Well, not technically. But after eight months of cold rain, this is the nicest day in Vancouver I can remember. My mother sent my daughter a brand new pretty dress. So no Friday Photography today, but here’s some pictures of Molly taken with my Nikon D40.

I haven’t had time to write lately, except for the two recent pieces about enrolment and city council, but those were school assignments. College is really hectic lately, and this week I’ve spent all three days doing homework until midnight. Fortunately I’ll be reward with a great job and a big pay cheque at the end of it all, right?

Oh, and I did have about five minutes to read about this. That’s some top-notch governing right there. Of course, I’m sure somebody will remind me of that Bairdsian wisdom:

“I think the longevity of the minority government has sort of allowed the opposition to go where no opposition could go or has gone before.”

I finally got around to uploading some pictures of the family on Facebook. The above picture was from a nice winter walk we took today at Minnekhada Park in Coquitlam. I don’t have the fancy camera anymore so I used my terribly old 4.0 megapixel Olympus and photoshopped the contrast to hide the pixelation.

I also posted a rare snow day in Vancouver from two weeks ago and my daughter’s birthday from January. Think of it an opportunity to add me on Facebook, too.

I was returning home from a silly stakeout at 2 a.m. tonight (don’t ask), driving along the wet empty streets of North Vancouver with the radio turned up loud. And there’s something about driving at night, when the road is empty and the surrounding world is sleeping, that is really enjoyable.

The darkness creates a sort of enveloping tunnel around the beams of light in front as the car races ahead. The music, depending on the selection, carries you through the rhythm of the road as it twists and turns. I sometimes eschew the direct route, just to avoid having to stop the car and break the momentum.

I remember when my daughter was younger and she didn’t want to go to sleep, I would gladly put her in the car and go for a ride. Sometimes I would just start driving along the empty highway, cruising in the darkness and let the white noise put her to sleep. It reminds me of my own days as a child when I would get into the car late at night and wake up in my own bed in the morning.

I love long drives. I can sit in a car for longer than most people would find it comfortable. But if I’m in the driver’s seat, I can go for 14 or 16 hours at a time. And I have. When I drove out to Vancouver from Toronto in 2008 by myself, I did Thunder Bay on the first day, Moose Jaw on the second, Calgary on the third and reached the coast on the fourth. It could have been done in three but I wanted to stop at a friend’s house in Calgary so he could show me the city.

Maybe there’s something about my personality, that I can sit in a car and just zone out and drive for hours. It’s that time you can really be alone with yourself without wondering what you’re going to do with yourself while you’re alone. It’s simple. You’re driving.

One of the best night drives exists on the west coast. If you go along the TransCanada into North Vancouver and follow it up to Whistler, you’ll find yourself on the winding, curving Sea-to-Sky highway. If you’re lucky there will be a full moon to illuminate the ocean as you cruise the twists and turns in the darkness of the highway. On one side the shimmering waters and on the other the looming shadow of mountains.

Of course I can’t do that much anymore. I don’t make any money while I’m in school and gasoline on the coast hit $1.30 today. I’m putting gas in the tank in $10 increments, hoping something will happen in the Middle East to calm this mess down. In the meantime I’m using the bus to go everywhere.

I know there are people who love the bus and swear by public transit. I guess it’s effective in an urban area, and it works in a utilitarian sort of way, even though there are times it resembles our public health care system (long waits, unreliable, often poor service).

But there’s nothing like the freedom of getting into a car and going anywhere you want. For all of the talk of global warming, and no matter where you stand on the issue, Canada is a really large place, and if you want to get anywhere in a time that’s reasonably dependent on your own agenda, you’d better have a car. (Public transit is sort of the socialism of transportation, while the automobile is the free market.)

The funny thing is that my car isn’t even very good. It’s a 1997 Ford Escort stationwagon with poor fuel economy. When I last visited Ontario in 2009 I rented a Chevrolet Impala and drove the back roads of the Bruce Peninsula with some real horsepower for once. I cannot honestly say I obeyed all the speed limits.

