Never surrender

I think it starts when you hit 60. That’s a hard number. Deep inside everybody “celebrating” their 60th, is a 16 year old wondering what the fuck happened. And it only gets worse from there. There’s a lot of societal pressure to see yourself as “old,” a “senior citizen,” etc. They lure you in with so-called “senior’s discounts.” Who doesn’t want to save five bucks on a haircut? Succumb to that, and you’ve embraced the senior citizen identity. Which I have, to be perfectly honest. I do like to save five bucks on a haircut… and it pays to visit Shoppers Drug Mart on seniors day. But there is a dark side to getting old. You get old. For the first time in your life you’re following your bowel movements the way you once followed your favorite sports teams. Go Leafs go! Then there’s the testosterone thing. Your testosterone factory has pretty much shut down by the time you’re a pensioner. There’s a lot of guys who are in denial about that. They take pills for that “special moment.” Ya right. You wake up every morning of your life with a boner, and now you have to take a pill? That doesn’t make a “special moment” for anyone who remembers their youth. But we want to delude ourselves with the fantasy that we still “have it.” While it’s inevitable that one make allowances for the passage of time, “old age” catches up to you sooner or later if you live long enough. That in itself is a cause for celebration! I’ve already passed the life expectancy I had at birth… party like it’s 1955! Nobody actually celebrates old people in our culture. My understanding of Indigenous societies is they revere and respect their elders. They’re way ahead of us in that department. In our society, elders are viewed more as a profit centre for nursing homes and pharmaceutical companies. But here’s my point; just because you’re old, doesn’t mean you have to act like it. My role model in that respect is my dear father. When we first arrived at Falling Downs, nearly twenty years ago, he was well into his seventies. We’d invited Mom and Dad up for an al fresco luncheon. They brought the fluffy white buns from Bunsmaster in the city, and we provided the cold cuts. I glance out the kitchen window while I’m putting things together, and there’s Dad, a good thirty feet up a pine tree, hacking away with a pruning saw because some of those branches might eventually impede the power line. You can’t stop the clock, and you ain’t gonna get younger no matter what pill you take. But you can keep climbing trees and living your life. That’s my shout-out to Dad this father’s day.

Modern living v old school

Modern living is the greatest, is it not?

You can get a whole roast chicken at any of the mega chains for well under ten bucks. What with these damned socialists upping the minimum wage to a luxuriant fifteen plump and rosy-cheeked dollars for every hour of so-called "work," (texting while ignoring customers, which happens all the time these days) the minimum wage crowd can now buy a whole roast chicken for about 45 minutes in the yoke.

A whole roast chicken, paired with a bag of pannini buns from Bunsmaster, and a 4L box of Keller Estates Dry Red, will keep a family of four going for two or three days, easy.

Looks to me like the millennial crowd is pretty close to recapturing the standard of living we (the working class) had in the pre-industrial era. Bread and wine and a roast chicken or locally made sausage on the dinner table.

Remember, this was the pre-industrial era. "Jobs" had yet to be invented. You were a butcher or a baker or a shoemaker and that's what you did and that's who you were.

Thankfully, we've been liberated from all that old school hippy dippy shit. Everything is way more efficient.

Just take that roast chicken, for example. Back in the day, lot's of folks would keep a few chickens. You'd get the eggs for two or three years and then you'd have a roast chicken. That's a stupendously inefficient way of getting your roast chicken.

That roast chicken our newly flush underclass will be chowing down on going forward doesn't come from there, obviously.  It comes from the kind of "farms" you'll see if you take a drive up the Elora Road. Just past my alma mater, Ponsonby Public School, you pass about a mile's worth of nondescript agricultural buildings.

Those are chicken factories.

Those chickens will never see a ray of sunshine or eat a blade of grass. They are the epitome of factory to plate dining.

Ya, I can see where you can wring inefficiencies out of things, but how far down that road do you go before you're wringing the soul out of them too?


I think we need to look to the past for our future.