BursonBoom

Dr. Tomorrow. That’s the title Frank bestowed upon himself. He was, of course, not a real doctor of anything.

He was what people commonly referred to as a “futurist.” Did a lot of corporate gigs. Motivational speaking, conferences, promotional events—that sort of thing.

He’d get his audiences all jazzed up on some amazing new technology. One that would, no doubt, change the very landscape of the the future. Once he had them worked into a real frenzy, imagining a brave new world with endless possibilities and universal spandex jackets, he whip some device out from under the lectern. “But this in not the distant future I’m talking about,” he’d declare. “This is here right now. Today! Sony will have this in homes with months.”

It was admittedly a great shtick. He got a lot of mileage out of it.

Frank and I had this sort of connection that nobody would ever know about. That is, unless I told them.

Frank and I each got our start in the same place, albeit twenty-five years apart.

Maisonneuve Broadcasting in Montreal belonged to Geoff Stirling. Stirling, a Newfoundlander who first worked as a stringer for Time and The Chicago Tribune, and eventually blossom into a bit of a media magnate—owned several broadcast properties in Newfoundland as well as Maisonneuve in Montreal.

Back in 1959, he hired Frank to manage CKGM, a popular Montreal AM radio station. Frank and Stirling used to hang out and trip on acid. Together they’d launch CHOM FM, one of the first FM operations in Canada. Like so many other FM stations, CHOM FM started as a bit of an underground attraction that became the voice of the hippy revolution. Its cultural influence persisted in Montreal until the late 1980s, before the station was cannibalized by proliferating specialty stations along the dial. That, and a decision by the CRTC to prohibit the use of French on CHOM owing to the fact its license specified English broadcast. What had been the characteristic patois of Montreal, constantly heard on CHOM, the “Franglais” spoken everywhere, was forbidden. Not a word of French could be spoken on CHOM.The station would never be the same after that.

Anyway, that’s what Frank and I had in common, to start with. My first real job came in the form of writing copy for CKGM AM and CHOM FM. Hundreds of thirty-second commercials for jeans, supermarkets, and greek restaurants.

Frank and I would eventually cross paths in Vancouver in the late 1980s when I used to visit him on his geodesic dome houseboat, festooned with satellite dishes and packed with all the latest gizmos. Frank’s wife, writer Carole Baker and I both contributed regularly to Paul Andrews’ publications, Media West and Media Wave magazines. I served as editor for Media Wave, a bi-monthly magazine that focused on the emerging Internet and related new media concerns.

The little circle grew when I met and married the eventual mother of my kids. After finishing a philosophy degree at Memorial University in St John’s, she worked a summer for Geoff Stirling on a TV documentary about German philosophers. We connected after that, when I hired her to to work as a junior writer at Vancouver’s Business Report where I held down the job of managing editor.

We fell in love, married, and had two kids. But only months after our second child came into the world, she presented as a paranoid schizophrenic. Things got clinical. Her mental illness left a huge blast radius.

Stories, they say, are supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Writers are supposed to weave order and meaning from raw chaos. I guess that’s why I go back to the Frank Ogden thing, back to my radio and magazine days, and the pathway of connections winding through the decades. I see symmetry. But this time there’s no ribbon to tie a moral bow around the story.

Frank and Carole are both gone. So is Geoff Stirling, years past. My wife and I divorced and the children went their own way. We never speak.

I moved on. Worked as a freelancer for decades, remarried, found a new path.

Funny now I look at it. Frank and his sparkling future and all of the ties that bound us, all just fading memories. Dr. Tomorrow has become nothing more than a part of my past.

This place is no longer the city where I grew up. We’re going back to the 1960s, when the population stood at half a million. Today it’s five times that.

The neighbourhoods of my youth have been decimated. None of the families who lived here remain. They’ve all scattered, driven out by high real estate prices. An entire community on the west side simply gone in a generation.

