Pictures of Kabul

A little late with this blog posting. I blame it on my roomie moving out, giving me some blessed solitude--something very rare on a highly dense military base. My roommate and friend Master Sergeant Ronnie R is headed back to Germany to see his wife and little ones. I hope I do as well with my next roomie. I immediately proceeded to abuse my newfound privacy by staying up late surfing the web, playing video games and watching movies. This is probably one of the reasons that it's wise to double up the rooms. It prevents a sort of natural withdrawal that is natural in such a crowded place. It won't be a problem for long though; any day now I'll get a new roomie. Hope he's as good as the last one.

It's snowing very heavily right now. We're in this nasty cycle of snow/thaw/freeze that leaves the entire place like an ice rink and plays hell with the engineering, cracking the concrete and loading the roofs and structures with ice. It got down to almost -20°C here a few days ago. Who knew it got that cold here? Just another reason why Kabul is such an international tourist mecca I guess. 

Speaking of Mecca, we discovered that toilets used by the Afghan locals have to be oriented so that they don't face Mecca. When this was announced, one of the sharper engineers offered "so which way do they orient the toilets in Mecca?"

In this next four month stint in Kabul, I'm determined to get out and about a little more to see Kabul. The first few months, I stayed close to home, as I felt I lacked the situational awareness to go wandering about Kabul. Also, there's military mindset here (not surprising for a military base, I suppose), that treats the city proper as a battle space. But the reality is that there are thousands of European and North American civilians living in Kabul, usually associated with some type of non-governmental association or another.

That said, you always have to keep your wits and eyes sharp when you're out and about. The biggest danger isn't insurgents, but kidnappers, since the average white guy here is tremendously wealthy compared to your rank-and-file Afghan. So, for example, you don't just hop into anyone's car who claims to be a cab driver. (The taxis here are just regular older-model Toyotas like 90% of the vehicles here.) Some of the guys here have grown beards and wear the scarves and ... so that they blend right in, weather because their job requires them to do so, or they just don't want to stand out. I'm 46 and I still can't grow a beard, plus I'm very white and tall compared to the locals, so I have a gaggle of kids gawking at me wherever I go.

The restaurant was a Lebanese bistro where I was meeting some Afghan friends for lunch. The food was excellent. It was a little uncomfortable having three waiters standing around the table the whole time, sublimely attuned to my most innocuous body language, even to, for example, rearranging the plates on the table so the dish I was reaching for was more conveniently located for me. At times, I felt like a Brit in 19th century India. "Bring me a plate of your finest meats and cheeses. And you-- dance for my amusement."

Afghan people, apart from the occasionally stinkeye, are very friendly. The kids clamor around you where ever you go. When I couldn't find the restaurant and wandered into an alley, these little alley rats offered, in very limited English, to be my bodyguards. To their credit, they somehow took me right where I wanted to go, so I greased their palms with a Yankee dollar and took their picture. 

My Afghan Bodyguards

The Afghan men and children love to have their picture taken. However, it's strictly taboo to take a picture of older girls or women. I've been told I shouldn't even acknowledge them unless I've a reason too.

Oh--and a humorous military logistics anecdote to relate. My friend Bill is the Warehouse guy--you know, keeping the office supplied with pens and paper. So anyway, a couple of days ago, he filled out the form for some stuff including one box of paper clips. I went with him to pick up the stuff, and the Warehouse guy dutifully loads up boxes of paper and a crate of binders, a few packages of pens, etc. And a paperclip. One. I guess the guy took the form pretty literally, where, for paperclips, it requested a Quantity of "1."

"Actually," said Bill, showing immense patience learned oly from years of exposure to military logistics, "I meant one box of paperclips."

"Ohhhhhhhhh."

Or how about this one: one of the Afghan locals working here was turned away from the base recently when he tried to bring a sheep in. There's a lot of locals working here, and the idea was that he was going to slaughter the sheep at lunch time and cook it up. The guard asked him why he didn’t just slaughter it at home or at the butcher, to which the guy replied (with impeccable logic, I might add) that then he would have to carry it here, rather than have lunch walk itself.

