a little less bereft

There was a meeting of the minds in Winnipeg.

It doesn't take much for people to come up with an excuse to get together and celebrate ANYTHING when it's -40 degrees. We'll attack the elements simply to get our internal furnaces together to have a combined efficiency in heat production.

Sometimes we get together with my friends and sometimes it's with Joyce's friends.
On the weekend it was with both. And I'm a little different for it, if not warmer.

Every time I think of the word "friends" I can't seem to escape a portion of the lyrics from a song by the Crash Test Dummies.


The Bereft Man's Song

...I can't stand her goddamned friends
But I will tolerate them, even though I hate them
( I don't, really )


I spent Sunday warm and content. Too cold to go to church, I stayed home and hung out in my long underwear and watched Apocalypto. I watched an ancient civilization become cursed and begin an unstoppable decimation. Fear and control. The film begins with historian Will Durant's famous quote: ''A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.'' I tried to see God's hands in all of this.

"God, damn the hands of glory
That hold the bloody firebrand high
Close the book and end the story
Of how so many men have died" ( Bruce Cockburn )


Life here in the cold outside and warm inside often has me wondering. Today I wondered that
perhaps God doesn't damn as much as he is given credit for.