Some thoughts from George Orwell, 'The Road to Wigan Pier'
"Watching coal-miners at work, you realise momentarily what different universes different people inhabit. Down there where coal is dug it is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably a majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly. For all the arts of peace coal is needed; if war breaks out it is needed all the more. In time of revolution the miner must go on working or the revolution must stop, for revolution as much as reaction needs coal. Whatever may be happening on the surface, the hacking and shovelling have got to continue without a pause, or at any rate without pasing for more than a few weeks at the most. In order that Hitler may march the goose-step, that the Pope may denounce Bolshevism, that the cricket crowds may assemble at Lord's, that the Nancy poets may scratch one another's backs, coal has got to be forthcoming. But on the whole we are not aware of it; we all know that we 'must have coal', but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves. Here am I, sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just 'coal' - something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners who are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower."
Our world changes only as quickly as we try to make it change. What is it that we have forgotten that keeps us always in this cycle of neverending strife?
You Know You're In Montreal When...
I'd like to take this time to send off the funniest things that have happened to me in the last few days. But good stories always begin with an apology. Dear Brian, I'm sorry for touching myself. I promise I'll never do it again. Sincerely yours, Charlie.
You know you're in Montreal when you have Celine Dion as a friend on Facebook. (Oh yeah, score!)
Listening to my downstairs neighbor's conversation at four in the morning (when is the moment when you tell someone, damn you speak too loudly!) and she swears the she 'owns' the local watering hole we like to call Chez Bifteck. Yeah. That's what everyone says. I don't understand why people can't just exist as a community in the bar. Somebody's always gotta own that shit.
How are you gonna kill that fly? With your good looks?
None of this makes sense to you. That's why I have the blog. So maybe you can better understand my life. Maybe. If you're lucky.
I'm off to study the proletariat. Wish me luck.