The relentless construction that never keeps up with in-migration, the traffic, the appalling lack of affordable housing, and a culture that no longer embodies the civility it once did… People brush past you on the street without a word, not even a brief glance of recognition, as though you don’t even exist, or that you are no more part of their day than a fire hydrant. At bus stops they keep their eyes buried in their portable devices, their hearing sealed off by ear buds. In a region of two-and-a-half million people, individual isolation seeps ever more into the character of the place. 

Maybe I’m just getting old, but this city no longer has the hold on me it once did. My parents are gone, as are my aunts and uncles, and the coterie of friends and associates who made up their generation. My cousins, too, have moved away, and most of the kids I grew up with. Two brothers remain. That’s all.

Then there is the ubiquitous presence of how it used to be. I walk through memories every day, the places of my childhood, old family homes, parks and schools and streets of my yesteryears. At times I feel like a tourist in my own past. I feel vaguely out of place, not dressed right for the event.

Increasingly, I feel almost trapped by these surroundings, by the routine, by all of the in-the-box habits, by my inability to escape the deeply ingrained expectations of the daily routine. I am diseased by it.

The juxtaposition of this growing disorientation and entrapment by habit— it grinds much more noticeably now than it did a decade ago. The place is no longer flush with attraction for me. So I have been more inclined to notice its flaws and blemishes.

When we travel lately, I no longer look forward to returning home, other than to sleep in my own bed and reunite with our dog. But this experience could be real anywhere. I also see the place, for the first few days on return, with a different perspective. It can’t offer the history, culture, and civilization I enjoy and which can be found only in other parts of the world. This is a young place, built of wood, and more recently of shiny metal and glass, but there are no bricks or stones of the centuries past to be found. 

It is a noisy place now, and each time we go away, only to return a few weeks later, this place feels more irritating. 

I have been unable to write for several years. It is only now, with the prospect of moving from here, that I can pay even the slightest attention to the muse. That I can at least hear the voice again, even for a few moments, lifts me.

If you were to ask why do I write? I write, not with ambition, not with intention, not to some artifice, but because it is what engages me to my core. It is what I know…

Even at four years of age I never understood it. The whole story around Jesus and all. My eye rolling reaction to Christian mythology aggravated the physically uncomfortable act of attending church.That’s aside from its being dreadfully boring.

My mother would take us to church when we were little kids. She’d dress us in woollen shorts, shirt, tie and jacket. I hated wool. It  made my skin crawl. She’d cinch the neck tie so tight I’d feel like my head would pop any second.

She’d guide us into a hard, cold pew. I’d squirm in my seat the whole time. I never knew which book to pick up. Was it the red one or the blue? Then I’d fumble with the onion skin pages laden with tiny print, struggle to find the right text. By the time I got there, the singing or the reading would be half over. Much to my benefit, because even today I deeply fear singing in public. 

Nor did I have any interest in the stories they told. I can only recall images of sheep. It seemed utterly impossible, some of the nonsense they recounted. The only piece I thought was cool was the one about Moses parting the red sea. That was visual. I imagined being able to step up to a churning wall of water and pick off a fish. Like visiting the aquarium, but better. 

Mercifully, we’d only be forced to sit still for half the service, after which we kids were herded into the church basement to get the child’s version of Christianity. The place smelled like stale soup and the games and crafts held utterly zero interest for me. I’d have much rather been at home watching cartoons on our old black and white television. Even the lamest of lame shows that aired on Sunday mornings would have been better than church and Sunday school. 

To make matters worse, most if not all of the kids in the neighbourhood also had to suffer through this kind of abuse. So even if you could somehow slip out of going to church, there was nobody around for a game of road hockey, not until after they returned home, later in the morning.

The damned thing was, my mother described herself as a humanist. I guess she might have been vaguely hopeful that the preposterous nonsense underpinning deity cultism might just be true. Later, she would explain that she thought we should be exposed to religion early so that we would not find ourselves attracted to some kind of cult later on. We were always given a broad education. We were given the opportunity to think for ourselves.

She stopped pushing us to attend after only a few years, which is how I happened to learn how bad Sunday morning cartoons were. Still, far better than going to church.