Will Monsanto Go To Ground?

On the surface, the news that Monsanto soon may be dead and buried seems too good to be true. Indeed, German pharmaceutical and industrial chemical beast Bayer wants to buy out the American corporation for the immodest sum of $62 billion.

When I first heard the news, my heart filled with joy. To me, the pesticide- and seed-producing giant is more than just a massive, Hydra-like, comic-book-evil organization that doesn’t even bother trying to improve its public perception—specifically that it favours profit over human and environmental health. The very name “Monsanto” represents—to me—a real-life manifestation of every morally corrupt, monopolistic, money-grubbing, power-hungry company populating sci-fi movies of the last thirty years: Soylent Corporation, Cyberdyne Systems and Umbrella Corporation all wrapped up in one malignant entity.

Whether this bad reputation is earned is another story. Among its “achievements,” Monsanto basically perfected the GMO process. But contrary to what conspiracy theorists and anti-GMO factions will have us believe, evidence that GMO foods are unhealthy is inconclusive, and opinions on the subject are likely more emotional than fact-based. Nonetheless, Monsanto has managed to nurture the bad taste in the mouth left by GMO’s and the unholy stigma associated with its seed patents, if only due to newsworthy stories like its proclivities for swallowing up business competitors and suing small-scale farmers who wittingly or otherwise infringe on patent rights. The fact that it wields incredible corporate influence over government food policy assuages no fears. Who likes to see so much power concentrated in so few hands?

More recently, the debate over Monsanto’s signature weed killer product, Roundup, and the possible carcinogenicity of its active ingredient, glyphosate, has gotten very contentious indeed. I can just imagine a bunch of white-coated scientists standing in a tight circle around an unseen slugfest, chanting “Fight, fight, fight, fight!” With regards to GMO and glyphosate safety, why can’t both sides of these fights see eye to eye? For the intertwined sakes of human and environmental health, some agreement must occur between industry and anti-industry scientists, or at least between non-partisan parties. Mustn’t it? I mean, what’s the point of profit if you have no children to pass it on to once you’re gone?

Back to the possibility of a Monsanto buyout. It seems more of a glass-half-empty kind of good news. Because whatever Monsanto does to incur such acrimony—from anti-GMO and organic food activists, from environmentalists, from anti-corporate activists, from me—it certainly doesn’t operate in a vacuum. If or when Monsanto disappears down Bayer’s massive gullet, the German conglomerate will own a monopoly over the seed and industrial pesticide markets, and will surely do its best to perpetuate Monsanto’s destructive legacy. And I haven’t even mentioned Syngenta, the world’s largest seller of agricultural chemicals. If ever Monsanto as an entity ceases to exist, the evils perpetrated on this planet and its food-producing and -consuming denizens by massive corporations will doubtless continue.

The situation reminds me of that old Newfie joke, where the waiter asks the Newfie if he wants his large pizza cut into six or eight pieces. “Oh, six, please,” the Newfie says. “I couldn’t eat eight.” Whether six or eight pieces, a large pizza is still a large pizza. Bayer may sound better than Monsanto, but an agro-chemical company is still an agro-chemical company, perpetuating more environmental harm than good. (Incidentally, Bayer is the largest vendor of neonicotinoid insecticides, so the bee genocide will certainly continue.) Monsanto’s possible relegation to the land of dead companies (or at least to footnote status) is indeed too good to be true.

Living On The Edge (Of Town)

Every word I write takes me further from the city bustle. I’m on a York Region Transit VIVA Blue bus heading north on Yonge Street, formerly the longest street in the world (until it officially broke into two, Yonge and Highway 11). I’m not going to the end of the line—nowhere close—although it sometimes seems like it. I’ve always lived on the city’s outskirts. But I never imagined I’d live as far away as I do now.

Richmond Hill, officially. Unofficially, the ’burbs. The boonies. The sticks. The other day my fiancée and I were driving south on Leslie Street, north of Elgin Mills. In the distance rose a silhouetted metropolis. That’s probably the highrises at Steeles and Yonge, I said. No, Praveena said. Don’t you see the CN Tower? It’s downtown Toronto! Indeed it was, thirty kilometres to the south. I could visualize that iconic, somewhat stereotypical sci-fi image of the mushroom cloud rising over a doomed downtown core. (Seriously, though, my feelings on the burbs are nowhere near apocalyptic.)

