I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee
When I'm dumb
I love coffee
It makes me hum
I love coffee
When I'm tired
I love coffee
It makes me wired
I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee
I love coffee
This post inspired by the poetic workings of Fergie via Alanis Morrisette
'My Humps'
So our band went to Kelowna, BC on the weekend for a benefit for the SPCA there. Yeah that's right... a friggin 10 hour drive (one way if you're speeding) through the rocky mountains and 2 or more national parks. Were we insane? Partially. Did we enjoy it? Even less than partially Will we do it again? Highly unlikely unless there is flying involved.
We left at 4 am Saturday morning and a good hour into the drive in the darkness of early morning we hit some nice blowing snow, and slush, and icy roads for about 45 minutes. I think I counted 4 cars in the ditch, one of them was a Jeep missing its front axle. In Calgary we waited in Dennys on our beloved leader and his slow bunch ... ate a friggin $10 breakfast (huge but wtf, $10?) and an hour after we had stopped we were back on the road into the mountains.
Highly uneventful... boring in fact other than the great scenery. The craziest thing was our guitar players driving... 130-140 on windy mountain highways... that's crazy. Oh and the van that we rented was the Chevrolet Uplander ... don't get it... it was uncomfortable and some really stupid design mistakes i.e. no armrests on the centre seats.. no 'oh shit' handles... and we couldn't find a way to fade the stereo from the back to the front. 18 hours of latin/pop music can really get to a person when the little crappy speaker is right by your ear, especially when you're trying to catch some Zzzzz's because you woke up at 3 am.
I really love the mountains though, I just do. There is almost nothing more impressive than driving through Jasper with a rock face on your right and a herd of bighorn sheep on the left grazing. We even saw a black bear (a pretty big one) on the way into the park. Wicked. I wanted to ditch the whole 'going back home' thing and stay in Jasper for the week. Screw work, screw everything, it's the friggin mountains! Yeah that didn't go over too well.
21 hours of driving in a 42 hour timespan is not a fun thing to do though, I wouldn't suggest it. Luckily we all get along pretty good none of us hate each other too badly, 'cause I can imagine some flaring tempers and flying fists.
So I got home last night and I was watching CBC, they had a 'Passionate Eye' article on about climate change. It was not pleasant, I mean, the show was fine, a bit dramatic, but it didn't pull punches and described exactly what I knew was happening in the way of world climate change. I'm not going to go into specifics because hell I'm no climatologist, if you want to read about it you can find it here at cbc.ca. I often find myself alone in my concerns, amongst these 'Doo-dee-doo' Albertans who can't see past their wallet and their pickup truck. Who still think that happiness is cheap gas, bright lights and powerful SUVs. Especially amongst co-workers who rarely read the news and sometimes STILL f$#@ing comment how they think Climate change is a bunch of 'hooeey' (in their words). I recently came up with the term 'Doo-dee-doo's' for them ... it's pretty accurate, they're walking around doodeedoing thinking it's just business as usual.
It's no surprise that they act like this in our so-called prosperous province of carbon spewers. In a recent report, Alberta's emissions are 40% higher emissions than the Kyoto benchmark and the oilsands are expected to fuel a 30% INCREASE in emissions over the next 10 years. If this continues I'm getting out, I don't care where I go, or what I do, but I can't stand it. People still don't care, they don't see the disaster that's imminent, they go about their day to day... they won't change.
Maybe part of the problem is that they know what's coming but don't think they can change anything and are waiting for someone else to fix it, as if it's all someone else's problem. Maybe they DO know but have resigned themselves to life with an oxygen mask and a haz-mat suit, or they figure the liquor and smoking will kill them before all this comes about so whatever, right?
Or maybe like some people say I should just drink my Alberta beer, watch my reality shows and turn off my brain. Maybe that's what I should do. And then 3 days later blow my brains out with a friggin shotgun... I think the latter would happen before the former.
addendum:
Some simple things to do: Recycle, turn the lights off, turn the computer off when you're not using it, don't run the water when you don't need to, STOP buying big fuel inefficient vehicles, I don't care, if you don't need something that seats 7, don't buy it even if you can afford it. Also something that I don't do but I should: Compost your compostibles.