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Spiders – Welcome To The Magical Friendship Squad! http://michaelmurray.ca Michael Murray Writes Things Fri, 04 Dec 2015 23:20:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 Bigfoot http://michaelmurray.ca/bigfoot http://michaelmurray.ca/bigfoot#respond Wed, 30 Sep 2015 16:40:52 +0000 http://michaelmurray.ca/?p=5509 Bigfoot!!

According to various reports, he is currently wandering around the remote BC island of Alert Bay, howling at the moon as if he’d just had his massive, mythical heart broken.

The news stations that deliver such stories do so with a smirk, as if it was on par with a Dachshund Super Bowl, a little bit of fun to indulge in at the end of a tough new cycle. Santa Claus stories packaged for children.

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And yes, of course, unhinged obsessives touched with a kind of religious fervour and pranksters, make up the undying core of Bigfoot promoters. The sober mainstream asserts that Bigfoot does not exist because there is no proof or evidence that he does, and to believe anything else is to indulge in fantasy.

However, I would argue that this is a position of arrogance. We are inconceivably small in this universe. It’s impossible for us to process how small this pale blue dot is in the vast darkness of infinity.

Pale-Blue-Dot

There is more that is unknown than known in this world and beyond, and more that is invisible than visible. Our tools for perceiving the universe (sight, sound, smell) are pitiful. As humans, everything we know and sense, is created and processed by the mystical chemistry of our brain. It is literally true that the universe exists inside of our head, and it is worth keeping in mind that a different universe exists inside the brain of a spider. As a species, we apply our technology to expand our tools of perception so that we might better understand some of the things that lie beyond our natural ability. In short, we see very, very little.

Imagine you were a lobster living on the bottom of the oceans floors.

If you could be imbued with a consciousness like a human, there is simply no way that you could conceive of living on the same world as a creature like a human being. Physically, you could hardly be more dissimilar.

lobster baby

Your skeletal structure exists on the outside not the inside, you shuffle along in the bottomless dark of the cold seas. Humans, bipedal giants. You cannot imagine a world beyond water. You cannot imagine air, this transitional plain, or that there is a world yet beyond that, a terrestrial land where humans live in palaces, farming and managing your species and then devouring them as a delicacy. Such a thing would seem ludicrous and completely beyond your imagination, but we know that it is true. Perhaps, in the great expanse of time, distance and dimension, a similar analogy can be made, only with us as existing as the lobster and something else as humans.

In searching for Bigfoot we seek his proof on our terms, not his.

sasquatch

He must exist as we understand things to exist, not as he may exist. He must be visible to our eyes. But what if like radiation, or the wind, he’s not visible to to us? What if he’s not quite of this world we live in, just as we, are not quite of the world the lobster lives in?
The older I get, the weirder the universe becomes, and the more ridiculous it seems that we profess anything with certainty. The people who believe in Bigfoot are no more flawed in their methodology than those who claim his existence an impossibility, and so I am content to imagine his howls at night, a reminder of the limitless mystery both inside of us, and beyond.

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Post surgery questions for Rachelle http://michaelmurray.ca/post-surgery-questions-for-rachelle http://michaelmurray.ca/post-surgery-questions-for-rachelle#respond Thu, 28 Nov 2013 06:46:27 +0000 http://michaelmurray.ca/?p=3948 Last week my wife Rachelle had a minor surgical procedure that required she be sedated. However, this was done in such a manner that although she wasn’t rendered unconscious, she wouldn’t remember anything from the experience. This made her curious as hell, wondering what sort of things she might be saying as she was in this transitional ether.  As such, she asked me to document her twilight state as she returned to consciousness, and so I prepared a series of questions which I asked her as she was coming to and these are the results:

Me: Rachelle! Rachelle! Are you there?

Rachelle: ( Moves hand as if swatting fly)

Me: What is your favourite crop?

Rachelle: Crop?

Me: Yes, like corn, wheat, tobacco or peanuts.

Rachelle: Mmmm. Peanut butter cups.

Me: Okay, next question. Who is the sluttiest person that you know?

Rachelle: Slutty sluts. They’re all sluts. You know that.

Me: Good answer.

Rachelle: Thirsty.

Me: I will ask the nurse if you can have an ice cube. What is your favourite natural disaster?

Rachelle: Twister. So. Very. Windy. Hide in the basement when the twister comes! Very serious. Lives ruined.

Me: And crops, twisters ruin crops too.

Rachelle: Twisters are ruiners.

cow twisterfass ]]> http://michaelmurray.ca/post-surgery-questions-for-rachelle/feed 0 Toronto Mayor Rob Ford: What The Mayor Was Thinking http://michaelmurray.ca/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-what-the-mayor-was-thinking http://michaelmurray.ca/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-what-the-mayor-was-thinking#respond Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:50:14 +0000 http://michaelmurray.ca/?p=3202 Toronto Mayor Rob Ford calls it getting ahead of the envelope. Ever since our days drinking together when we were both enrolled at Carleton University in Ottawa, Rob has been almost preternaturally media savvy. He likes to get ahead of the story, predicting where a problem might arise and then defusing it before it catches fire in the media. Unfortunately for Rob, he’s never been a particularly photogenic man, and many of his enemies seek to exploit this vulnerability and cast him in the least flattering light imaginable. With this in mind, Rob contacted me late one night and asked if I could help him “get ahead of the envelope” when it came to the anti-Ford paparazzi.

Based on the old New York Times Photo series, What They Were Thinking, I came up with an idea to post the unflattering picture of Ford before it made a splash, and have the Mayor, in his own words, tell the public exactly what he was thinking the moment the photograph was snapped. This way, we would be ahead of the envelope and we could see the inner, vulnerable Mayor.

This photograph, taken late Thursday night at a CJPAC event, shows the Mayor kindly posing for a photograph with a fan.

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What The Mayor Was Thinking:

“Well, it was International Woman’s Day, so I was thinking about all the amazing contributions women have made to the world. If it weren’t for women, I don’t think that there would be any cookies, babies, or lingerie football, and I bet Cute Overload would have tanked. There’s tons of other stuff, too, and I was thinking about that, also. I mean, women have written books and starred in movies, there have even been lady Mayors! It’s amazing, when you think about it, and I was considering all of it, the sorts of make-out music they like and how they’re scared of spiders. I was really feeling the lady vibe right then. Like, the way that they smell, the way they feel, and the way that their voices are higher and softer than your own—it’s just so cool. You know, Jessica Alba, Jennifer Aniston, The Kardashians, Jennifer Lawrence, Pamela Anderson, hell, even Lindsay Lohan, and Scarlett Johansson, yeah, her big time…The list just goes on and on. Women are fucking awesome, and I really like it when they’re around, especially when I’m feeling a little lonely, and believe me, even a big, cool Mayor like me gets lonely from time to time.”

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*Late on Thursday night while at a CJPAC event, Sarah Thomson, a former candidate for Mayor, posted the photograph of Rob and her at the function, stating that he said she should have been in Florida with him last week because his wife wasn’t there and then grabbed her ass.

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