I had an even older car, a 1993 Saturn, that I lost to the environmentalist laws of the city of Vancouver. It wouldn’t pass the emissions testing, so we had to give it up for scrap. The sad thing is that that baby traversed Canada twice without so much as a whimper. It was a good reliable car and it was good on the gas.

Vancouver is trying to reinvent itself as a bicycle city, as though it thinks it’s Copenhagen or any other European city with a dense population. That’s fine, I guess, except for the fact the city wasn’t designed to be a bike city and it rains too much for more than 5 per cent of the people to want to do it.

But you can’t jump on your bike and decide you’re going to drive to Chilliwack for apple pie. You can’t go tearing along the coastal mountain range at night in the driving rain listening to music. And you sure can’t load the family up on short notice to drive to the top of Seymour and look at the Lower Mainland as the sun sets.

The funny thing is that the two things that most revolutionized the modern world would have to be the incandescent light bulb and the automobile. Both have come under attack for being unfriendly to the environment, yet both are symbolic of the greatest technological achievements of post-industrial civilization. The car brings the freedom of unlimited movement and the light bulb the ability to do it in the dark.

People keep talking about peak oil, a day when this wonderful ride will come to a crashing halt. And some people even want that day to come as soon as possible. To them I’d suggest they go for a nice long night drive and think about what that would really mean.

There won’t be any Friday Photography tonight. That’s because I’m preparing for a journalistic assignment beginning tomorrow. If you’ve already spoken to me by email then you know what I’m referring to. If you haven’t, and you want to know, you can drop me a line.

unambig at gmail dot com

While I’m away, blogging or updating here may be limited, but Mark Collins will still add his own content. Regardless of how much I’ll be able to check in while I’m away, I will be back by around October 9. In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been lately, journalism school has taken up too much of my time in the evenings. But this assignment is unrelated to school.

I guess that’s pretty much it. See you soon.

When I had my first child, I sort of thought of it as running the touchdown in the game of biological football. I knew the game wasn’t over, but insofar as my genetic obligations were concerned, I had managed — against all odds — to reproduce. Mission accomplished. Banner hanging over the aircraft carrier.

I know, of course, that there’s a lot more to parenting than simply being a donor in the fertility department. There are lot of men who can reproduce, but not all of them can be fathers. Plenty of men walk away from the challenge, or decide that the rewards aren’t worth the personal sacrifice.

Unlike the vast majority of men the planet over, I didn’t hope for a son for my first child. I don’t know why that is. I suppose a part of that biological imperative is to hope for a son to carry on the family line, but I sort of consider that a social construct. Sure, the male name is what is carried on to the next generation, but we don’t raise names. We raise children.

I wanted a girl because I had no idea what girls would be like. I had a brother of close age growing up, so I was very familiar with that kind of life experience. But girls — the way they act, the way they think, the way they feel — were a complete mystery.

That’s not to say I wasn’t happy to have a son. There’s something at once indescribably fascinating and frightening about the fact that you have managed to create a miniature version of yourself. It’s as though you split off a part of yourself to live on beside you, and though you have no control over what they will become, you sense that part inside of them. It is a very primal realization.

My son is eight now, and he and I have cultivated enough of a life together that, should unforeseeable disaster strike, he would remember me. Perhaps he wouldn’t remember everything about me, but he would have memories of our time spent together as father and son. I don’t know how meaningful these memories would be to him, but I suspect they would be scattered throughout the memory banks of his brain like grains of sand on a table of glass. Occasionally he would come across one grain, and for a moment he would be flooded with the cognitive senses of years long departed.

But my daughter is only two and a half. Her memories may eventually become hazy shadows of a life early in development. She is fully sentient, yet she lacks the awareness to really be able to file these moments for permanent recall. If something were to happen to either my wife or I, she would remember nothing of our brief time together.

