A Blending of Art and Reality.

Written by Christopher Pentecost on February 28, 2024

I’ve talked a lot about perspectives, and there’s a main reason for that. Since 2020, I’ve been sort of putting myself through a blender of sorts to strip away the many layers that this ogre has and to shed away a lot of the things and the preconceptions that I’ve just lived with for the past 40 odd years. Now, that’s not to say that I’m trying to erase the past. What I’m trying to do is reshape a future in a better, more well-rounded, and healthier way. A lot of that comes with taking a look at myself and the world around me and trying to make sense of it all, which is a grand undertaking when you think that the person who’s telling you this has already told you that he suffers from a lot of problems, issues, traumas, and a whack ton of mental illness. So, can we really trust me to be a decent guide for myself, let alone anyone else on these topics? To be perfectly frank, I don’t know, but I’m willing to take a look at it and I’m willing to go through a lot of uncomfortable shit to allow me to heal and grow. Sort of like a forest fire, it’s tragic, there’s a lot of damage at the end of it, but life springs from this. Things will continue to grow out of this tragedy, and if we can build it better to withstand the trauma that we faced, then I think we’re better than when we started. So, we’re going to try to look at that.

Where do I begin? We’re talking about over 40 years of life through some of the more turbulent and interesting times. When I was born, Vietnam was over, but the pain that came out of that was still relevant. A new era of discontent was flowing underneath the facade that everything was going to be fine. Our political leaders came from a free-market stance that 180’d what the world had been doing up until that point. Capitalism and greed started to permeate society itself. We sold our souls to a new level of consumerism, and yet, as kids, we just knew about going outside, touching grass, riding our bikes, skinned knees, and being home before the lights came on. It’s not until we look at the history of what we grew up in do we see a lot of the faults that maybe we played into. It’s the same with our kids right now. My kids look at things and they see people having fun on the internet, and for the most part, they are. But they don’t really grasp the actual reality of what this world is because they’re sort of innocent. They haven’t learned what struggles will await them, and we as parents, and I assume my parents as well, tried to protect us from the harsh realities of the world for as long as they could. Now, are we robbed of anything when our parents do that? I don’t think so because kids have ears. Kids have eyes. No matter how quiet you think you are when you’re arguing, we could always hear. We always knew to press our ears to the furnace grate so that we could hear the echoes of our parents through the ductwork.

I knew that my parents had it hard when we had hamburger, and I’m not just saying hamburgers, no ground beef for the better part of a year if not more because it was the only form of protein my parents could afford. Now, to say that that was back then, but my parents were dealing with a mortgage that was sitting at an interest rate of 15% if not 17%, and it meant money had to be saved or else we would have been homeless. So, those things where you question why we’re having hamburger again and it’s all your mother can do to either a) not yell at you or b) not cry due to the situation that we’re in. Now, that situation got better once my parents got out from under that horrific situation, and to celebrate, my great aunt bought us a Nintendo. Woohoo, Nintendo, my first ever foray into the video gaming world, and of course, most of the couple of friends that I had already had things like Atari and other things, and they’d already been playing Nintendo for years, but it was good to take the wins when you can. Now, the struggles, I don’t think they ever end and they just rolled over out of 1989. We had Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall came down, the end of the Soviet Union, or we could all sort of relatively take an audible sigh of relief that quite possibly a nuclear weapon wouldn’t fall out of the sky and just incinerate us into nothing anymore. Then the Gulf War happened, and everything moved for the next over 30 years to the West versus the Middle East. So, what do you do with that? In my grandparents’ time, they would have been shipped off to war to fight. Now it was we were fighting proxies or only the military went and you didn’t really need to go if you didn’t want to. It sure did nothing for the price of gas, but then again, it was still hovering around 45 cents a liter, and my parents sounded back then like I do now when it hits $1.50 a liter.

The times continue to change, and we continue to change with it. I remember my mother telling me that it was weird to her that all the girls in my classes were wearing the same clothes that she wore back in the seventies: flared bell-bottom pants, tight crop top sweaters. It’s really funny now because I say that, and then that’s sort of what the style is coming back at this point. So, it just seems like everything is circular and that what is old will become new again at some point. I think a lot of frustration for people comes from the fact that it just feels as if we are always in perpetual motion, the next cog to hit, the gears will always turn in a particular way, and there’s nothing we can do about it to break that cycle. For as long as I can remember, for me, I don’t think I ever considered myself as a part of the cog. I know now that I am because I’m white. And I don’t say that with any level of bitterness because I am who I was born as, to the parents who raised me, and to slightly suffer a couple of my grandparents being just a little off their rocker when it came to people from outside of Canada.

