Black Dot Diary

Photo by fauxto_​digit

The moon phases appli­ca­tion on iGoogle said the moon was 100% full last night. Google is like God, right, so this must be true?

I swear I could feel the full­ness even if Google hadn’t told me and I couldn’t see with my own eyes that lus­cious golden ball in the sky.

My cats felt some­thing in the air too — those boys were crazy last night, even with­out the cat­nip. The dogs down at the four way hon­oured the moon with wolfish howl­ing. Teenagers pulled up the stop signs at the crossroads.

What’s it like to be on stage with U2? I never dreamed I’d ever find out. But life is full of twists, turns and gifts as I dis­cov­ered at U2’s Van­cou­ver show on Octo­ber 28, 2009.

U2’s music has been with me through a lot of my life — births, cel­e­bra­tions, deaths, dances, epipha­nies. Their music takes me to the same place I go when I’m writ­ing poetry — the almost-​undefinable, mag­i­cal place where the poetry gets lift off and seems to write itself.

Did you know the British Colum­bia gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to cut arts fund­ing by 50% this com­ing year, 90% in 2011, and 91%-94% the fol­low­ing year? It’s time to stand up for the arts. Bring your­self, a sign, a work of art, a musi­cal instru­ment or what­ever to the BC Leg­is­la­ture tomor­row and let the BC gov­ern­ment know what you really think about cuts to the arts. We should not be silent about this crit­i­cal issue for BC.

Please visit a great site www​.stop​b​carts​cuts​.ca who have worked fast to draw atten­tion to this impor­tant issue.

Hello every­one, I am so new to Word­press that I acci­den­tally “cut” a blog post that was gen­er­at­ing some inter­est: “Canada & BC Arts Cuts: Deep Insult, Shal­low Think­ing,” first posted on Octo­ber 10^th, 2009. I have to say there’s a strange les­son in cut­ting this blog — when you cut some­thing that is a unique cre­ation of an indi­vid­ual, you often can never get it back. You can’t unring a bell. Les­son learned for me. If only the Harper and Camp­bell gov­ern­ments would learn the same thing about cut­ting the arts. Their cuts have far more dire con­se­quences than the mere dele­tion of a blog. Below is my attempt to recre­ate what I had written:

Land & Sea Murals at Ogden Point Break­wa­ter, Vic­to­ria, British Colum­bia. Photo by Chris Holt Pho­tos, http://​www​.chrisholt​pho​tos​.com

I took a walk with my fam­ily on Thanks­giv­ing Day and, under a dra­mat­i­cally dark Octo­ber sky, saw for the first time the spec­tac­u­lar murals on the break­wa­ter at Ogden Point in Vic­to­ria, BC. With the addi­tion of the murals, the old grey break­wa­ter has become majes­tic. It doesn’t com­pete with its coastal back­drop but appears to emerge from it.

Four years ago an alien arrived in my liv­ing room. It was grey with big black eyes, scaly feet and feath­ers. It spoke Eng­lish and could bite, hard. It also said “I love you” and would run around the house scream­ing “Help” if it was time for a bath.

This alien is a 21-​year-​old African Grey Par­rot named Ben­nie. She came for a hol­i­day and never left. Since she arrived in our house, she has become a much-​loved mem­ber of our fam­ily. I could not imag­ine life with­out Ben, and that’s good because she could pos­si­bly live for another 45 years.