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Man with sword no horse or gun and a small pension. A boy yet to die

Image by Steve Punter

We are still at war Or This man could die

Who cares?

Here stands
soon to lay

Another boy
will die in a foreign field
shot through by steel

The words are mine
the eyes are his

And as ever
for
The Blues and Royals
my friends
by sentiment
adopted
from childhood

I will stand
happily
with them
with only ideas
in the front line

” My friend Paulo sculpts clay into gold ” …. Jenn Heil Silver & Alex Bilodeau first Canadian Gold medallist ever on Canadian soil

Image by gmayster01 ….

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLIT1nFMZSw&feature=related

Tommy Emmanuel – Somewhere over the rainbow

The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics begin on Friday

I have been friends with Paulo Sadanha since he was a budding professional triathlete
A few friends helped him out
He became a world class athlete and Canadian Champion
Our rule no repayment Paulo just give back and be the best you can be !
Gold medal in Masters in exercise physiology later ( McGill )
He is the personal fitness director to many Gold Medal potential athletes in Vancouver
He founded Premier Studio his vehicle to improve his client’s performance according to their goals and abilities .
Montreal has an over representation of athletes with a possibility of winning Olympic medals .
Paulo developed their base line training and supervision programs in order to improve each athlete or client to the best of their ability.
I know how hard he pushed me !
Jennifer Heil ( Mogul skiing )
Alex Bilodeau ( Mogul skiing )
Joannie Rochette ( Woman,s Figure skating )
Kim St Pierre ( Olympic Woman’s hockey team goalie )
And a few others
Please congratulate my friend for keeping his word & enabling fine people be their best !
I’ll be following the Olympics
Cheers
Guy

119/365: 2000-2001

Image by bloody marty mix

Monday, 22 September 2008.

40 Years in 40 Days [ view the entire set ]
An examination and remembrance of a life at 40.

For the 40 days leading up to my 40th birthday, I intend to use my 365 Days project to document and remember my life and lay bare what defines me. 40 years, 40 qualities, 40 days.

Year 33: 2000-2001

In the fall of 2000, I became obsessed with cable news networks. It started on the evening of the Presidential election, when I gaped with horror at the unfolding events. First, I could not fathom how we appeared to be on the verge of electing Bush. Then, I could not fathom how lazy and inept the press was in covering a recount process that was nakedly steeped in corruption and bald-faced lies. I eschewed the office, and worked from home, keeping the TV on around the clock. I devoured information, consuming endless hours of TV, radio, and print coverage of the minute-to-minute changes happening in Florida and Washington DC. Through sheer volume of coverage, I was able to piece together enough accurate reporting to see what was happening, and was thoroughly boggled at how mendacious certain players were, and how gullible and ill-informed the talking-head punditry was showing itself to be. It was a wake-up call that I could not ignore, and I began to work from home regularly, so that I could keep myself fully informed politically, and better apprised of the political media’s venality.

Working from home threatened to cut me off completely from other people, and though I was still inclined toward introversion, I had no desire to become a hermit. I did my best to stay connected and active with friends. Mark, my best friend from college, had finished his medical school training and had taken a position at a Chicago-area hospital. I was thrilled to have him back in town, and arranged to have him meet my "Pat friends" (the circle of acquaintances that had developed out of regular attendance at Monday night Pat McCurdy shows). He fit in easily, and his terrific Bucktown condo quickly became a center of social activity for the group.

Around Christmas, Mark introduced us to Gina, a woman he’d recently met and begun dating. Unbeknownst to me, my presence was to be Gina’s trial. If she passed muster with me, she would be OK. If she didn’t, she didn’t stand a chance. I loved her immediately (which was remarkable, given my uneasy relationship with other women), and told Mark that I would never forgive him if he fucked this relationship up. Years later at their wedding, Gina would thank me for that night, and confess that she would never have gotten so much as a foot in the door with Mark had I not given her my stamp of approval, so greatly did Mark value my opinion. All I knew at the time was that she was smart, sharply funny, and charming without pretense, and she seemed perfectly matched for him. He was light and happy and that was good to see.

I had also begun dating, off and on, with limited success. A few weeks with a coworker here, a few hours with an acquaintance there. It never added up to much, but I hadn’t been ready for much. I still carried a tremendous amount of pain, still open and raw. I was grateful for the flirtation and attention, but I really didn’t have much to give in return yet. I had tiny inklings of feelings, though, particularly for a man who had always been on the periphery of my social circle, and who had been one of the first to express some interest in me after Dave left. His name was Kurt, and he’d been a coworker of Dave’s, and a regular at the Monday night Pat shows. I found him maddening. He was nearly my political opposite at a time when I was tightly wound about politics. With a couple of notable exceptions, he had a habit of dating women who seemed to me well beneath him intellectually, and sometimes downright doltish and insane. But, he was also kind, funny, and charming, and he intrigued me. I could not figure him out. We shared some moments together over that fall and winter, but they never developed into anything more, and I tucked my interest in him into the back of my mind, chalking it up to harmless dalliances between friends.