When we read things in history like people from Europe coming to North America, the fur trade, Confederation, the railroad, all of these things that Western people did to make us a great country, you sort of never second-guess your elementary school teachers that they’re teaching you something wrong. You grow up with this teaching and this way of looking at the world around you, and you go, “Hey, it’s not that bad.” Then, yeah, read the newspaper or you watch the news on TV that your parents are interested in, and you see things happening in other parts of the world. Most of them are things that will grab a headline: a bomb detonated in Londonderry, hostages killed in Lebanon, the suppression of rights in Iran and China. And we go, “Wow, it’s all over there. Look at how they do things in their neck of the woods. Luckily, we don’t have that here in our neck of the woods,” and mainly we can say that because it was never reported because we would hate the mirror to be pointed back at ourselves.

I always remember elementary school for having Multicultural Day. It’s where all the different kids from all the different countries that came to this country would be proud of their heritage. Most people created displays, maybe brought in traditional dishes for all of us to eat. This relatively is where white people say, “Oh, this is really spicy,” mainly because there’s more than salt and pepper in there. Now, I will admit I grew up with a grandmother from Newfoundland, in which they are proud to boil almost everything, so really salt and pepper was spice in my grandmother’s house. But my other grandmother had a recipe for homemade chili sauce which, although not hot, was incredibly flavorful. And I think that’s where I sort of get a little bit of my palate when it comes to food. Where I don’t mind trying new things, although they were also very British in a way. That curry, even though it really was closer to biryani, I’d eat yellow curry powder on rice with some raisins and a little bit of chicken, so I had a little bit of taste for some spice. Now, when my mother did spaghetti sauce, a red tomato sauce with basil, oregano, thyme, believe a little bit of sage, bay leaves, which you had to dig out from your plate, poured over spaghetti and topped with fake Parmesan cheese, you tend to pull some flavor out of that. So, it’s not like my mother was afraid of flavor or using seasoning; it’s where she would stop. I would sort of continue, but again, that sort of comes from pulling from different cultures and experimenting with certain things. Do I think my parents would have ever gone with me to an Ethiopian restaurant? Probably not. They would probably think that was really spicy, whereas I would more over taste more the flavor than spice. But again, this comes from sort of multiculturalism that I grew up with that my parents didn’t.

For those Multicultural days, we would have a few people from what you would assume would be general areas, with people from Japan, Korea, China. You get people from the Middle East, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, moreover, people who were displaced, to be slightly honest, I would assume. But I never really took notice of it, which I think is why I don’t really have a lot of other fond memories of back then of those people because I never really saw them as different. But they were different, and some of them were treated badly for being different. I’d like to hope I wasn’t a part of that, but then back then you sort of kind of go with things and situations that happen around you. You don’t want to be that person who stood up for the person being bullied. I sure as hell know about that because I suffered my share of mental and physical abuse at the hands of bullies. And please note, these are the same people who knew I had a goalie stick and would want me to come out and play goal for when they wanted to play street hockey. So that could happen on a Saturday, and on the following Monday, I’d get my ass kicked. So you explain to me how quite damaging that might be and how you may deal with that situation.

There were other things about life back then where the perception was, “it’s just a word.” Let’s take the word “gay” for an example, like “rad,” “gnarly,” “cool,” “righteous,” “Cowabunga,” phrases like “eat my shorts,” “D’OH.” These were all common catchphrases or words that just permeated what we were growing up with, and so we took it upon ourselves to sort of implement it into our own lives and our own vocabulary. They were just words. Some of us knew that words could hurt, but that didn’t stop us from using terms like “that’s so gay” to describe a situation that was not cool. I think now about how many people that may have hurt growing up when I did, even if it wasn’t directed at them, just hearing that, how it made them feel. These are some of the processes that most recently I’ve been trying to go back and not filter out, but try to make sense of. Why were we like this? Well, ultimately, we could be pretty much the product of the generation that came before us, which if you look at that, that’s the Boomers, and fuck, they’ve done a great job of screwing us over. But beyond that, at some point, we had to take it upon ourselves to do something with it, to fix it. It wasn’t enough to slap on a Dead Kennedys patch and say, “Fuck you, Dad,” because what did we know about all that?

