Runaway Future

In a strange and twisted way, I view writing as being similar to doing the dishes. Not saying that they’re both chores and I often leave both until they become desperate and mandatory situations requiring immediate action, although that shoe often fits more often then not as well…

They’re both things that I seem to avoid to do, almost to a fault. Deadlines fly by and dishes pile up. But once I do in fact begin the deed, it’s not that bad. Dishes provide a great time to reflect. Hell, I thought of this meandering passage of meaningless babble up to my elbows in dishwater.

They’re both almost addictive once I get started. Having to see the task through to the end. Just like coloring in coloring books, where I imagined that I had to color each part of the picture for it to actually come alive. The order, the process, the tangible start and finish of it all, it attracts me.

Of course this is just babble. Most everything I write here these days (or months from the look at the archives) is just to catch that first whiff of the words, the first dip of the quill and to focus that energy elsewhere. Rarely, if ever do I say what I mean to say. But I’ve already explained that all before.

For now, I have dishwater getting colder, dishes needing cleaner and then the real chores of words on a page for some other master.

A long time ago I read the book “The Know-It-All” about a guy who read the whole Encyclopedia Britannica set and wrote a book about the process. I think I might have mentioned it before. Either way the book sits on a side table with a bunch of notes stuck in it of things I found interesting and wanted to write about.

Flipping through it recently, I came across a mention of facial feedback. The basic idea is that if your brain feels your face in a happy position (like smiling), then your brain figures you must be happy and thus it puts into play all those chemical reactions that happen in your body. It’s an interesting concept, the idea to smile when you are feeling blue.

In the same breath, there’s this entry from Scott Adams’ blog, which basically says that it is society’s tendency to bring everyone into the norm. So if you’re sad, everyone wants you to be happy. If you’re too happy, then they want to bring you back down a peg or two. It’s a bit of a scary idea, but it makes plenty of sense. Adams even talks about a few ways to protect your own feelings of happiness so that the mass majority doesn’t eventually bring you down. (Basically inwardly happy, outwardly complaining).

Reading the Scott Adams’ entry makes me think of Matt Good’s latest record. Good went through a lot of crap, involving a divorce, a near death, a hospitalization and some ongoing psychiatric problems. Through it all, he wrote music, eventually releasing the CD “Hospital Music”. It’s a pretty amazing record. I’ve since gone to see him play live once in September, and will undoubtedly go again when he returns in May. The record has been successful, with a strong niche of his fans forming almost a support community that can be found on his website. Applying that whole scenario to the Scott Adams’ post, one has to wonder if the record would have been as well received and as successful if Good was not as open and forthcoming about what inspired the record.

While it’s not nice to think that if you are happy, something will inevitably bring you down (the ol’ ‘this too shall pass’), it is nice to see the world itself bringing people back up. Obviously, Matt Good’s example isn’t a good reflection of this happening for everyone, but it’s the most visible one. Everyone finds happiness in different ways and everyone has different levels of feeling good.

Coming back from the gym, I suddenly thought of a phrase that reminded me of my old MSN space that I used prior to acquiring this website. So here I am, still sweaty and smelly from the gym, reflecting on how I got here.

It’s funny, you know, how the phases of the last five years of my life coincided so much so with the blogs and websites that I keep. A melding of personal change and technology.

Runaway Future all started on a free website, that was hosted by a company called Future Research and Technology, frandt for short. I had a blog there that detailed basically my entire time in college. To be fair, it didn’t really detail my college education as much as it detailed my college experience. Plenty of talk about the news, about politics, about different things going on and my opinion on them. The content in itself was a reflection of my own attention to my college program, where often, my mind was elsewhere.

I went from college to the RCMP work term. My computer crashed and I had to use some tools from the lab to fix it and recover everything (losing only my bookmarks in Firefox, which at the time numbered in the 800. that was probably a blessing, as I would never had been able to organize them, but at the same time, I always feel like I lost something valuable and never to be found again). Around the same time as the work term, my website blew up. Since it was a free website, there was no backup and the main content of two years of my life, the database of my thoughts, my dreams, my fears and my stories was gone forever. Again, maybe that is for the best, but again, I feel like I may have lost something worthwhile, lost the record of an important part in my story, my battle.

Regardless, there was little I could do, besides I had bigger fish to fry. Namely, entry into the University of King’s College to take Journalism. So off I go, get accepted and plan to hitch my cart on being a student for the next four years. Life had other plans and soon I had a job interview, closely followed by a job offer.

The next month that followed was one of indecision and perhaps one of the more defining changes in my life. I had to choose between work and schooling, money and experience or academia. Wrought with conflicting emotions and insecurity, I again needed and outlet to express the struggles inside of me. Thus the MSN Space version of Runaway Future was born. It’s rather brief and not completely fluid in content or voice, which I think is a perfect reflection of my attitude at that point in time. Bearing the tagline “neurotic idiosyncrasies”, the Space no doubt means little in terms of actual content to anyone but myself. I keep it around purely to remind me how hard a decision I eventually had to make was. I spent a lot of time at Public Gardens, reading and thinking, trying to funnel that outside peace into myself. Thinking of it now, that’s something I should do more often when the gates open up again.

Once things settled down, both externally with my job and my decision to stop being a student after 14 years and internally with me dealing with that decision and putting those demons to rest, I settled down with this space, where I have been writing what I’ve been thinking since August 2005.

