IN THE END, WE'RE ALL JUST CLERKS

The Good Shepherd is a great movie. Big in its themes, its ideas, its executions. Grand in its interweaving of the political and personal, the clerical and the tragic. Robert DeNiro's second film as a director -- after A Bronx Tale, years ago -- was dismissed by most critics and shunned by audiences when it opened in North America around Christmastime, but I'm telling you, The Good Shepherd is the real deal.

What do we owe ourselves? What do we owe our countries? Our families? How do we live with the decisions that we make? The film, written by Eric Roth, utilizes the complex prism of the C.I.A. to tell this story and ask those questions. We watch Matt Damon's character evolve through college and into a career C.I.A. man, step-by-step, in flashbacks and real-time, and through it all Damon maintains the same stoic, almost grim demeanour: rarely does a smile flash across this man's face. Rarely can we tell what he's thinking. Most of the time it seems that he doesn't know what he's thinking, either. That's the point. Lost in a labryinth of lies and deceptions, maintaining a moral code at all costs, he eventually comes to a point where loyalties intersect; where the right thing to do is impossible to ascertain; where good judgement merges with darker, fiercer instincts. One where we live with the decisions we are forced to make. Or choose to make, which can be even more tragic.

If The Godfather used the Mafia as a metaphor for the American experience, then The Good Shepherd utizilizes the C.I.A. for similar purposes. (In that regard, it's an interesting counterpoint to Norman Mailer's massive, majestic 1991 novel of the C.I.A., Harlot's Ghost.) Is it as good as The Godfather? No, but that's fine; almost no films are. But Francis Ford Coppola is one of The Good Shepherd's producers, and the film aims at similar ideals -- explorations of business and family, fidelity and trust in a world where neither notion applies, but both are expected.

The film is long, and slow, and it unfolds. It develops, then envelops. Everything is restrained, held-back, kept inside. Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, John Turturro, Billy Crudup, even Joe Pesci (!) pop up, but Matt Damon is the anchor. His performance is so low-key that it will probably put half the audience to sleep (as might the film, truth be told), but that's the point: these are men engaged in the most nefarious undertakings known to modern governments, and yet they must perform and act as if they nothing more than ordinary bureaucrats. These days, we want our actors to emote; Damon doesn't. He acts. Which might be even harder.

It has the density and complexity of a great novel, this film does, and near the end of the film, when things come together, when the pieces fall into place, it attains a sad and simple majesty that, yes, rivals The Godfather for emotional impact.

It's not for everyone, this film. It's pacing and its structure and its emotional complexity harken back to a different time, when people went to films for different reasons. Movies today, even the good ones, the Academy Award nominated stuff, relish and revel in pyrotechnics, computer-generated or otherwise. We want to see our actors explode with rage and anger; we want to see dramatic tensions unleashed in violence, verbal and physical. This is a film centred on quiet conversations in crowded bars. On the things left unsaid between fathers and sons. On mysterious looks across midnight streets. On the way a hat is placed just so, being noticed only by those who are trained to notice such things.

And it doesn't flaunt its depth, and its greatness. Its validity. That's the thing -- this flick is valid. My favorite line, a great line, the line of all lines, comes midway through the film, when DeNiro's character, one of the first C.I.A. recruiters at the dawn of the Cold War, hobbled by sickness, slumps into his car. He's explaining to Matt Damon where as an agent he'll go and what he'll have to do. Idealism doesn't come up. A film that previously allowed its characters to trumpet the necessity of God, and country, and stopping the spread of evil throughout the world, now dispenses with such obvious bullshit.

"In the end, we're all just clerks," DeNiro says. Offhand, almost.

And the car drives off.

That may sound like a throwaway line, but the timbre of it, the tone of it, the nonchalance, says it all.

In the end, we're all just clerks.

The tragedy of the film, the beauty of it, is that at the end you're left wondering: if that's the case, then was it all worth it?

ALMOST VIVID, DAILY

The news that the wife of John Edwards, Democratic contender for the presidential nomination, has had her breast cancer return hit me like a punch in the gut. Not because I particularly care about Edwards, or his quest for the presidency, but because cancer is one of those things that cut across all racial and national and class lines, and it demands to be heard. It cuts to the chase, cancer does. And Edwards's wife had supposedly been given the all-clear awhile back, and here comes the cancer, back for more. Stage Four: treatable, but not curable.