I remembered 9/11. Now, as a person who is from the left politically and socially, with a slight interest portion of me that likes fiscal responsibility (not back then, definitely now), I always had a hard time wondering what it would take for some people to do what they did. I remember getting bullied so bad in Grade 9, which was only about seven years before 9/11, that I wrote out in my geography class how I would kill every single classmate I ever had, and I sort of went into detail about how I would do it and what I would do to certain people. Quite literally, the geography teacher looked over my shoulder, saw that, picked up my book, ripped the two pages out of it, and walked up to his desk, put it on his desk, covered it with a book, and went on with the lesson. And it wouldn’t be for another 4 months that I would be in the guidance counselor’s office on a totally unrelated issue, and it was brought up then, going, “Hey, what was this all about?” And quite literally, that had been the first time I’d seen it since the teacher took it away from me. My answer to the guidance counselor was, “I was being bullied, no one was doing anything about it, and I was having a bad day.” Their second question was, “Should we be worried?” I said, “No,” and that was the end of it. He tore it up and threw it in the garbage. These days, that would be called a sign of something truly wrong. I reflected on that the day after Columbine and the shootings in Tabour, Alberta. When I walked down the hall of my high school in a trench coat (mind you, I had had this for at least 4 years at this point so this was not anything new to anyone who knew me), and the crowd parted slightly like the Red Sea after Columbine. If I had ever written that kind of a list, I probably would have been suspended or expelled and probably forced into some sort of institution where they could look at my brain which, looking back on it now, probably would have been beneficial. Not that I believe I’m mentally unstable or anything. I probably would have gotten a little more help and maybe even diagnosed with something by then. But again, sorry for the tangent, back to 9/11. The Halloween right after 9/11, I witnessed insensitivity on such a level where a lot of people got dressed up like Osama bin Laden and would walk around with a white flag. I saw one group of people dress up like a couple of US presidents walking around with a dinner cart with a silver cloche on it and when you opened it up, a friend had painted his face to look more Arab like Osama Bin Laden as if to serve him up on a silver platter. This is racist, yes. Was it insensitive? Absolutely. Could it be that we didn’t know how to react to something as traumatic as that happening so close? Maybe. I say that because being a person who enjoys learning about history and wanting to know more about why the world is the way that it is, I realized that there are extenuating circumstances that led to people thinking like this and having that view of the last, a view that most of us in the West did not have because we were never taught it. And that view was, we were the colonizers, we were the people who interfered when we shouldn’t have, we were the people who Rage Against the Machine sings about, we were the people who would go around the world for centuries causing death, destruction, and sowing discord to the point where it’s unfathomable of how insensitive we are to the rest of the world. 9/11 was the buildup of aggression by the West interfering and helping a war of attrition that saw Afghanistan destroyed back to the Stone Age. Soviets tried to go in, take over the land to extend their empire, and were beaten back by locals who were supplied by the United States. And once the Russian threat was gone, the United States disappeared as well. And what was left was a country left in utter poverty, destruction, and no one helped to rebuild it. Those people felt abandoned and they were angry, and that anger festered. So, it was really hard for me to continue to listen to a lot of the talking points that came out of that, saying we don’t know why they would have done this to us, we are the greatest country to ever live, and Canadians are no better.

In 2020, I saw the video of the death of George Floyd. We are almost 20 years separated from 9/11 to then, and when I saw that happen, I thought to myself, how did we get here? How could we get to this point? And that is what really started the push to better understand. That’s when I threw my onion into the mandolin and began to chop back the layers because there are layers. Every situation has layers, and we need to peel back those layers to have a better understanding of what lies beneath. I started to research things that I only sort of knew about. I started to go back and research things that I did know about but with newer perspectives. I started to think about what it meant for me as a straight white man to peel this back and try to see how I could be different because no one wants to be thrown into the same categories as all the rest of them. But I also understand that I wield a certain level of privilege, and it’s my understanding of that that makes me uncomfortable with all the other things that I see, and how can I use that uncomfortableness to change me for the better? I don’t mind feeling uncomfortable. I felt uncomfortable most of my life. I don’t feel as if I fit in my own skin, although there is a lot of it, I will say. I don’t think I’ve ever belonged quite literally anywhere. I’ve always felt like an outsider. So I have that perspective, but I’ve never had to worry about all of the other things like police, living in the wrong neighborhood, feeling uncomfortable just taking a walk. I started talking with my friend. He’s a personal trainer, known each other for 20 years. His name’s Lisle, and he’s black, and him and I try to set some time out where we can talk about the world around us, me hoping to get a better perspective of what it’s like to be a black person living in this world at this time. I know he’s been going through a lot more than me because he’s lived it and I haven’t, but his perspective has helped me grow mine. Between Lisle and the social-political world around me, I have started to shape more of a perspective that is much different than the one I grew up with. I would never use a saying like “that’s so gay” because there are people I know who are from the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. I gave up organized religion for the Satanic Temple right when the religious right won their ability in the states to overturn Roe versus Wade. I saw that as an attack on all women, and I didn’t want to be a part of a group that would do that to someone else. To me, it wasn’t very Christ-like, and for the most part, my former minister June, although not fully behind it, understood where I was coming from and slightly agreed that a lot of the churches that didn’t believe in what was happening and were supportive of women in pro-choice were not doing enough to call out the ones that weren’t, and I think as Christians, you would think they would be the first one to tell a bunch of religious people how fucked up they are being to other people. I looked at the Freedom Convoy and saw it for what it was. They saw themselves as Freedom Fighters. I saw them as whiny ass bitches that didn’t like the fact that their privileges were being limited for the benefit of society. These are people that were only in it for themselves, and as much as I’m all for freedom of expression, I still have enough Punk left in me to flip them the finger every single time I see them. And remember, I’ve already given up Christianity so not really fucked up the whole religious thing. I have not gone to a sporting event yet, so I haven’t had the wonderful chance to sit through a national anthem. It’s one of those things where you want to tell your kids you don’t have to stand for that, but I don’t think at this moment it’s the right time to sort of tell them about that. It’s sort of me protecting the innocence of my children because they don’t need to be so politically involved. Especially when you think their classrooms are way more Multicultural now than mine ever were, and they’re so accepting of all the other people. When I was invited to parties, I would go and they would all be white. That was it. Very rarely did you end up getting one of the kids who were visible minority at one of these parties. It wasn’t until I was in the Boy Scouts that I ended up meeting one of my classmates who was part Japanese, I believe.