This realization came to me today as I was walking with her in a department store, holding her by the hand to keep her boundless exuberance from imperiling her. These moments we have together are meaningful, close, and loving. I can see the emotional range of my daughter is very developed. She laughs from the happiness of our company. She cries from the sorrow of a rebuke. She is comforted by the reassurance of our embrace.

All of these memories, however, are mine to enjoy. Though this development may make her feel loved and socially well-adjusted in adulthood, she won’t remember running through the grass under an azure September sky, the sun bouncing chestnut-coloured light from her hair. This friendship I have with my daughter is still literally in a stage of infancy. If I could no longer be with her, that fragile friendship would break, and the memories ebb away as though the grains of sand had been washed from the table.

I’ve suddenly gleaned a new dimension in my fear of mortality. I don’t concern myself with death for the sake of personal doubt about what lies beyond. I’ve ceased to look at my life’s mortal limitations from a self-serving perspective. For the first time, I’ve realized that my life has value beyond my own preservation instinct.

I feel a deep sense of guilt that my death would rob my daughter, and to a lesser extent my son, of a lifetime full of good memories about a loving father. I feel guilt that I cannot control this intangibility, to give my children a guarantee that I will be there for them.

It isn’t that I’m engaging in morbid thinking. I could very well live until I’m 89, or I could try and catch the bus tomorrow and get killed. It’s merely a fear that I have at times, lying awake at night, wondering what kind of a woman my daughter would become without knowing her father. It’s a terrible thing to agonize over, though I suspect it’s something that every firefighter, police officer, and soldier has ruminated on at least once.

I’ve been saving this blog entry for a while, despite knowing for several months how much my life is about to change. In just over two weeks I’m heading to College to get a certificate in journalism. It’s a daunting task, considering the amount of time I’ve been out of academia, and a completely new direction in my career.

I have been working as a glazier in construction for many years now, but I have come to the conclusion in the past year or so that I wasn’t meant to be a tradesperson. It isn’t that the trades aren’t rewarding in certain ways, but that I have come to the full realization as I write this on the completion of my thirty-sixth year on this planet, that I was meant to be a writer.

I know that some people don’t think that journalism is an admirable career choice, and there are some negative impressions of the industry. I felt the same way when I was 18 years-old, trying to make a decision on what to do with my life, and believing that journalists were all ambulance-chasing megalomaniacs, all jostling and shoving one another for personal recognition.

All I really care about is being able to use my writing in some capacity that will fulfill me beyond what construction has managed. The main problem I have had with construction is that I’ve had to adapt to a career that I wasn’t born to do, so I have always struggled to compensate for these genetic shortcomings. I truly believe that people are born with inherent skills they discover as they age, and mine is not found in working with my hands.

Don’t get me wrong. There are times when working construction can be fulfilling. In the moments when you finish another project as a part of a team, you feel a sense of accomplishment and contribution to the world. Working with and relying on your crew, no matter what the weather conditions of snow or rain or blistering heat, can fill one with a sense of belonging and of fraternity. Upon the rare occasion when I would manage to outperform my limited abilities, I even felt a sense of pride and satisfaction.

But I feel most at home in my element when I am writing. And while it would be nice if political commentating could sustain my family financially, I’ve had to take a more proactive approach to getting into the media industry by going to school.

It won’t be easy, either for me or my family. The financial struggle will be severe, as my wife adopts a sudden role change of caregiver at home, to the provider while I go to school. Neither of us really know whether this will work at all. But we both agree that it’s a sacrifice worth making.

I also have some very big news for the future that I won’t be divulging here on my blog. But if you’ve been reading me for a long time, and you want to know more, you can always email me and I’d be happy to hear from you.

Though you should feel no obligation whatsoever, if you want to make a donation to my endeavors you can do so below.