In many ways, Richmond Hill isn’t so different from the big city. It’s certainly home to some odd ducks. On a VIVA Blue bus the other day, I saw a guy drinking a beer. This in itself isn’t so strange—I’ve seen people drinking beer on VIVA buses, as I’ve seen people drinking beer on Toronto Transit Commission vehicles. The weird thing was that this was at 6:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. Rather than coming home from an all-night bender, the drinker looked to be on his way to work. He wore green scrubs; I figure he worked in some capacity in the health-care industry. Just one seedy story from among the satellite city’s 185,000 citizens.

No, my adopted city is not sparsely populated. In particular, it boasts large Asian and Persian contingents. I get my hair cut by Persians and do much of my grocery shopping at Asian supermarkets. Seeing all the Korean and Chinese signage in these stores, I certainly feel far from the town where I grew up. Then again, coming home to Praveena every evening makes me feel right at home—more so, perhaps, than ever before.

Aesthetically and functionally, much of Richmond Hill resembles any bustling, North American metropolis: concrete and steel, asphalt and pavement, light poles and power lines, traffic and public transit. The place offers many of the same benefits of city living—maybe an American city more than a Canadian one, with its myriad strip malls and shopping centres rising on every other block. But the businesses dotting the Richmond Hill landscape are totally Canadian: Tim Horton’s, No Frills, Kelsey’s, Petro-Canada, Sporting Life. While items like clothing and groceries seem a tad pricier in the ’burbs, at least rent is cheaper.

Richmond Hill doesn’t offer all the same perks, however. In the absence of bike lanes, bicycles are best ridden (illegally, I might add) on the sidewalk, as roads such as Yonge Street function more like highways. They’re busier, with faster traffic; bicycle riding on them can be a life-threatening experience. Though compared to city traffic, suburb traffic isn’t nearly as bumper-to-bumper (although try saying that with a straight face while travelling north on Yonge Street around 6 pm).

Another annoyingly American quality of the ’burbs is how everything seems so far apart. “Next door” is a minimum five-minute trek. Even the roads are wider than what I’m used to. (Fortunately, my library’s but a seven-minute saunter from home.) Since no two points are very close together, an outing becomes “an outing,” and a trip to the city is most definitely a “trip to the city.” Consequently I spend lots of time travelling down to the city to work, to visit family and friends. But in taking public transit, I use my travel time wisely, reading and writing—like now, writing this. Alternatively, everything being so far apart is more reason to stay in with Praveena.

Maybe the biggest pleasure of living in Richmond Hill is its proximity to unabridged nature. Go a little north, to Stouffville Road, say, and you’re surrounded by fields, lakes, trails, wildlife, tree-lined horizons. My roots may have sprouted in the city, and no one will ever confuse me with Cartier or Brûlé, but I love exploring, stirring up rural dust.

Every word I write takes me further from the city bustle. Praveena and I may be somewhat isolated up here, separated from friends and family, but that just means we get to experience the joys of relying on each other for support. And we can spend lots of time together.

Bottom line? You forge your own life. It’s not where you’re living, but with whom you live, with whom you create your own experiences, discover your own pleasures, find your own solutions to problems, build your own memories. Make no mistake: living in the ’burbs is still living.

Remembering How To Live

What’s it like to live, I sometimes wonder. It’s easy to forget, especially when one takes living for granted, which many of us do in today’s world—The sound of suction drainage of a gaping wound resembles the guttural noises of a zombie protesting its infinite hunger—One gets caught up in the drudgery of existence: working a menial job, spending time on public transit, cooking meals, washing dishes and clothes and body parts, flossing and brushing teeth, etc. These things add up, and before you know it, you think you have no time for the simple pleasures.