So currently, that’s where we’re at with the transformation. Do I have a bit more to go? I’ve got a hell of a long way to go, but I’m glad I’m doing it because there’s still a lot that I need to unravel, a lot of baggage to unload and put away. We will get there eventually, hopefully sooner than later because it’s a part of life and evolution, the evolution of oneself, not just the entire species, although the entire species should really be eradicated, I think, at this point. Got to love entropy at this moment because it’s probably one of the only ways that we’re actually going to be able to weed out some of the shit that is around.

I continue to find things, whether it be on social media, whether it be in my life, whether it be out in the world, where I now look at things through a different lens. Because it can no longer work if I only look at it through my own perspective. I need to be able to look at things from more than one angle. I was always able to frustrate people enough in my life, so this is a slight apology because I was able to continue an argument by shifting the perspective of the argument slightly. What makes me a great debater because I’ll go into the argument knowing what the other person has to say against what I’m looking at. And this is also why my brain doesn’t shut up, is because it’s always looking at whatever thing is in front of me to try and find the other perspective, to try and find a way what I’m seeing is the most correct picture, and pretty much the most layman ish terms that I can think of.

I look at every situation as art, and I try to see it from as many perspectives as I can, which a lot of the time sucks the life and the enjoyment out of it for me, but it is more to try to understand exactly what I see and how I should interpret it. I will say it makes things really, really difficult sometimes because then you’re always looking for a deeper meaning when the most generic, easiest answer is sometimes the best answer and the only answer that’s there. I know for myself, I make things way more difficult than I think a lot of things should be, but soon I will be working on that with a therapist because sometimes you just need therapy.

You know, that was kind of a weird post, and there’s more to dig up from that, and I’m pretty sure we’ll go into that, but after two and a half weeks of training at a new job, trying to fit this in, trying to do other things as well, my brain’s kind of fried. And I write this post as a way of quieting my mind and allowing it just a stream of consciousness out, a bunch of things. I try to make it as coherent as possible. Sometimes my mind just doesn’t want to work that way. I feel as if doing these posts, it allows a better view of how sort of my mind doesn’t work in a linear fashion, and that you get to see sort of an unedited, raw version of how my thinking goes. Please understand because I’ve dealt with this all the time. I understand how this may come off to other people as very difficult to decipher, very difficult to read, very difficult to wrap your head around because my mind goes in multiple different directions, and I dealt with that for a very long time with the people around me because there are a lot of times where I will say something in what I think is in turn but is quite out of turn, and then all of a sudden now I feel awkward.

Beyond the shifting of my perspectives and what I’m trying to accomplish on that front, I hope this was just a little bit of a small rear window into sort of a process that I continue to work on. The idea behind these blogs was always to try and get a better handle on how I present my thesis in my arguments, and I understand these are very raw and very eccentric in a way, but that’s purposeful. And as I continue to go along and continue to let this be an outlet from my brain, the idea is to hopefully start to refine and get a more linear sense. Not that I don’t like a fantastic Jackson Pollock, but I also want to make sure that there is a more refined method to the art that’s being created.

With that being said, I will leave you with a song that sort of speaks to me and the issues with my own perspective by an artist that also dealt with his own issues with perspective in his own life. So below I present to you George Michael’s “Freedom 90.” The video for this song would help spark the careers of a lot of supermodels, but also showed the tearing down of the perception that had been built by the industry of what George Michael was, the biker jacket, the jukebox, the guitar, all either burned or blown up as a way to break down the image that everyone else had of him and to reinvent himself as he truly was inside. I relate to this a lot, as do a lot of people, I think. And if there is a song that maybe could link us all together, it’s this one. Please enjoy. Thank you.