As I was clearing up our shared drive the other day, I came across a slideshow put together, I believe, but one of the German engineers that used to work here. There's some fantastic shots here that really portray what it's like here in Kabul. There's some fantastic shots.  Have a look!

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, 1989

Ain't got no picture postcards, ain't got no souvenirs,

My baby, she don't know me when I'm thinking 'bout those years.

-- Tragically Hip, New Orleans is Sinking

After second year chemical engineering at UBC, I couldn't find an industry-related job.  Times were tough for engineers in 1990; doubly tough when recent grads a little older than us were boasting of when companies used to vie for their affections with promises of new cars and ten thousand dollar signing bonuses.  Also, I was and continue to be absolutely abysmal in job interviews.  Seriously, it's like I'm hovering over top of myself, slapping my forehead and thinking "Did you really just say that, you moron?"

What's more I was not completely convinced I'd passed. In first semester I'd gotten 23% and 25% in my calculus courses, although it was aces all the way in Drinking 101. I'd completed the test for the esteemed 40-Beer patch in an astounding 6 hours and 23 minutes.   Joining a frat didn’t help academic matters any.  You needed a 55 average to stay in the game.

So, jobless, I headed back to Winnipeg, where I'd lived and bartended until the year before.  My buddy Jamie had a pad on Manitoba and Salter in the North End (or as the media refer to it, "Winnipeg's troubled North End").  Jamie was a big feller and he bounced at a couple of the more questionable joints in town.  The house where he lived was pretty much a tear-down and you never really knew all the faces who were crashing there.

It was 1989. Nirvana was trying to make it in the Seattle bar scene, and the internet was still just text-driven bulletin boards populated by nerds. The 90s were out there,  just waiting to happen.

I went down to the Unemployment Office and perused the little indexed cards looking for something I was remotely qualified to do.  There was nothing for engineering, but there was a job requiring a guitar player and another looking for a bartender.  Bingo!

My prospective employer, David M, ran a pawn shop on Main Street in Winnipeg, a street comprised primarily of lo-rent hotels, bars, pawn shops and discount stores.  Like any pawnshop, guitars are a good chunk of the business (what does this tell you about guitar players?), along with jewelry, small appliances and stereo equipment.  David needed someone to keep the axes tuned and demonstrate them to prospective buyers.  It was close to where I lived, and I could handle keeping a bunch of guitars tuned.  And the job interview was a lot less stressful than Proctor and Gamble's.  I took the job.

This ain't it, but it looked a lot like this.

David and Karen were your stereotypical old Jewish couple who would argue back and forth in Yiddish all day, regardless of who was in the store.  I liked them a lot.  And they liked me.  I was honest and showed up to work sober (if occasionally hung over).  The clientele was primarily natives, who, along with Eastern European immigrants, comprised the dominant ethnicity of the North End.

One time, some guy pulled up in a Caddy looking for a radio for his garage  "Just something cheap" he kept saying.  Whatever David put in front of him he'd balk at the price, and said if he wanted to pay that he'd go to "regular" store.  Well David didn’t like that and he took the radio and smashed it on the counter and said "There!  That's what I'd do rather than sell it to you.  Now get out of my store." 

Nights and weekends, I worked the Manor Hotel just down the street.  This may have the dubious distinction of being the biggest dive in the North End.  It was mostly haunted by old-man Ukrainians and Poles who lived upstairs drawing welfare.  The beer was literally so bad that I couldn't even give it away to my friends, who were not exactly folks with the most discriminating of tastes when it came to alcohol.  Not a word of a lie, I had to manually remove cockroach legs from the beer before serving sometimes.  I've no idea how they got into the beer lines.

Every morning at 11:00, four rubbies were lined up at the front door waiting for opening.  They'd file in to the same dark table at the back and order a glass of beer between them.  Their clothes were stuck to their bodies, they'd been wearing them so long, and their breath was the sickly-sweet of decay.  Every one would savour one "virgin" sip from the glass before pulling out the bottle of rubbing alcohol and topping 'er up.  When the liquid in the glass was clear--pure propyl alcohol--it was my cue to kick them out.  They'd spend the rest of the day under the railway bridge.