Taking living for granted is like taking drugs. You do it more and more until you're doing it cuz it’s easy and convenient, at which point you’re not even choosing it. Rather, it’s choosing you. Drugs were my path for decades. In all that time I didn’t have to plan my day. It was already planned for me—Shambling zombie-like along a dimly lit hall in the geriatric ward, decaying bit by bit every day…Get that body to the morgue before it rots!—but of course that arrangement can’t last forever without serious atrophy of the brain, and a gradual deterioration of self-respect. Which leads to a gradual forgetting, or annihilation, of one’s self.

I’ve been clean for over a year now, and while my story isn't by any means unique, it's still my story. I’m gradually re-learning, remembering, who I am and how to live—Cancel Code Blue, cancel Code Blue—and how to treat myself with dignity and respect. I was lucky, though. I awoke from addiction staring into the beautiful face of a smart, sexy woman. And yes, I know, one must quit bad habits for one’s own sake, not for the sake of anyone else. But a smart, beautiful woman with a sense of humour and a sexy reading habit—how’s that for incentive to stay sober?

I’m a 43-year-old man who for eighteen years has worked a menial hospital support-staff job, roughly paralleling the time of my drug addiction. I don’t work with corpses, but it sometimes feels like I’m watching myself slowly become a zombie. It’s long past time to get out of this lame-duck job and get into one that’s been my passion since I was a sober teenager. I want to write and edit and work with words in an environment crackling with creativity. I am looking for a new job, but it’s taking much longer than I expected. (Nurse, how much longer will I have to wait?) I am prepared to persevere and endure the wait—and search—however long it takes.

In the meantime, I still occasionally wonder what it’s like to live—but not often. In the early days of sobriety, I would finish work and feel I had nothing to look forward to. No bottle tokes, no white Russians, no cigarettes. The longer I’ve remained sober, the more I’ve (re)discovered how to enjoy life, the more I’ve found things to look forward to—first and foremost time spent with my beautiful, smart fiancée.

Here are some of the things sobriety has taught me (Shift change! Time to give report): living is about filling in life’s cracks. It’s about doing all the things in a day, big and small, that make one feel one has used up the day such that it can be crumpled up and tossed in the garbage. Exercising, working, reading a book, writing, completing that long-neglected project, cooking and eating a meal, cleaning up afterwards, brushing one’s teeth, cutting one’s toenails, doing the banking, cutting the lawn, seeing a concert, going on a date, taking a vacation. Relearning to live is about remembering how to do these (and many other) things, and forgetting all the things that are unimportant or destructive in their extremity. The more enticements towards sober, moderate living one has—a beautiful girlfriend, a full daily itinerary—the easier it is to effectively grasp the practice of living. And the sooner one understands these things, the sooner one can start living again without taking life for granted.

serenity

here I am

bursting with violence I must release

lest it release me

in fury and blindness

a stylish tragedy

a dashing finale

I try to silence

my violence

but anger trumps

any fragile attempt

a strong hand

played poorly

is a travesty

but keep playing

by all means

keep playing

and hopefully the face you

smash is not your own

again

Hope Springs Eternal

So I’ve been thinking about PlayStation 2 for a while now. Destroyed mine back in November, couple days after the Phils beat the Rays in the actual World Series, because I got angry about losing a ball game after growing far too comfortable with winning. The attack totally blindsided me. Didn’t see it coming. One second I’m trying to control what seems like a moderate bout of anger and frustration — totally misplaced as it is — and literally the next I’m rising from my chair, striding toward the console beside the tv set, grabbing the console, smashing it against the coffee table. Repeatedly. Once I finished I felt calm and peaceful, and that was it for baseball and me. All winter I went without playing, recalling my incredibly stupid fit of destruction whenever I suffered an urge for a game. But in mid-February, when spring training came around, I started getting real hankerings.

I can’t say my anger management is better than it’s ever been, because I’ve been here before. I’ve been anger-less, or rather destructive-behaviour–less, for long periods of time, and I’ve always kind of stopped being vigilant, stopped seeing whatever shrink I was seeing, stopped worrying about anger management. Stopped being honest with myself, shut down communication lines. That’s when the destructive behaviour returns. And I never seem to expect it. Thus the risk of getting a new PlayStation. This time, though, I’ve continued my vigilance, continued seeing whatever shrink I’m seeing, continued working on anger management as a moment-to-moment thing rather than dealing with it only as or after it arises. I’ll continue to be proactive rather than reactive.

