Shane's Report #3

Day 23 - November 25th, 2006

Just a quick word before I try to sleep. When I first flew into Inuvik and we went out to the new Mackenzie for dinner I was bubbling with, "wow, this is a wild place, it's so unique and its own thing." And it certainly is. At first I was struck by how hip everyone was dressed. You could not tell the difference between a person dressed out for a pub here or a person dressed for a pub in Toronto or Vancouver. Cool jeans, cool shirt, latest hair cut, some new hip drink, and a hockey game on behind the leather sofas. All very modern and the same. Styles are the same. Only when you leave the pub here you bundle up and change your footwear to minus 60 degree boots. I heard "Inuvik", "Western Arctic", "NWT" and I thought it was still 1870 or something. They got 90 channels of TV, high speed internet, and the latest fashions of everything here.

The second night here was different. The "day" began with waking up at 9 AM in complete darkness. The sun only comes up at noon and sticks around until 3 PM in twilight light only. I rely on the daylight, even cloudy, to wake me up and get my day going. It was kind of tough to snap outta the sleepy in the darkness today - I mean midnight black darkness ... at 11 AM. So, the second night we went back to the Mackenzie for more grub and this time it was different. Well, what was different was that I wasn't as bushy tailed with excitement. Everything was the exact same. There was another hockey game on, someone was winning and someone was loosing. But suddenly the imagination switched from, "Canada's great big north, I could live here, it would be neat, it would be exciting," to "there's no goddamn way I'd live here, everything is the same, it's a small, small, small community where everyone knows everyone, that's not good, that's stifling, and the sun was only out for 3 hours and it gets less and less day by day until february."

One last random thought: TVs. I don't watch a lot of TV. I watch select TV shows on DVD for sure, very fun (Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Rescue Me, etc.), and usually in marathon sessions of a season over 2-3 days. But what I found on this trip is, back in the hotel, I switch the TV on and channel surf for a while. No particular reason, maybe just for company. Hotel rooms are lonely and being in them for so long I can see why hotel rooms are the scenes of lots of weird behavior, it's really really small and lonely in a hotel room with a bed spread you are sharing with thousands prior guests. But what I kind of realized was that I was basically just tired and needed a break from the work day. As opposed to taking a nap, I take 5 to 7 hours of not sleeping and channel surfing in this lull of weirdness (well, I have to burn footage onto DVDs and that explains the hours and hours of time sitting in a hotel room). And today it kind of dawned on me: TV gives you nothing. It really doesn't. TV doesn't give you energy, it doesn't set you out into the world better for watching it, it actually sucks the energy out of you. And when I say TV here I mean channel surfing TV, not watching movies and no-commercial TV on DVDs. But what does it give you? Really, what? A "shared" experience? An "uplift" from an otherwise depressing day? (Not when you're a Raptors fan, that is for sure.) What do you get BACK from watching TV? I feel as though it is time that has just evaporated, but wont ever be set back as rain someplace else, just up and gone into nothingness of personal life history - deathbed regret, "you were healthy and young and you did what?"

So, I've resolved the keep the TV off the rest of the trip. When the lonely bug sets in (usually for me a good time to play guitar, but I don't have one with me) it'll be time to read, work on the scripts, and write to you here like this. What I'm thinking is, we watch TV because we are hungry. Just like we're hungry for food we go out to eat and if we eat shit, we just eat, eat, eat, eat until we clog an artery with junk food debris. Same for TV. We sit down because we're hungry for interaction, for connection, for an opening of consciousness, for life's eternal fire to be re-lit and sparked and rejuvenated after a long day. But I think we're looking for the right things in the wrong place(s) - TV just ain't it. A hotel pub scattered with travelers who've assembled in this room together, and in our small groups we eat and talk mini-talks through commercials, but otherwise there is a general energy sapping from everyone going into the TV sets looking down at us - so collected together yet so isolated. (And man, watch the bar tabs pile high in these lonely hotel pubs).

If this isn't lost on you yet, all the great sages, Rumi being one, talk about this loneliness, that it is the true core and unquenchable thirst for humankind. It is the search and the longing to return or reconnect with the source of life from which we've been pulled apart to make life ... life. Rumi's masterful analogy was the reed flute. Pulled from the river bed, from the mud of god, and carved into a flute, it makes such sweet sounds because it longs to return to the mud, to be as it once was, connected and fully immersed in all things. "TV is set up as commerce, entertainment, and 'news' ... so, um, this mud of God thing is a little heavy handed, Belcourt."

I think we gotta stop flat-lining our minds, our cultures, our geographic identities, and we gotta find a way to blow up our TVs. And microwaves. And cell phones ... and ... "Hi, my name is technology burner and I'm running for office. Vote for me."