"Killer" had some kind of degenerative muscular or nerve condition.  He was a young fellow, a couple of years older than me, though shriveled and bent by his condition. He'd piss himself and not even know it, so he didn't always smell the best.  Plus he was a homeless alcoholic.  He'd come in a shoot pool a while when his check came in, and boast about how he could kick anyone's ass on the table.  Friendly guy.  I came out at closing time one time and he was lying the street.  I guess a bunch of thugs had come by and kicked the shit out of him and caved in his face pretty good.  I called the ambulance and saw him off, but never knew what became of him after that.  That's the North End for you right there, though.  I grew up there so I never realized at the time how crazy it was compared to just about anywhere else. 

My evenings were spent with drinking with various bouncers, bikers, gangsters and ne'er-do-wells.  There as Adolph--half German and half Apache. He didn't like to drink because it got in the way of his fighting.  And Steve was tougher than a sack full of frozen hammers, but had a heart of gold.  He got into the heroin though.  And my buddy Jamie was the biggest of them all, though that meant taking on all comers.  He even got a busted beer bottle in the throat that summer, but pulled out of it OK.  I have this surreal memory of us all doing acid one night and heading down to what passed for a carnival in the North End--a few rides and hucksters set up in the Loblaws parking lot--and then partying with the carnies until the wee hours.

It wasn't exactly a sustainable lifestyle, or even a safe one. I was 24 and the choice was stark:  was I going to be an engineer, or run with the bad boys? It all depended on that letter from UBC--pass or fail--and until I got it I lived in a mélange of two worlds and nothing seemed real. I think maybe that's why I went so crazy that summer, why I marched jaw-first into the harshest situations I could uncover--to make it real, to banish the fog of my future by experiencing the now in all its exquisite insanity. Maybe, here in Kabul, I'm still doing that.

I got the letter from UBC late in the summer and was incredibly relieved to find I'd managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat and manage a 57% average, and was soon cloistered once again in the hallowed halls of UBC.  I never went back to Winnipeg after that.  But images from that summer are still seared into my cortex 20-plus years later. 

From Disneyland to Kabul in One Week

Well a belated Happy New Year to you.  I'm currently sitting in a lounge in Dubai Airport enjoying what will probably be my last beer for a few months and preparing to fly out to Kabul at four in the morning.  It's eight at night now.  So there might actually be a couple more beers.  It's back to the war so that means back to the blog!

Dubai Airport.  Fannnnn-cy.

Meh.  It's a blend.

My R&R was awesome.  Alice, my six year old, wouldn't let go of me for days after I got back.  Oscar, 8, wanted to play soccer with me everyday.  Even Helen, my wife, was happy to see me.  We had a fantastic Christmas and New Years with friends and family.  The highlight of the trip (apart from seeing my family of course) was the trip to Disneyland in California, the Happiest Place on Earth. 

The weather was fantastic and we had five days of sun, swimming and exploring Disneyland and that other park right next door, the name of which currently eludes me.  When you walk into Disneyland the first the thing you hit is Main Street.  Not just any Main Street but the apotheosis of Main Street.  Main Street USA.  I suppose you could get all cynical and point out that Main Street is just a ruse for extracting money from tourists' pockets on the way to the rides, but I found it strangely moving after four months in Kabul.  City Hall, the movie theatre, the ice cream store, the parades, the olde-style trams and horse-drawn buggies, and a hundred-foot tall, gloriously decorated Christmas Tree and the Magic Castle in the distance. 

Main Street, USA, Disneyland

The kids were climbing over themselves getting autographs from all the Disney characters (especially Alice!), ogling the mouth-watering candy, and figuring out which direction to go exploring. 

Everyone is always smiling in Disneyland. The best thing is that, if a child starts crying for some reason, he is immediately cordoned off by a bevy of dapperly-dressed dandies in orange and white striped suits and hats who turn and face the crowd forming a human wall that we might not be subjected to the sight of human misery.  They slowly back up, and, if the child does not cease his wailing then the family are backed through a gate and pushed behind the grand façade amongst the empty palettes, garbage bins and forklifts and expunged from the Magic Kingdom.  Such is their dedication to a happy experience for all. 

Smile ... Or Else!