I think cancer should probably become a curse word. Put it in Bartlett's Quotations under Profanities, or Slang, or wherever the 'bad words' come to rest. It needs to be the word we say when we stub our toes, or hammer our thumbs, or forget to add the fabric softener. "Cancer!" we should say. Everything else sounds kind of silly in comparison. "Jesus Christ!" we say. I mean, shit, Jesus was, by the sounds of things, a pretty good guy. "Motherfucker!" others might blurt out. But c'mon -- who knows anybody that's fucked their mother? And why would that piss us off, necessarily? (Unless it was our own mother, I guess.)

But cancer.

Stephen King was going to name his novel Dreamcatcher 'Cancer', until his wife forbade it, saying that the book would then be practically begging for bad luck. Because what else is cancer but bad luck, ominous music playing in the background, the sound of a tree against your windowpanes on a dark and wintry night? It's a lottery played by fate, or body chemistry, or lifestyle, that chucks the dice and wishes you luck before it heads on out to another house, only to return, months or years later, still as potent and primal as ever.

I try not to think about cancer too much, which means only a few times a day. Self-pity is not an option, especially since I'm not the one with the disease. But self-pity seems to be what humans are built to execrete, then endure, so sometimes it can be a challenge. The thing is, this disease truly is everywhere. We're waiting for the CT-scan results for ovarian cancer in the oncologist's office in Manila last summer and on the TV is Larry King and he's showing a retrospective of interviews with Patsy Ramsey (former-suspect in her daughter Jon Benet's death) on the occasion of her death from ovarian cancer. ("Nice. Let's change the channel, shall we.") A month or so ago Angelina Jolie's mother dies of ovarian. ("Hmm. Wonder who's on Conan.") Turn on the news the other day and Maria Shriver is chatting about cancer with Sheryl Crow and everybody's skirting around the issue of how much time Edwards' wife has left. ("Right. Idol should be starting about now.")

And that's just from the famous folk. You sit in the doctor's office and watch the glum and frightened faces of young women, mothers, grandmothers, workers. Their kids play at their feet, oblivious. Outside the sound of the street maintains its usual hum. Life endures.

There's a sign in that office. 'My Life Has Gotten Better Since I Learned I Had Cancer' it says. You gotta be fucking kidding me, I thought, when I first read it. I've read it a bunch of times since then. Again and again. Read it until it started to make some kind of sense. I don't have cancer, so it's not truly intended for my eyes, but I know someone who does, so I've taken the liberty of studying its axioms.

It makes sense to me now, a little. Things become telescoped. Days are more intense. Fears are more acute. Tears are more real, and genuine, and accepted, if not earned. (After all, if tears are going to come, they might as well be for cancer.) Perspective becomes total. Difficult decisions do not seem so difficult. Excuses no longer seem as valid. Everything becomes intense. Almost vivid, daily.

The strange paradox is that cancer brings sickness and disease and decay and, most of all, death, to the forefront, but by doing so, it allows you to become more enveloped by life. You truly understand the yin and the yang of it all. (You don't necessarily accept it, or like it, but you can understand it. Slightly.) You marvel about the unfathomably minor things we worry about, focus on, obsess over. You appreciate the grace of mobility. You see the endgame brought up close, so soon. You understand that today is here, and now, and in your hands.

SO MANY TOMORROWS -- TEN YEARS ON

Arriving in the mail here in the Philippines -- alongside my brand-spanking new Ontario driver's license -- was a short story my mom found stuck in some box in the basement, a story I wrote around ten years ago and published, apparently, in a York University Fine Arts fanzine.

I say 'apparently' because I don't remember even writing this story, and I certainly don't recognize the rather strange illustrations that accompany the text. (I sure as hell didn't draw them, and whoever did was probably smoking crack. The bad crack, not the good crack.) It could have been for MyTake, the film department's magazine started up by my friend Eric and a few others, but why would they have stuck a short story in a cinema journal? There's no other pieces alongside my photocopied story, no masthead, no contributors list. As if it emerged in that box, whole and complete, waiting to be found.