In this headspace, I’ve been thinking about that PlayStation for a while now. A few weeks ago I resisted an impulse to go out and buy it. I waited. And waited. And waited. And then last Friday, my day off, weekend before MLB opening day, I went. Now lemme back up a moment. In the weeks leading up to Friday, I’d also been pricing the system. One-twenty-nine plus tax, same as the one I’d gotten in 2006. So on Friday I went up the street to that blue-and-yellow consumer vortex, BestBuy, and discovered that the system’s price had that very day dropped twenty bucks. Sure, what’s twenty bucks. Well, hey, I’ll tell you, I’m on a tight budget. Well, no budget really, but I do have very little money to spare these days. Spending way too much on booze and dope. You didn’t read that. So I’m thinking, Cool, twenty bucks in my pocket. Just for being patient. Heh heh, when I’m done here I’ll just pop next door into the liquor store.

Anyway, a blue-shirt comes up to me and introduces himself, Dave, and assures me he’s not on commission, and I say, yeah, I didn’t think the commercials were lying, and he laughs, and I tell him why I’m there and we get into a discussion about PlayStation and baseball video games, and I discover he’s as much of a video game baseball junkie as I am, and he used to play the very game I used to play (EA Sports 2004 MLB something-or-other, the one with Manny Ramirez on the cover), and we talk about that game’s fun points and glitches and then he tells me about MLB 09 The Show, how it’s the same as the other one only waaaaay better, etc etc etc, until I tell him I’m sold. And even then, because he’s not on commission, we continue to talk about video game baseball.

As we’re going to the register to ring up the transaction, Dave asks what happened to my previous console. I pause, wondering if I should tell him the truth. Then I just say it. Anger management. He offers a knowing look and we get to the register and he says, This is what I’m gonna do for you. This warranty covers any damage your console might incur. Not including anger management, he adds with that knowing look. You just call this number on the brochure and they’ll send you a gift certificate for $109 to cover the cost of the system. I’m throwing it in at no extra charge. Now I do have to ring it in to activate it, and it’s twenty-nine ninety-nine, but what I’ll do is I won’t charge you for the game. So it’s a wash.

Well I’m overcome with gratitude. All I can do is thank him. Several times, until he says I can stop thanking him. Let me just say, Dave from BestBuy, if you’re reading this, you’re absolutely right: this game is the same as the other one only waaaaay better. Graphics, realism, play-by-play soundtrack, statistical supplements, degree of difficulty, everything. I’m using it to practise patience. And I’m getting tons of practice. Because whereas on the old game I was a star, kicking rawhide ass and winning every MVP and World Series, on this new one I can barely hit the strike zone or for that matter the ball. But I’ll practise, I’ll get better. I’ll practise. I’ll get better. It’s an ongoing process, requiring patience and honesty.

Stop the Presses, Cuz Ain’t No One Ever Heard This Shit Before . . . Have They?

Dunno what to write. I’m empty. Just finished a 10,000-word story. Sucked everything outta me. Dried me up and tossed away my husk. Now here I am, trying to revitalize. Trying to regain my wind and start from scratch. I know it’ll take a few days. But I want it now. That’s my generation’s defining complex. Perversion of entitlement, I call it. That’s us, that’s Generation X. Subsequent generations, too. But we started it.

(Warning: sweeping generalizations to follow. Maybe one or two already.)

As children, we had everything we could want. Our baby-boomer, doctor-lawyer-executive parents had caught a virulent strain of the (North) American Dream, and we Gen Xers grew up with the symptoms: two-car garages, cottages, kidney-shaped pools in the backyard, two- and three-figure allowances, computers, video games, VCRs, pay-tv, bitter divorces, two birthdays, two Christmases . . . in short, excess. And lots of it. So we Gen Xers coasted into “adulthood” in the recession-riddled nineties, and it was like the carpet being pulled out from under our feet. We may have been educated up the wazoo, but really, we were facing a dead end: no job prospects, no savings, no property, nothing. Just that education up the wazoo, maybe a corresponding student debt, and the parent(s) we could always go back and live with for a while, just until the cloud passed . . . yeah, yeah, the deceptive lure of home’s stunting comforts . . . How could we establish new places to call home when we had neither moolah nor moxie enough to leave the homes of our parent(s) for ones of our own?

