I've decided it's time to do the phoenix thing. I don't have much new left to say, there's not much new happening around - all variations on the same old same old, the more things change the more they remain the same and all that - and I've never got much enjoyment out of flogging dead horses, which the idea of waking up enough people in Canada to actually start doing something about the problems we face in time to do something about them before they become critical seems to be. The country will or will not survive, will be a progressive sort of democracy or American puppet or some pathetic deadish sort of thing not sure at all what it wants to be in between, with or without RM.

And I have many other things to be getting at, where it seems to me my time might more fruitfully be spent. RM was fun for awhile, a good catharsis, good words practice, but I guess I've gotten rid of most of the bile that has/had built up over the years - it is really, really, really frustrating to want to comment, to want to be heard in the public debate, and none of the media will print anything you write. But during all of my shouting and ranting at them and others the last year, I had considerable opportunity and cause to consider the reasons for this (one of the reasons I write has always been that it helps clarify things), and understand things, I believe, somewhat better now, which eases the frustration at least about that, if not about the seeming obliviousness of my fellow Canadians to the seriousness of the situation they - we - are in, or their acceptance of the lies under which they live - the lie of "democracy", the lie of a free and responsible media, the lie of freedom itself, and all the lesser lies needed to create the conditions for the bigger lies. All reports indicate that the average German citizen thought things were really pretty great or at least good in Germany in the mid-1930s. I believe that we in Canada are in a similar period right now - we don't have a Hitler at the helm, but we do have a government that is about to show its true colors, and do so in a way that will be very destructive for everyone, and very difficult to stop. As I have oft said, the government has not been training and equipping our Canadian police forces with great wonderful new tools to suppress people the last several years to fight some bogeyman terrorists, although that has been the excuse.

But enough. Enough. I said enough! Those horses have been flogged and flogged again.

So I thank those few of you who have been reading and listening - and maybe I'll put the next half million words into something else you'll find interesting and useful as well this coming time - check back now and then if you want to see what happens when ?????? crawls forth from the ashes of the phoenix phyre of the bird I birthed last year and called RM, and which has lived a relatively short but certainly not quiet existance, even if most of the ranting has been done in mostly empty halls. I think I've cleared the tubes out, prepared a space around myself for perspective, and sussed out some new tools and knowledge and ideas with which to operate, and we (I and my many muses who are never silent for long, or short of wonderful or crazy ideas) are ready for a more effective approach, of some sort, to the struggle for a better world.

I'm not closing the site, just - like I said - doing a phoenix thing. One thing about phoenix things is that you never know what you'll wake up as. Or when for that matter. Sort of like Karma.

I do trust something will emerge from the ashes of RM, however, and probably sooner than RM emerged from the last immolation, the ending of a tab called the Alternative Voice I did in PEI in 92 or thereabouts - I have no intention of stopping writing or thinking about how to make things better around here - I don't think I can, I think it's a genetic thing somehow, I'm hardwired to do this - there is no question that I will continue to be immensely pissed off at what is happening in my country and world, and I do also believe that one cannot turn one's back on injustice and wrongdoing if one wishes to call oneself truly human. Which I do aspire to - it is distasteful in the extreme to think one might be no better than the likes of Mulroney or Bush or the multitude of others like them, whose only motto seems to be mememe fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou lielielie hahahasucker. What a disgrace that we allow and even encourage people like this as our "leaders" - it does indeed say as much about "us" as it does about them. No wonder, as Calvin once noted, that intelligent species from other places have not contacted us.

So - as they say where I hail from - catch ya later.

After the bonfire. (hahaha I was gonna say conflagration - but it looked wrong - too pretentious - I am, after all, just a small phoenix. hahahaha. so far). After the ashes ......

Dave (RM)