Glenn Kubish

It’s the end of the week as we know it, friends. Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.                             1. Downtown vibrancy   The walls of McDougall United Church don’t keep out the sounds from outside, so, a few times during the concert, Ryan Adams would stop and wait for the sirens downtown to subside, joking that the jazz police were on their way to apprehend him.   It was not the experience of going to a classical concert at the Jube or the Winspear where layers of building insulation and good breeding enforce the silence thought best to attract the sublime. If I remember right, the new LRT line outside the Winspear even has a section of special sound dampening equipment built under the tracks to keep the reverberations of a passing train from disturbing the stillness of the concert hall. This wasn’t that. Before he played a note, the artist played off the ...

Happy end of the week, y’all. Besides the return of winter-weary crunchy ice, here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude this week.                     1. Resources   Somehow, I’m finishing up teaching a strategic communications planning course at MacEwan University. I enjoy hanging out in the academy where inquiry is still a thing. In school, I’m still a fish hooked by the question mark. The students are clever, and I’ve had a strong supporting cast for this one-of-a-kind experience. The doc came by to talk about diagnosing things properly, either medical situations or communications challenges. Rely on your heuristics, your shortcuts, as you assess the nature of a problem, he said, but don’t let them become prejudices. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, but keep zebras in mind, he said.   J-P reminded the students there is no such thing as the general public. Be specific, she said. Son shared...

Here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. We keep going, right? Three Things, episode 113:                                            1. Digging   I am drawn to the CN Tower. Not that CN Tower. I mean, Edmonton’s CN Tower at the north end of 100 Street downtown, the original CN Tower. Its name is borderline obsolete, sure. At 26 storeys, it’s not so towering. And the railway company no longer has a presence in the building, even though its logo, the good old twisted paper clip, still adorns the structure at base and tip. When I was a boy, the basement of the building housed the train station and it was from there that trips to visit the Winnipeg grandparents commenced. Waiting for Christmas morning was a snap compared to the agony of waiting for the train to wake up and, abruptly, with a jolt, head east.   “Are you looking for something ...

  From the maelstrom, here are three things that notched some gratitude and happiness this past week. Three Things, episode 112:                         1. Medium/message   The day I realized that all the places I would like to travel to I won’t travel to because as I get older it will be harder to travel to, and that I might have <knock on world> another decade and a half to make tracks, get back to Tulsa, get back to Ottawa and Montréal, see the Maritimes, that day was an eye-opening, bucket-list-editing day. The quantity of time isn’t the same thing as the quality of time. Well, huh, didn’t quite grasp that at 25. Same thing with all the things I would like to understand. It might be a smarter strategy to concentrate my dwindling resources on a few key teachings and then knuckle down and try to get a hold of them. For me, McLuhan’s maxim that the medium is the message is one of those elusive things. It h...