Irregardless, here it is, my blast from the past.

I remember writing stuff back then and thinking: This will be interesting to read ten, twenty years from now -- a snapshot of who I was and what I was thinking. (Come to think of it, I still think like that.

It's not even really a narrative, actually; more of a character piece. About an old man who is going through his voluminous stack of diaries that he has faithfully recorded for the past fifty years. He finds an entry from his wedding night, at the age of twenty-two (older than I was when I wrote it). He is ecstatic. His life is all ahead of him. It can't get better than this, he thinks. And the old man, looking back at his younger self's words, agrees -- it didn't get better. That was the peak. After that, at some point in time, the old man's wife got sick, got cancer, died. And now he has all these empty days to look forward to. (The piece is called So Many Tomorrows, a title that literally makes me cringe -- but what the hell. If you can't be sophomoric when one is a sophomore, when can you, right?)

My younger self was right, too -- it is a snapshot of who I was and what I was thinking about.

Trying to turn my own rather mundane, ordinary Ontario upbringing into something simultaneously larger and smaller than itself. Remembering the details of who I was and where I came from and trying to elevate such observations into something universal. The story is set in Freemont, Ontario, a fictional town that later served as the centrepiece of a series of linked short-stories I wrote. (I even sent them out to a few publishers, receiving a few letters that said, essentially: "Um, no.") Based on St.Catharines, Fort Erie, and Manotick, all Ontario towns and cities, it was my own attempt to fuse various writers' styles -- namely, Ross Lockridge, Jr., Don Robertson, Alice Munro, and, especially, Sherwood Anderson -- with my own clumsy attempts at encapsulating all that I knew and thought and believed about small-town life. Various St.Catharines stores and street names pop up. I can see which authors' styles I was swiping from. I can sense what I was trying to do, even if I don't think I pulled it off.

Looking at it objectively, the piece is pretty terrible: overdone, maudlin, emotional. I like the writing itself -- the pacing, the rhythm -- but nothing happens, and what does happen dwells in its own moroseness.

But I have to say.

It feels like it was written by an old soul. What was a twenty-one year old kid doing writing about an old man who's looking back, dejected and defeated, at the best years of his life? What did I know about sickness, or disease, or death?

As I said, I have no recollection of writing it, so reading that his wife died of cancer, that he kissed her 'shaved head', kind of threw me for a loop.

I've had plenty of experience with cancer in the last year-and-a-half, something I'm sure I never, ever would have imagined back in 1996. (Where I did get the idea that people with cancer shaved their heads? Was I that naive? Didn't I know that the hair fell out from the chemo? Maybe not. Disease was a story-tool, not a reality.)

Eerie, a little bit. Reading that piece. An old man looks back on his life and his wife with cancer, realizing, now, that there's nothing left for him anymore. And here I am, having now actually experienced what that twenty-one year old kid was simply using as ingredients for what he thought would make an interesting, emotional story.

I can see now that I was trying to write about that which I did not know. Aging, grief, the remembrance of youth past. I had experienced none of that. I was trying to be a fiction writer. I was trying to imagine everything. I couldn't have imagined that even life sometimes outdoes and one-ups one's own imagination.

And here, in this story, the old man is wondering what he would tell his younger self. And here I am -- not old, no, but older -- wondering what I would say to my younger self, the one who wrote the story about the older man talking to the younger man.

Weird, weird, weird.

Boxes within boxes. Characters within characters. Myself, inhabiting each.

Writing is a window into another world, but, for the writer, reading one's own work is also a glimpse into one's self -- another self, a younger self. "Oh, that's what I was thinking about," we say. On one level we're looking at the technical craft of what we were trying to accomplish; on another level, a deeper level, the place where the writing begins, where the emotion orginates, we're recollecting all that was inside of us, and what we were trying to say, and why.

Strange.

Reading is all about and always about getting inside somebody else's head in the hope of understanding what's going on inside of your own. Reading one's own writing is akin to delving inside of your own head, refracted and removed by distance, time, maturity.

I actually haven't read the whole piece straight through. I've looked at bits and pieces, in and out of order. Read some passages here and there. It's only four, five pages long, but there's a lot of stuff lurking between those lines, and I'll save them for another tomorrow.