There's  a lot of wheelchairs at Disneyland.  I think you must get some kind of line bypass or something, because the place is crawling with folks pushing around wheelchairs occupied by people who were forever getting up out of the wheelchair.  There was also a lot of strollers (they have designated stroller parking at Disneyland) filled with kids who were, frankly, too big to be in a stroller.  The wheelchairs and strollers are excellent for navigating crowds.  Just point your wheeled device and push to clear the way in front of you.

Another cultural observation is that those Tap Out brand T-shirts they make only come in in three sizes:  XXL, XXXL and muu-muu. 

I was, of course, very interested in the engineering aspect.  Actually Walt Disney called his design team Imagineers, a moniker that might seem pretentious unless you take into account the grand scale of the place and exquisite attention to detail.  Even the garbage bins in the different parts of the park were designed to fit the theme (how can you tell I'm an environmental engineer).  They could have easily put in painted plastic fences around the rides, but opted instead for beautifully realized wrought iron creations.

We need a mountian for this ride?  No prob, we'll just build one.  Let's call it Bear Mountain.
Oh--and let's make it shaped like a giant bear.

And the animatronics!  Splash Mountain was my favourite.  I don't even know what Disney movie it's based on. Brer Rabbit?  It's probably an old movie that has some politically incorrect component to it so they don’t show it anymore, but the singing wolves and rabbits were really a wonder to behold.  The best part was that Helen always situated herself in the seat she thought would get the least wet and inevitably got more soaked than the rest of us. That was revenge for Helen making me go on the California Screamin' roller coaster.  That is some roller coaster.  And the Ferris wheel scared the crap out of me too.  Your car shifts suddenly as it moves around the track.

Scary Roller Coaster and Ferris Wheel.  Look closely and you can
see how the cars in the Ferris Wheel shift as they turn.

Oscar was oddly fascinated by the empty, little movie cinema on Main Street that showed the original Mickey Mouse movie, Steamboat Willie, from 1928 over and over again.  Every might, on the way home, the kids would stop and watch it and laugh all the way through.  Hats off to Walt Disney is all I can say.  As far as our family was concerned that place really is magic.

Where I'm headed, big booms in the sky at night mean somehting completely different. 

So now I'm on my third pint after saying good-bye to my family, flying to LA, a four-hour stop-over, a 17-hour flight to Dubai, an eight-hour stopover, and an upcoming flight to Kabul, arriving Monday morning.  When I walk out of Kabul Airport there will be machine guns trained on me and I'll know I'm back to the war.

That said, I've got friends there, and I'm looking forward to seeing them.  Back to Canada House BBQs, working out at the gym, reading and writing, and doing some important work.

It was hard leaving though.  Harder than the first time.  Helen and I try to gloss over the fact that I'm heading for a war zone, but the kids sense it.  They know.  They've got it tougher than me.  Helen has to manage the family by herself, and the kids have to make do without a father.

Well, now I'm on my fourth pint and getting all maudlin and having to rely on spellchecker more and more so I'll sign off here.  Talk to you soon.

Epilogue

Arrived safe and sound in Kabul as advertised.  I knew I as in Afghanistan, because we were stuck on the plane for the better part of an hour while they tried to find some steps so we could get off the plane.  Then the power went out in Customs...twice. A gorgeous sunset as we flew in.  The picture from the through the airplane window doesn't really do it justice.

Sunrise over Afghanistan

Mountains south of Kabul from the air.

But enough about me, what do YOU think about me?

Out of the basement

And into your brain.

     -- Blood Clot

I've just realized that I've been blogging away for some time now without ever discussing my favourite subject: me.  As many of you know, I can go on about me for hours.  The subject is just an endless source of fascination for me.  Many's the time, in days of yore, I'd hold entire kitchen parties spellbound with tales of me.

Boring, compared to me.

Most of you probably know me a the piano player from Skystone from all those years reeling off Newfie tunes at the old Trap and Gill in downtown Vancouver, but I'm actually primarily a guitar man. 

I sang and played guitar for a few years with Blood Clot ("Out of the Basement and Into Your Brain"), with my good friends Shayne MacDonald, Corey MacDonald and Dan Jamieson but unfortunately (or fortunately) that was in the Dark Ages before YouTube so no record exists.

