelessly to advance society, civilization, and science for the benefit of all mankind.

Canada is a mostly excellent place to be in the world, be it for richer, or for poorer... I run into exceedingly positive, well-adjusted yet helplessly impoverished strangers all the time – especially so when I take the nice doggies along for the stroll – the quintessential icebreakers that they are. Perhaps these ragged, soiled and grubby folks I haplessly encounter are merely pretending to be poor, or like me, manage to get what they want from life despite being perpetually broke and always between jobs. Take Bob the Binner, for example, who always seems spiritedly enthusiastic about zig-zagging from bin-2-bin (good boy band name?), scoping out allies, and wheeling and dealing his rare, sometimes exceptional finds to the general public. Good exercise doth he get, speed walking between depot and dumpster, sorting, sifting, and separating.

Where I live, close to my Province's legislative building,  I also happen to see what seems a disproportionate number of smiling faces who are always well-heeled and behind the wheels of exciting luxury importamobiles. The University kids are wearing all the latest designer fashions and practice good cosmopolitanism. The minimum wage in Alberta is currently $9.90 per hour ($9.96 U.S. Dollars) and the average rent downtown in Alberta's capital city, Edmonton, is around $1200 for a bare-bones two bedroom.

You're richer than you think. Or at least a certain commercial bank with it's roots in The Maritimes (a collection of quirky coastal provinces in Canada's eastern seaboard) would have Canadians believe. In their television / radio ads you find ordinary working class couples quite surprised to discover someone willing to help them over-extend themselves by committing to a monolithic mortgage in order to finance what amounts to both a qualitative and quantitative “matchbox” in some really boring part of the city.

I recently learned that most working-class Canadians are financed up to their hoohas to supplant a bunch of deteriorating assets while their jobs may even be hanging by a thread in spite of an already volatile economy. The figure quoted to me regarding the average Canadian's household's debt amount was something like $44k. Mere statistics, right? Probably as inaccurate as a house cat playing a CASIO keyboard anyway.

“We (The Big Bad Banks) are richer than you and your broke friends could ever even dream: we'll suck tirelessly at your measly, direct deposited paycheque, mercilessly nickel and diming whatever your ruthless government leaves you with” is closer to the mark when it comes to Canada's big banks if you ask me; just a lowly tenant in a high rise building who's been renting - rarely dining out for the last six years.

To briefly conclude my little assertion (for lack of a better descriptor for this bumbling dialogue), it would seem that given the rapidly escalating Cost of Living vs. Wages, we, the ordinary working-class Canadian may as well become used to the idea of resigning to a lifetime of wage slavery, declining standards, and fewer holidays as globalization nestles into every facet of our collective lives.

Whistle while you work, people!

Flouting the Floutist

My mind wandering ever so waveringly, I came in from the cold, drizzling rain with two smelly shepherd-looking dogs in tow. It was to be my second stroll along the cobbled streets in less than three quarters an hour. The kids in the neighbouring suite strummed guitars, sang sweetly, and flouted flutes and I was feeling a not-so-strong pull to sit-in on their little jam; couldn't muster the nerve this so far booze-less night- freshly baked, nerves shot. I decided to just spend the night in sipping coffee, writing nonsense into my computer, and passively warming up food in my toaster oven.

Since I'd last endured the ridiculously sexist hierarchy of a hen-pecking order within the corporate office I'd worked in for a big power company downtown, it had been fully four years - seemed about all that that gaggle of giggling granola munching grandmas ever wanted to do was just to pigeon-hole me - make me sweat. I made a point of never showing up less than five minutes late and I struggled greatly with my wardrobe for the daily fashion show on the streets and corridors of “Cubicleville.” All I cared about in those days was drinking, playing guitar, and getting drunk. Not much has changed since then, really, except that I probably can drink more before becoming drunk.

At least there was a top-notch Japanese lunch-joint a block away on Jasper Ave where one could grab a few slices of sashimi and a sushi roll or two. As a cook and food fanatic, I've known immense pleasure from sampling the many unique and distinctive tastes of just about anything that grows under the sun in both the plant and animal kingdoms. Let it be known, however, that never again will I ever eat octopus. Since seeing a documentary showcasing this animal's problem-solving ability outside from its natural habitat, I developed a new-found respect for these most bizarre, tentacled creatures. I once had a very satisfying soup made from the deep sea dweller, and it was good, but I can no longer in good conscious order such a thing ever again. Funny, eh? I've no problem with sacrificing a cow, a chicken, or a fish to fill my tummy, but octopus – well that's just cruel. Save the octopus!