WHY PROFESSIONAL PING-PONG PLAYERS GET NO, I MEAN NO, RESPECT, AND WHAT WE, AS A PEOPLE, CAN DO ABOUT IT

I'm not saying that I'm a fanatical follower of ping pong, but if I happen to catch a match on TV I'll watch it for a moment or two, and because it's on TV in Asia a hell of a lot more often than it's on the air back home, I've noticed something important over the past few years: the players get no, I mean no respect.

Here's what I mean.

In the west, table tennis has mostly been relegated to the rec-room of middle-class suburbanites, Friday night fodder for the almost-tween-and-under set. (If you were a Canadian in your mid-twenties who was freakishly adept at ping-pong I'd be slightly worried.) In the east, however, for some reason, at some point in the dark and distant past (because of the famous Nixon ping-pong diplomacy of the seventies, perhaps?), table tennis has taken off as a genuine, unabashedly intense, fiercely competitive,well, sport.

But here's the thing.

The sad thing.

The almost almost pathetic thing.

So unbearable that it hurts to write about it.

These professional athletes, competing at the highest levels of their chosen craft, have to go and pick up their own ping-pong balls when they fly off the table.

Which they do after each and every point, because have you ever seen the way pros play ping-pong? Forrest Gump's got nothing on these guys, let me tell you. Balls are flying everywhere all the time, in all possible directions. The rallies in table tennis are unbelievably short compared to tennis, two or three back-and-forths between the players at the most, whereas a good volley in tennis can sometimes go on for twelve, fifteen whacks before the ball finally hits the net.

And what happens when that happens, the ball hitting the net?

Well, in country-club tennis, a young boy or girl races from the sidelines and grabs the ball and gets it out of the way, or throws it back to the players, or hands them a towel, a wet one. They might even fetch a double-latte from Starbucks for Serena for all I know, or a muffin for Mcenroe. A coffee for Conners, perhaps.

In ping-pong?

Uh-uh.

The ball flys off the table.

And the player himself has to chase it around the court, waiting for it to stop bobbing.

Think about it.

The, I don't know, indignity of it all.

Remember how often John Mcenroe (my favorite tennis player) used to flip out and go berserk? Imagine how often it would have happened had he had to chase the freaking ball around the court after every, single, point.

Or Roger Federer. Look at his graceful rhythm, his improbable, unstoppable dominance of the game. Would he be so cool, so calm, so collected, so Swiss, if he had to worry about wasting valuable energy scrambling after the freakin' ball three hundred times a match.

You may laugh.

You may scorn.

But somebody has to stand up for the rights of professional ping-pong players, goddamnit.

Get them a ball-boy, I say. (Or a ball-girl.) There's a lot of spectators in the audience. Couldn't they pass around a baseball cap, collect some coins, and give the cash to some little tyke for an hour or two's worth of work?

Then the table-tennis titans would be able to focus on the majesty of their sport. The strategy of their technique. The intensity of their ferocity.

Soccer is known as 'the beautiful game'.

But get some ball-boys to work in table-tennis, and within five, ten years, tops, ping-pong would be a serious rival for the sporting world's affection.

I'm telling you.

There would be parades, riots, hooligans. The whole deal.

If we write to our governments. If we unite as one. If we maintain solidarity.

Change can come. Change will come.

Am I asking for too much?

THE PARADOXICAL COMMANDMENTS BY DR.KENT M.KEITH

People are illogical, unreasonable and self-centred.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

SOME RATHER HIGHBROW INTELLECTUAL ARGUMENTS

Here's a thought. What would happen if everybody in the entire world sneezed at one and the same time? One giant, hacking honk of a sneeze. Everyone. At once. Would the sound be deafening? Would the velocity and volume of such a sneeze shatter our eardrums, or would we only hear the sneezes that were in our direct vicinity? ("Sneeze globally, hear locally.")

This is something I've been wondering about since I was a kid. Does sound travel like light travels? Would it not matter one little bit if everybody sneezed in unison? Would it be the same as me sneezing in one room and somebody else sneezing in another?

