Boring...

I am bored. I have lots to do, people to visit, things to see. I have in fact a rather interesting life. There are even times when I wish I was just a little bit less busy. But I am bored with the news.

Just a few years ago I was "preaching' to my students that if they wanted to write better, they needed to write 500 words a day - it didn't matter what they wrote about, or even if the writing was that great. They just needed to practice the craft of writing. I myself was averaging 2000-3000 words a week. I had lists of things to discuss, the news seem to just bubble over with exciting things to think about and then to write about. Not all of it got published on the blog, but I was writing. I felt as if my mind was constantly active.

Alas, the news is no longer providing that level of stimulation. Perhaps it is that Trump dominates/contaminates the international news. The absurdities that are dribbling from that fool's mouth and the mouths of his confederates are seldom worth the effort to try to even guess what he is doing (dare I say thinking?). As the Canadian press has decided that the world can only be viewed through a lens that includes his perspective - the news is boring. Whether it is NAFTA, Korea or climate change -  his presence is so large, that  his shadow dominates everything.

Canadian politics don't seem to be that much more interesting. Yes there is the Kinder Morgan pipeline debate but that debate - like so many other complex Canadian decisions will be made by the Supreme Court. Politicians from all sides will huff and puff, they will threaten to blow down the very fabric of Canada, they will play to their constituents but at the end of the day they will live with what those nine judges say.

There is, of course, the provincial election in Ontario. If I still lived in that province I would find it perhaps an interesting debate, one that was worthy of being fully engaged in, but the election, seen from a distance of 3000 miles, looks like a movie I have seen before. A movie in which the ending is predicable  -no one will be happy a year from now. Perhaps I should be grateful that in Canada major news is when somebody who should not have,  gets invited on a trip with the Prime Minister. I guess that means that nothing too terrible is happening.

British Columbia politics, with the exception of the Kinder Morgan pipeline - are well past being passive and boring. If one was a cynic, perhaps one would wonder if Kinder Morgan is being kept in the public mind to keep our minds away from the more pressing issues of the day - to put us asleep with the mindless repetition of the same positions.

Perhaps it is because I am just jaded, or perhaps I am getting to the old man stage where I am just redundantly and uselessly cranky at everything. I do not want something terrible to happen, I am not like some junky looking for a fix of adrenalin to wake me up in the morning - but some meaningful dialogue about real issues would be refreshing.