Around 1995, Blood Clot was in some Battle of the Bands at the World Famous Astoria Hotel on Hastings Street (aka Skid Row) in Vancouver.  We were pretty loud and the regulars complained that it made the dust rain from the rotting acoustic ceiling tiles when we played.  S'OK though we'd always buy 'em more beer.  Then they loved us.

Cheap TVs in the parking lot, but you didn't hear it from me.

One time one of the ladies of the night working the area staggers into the joint and stops in the middle of the dance floor, stares up at us, and starts grooving. The bouncer ran up to throw her out. "What?" she complained, "I fixed outside."  Little did she realize the needle was still sticking out of her leg.  Good times. 

Blood Clot was a pretty good band, and might have made a name for ourselves if any of us had have been born with a motivation bone. As it was, I quit the band when I realized even the drummer was getting laid more than me.  That's what I said.  The drummer.  I know, right?


Here's the Blood Clot song "Rage" (audio only).  I'm not that angry anymore.  Really.

After the Clot, there was the insanity the depression, the booze, the women, the stark nights of terror, before joining Skystone through my good buddy Adrian Duncan.  Adrian Duncan is a fascinating fellow and one of the most incredible musicians I've had the pleasure to play with. But as we are talking about me, we shall dispense with the subject of Adrian.  I switched to mostly piano with this band, figuring was that a piano player should get laid more than a drummer.


Anyways the hard thing about Skystone was that, despite playing two instruments--piano and guitar--I was still the worst musician in the band.  Adrian plays about ten instruments, sings, conducts, entertains the crowd and has forgotten more songs than I'll ever know.  Saul Schneider and Mary Brunner bring the house down with their fiddling.  Gary Kennedy was a percussionist extraordinaire and had a kickass R&B voice.  Even the bass player had me beat.  Kenny Ogilvie didn’t sing, didn't play any other instruments, and pretty much just stood there like a mannequin.  But I've been playing with the guy for more than ten years now and I swear he's never hit a bad note.  Anyways, clearly I couldn't stay in a band where my inherent magnificence was not immediately recognizable.  

Skystone.  This drummer got laid more than me too.

So me and my good buddy Adrian started up a caving band wiht buddy Pete Curtis called Dangeous Dick and the Duckbusters.

We met jamming in Resonance Cave, Vancouver Island.

We are probably, it must be said, the most famous ever band that sings songs exclusively about caves.  Probably, it must be said, the only band that sings songs exclusively about caves.  Also, since the band has no drummer, the drummer doesn't get laid more than me.  Ha!

Dangerous Dick and the Duckbusters.  Adrian Duncan on the right.

Me doing a bubblehead.  This is the kind of stuff you have to do when you got no talent.

Here's one of favourite Dangerous Dick tunes.  Snappy little number featuring Adrian on madnolin and banjo.  And bass.  And singing.  Dammit, Adrian, am I even on this one?  

	Dangerous Dick & the Duckbusters - Mole in a Hole .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

We've got three CDs under our belt so far and have played internationally (and by internationally, I mean an hour's drive south of the border in Bellingham.  Still counts though. You can buy our CDs at the Cancaver website.  All proceeds to the Canadain Cave Conservancy.


I've had the pleasure of jamming with so many great friends over the years, and I'm looking forward to many more years of jamming.  Maybe even with my kids. Like Bach.  He had like fifteen kids and they'd all jam.

Jamming with good friends Yo Thornton (harp), Derek Miller (drums) and some dude from The Odds.
A great memory.

Sucks that I can't play over here though.  One of the magical things about music is its ability to bring people together.  I'm sure if we cranked some Judas Priest, those Taliban would throw down there arms and start giving 'er one of these...

Richard Simmons rocking the frizz-cut.  Oops, I mean Ronnie James Dio

When I get back from Afghanistan, as a gift to myself, I'm buying myself a Gibson ES-335

Alex Lifeson of Rush, playing a 1976 Gibson ES-335.
Still love all those Rush songs...that Geddy doesn't sing in.

But enough about me, what do you think about me?  Feel free to provide comments about me below.