Birthday Boy and Poetry Slam-The Week That Was

   This week, Bryant, my son, celebrated his 32nd birthday.
   Now, this still kind of blows me away that I have a son in his thirties but I try not to dwell on it too much, it could be that he is blown away by having a Dad in his sixties!

Myself and Bry

   We graciously shared him with Lindsay, his girlfriend, on the actual day of his birthday, Wednesday, and made arrangements to get together with him the following night.
   We ended up taking him out to Beer Town for supper. Beer Town is a fairly new restaurant here in London which specializes in a variety of different kinds of beer (naturally). I actually had a fruit-infused beer, which was quite tasty (but not gluten-free, which means I might have been playing with fire...) We found the food to be excellent as well and the service very good, to boot. Highly recommended!


Bryant and Doralyn

   After supper, it was off to Michael's and we managed to track down a frame suitable for housing Bryant's autographed Patrick Roy jersey. Hard for me, being a Boston fan!

   On Friday night, we attended this month's edition of the London Poetry Slam. Went there with our friend, Louise and her friend Jacek. The two of them had been to the previous month's Slam and reported having had a great time so we joined them on Friday.
   A poetry slam is basically an opportunity for a poet to get up in front of an audience and recite a poem and then....get judged on it! Five or six judges with scorecards, scattered throughout the audience, rate every poem, much as in a diving competition. You end up with scores such as 8.6 or 7.2 or that ever-elusive 10.0. At the end of the evening, the poet with the most points wins! Just not sure what exactly they win, likely some money.
   There is also a featured spoken word poet every month and this month it was Titilope Sonuga. She is an amazing poet and for the better part of ten (?) minutes she mesmerised us with her presence and the wonderful things she did with words. You can read about her and find out more about the London Poetry Slam here.
   Throughout the evening, the audience is encouraged to be loud and boisterous (though perhaps not when the poet is reading) and regularly shouts out encouragement. If one of the judges posts a score you don't agree with, you are free to berate them. If you approve of poem as the poet speaks, you snap your fingers. Poets must speak the truth and the audience must show the love.
   There is an entry fee if you wish to engage in the competition but if you are simply "testing the waters" then you are encouraged to sign up for the open mic portion of the contest.
   Many of the poets spoke from deeply wounded areas related to abuse, incest and race. A couple were quite humourous. All were passionate. Together, they did what poets , I believe, were meant to do---bring you to self-examination. I wouldn't be surprised if we go back!

Facebook And The Soundtrack Of My Life

   About a week and a half ago, to celebrate its 10th birthday, Facebook did the service of allowing us to view our individual "Look Back" videos.
   These were one minute vignettes of selected posts and pics that were deemed the most popular, or "viewed", dating back to when we each joined the social media site.
   I was moved by mine. I understand that many of us were and that some of us were even moved to tears.
   None of us saw pictures or posts we'd never seen before, obviously, and yet we were still moved.
   For me, it was the music.
   Yes, music was a big part of it but it was also the juxtaposition of the music and the particular photos that appeared on my video which truly touched me.
   For the most part, they were family-oriented and significant--pictures of our wedding, kids, and both of my parents.
   These pics were already significant to me but combining them with music and streaming them through my consciousness in such a manner seemed to give them that much more significance.
   I guess that's what a soundtrack will do, it will provide that extra aural and emotional context to what you are seeing. How many movies can you think of that are hard to separate from the music that accompanied them? Hard to imagine such movies as Gone With The Wind, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Pink Panther, Jurassic Park, Lawrence of Arabia and Pulp Fiction without the iconic music which accompanied them. One of my all-time favourite scenes from any movie occurs during Jurassic Park, at the moment when the visitors to the island come across dinosaurs for the first time. They are brought, literally, to their knees as the scope of what they are seeing becomes apparent. At this point in the movie, John Williams' music is both soaring and majestic as man comes face-to-face with...well...history. In my mind, an indelible moment is created as much because of the music as for any other reason.
   Without thinking about it too much, we took pictures. For a variety of reasons, we gathered up pictures which had already been taken. If the mood struck us, we said something that other people might have thought was pertinent, important or perhaps humourous. Singly, the significance of all these actions was possibly not obvious to us. String them together, though, and then add music and all this changes somehow.
   So does the music just add emotion or does it bring out the emotion that was already intrinsically there? Does it act somehow in a similar way as alcohol, heightening the emotional intensity of a relationship to a person or event?
   It's almost as if music breaks down whatever subconscious defense mechanism we've deployed to keep ourselves on the even emotional keel which gets us through our days. Throw in a little music, however, and we are emotional in a variety of ways over things which did not seem terribly momentous at the time they actually occurred.
   If you are at all like me, you may have been just a touch creeped out that Facebook was even able to do these videos. I realize that none of the pictures or statuses on my Facebook page are truly private but I was trying hard to imagine that nobody was paying any attention to, or had any vested interest in, them. This seems to not be the case. In an example of marketing at its low-key best, Facebook has wormed its way into our hearts and all it took was adding a little music to the soundtrack of our life. 
  