In the spring, Don W., my ex-roommate and oldest friend from college, set about trying to set me up with one of his friends. Don assured me that Leo would be perfect for me, and when I finally met him, I had to admit that Don might have been right. Leo captivated me instantly, and for the first time since Dave left, I felt like diving back into the relationship pool. Leo was equally enchanted, and within hours of meeting, we were holding hands, and talking about traveling to Cuba together to see some winter baseball. He retrieved his guitar and began to play and sing for me. While he had the gravelly and strained speaking voice of a heavy smoker, his singing voice was smooth, resonant, and yearning. He was half Italian and half Argentinian, and his olive skin and deep brown eyes made me weak in the knees. That he also sometimes spoke to me in a mellifluent spanish left me completely wrecked.

Leo and I spent most of our time together that summer, and while I continued to be fairly smitten with him, problems soon cropped up. I had access to a car, and Leo did not have one, so I often drove us around. Leo was a horrible back-seat driver. and I found that he made me so tense and nervous that I would be unable to pay attention to my own driving. We fought often in the car. Leo also seemed to dominate our time together. We talked about what he wanted, and did what he wanted, when he wanted to do it. It was as if he could not see me as anything more than a character in the story of his life, rather than as an autonomous person, and though I was very fond of him, by the fall of 2001, our relationship was strained.

On the morning of September 11, I woke to the clock radio (set to NPR) telling me that all air traffic in the country had been grounded by order of the President. I turned over to hit the snooze button and stopped. What? I thought. This was immediately followed by the news that the Pentagon was on fire. What?! I shot out of bed and turned on the TV to see smoke pouring from giant gashes in the World Trade Center towers. I could not immediately grasp what was happening. It was too much to take in. Planes… no, not planes… passenger jets had been flown into the buildings. There could be no mistaking what had happened. I called Leo and shouted at him to turn on the TV. He was already watching, and as we spoke, the first tower began to crumble and fall. "Oh my God, the people!" I wailed into the phone. "All those people!" I hung up the phone and watched in horror as the second tower disintegrated in its turn. I could not wrap my mind around what I had just seen.

Terrified of what I might discover, I e-mailed Dave, asking him to let me know if and when he found out about his family in Manhattan. Then I got dressed and headed to work because I had things to do for which I needed to be in the office. I carried a Walkman with me, and as I rode the train with the other late commuters, I tried hard not to burst into tears. Around me, I saw others with red-rimmed and staring eyes, marking them as people who already knew what had happened. When I got to the office, the halls were dead and silent, most people having gone home to be with their families. My office-mate had not yet heard the news, and when I informed him, he too packed up his things and left. I didn’t even make a half-hearted attempt at working. I got on the net and searched and waited for news. When word came that a plane had gone down in Pennsylvania, I could take it no longer, and left. I took the keys for one of the motor pool cars and, not caring if anyone questioned whether I was using it for business purposes or not, I drove into the city, not sure at all where I was going. I ended up sitting in the parking lot of a Target near Leo’s apartment, listening to the radio and wiping away tears. I called Leo and asked if I could come over, and we spent the rest of the day and evening on his couch in front of the TV.

Over the next few days, there was a flurry of e-mail, with friends and family seeking word from loved ones. Information trickled in. Dave’s sister and aunt were OK. Former coworkers who had moved to Manhattan checked in, one by one. It seemed everyone I knew in New York was OK. My friend, Don, was not so lucky. He had lost friends in the towers, and his father, who worked in the Pentagon, had been listed as missing. With no word on his father’s whereabouts, Don was tense and morose, and his friends did what they could to comfort and support him. When word finally came days later that his father was OK, and that he had been listed as missing for security reasons, we cried tears of relief for him.

I was also tense. There seemed to be a constant crackling hum emanating from my body, and I jumped at the slightest motion or sound. The roar of the fighter jets that criss-crossed the sky periodically made my heart pound, and I tried to close my eyes and breathe the sound away. I was scared of what was happening around me. My eyes welled up with tears of pride when I saw the flags flying everywhere I looked, but I feared what the administration and the popular media would do with these raw emotions. I knew that in the midst of our solidarity and mourning and pride, we could be on the verge of something ugly and terrible growing like a cancer in the heart of the body politic. Would we react with rationality and focus, or would we lash out like wounded animals? I knew that if my own reaction were to growl that we should "just turn the whole fucking desert into glass," that surely others would react that way too, and that the better angels of our nature might not be strong enough to keep us from doing it. I mourned for the lost and the dead, and for the country I feared might soon become unrecognizable to me.

Who am I?

I am a patriot, not a nationalist.

I love the principles upon which this country was founded. It was, perhaps, the greatest human experiment ever undertaken. In my opinion, the Constitution of the United States of America is as great a work as any we have ever produced. The ideas embodied within it are what constitutes America, and that is what I love. America is an idea, not a people. We did not, as nationalists do, stake out a plot of land and form ourselves a government out of a sense of shared heritage. We did so out of an idea that we possessed inalienable rights regardless of our heritage. When fervent and misguided nationalists eagerly throw overboard the basic civil liberties that constitute the idea that is America, ostensibly to protect America, I have to ask: What is it they think they’re protecting?

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