[Untitled]

Something I regret is that we didn't talk more about death when you were alive. Sure, every once in a while we'd argue at the breakfast table on Saturday morning and you'd say, "When I'm gone...." But that never seemed real, and I always changed the subject.

I knew you thought about these things. When you tried showing me how to take care of my money, that was your way of preparing me. You'd also made a will, and I knew you'd planned ways to take care of mom, Stephen and me.

But beyond these things, I wish I'd said something like, When the time comes, if there's still a chance, I want you to fight with all you've got, and mom and Stephen and I will be fighting here with you. But if at that time, there's not a chance left and you know it, then I want you to know that it's okay to let go, that guh-guh and I will take care of mom and each other.

I hope you weren't scared. You'll never know how many times I've thought of that moment. Or maybe you do. Did you know "expire" comes from the Latin "to breathe out"?

On this rainy day in September, almost six months to the day, for some reason I'm thinking how I'll never know what kind of old man you would have become, what kind of habits you would have developed, whether there's some food you would have started liking or some TV show you would have started watching. And in a strange way, I wonder if I'll ever change in your mind too, if you've stopped seeing me and only remember me from the last time we saw each other. Will you recognize me the next time?

More recent highlights from the digital

The last couple weekends I've been trying to take advantage of a membership I got to a local botanical garden on a whim. Summer's making its last stand, and I want to make sure I have something to remember it by:

Last Sunday I arrived just before closing time as the sun started to set:


In this next image I'm actually playing a trick on you. Can you see it?


This Sunday I arrived with time to spare. The sun was still high enough to cast an aura around some things:


And water curiously beaded on the leaves of one plant:


I'm always in a better state of mind when I'm leaving the Garden than when I arrived. I seem reset each time:

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, / Seem to me all the uses of this world! / Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden..."

Berries

I'm on my mountain bike descending into the brambles on a late September evening. Thorns catch my arms. The sun's setting and sends out jetties of light onto the trail.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of seeing the brambles in BC. They zip by and I can just see they're bearing fruit. Branches sag with clusters of red and black at their tips. Spiders are weaving their way through the branches and leave their lacework behind.

The calendar says it's not Michaelmas yet: the berries are still good to eat. I stop trail-side and tug at a berry that hangs at waist-level. It's too firm, and I know it'll taste sour but I taste it anyway. I spit it out next to my feet. Then I aim for another, this one too ripe. It explodes in burgundy all over my fingertips.

Finally I get one that's got the right amount of give to it. I blow on it to chase out any bugs inside, then I pop it into my mouth. It's an understated kind of sweet and I get swirl it on my tongue, swallow, and juggle a few of the remaining seeds between my teeth. I pick a few more, cupping them loosely in my hand, then push on down the trail and on toward home.

Recent highlights from the digital

The hellish-looking coast of west Vancouver Island:


Tower Beach off the UBC campus on a halcyon day:


Pile of rocks that mysteriously stack themselves on Centennial Beach, one hour south of Vancouver:


Berries near Centennial Beach explode in late summer growth:

The future is quiet

Cycling into campus today -- and by the way, did you know UBC was ranked the best place in Canada to do a postdoc by The Scientist magazine last year? -- I was enjoying the mild weather, the gravelly feel of the trail under my tires, and the running loop of thoughts in my head. This all made for a gentle whrring sound -- the gears on my bike, the gears in my head -- until I was interrupted. Trucks came grinding by, one after the other. And then I almost ran over horse poop. (The trail's multi-use which apparently means pedestrian, bike, and horse in Canada.)

This got me thinking about something I'd read before, about how the greatest contributor to noise pollution was the modern combustion engine. There just doesn't seem to be any way to convert fossil fuel into kinetic energy quietly. No matter how much technology you throw at it, you still fundamentally have to blow the damn thing up, and that makes noise.

Then I started thinking about how there's all this talk about hybrids and even (gasp!) fully electric vehicles. Have you ever ridden in one of these? If you have, you know they get eerily quiet at stop lights and intersections. I mean, suddenly you're just sitting there doing nothing. And if you're with someone you don't get along with, this is when it gets really awkward.

And that brings me to this, an unintended consequence of the eventual switch to hybrid and electric vehicles: The future is quiet. And with that quietude, I bet driving/riding fundamentally changes. Gets more relaxing, less stressful, maybe even more thoughtful.

The WHO says one consequence of noise pollution is "annoyance". (A quantitative study comes out in December.) Could this spell the end of road rage? Other studies point to a link between noise, cardiovascular disease, poor sleep, and (duh) hearing loss.

It's no coincidence that low rumbly sounds -- like the ones I heard pass me this morning -- evoke bad reactions physiologically. To our prehistoric ancestors low sounds meant thunderstorms, bears, and earthquakes. They're the go-to when sound engineers want to scare us at the movies. Take The Haunting with Liam Neeson. Audiophiles routinely test their subwoofers to the low growls from this movie. Take away those sounds and you're left with forgettable Sunday afternoon fare.

So it goes with our electric future. Imagine the road trip of the future: You won't hear the engine. You'll hear the wind as you whoosh through it. And the gentle whrr of those thoughts in your head.

"What could go wrong?"

Today I was walking through the tony and a little-too-comfortable-for-its-own-good Kerrisdale neighborhood of Vancouver when I saw a woman dash into a bakery.

She left her baby stroller outside tied to a dog.

The question came to mind "What could go wrong?" followed by "Where does one even begin?"

It was a case of "caveat emptor" and "non sequitur" all rolled into one. A twofer! Sometimes you just have to laugh at the little things.