(Warning: totally arid and possibly spurious generalizations to follow.)

The answer: We rented. Rented for years. Put close to a hundred grand into someone else’s mortgage over the next decade without coming close to actually owning anything. Lived paycheck-to-paycheck, knowing that if the bottom ever fell out, we could always — sigh — move back in with the folk(s). But so long as we didn’t, so long as we could afford to stay away, we Gen Xers forged homes of our own. Even if we didn’t have two-car garages or cottages or kidney-shaped pools in the backyard, we had the Internet. We had video games. Home entertainment systems. Satellite TV. Five- and six- and even seven-figure salaries. Bitter divorces. Two Christmases (plus Hanukkah and Kwanza). Cellphones and ATMs and fast food on every corner, for every other meal. We had everything we wanted. Because we’d been conditioned to want shallow and technological and sarcastic and chemical distractions. Not just want them; expect them. Even with time, such early and effective conditioning is tough to break. Some of us strive for advancement or enlightenment; many of us avoid any attempt at improvement if it requires real effort, falling back on a default assumption that without lifting a finger, we’ll somehow still get what we want: shallow and technological and sarcastic and chemical. (Perhaps there’s an equation in nature, a ratio — crudely put — of deadbeat citizens to conscientious citizens. The relation seems to be consistent across human populations.) That’s us, that’s Generation X. Which now we can presume stands for Generation Expectation. Perversion of entitlement. We started it.

Update

Good evening and welcome to Channel 12 News at 6. In our top story today, a plane did not crash into the Bay of Bengal, not killing all 155 on board. According to reports, the plane made a safe and routine air crossing of the Bay during its flight from Madras to Mandalay. Said the pilot, “I’m sure glad I know how to do this, otherwise it mighta been difficult.” One passenger, wishing to remain anonymous, revealed that the in-flight meal was a choice between kidney pie and tilapia.

In our top local story, this afternoon at a west-end subway station a woman was not pushed in front of a subway train. Please be warned that this story contains graphic images and descriptions. Several witnesses claim that the woman was standing on the yellow strip, close to the edge of the platform, as the 4:12 eastbound entered the station running ninety seconds late. A witness describes the moment: "Here comes the subway, and there she is, standing right on the yellow strip, watching the subway get closer, minding her own business, and all of a sudden no one pushes her! It’s an image I’ll live with forever." The woman, who survived the ordeal, went to a nearby Emergency Department seeking a sedative. The subway crew will receive trauma counselling, including the driver, who was inches away from the windshield when the woman’s body didn’t splatter against it. No one has been apprehended and no motive has been suggested.

In gun news, several people around the city were not shot and killed today. Our voice on the street, Richard Drizzle, has more. Richard?

“Thanks, Ming-Poon, yes. In this amazing development, each individual in question apparently suffered the same fate, namely, not getting shot and killed. I’ve spoken with several of the non-victims, and each one has a different story. I’m just going to play some quotes from my tape recorder here.” (click)


VOICE (woman’s): You hear about it happening all the time and you never think it could be you.

VOICE (man’s): Used to be that you could walk these streets without worrying about not getting shot. Now when I walk these streets, I worry.

VOICE (man’s): I ride the TTC every day. All of a sudden, these last few months, all these people not getting shot on the TTC, not getting pushed in front of trains, I’m thinking maybe I’ll find another way to get around.

VOICE (woman’s): As if parents don’t have enough to worry about, now they’re constantly living in fear of the possibility of their children not getting shot at school.


“As you can hear, a lotta fear and frustration. The citizens of this city have been crying out for something to be done to make the streets unsafer. And if they don’t get what they want, this being an election year, Mayor Milker might be looking for a new job soon. Back to you, Ming-Poon.”

Thank you, Richard. God knows I’m not paid to editorialize, but what the kelly is happening to our city? Anyway, turning to sports, here’s Ratso.