  
  

Escape Velocity (You Wanna Live To Be A Thousand?)

   Many, many years ago, I wrote something (a poem?) in which I postulated that ours was the first generation in the history of the world which had any sort of expectation of living forever.

   I stated this simply because of all the medical advances which (at that time) had been made and not because I was privy to any scientific knowledge which wasn't already available to the masses.
   Last week, as I was rooting around on the internet in an attempt to find out some info on Masters athletes, I came across websites which described terms such as "escape velocity", "actuarial escape velocity" or "longevity escape velocity". They were used in reference to the aging process and described the point at which the speed of the advancements in the medical treatment of age-related deterioration exceeded the speed of the deterioration itself.
   One website quoted well-known biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey as theorizing that the first person to live to be 150 has already been born and that in another 20 years the first person to live to be 1,000 will have been born.
   I found this both staggering and fascinating at the same time.
   It throws the world as we know it way out of whack.
   Not that we consciously think about it throughout our everyday life, but we run that same life under the assumption that we're going to die some day relatively soon.
   We set aside money for retirement, write wills, seek adventure and change relationships.
   What would you do differently, though, if you knew you were going to live for a thousand years?
   Because I am under the assumption that I'm going to die sometime soon, I am also planning my retirement and have begun to "count the days". With a lifespan of a thousand years, though, would I then be looking at working for eight hundred of those years? Think about that for a moment and tell me if you find that appealing. Exactly how would you spend a thousand years of your life?


Typical weekend at the beach?

   Back that many years ago when I talked about our generation looking at the possibility of living forever, I also envisioned bodies lacking in vitality. Aubrey de Grey, however, believes that medical advances will make the human body quite viable, giving way to the prospect of being actually able to enjoy our greatly increased lifespan.
   What then concerns me most, though, is what kind of a world will there be to live in?
   Our world, in many parts of it, is a nasty place and is becoming nastier all the time. We also live under the constant threat of terrorism and what seems to be the increased risk of nuclear conflict. Should these threats ever come to full fruition, I think the world will not be a place you'd want to live in, particularly for another 800 years!
   I like the idea of longevity. Part of the deal with "escape velocity" was that you need to be healthy enough to live until these medical advances become available. I personally just wanted to be healthy until the end of my life, say in my mid-eighties or so. I never figured on living anywhere from 150 to a thousand years. I was never aiming, and still am not, to attain "escape velocity".
   Think of a world where no-one dies a natural death. If nothing else, think how crowded it would be. At some point we would at least feel as though we were all shoulder-to-shoulder. You would have the opportunity to meet your great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren but how familiar would you be with any of them and how could you possibly play a real role in their lives. So what would be the point?
   I strongly suspect that, given the opportunity to live several hundred years, we would choose death at some point. When there were no new things to experience and the world was closing in on you, death would be the only thing left that would seem like both an adventure and an escape with a velocity of its own.