I hope to read many emails from the friends I have made on this blog over the years very soon.

I have got to be the worst email correspondent of all time. Not intentionally, of course, but incidentally and inevitably stemming from my procrastination.

What “procrastination?” one might ask. You write every day, so what’s the big difference between writing a blog entry and answering that email I sent you two months ago?

The difference is significant, actually. When I research and write about a topic, the process is fluid, continuous, and solitary. I don’t need to think of the social interactive dynamic that is reaching out to another person and showing interest in their query. A blog entry is a unidirectional flow of information from brain to internet.

With emails, I find myself forestalling the eventuality of clicking the reply button and sitting in my chair trying to think of ways to respond in a manner that conveys both a sense that I care about the email I am writing, as well as displaying the requisite courtesy of showing an interest in the life of the person writing to me.

Unfortunately, the task always seems too Herculean to my mind. I read and save every email in my inbox, but I often flag the ones I am supposed to respond to. The original plan is usually to answer them after supper, and failing that, the next day. The next day comes and goes, and I plan for the weekend. And once the weekend disappears, the emails usually get buried under new emails that I flag, and the process become cyclic.

It isn’t that I don’t realize how rude it is to go for weeks on end without answering your email. It’s just that the task, albeit a small one at first, grows in weight for every moment I let it languish in the inbox. Although the email sits there, unloved and unanswered, the guilt begins to build inside, simply knowing that the task remains unfinished.

The problem with email is that it’s never finished. Every day somebody from some organization, or a reader of my blog or National Post entries, or some individual who has put me on a “media” mailing list, sends me something that they expect me to answer. It’s a reasonable expectation. But the moment the task of answering today’s emails are completed, it’s only a matter of time before tomorrow’s arrive.

Answering email, then, has become nothing but a chore. A task which must be completed during the day, like showering, brushing one’s teeth, or eating.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy receiving emails, even though I read them, flag them, and then let them gather e-dust. Some of these archives I even pull from the depths of the Mariana Trench and answer them, months out of context, like I’m Ringo Frickkin Starr with a “better late than never” attitude.

But more often than not I simply pacify my guilty conscience by deleting the email entirely, which is sort of like destroying the evidence of contact altogether. Yes, I received your email, but you’ll never know that because I couldn’t summon the mental fortitude to acknowledge it in a short reply.

It is sometimes a mix of pleasure and revulsion to wake up to 30 unread emails in my inbox, knowing that if I don’t at least read and sort them now, there will be twice the “work” to do later.

So if you do intend to send me an email in the future, I welcome your thoughts. Just know that if you get a reply to your question about the G20 summit as the stockings are being hung by the chimney, it’s my way of showing that I care.

It seems like it’s been raining every day since I started working again, and it’s taken me more time to get adjusted to working full-time and writing in the evenings than I thought it would. Honestly, I’m still acclimatizing. Working construction again after a long layoff is kind of like taking up jogging again after sitting on the couch for a few months. When you break the routine, it’s difficult to get the body used to it again.

Today I came home dog tired, sat in front of the computer and looked blankly at the screen. And no matter how long I looked at it, I just didn’t feel like writing about anything. Well, anything of consequence.

The rain had been pouring most of the morning, but began to stop in the afternoon. When I got home, the streets were beginning to dry up, but my place was still pretty dark with the lights out.

I sat down on my bed in the darkness and considered just putting an end to a miserable day right there and then. But suddenly, dramatically, I felt immense warmth on the back of my neck and a bright light began shining in the room, the darkness dissipating like wisps of smoke in the air.

The light grew in intensity and brightness so quickly that it was briefly alarming, and I turned and saw the sun had broken free of the clouds, allowing for a brilliant beam directed at just the right angle to reach me. It was as though the heavens had sent this golden light to refresh my spirits and vitality.

Just as quickly as the light had come, it faded and became pale as the sun fell behind thin clouds again. But the darkness did not return.