All in all, that’s how I got to hear. That’s how I am where I am. This website will never be “complete”, I always will have something to write (currently 23 drafts saved on the site and countless ideas on scraps of paper strewn about the apartment). But I think it’s important, for me, to see this journey. I have been wondering about the purpose of Runaway Future over the past few months. I don’t know if these words are read, if they resound anywhere but off the empty walls of some server space in California (quite frankly, I don’t want to know, as Don Crowdis found out, sometimes having an audience scares the muse). But, when that muse isn’t there, I wonder why I keep trying to ensure I have at least a post, of something, of anything to fill out every month. There’s so many abysmal efforts made over the past year that I feel ashamed. Especially when thinking of the futur.frandt.com days when I posted at least once a day, if not more and digested so much more on everything around me.

The common excuse is time, and maybe that’s right. Maybe I am busy, or maybe I can’t stomach writing. Lord knows, there’s so many words I owe others. I’ve also been tempted to pull the Facebook feed on this, if only to continue what has been a slow and gradual withdraw from that phenomenon over the past few months.

If I turn to something different, maybe I’ll have to get another website?

At the beginning of the month, Hockey’s Future, one of the sites that I write for was sold to Crave Online, a site targeted towards men, covering things like action movies, gaming, babes, cars and yes..sports.

So far I still don’t know what that will mean for HF or more specifically for myself and my work with HF. All I have been hearing from the management is that for the time being things will remain the same.

Obviously, I have some concerns about the future of the site and so on, simply because I’ve been working with HF for 5 years now and the fact that I don’t know what to expect is weighing on me a bit. We’ve been handed a few documents of legalese to agree to about our writing and stuff and it’s all a bit too confusing and overwhelming.

From what I do know, Crave is owned by Gorilla Nation, an online advertisement company. The sale allows GN to serve ads to the HF network (replacing previous ads that were provided via our previous owners, First Beat Media). As pretty much the leader in hockey prospect news, as well as running the busiest hockey message board on the Internet, the attractiveness of the HF network to the advertisers is obvious.

With Crave and HF sharing roughly the same target demographic (for the most part males between the ages of 16 to 40 or so), the match becomes apparent. What’s a concern right now, for me and others, is how much of a match will it be and whether any integration into the Crave network will upset the “norm” of HF and the HFBoards. Will the scope of our content change? Will there be editorial changes? HF has worked hard to establish itself in a niche of the hockey world, which is a small part of the overall sports journalism pie, but still, there’s plenty of room for change and growth in many directions, not all of them positive and not all of them negative.

There are direct benefits, of course. We’re getting shiny new servers which should mean we will finally survive a trade deadline day, a draft and the first day of the free agent season. Our server load at those peak times has been too much to handle at times.

Anyway, that’s just something that’s happening and on my mind right now. Mark me down as being apprehensively optimistic.

Out of everything that I want to write, this is the one thing that touched me the most. I have been trying to write these words for well…almost two months now.

On September 18th, Peter Oliver died.

I can’t speak for his youth in Wales, his time in the Army, his work with Oval House in London, his tours of Europe acting or his social work in Toronto. But I can talk about what Peter meant to me. Quite frankly, it’s hard to even speak to that, to capture his influence in words alone.

I met Peter when I was in junior high, he was putting together what would eventually become Uranus Theatre, run out of Our House. I think I joined only because most of the girls that I hung around with were joining. But I stayed because of Peter.

Peter believed in youth, he really did. He believed in their potential and that they could realize that potential and capture it. He was huge on discovery of self and the inspiration that draws out of finding out what you’re really capable of.

If it wasn’t for Peter, I wouldn’t have my own ideas of self identity, my own confidence. If it wasn’t for Peter, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

Peter was a muse, a mentor, a teacher, a thespian and a friend. And now, he’s no longer here.

Always with that mischevious, sly grin, a knowing wink and a wry sense of humour. Always throwing in social commentary even when it was lost on the audience, even when it was lost on the cast. Peter always challenged people to be better, to go past their comfort zones and see what was truly out there.

I’m going to miss him terribly, but I’m eternally grateful for being able to know him in the first place.

I’m not the only one who will miss him. Oval House, a theatre in London has a tribute page up for him now. It’s absolutely amazing with many people posting memories of him from his time in London. Carole Woddis wrote an amazing obituary that appeared in the Guardian. His passing was mentioned on the theatre site Rogues and Vagabonds. And finally, ten days before his passing, singer Maggie Nichols posted this small tribute to him.

Locally, the remnants of Basement Theatre both of today and years gone by and other Shelburne folk who crossed paths with Peter did a show at the beginning of the month. I understand that there’s going to be a scholarship of sorts named after him and available through SRHS.

I performed a monologue in the show, the first time I’ve done any sort of acting since my last time with Basement Theatre, five years ago in the Two and One Half Penny Opera. I didn’t know my lines well enough and had to refer to them once, but that energy is still there. It was so good to catch up with everyone.

Plus I got to visit with Joan, Peter’s wife prior to the show. He was in the process of writing a book, a history of sorts of Oval House. Now Joan and his daughter Odette are left with the remnants. I’ve offered my help and hopefully I can be of some use.

I still can’t believe he’s gone.

And so I throw my small tribute to Peter into the mix. It’s astonishing that a man could touch so many in a lifetime. It’s commendable and like a lot of what I picked up from my time knowing him, it’s a lesson to live by.

Bye Bye Peter.