When better to reflect on lunacy than when listening to Echo and the Bunnymen? That must have been a great five years in music. EastEnders cues it, usually on the stereo in the Queen Victoria.
Am I posting about partygoing?
CHVRCHES – GOOD GIRLS (JOHN CARPENTER REMIX) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypUwRjH9sAU
I’m starting on what I hope is a humourous note, that what Spotify calls “early alternative” survives well and good on its own, forever having shaped itself into fashion like shells in the seaweed.
Pivoting from TV soap to horror, like The Wolfman, perhaps, satisfying his need for power by drinking the contents of what could be a steaming glass cylinder. He is transformed, haplessly, into the guise of a monster, in order to confront what will transform him. That is wisdom imparted to me back in high school by the head of the English department.
One of the challenges, when I went to school in the 1990s and in the 2000s, was to comprehend the reading teachers assigned me as a student of theirs. To this day, I try to read the occasional paper to keep my mind energized–papers of errata, I sort of think of them. I am interested in how an education for our present Gen Z could relate to what will be going on in the minds and hearts of young people.
Today is my parents’ anniversary. I believe that my mother sometimes reads my blog, and I guess that is sort of stereotypically embarrassing, but I thought of some of my observations, and how they may seem naïve, even at my present age, when I try sometimes to explain how it was to be young, and naïve, when perhaps I’ve never really shaken that naivete. How can that be?
I resolve not to think about it too much. My mother can see something I value negatively some of the time.
I once read the observation that social media is like having a giant billboard showing you traffic on the highway, a plain strange metaphor. My Facebook timeline nowadays occasionally recommends me posts from the site for blogTO.
The Facebook timeline, in case you’re new to Facebook, is the piece of your Facebook page that shows posts from both people you’ve befriended and from pages that you follow.
Like for me, https://www.facebook.com/LouthUnited/ is the business page for our family business, the cemetery.
In addition to being a good read, blogTO appears tidy on Facebook, and likewise fresh on TikTok. https://www.blogto.com/ …if you want the link.
When my dad and I agreed to do business together, in what might have been 2011, we wanted a Facebook page. The church on the cemetery grounds had disbanded in ’06, so a good five years had gone as the church fell away from that. We decided not to let the cemetery go as well.
It hasn’t been that long that I’ve been thinking about blogTO. The individual who first brought it to my attention is our dear Pam, one of my mother’s cousins, and a true Toronto resident.
Pam shares blogTO posts typically to reflect how she feels about the weather, or how construction in the city is, or how her interest in TIFF goes. Our last face-to-face was at my maternal grandmother’s eightieth birthday party.
I have lived in a burb my whole life, with the exceptions of brief visits to other parts of the province, that the province Ontario, as well as a once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Florida, and visits to my godparents in Tennessee, a 1995 visit to friends in British Columbia, school in Kingston, Ontario, and, in addition, beginning to really learn in England, when I was awarded a bursary to do a semester overseas, during which I even briefly saw Paris. If I were a priest, you might compare that semester to a sabbatical. I felt like Victor Frankenstein, I fancied.
I wrapped up my schooling with a year taking classes in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a very picturesque town nearby where I live. I could get a bus from the bus terminal to the campus twice a day, there and back again.
I have also travelled independently, to the Atlantic, the Prairies, and to Portland, Maine, as well as to NYC and to New Orleans, the latter perhaps for the jazz. These trips were all brief excursions. Thereby my impressions of the world were formed.
I felt overwhelmed during my first year of university, starting that up. It was mad to be young the year of Y2K. That was the fear, mostly mythical, that computers synchronized to midnight on January 1, 2000, would all crash, given that their computer infrastructure wouldn’t be able to handle the transition from the twentieth century into the twenty-first.
Dad and I have a little cemetery that would be cared for only by the municipality if my dad never had taken the steps to bring it under his care.
blogTO is a tourism blog for the city of Toronto, helping people find out what things they can do if they visit or if they live in Toronto. When I was but twenty-nine years old, I inquired with Ontario March of Dimes, in Niagara Falls, if I would have any luck in a tourism job, an entry-level job.
My contact at March of Dimes was scornful at that moment, given my reported age, and the nature of my request. In a way, I never lived that down. I have regrets, of course.
It is just that it was a difficult lesson to accept that the decade of life that was my twenties was almost completely finished.
My loving sister, Kaitlyn, encouraged me to try my hand at writing for the campus newspaper in our city. I wrote what you might say amounted to a portfolio of work, ten columns of film criticism that I wrote for the paper, coming out of my own pocket. She’s another girl to who I owe an apology.
Mind you I had the community support of assistance, with the rent, and funds allotted to maintaining a lifestyle. The thrill, and there was a word that a high school teacher had taught me that made it desirable, the word rush, was having to go see a film, typically, the Friday night, and then review the movie within twenty-four hours or so after the lights came up.
My mother was happy I was kind of following a dream, but I really was nothing, and nothing came of it. I was but an amateur.
Since then, the last several years I have done some more writing. I made a few bucks working for a mill, but discarding that perhaps shows foresight as my present advantage is that I can treat any theme I want at any time I want, rather than doing that rush I tried my hand in, to get credentials established. The chief activity that’s been on the productivity chart for me is the last ten years or so helping out my father operate the cemetery, with additional help from family and friends, like Dave and Gerard.
I have translated some of my “journalling” skills into helping keep us in the loop on Facebook, which my sister, thinking of herself as an “early adopter” of the social media platform, encouraged me to join perhaps in the year 2010–at the moment I am not completely sure when I got started. It may have been around the time David Fincher delivered his stellar film The Social Network. I enjoy that film, as do many others.
Kaitlyn’s been the real deal–when she was yet a single girl, she had a position as a bona fide newspaper editor. Kudos to her.
Twenty years before, about 1990, the soon-to-be-famous author John Gray finished his first book, which he titled What You Feel, You Can Heal. I remember that John Gray referred to taking your twenties to discover who you are, to find yourself. I wanted to quickly again establish, with this post, where I am at, which I do from time to time to keep it centered, I think.
I’m well older than that. In 2021, another famous figure, Jordan Peterson, himself a former university professor, has been bold enough to ask if university life will be finished.
It won’t surprise me if blogTO has his number.
You’re welcome to bang that “like” button, leave me a comment, or to follow the blog if any of that appeals to you. Thank you for flying with me, on WordPress. These are only the beginning of the days I am trying to take my work more seriously than I have in the first while, when I feel I had a learning curve.
Personal Links
https://www.facebook.com/findingenvirons Patrick Coholan. My dad Pete got enchanted with making our Maple Lawn a business and decided I’d be a valuable …
https://twitter.com/findingenvirons?lang=en The latest Tweets from Patrick coholan (@findingenvirons). Rock music fanatic. Award-winning book lover. Introvert. Small talk evangelist. Internet fan.
http://www.findglocal.com/CA/Saint-Catharines/105004929651130/Louth-United-Church-and-Maple-Lawn-Cemetery In 2012, Peter Coholan, having been retired for 2 years, … Hello, it’s Patrick here, writing a happy Groundhog Day greeting, for those who know us.
http://fictioncrowd.weebly.com/issue-three.html By Patrick Coholan. Picture. By Jon Pluck. Picture. Version: Mobile | Web. Home · Issue One · Issue Two · Issue Three
Bonus
‘Misbehaviour’: Film Review BY LESLIE FELPERIN https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/misbehaviour-review-1282933/
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 