Glenn Kubish

If I had a happiness and gratitude sonar, these would be the three pings from last week.   Three Things, episode 140:                               1. Experts   Before social media and the democratization of knowledge made everyone an expert, there was a class of people called, well, for lack of a better term, experts. Newspaper editors. Doctors. Politicians. University professors. Civil servants.   It wasn’t necessarily the best of times. Many other voices weren’t heard, lots of experience was somehow ruled to be of no value.   I worked in newspapers as the hierarchy of knowledge came crashing down on some bewildered gatekeepers who I can still see walking out through the debris of fallen pillars as the influencers sashayed in. Those technocrats are not the experts I want back, but I do miss some experts. Or, at least, one specific category of expert. I miss the disc jockey. I still pref...

Hello from Edmonton, where, once a week, I try to discern the tracks left behind after things that made me happy or thankful passed through. This week’s podcast is here for the hearing:                                 And for the reading: 1. The Tour The Tour de France has the architecture of a pilgrimage, its peloton a collection of the faithful moving together on the winding road to immortality in the Elysian fields of Paris. The gang is a motley group, at turns jovial and gloomy. Some are pure of heart and body. Some are polluted and penitent. Bowed down like supplicants, they move in their own congregations, recognizable by their various robes and badges. They hear voices in their heads. Together, this colourful ribbon flows through towns and villages, by churches and public houses, each pilgrim carrying water and a simple pouch of food. Chains shuttle like holy beads moving through expert fingers. Carri...

Here are three things that left behind tracks of gratitude and happiness in the maelstrom. Three Things, episode 111:                               1. Socks   I was reading Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech from, wow, what is already, could it really be, six years ago now? Near the end, he takes us to the underworld, calling up the specter of the wandering Odysseus, who has made a never-ending tour stop in Hades to meet the Greek hero Achilles.  Dylan reminds us that Achilles said if he could, he would choose to go back   “...and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is,   king in the land of the dead, hat whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.” I heard the echo of Maya Angelou’s grandmother. She warns her granddaughter about complaining like the customers, Sister Murphy and Brother Thomps...

Happy end of the week and happy Folk Fest is back (more about that next week), friends. Here are three little things from my life that I noticed I noticed made me feel happy or thankful. Three Things, episode 81:                                  1. Flowers   There are days, like last Monday, when my angle on things is obtuse enough to let me make believe that I am underwater, that all of this is underwater, that the sky, as I ride my bike, isn’t as much the sky as the top skin of the ocean stared up at from its asphalt floor. The illusion is enhanced by the flow of automobile traffic that carries along the leviathans of the road, the delivery trucks. Pickups emit inky exhaust. Motorcycles dart in and out of their lanes, rapidly. Boulevard trees sway like seagrass.  Sea anemone, downtown Edmonton At the front of a yard in Glenora, a bee floats through the thin stems and the tiny bell-shaped flo...