Oh, and one other thing. There was something in the news recently about a little girl who couldn't stop hiccuping for a good three or four weeks. Sixty times a minute. All day long. The only rest she had was when she slept. Until finally, one day, for no reason, zilch. Nada. Not a hiccup to be heard.

But hiccups don't actually produce anything, right?

Sneezing, however, usually results in at least a little bit of snot. Nose mucus. Whatever you want to call it.

So what would happen if you sneezed, constantly, every minute, every hour? Would your body run out of snot? Think about it. There's got to be like a finite supply of the green stuff in our bodies. Would we end up sneezing blood? Could you literally sneeze all the blood right out of your body?

University educated. UN experience. Lived in four different countries.

And this is what keeps me up at night.

VANILLA MORE THAN CHOCOLATE (OR VICE VERSA)

Why do we always have to be right?

There's something inside of us, each of us, that tells us that this is right and that is wrong. I'm not only talking about political beliefs, or ideological beliefs; I'm talking about a sense, a certainty, that what works for me, well, works, and everything else is alien, uncertain, unstable. A faulty machine just waiting to break down.

It's long been my belief that we really don't know anything about anything. Meaning, our most fundamental beliefs are all based on kind of vague sensations that whirl around our subconscious selves like helicopters looking for, but never finding, a landing point.

Take ice cream.

What's your favorite flavor?

You may like vanilla best because you don't like all that extra added sweetness of chocolate or strawberry.

But why don't you like that extra added sweetness?

Because it doesn't taste as good to you.

But why is that?

Perhaps we could trace it back to what your mother fed you in the high chair, and how that devoped your taste buds in a particular pattern, but I don't know if that kind of pseudo-scientific reasoning would really satisfy my question.

The same principles could be applied to books, or movies, or music. Some people will watch a certain perfomance, a certain actor, and say: "Magnificent." Others will watch the exact same images and say: "Pretentious, overblown junk."

What's going on here?

The things we watch, respond to, indulge in, strike something within us. They ring bells. And we listen to those bells. If the bells ring loud and clear, we judge it good. If the bells are faint and distant, we judge it bad.

And at the bottom of these beliefs, these feelings, these I-like-vanilla-more-than-chocolate stirrings lies a certain certainty. The kind of certainty that forms the bedrock of patriotism, which is nothing more than the underbelly of nationalism.

The more time I've lived abroad, the less patience I have for nationalism. Not to say that I'm not proud of my country, or love my country, but you know what? Everybody's proud of their country. Everybody secretly believes that their country is the best country. Patriotism and nationalism are linked to those feelings at the base of our most secret selves, those inklings and nerve endings that whisper: "We are right and they are wrong."

The intensity, verging on animosity, with which the American presidential elections engender such stirrings is symptomatic of this, I think. Both sides, Democrats and Republicans, sincerely, unequivocally believe that they are right. Empirically so, almost. As if it were a scientific equation. (Not that Canadian political parties are excluded from this kind of thinking. We're just not as, well, neon about the whole thing.)

So when we have political parties that believe they are right, filled with people who sincerely believe that their religion is the right religion, the result is a polarized environment where the only solution is a fight-to-the-death for all involved. The victor will stand. The fallen will regroup and prepare for the next battle. (Because, even though they lost, they're still right. Right?)

I guess this is the way that things have to be.

Humans, as a species, tend to gravitate towards that which confirms their own perceptions about themselves. That validates their own sense of the world. Were we to acknowledge that others' points of view have equal weight, then, in a sense, we're stating that our views are flexible, malleable, bendable. That we may not be right after all. And to admit this would be to reduce us, in a sense, to the levels of animals, who don't worry about such distinctions, who just do their own thing, who live their lives, who feed and fall and kill and nurture.

Maybe we need this feeling of rightness.

If we didn't have it, then we would be forced to live our lives in a sort of pseudo-limbo, where everything shifts and sways with the frequency of waves coming towards and away from the shore. We would have nothing to grasp on to. We would have no sense of self. We would be forced to collide and connect with others in a manner both frightening and intimate. We would have to abandon what we know for a present and a future that hints at only possibilities.

And that would be too, too much to ask of ourselves.

After all, we're only human.

Right?