Whatever Happened to Brian Moffatt?

Whatever Happened to BMO Easy?

Last year one of the more barbaric yawpers … gotta thank the Dean campaign for bringing Whitman home there … someone we counted on to “Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs” was Brian Moffatt. (That’s my free American jazz movement allusion for today. If anyone asks you where “kick out the jams” comes from, you now have the Whitman reference).

Brian quit blogging in December. Shadows of his blog remain in Google cache.

A few days ago I was whining about lack of access to the gated community that is Orkut and all three of the people I pestered for an invitation were willing to let me in, but then the thing went down and I had to wait. I think I might owe Turner US$9.95 since I asked him for an invitation before I found out there were people willing to do it for free.

When they finally lifted the red velvet rope and the doorman discovered that indeed, my name was on the list and there was no reason for me to wait outside scuffling in the pigeon poop any longer, one of the first things I did was comb through my address book to be sure there would be people like me inside. I inquired of Brian and since I had him on the line so to speak, I asked him what happened to his blog. His response was of course worth sharing, because he’s a flaming genius. Here it is:

Hey Frank,

Truth be told, I only pulled the blog because my family demanded it! I have to admit I was getting a little carried away with it. My children need some attention. Which, again, truth be told, they’ve now been getting. To my everlasting benefit and joy.

As well, I could see that I was ‘wanting’ to write something a little more satiric. The last three posts I wrote were complete fabrications - valid as far as I was concerned - but I felt something of the charlatan, especially regarding the comments people were leaving. I had no intention of embarrassing anyone, but felt I had.

Plus Mike Golby wrote to say that my comments box wasn’t working properly.

Plus my web host and domain name were both up for renewal and I couldn’t justify the expense. Especially around Christmas.

Plus I was thinking that I might try my hand at finishing off a novel I’d abandoned a few years ago. (Why I persist in that delusion - a novel about delusion - I know not. In fact there might be a novel in that. A novel about a deluded wannabe novelist persisting in writing a novel about delusion -
reminds me of the Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, the protagonist going on incessantly about his last cigarette)

Plus the house…

… was/is a mess. And needs my immediate/ongoing attention. Within a space of two months our TV, fridge, dryer and car all went kaput. Not to mention the burst pipes and the door of the downstairs washroom falling off its hinges.

Plus I’m very mercurial and I just hit delete delete delete like Gogol burning his Dead Souls.

Plus - and this is the weird part - I was really beginning to resent the traffic. Not the normal blog traffic, but the other traffic, looking for nude photos of Wayne Gretzky’s daughter because I just happened to mention her in passing.

Plus, I was finding the whole experience depressing. Physically I mean. The logistics of blogging. The linking, the maintenance, the obligation. I felt guilty blogging and I felt guilty not blogging daily.

So you can see there are a lot of plusses in me not blogging, Frank.

That said, as they say, it just so happens I fired up a blogspot blog yesterday and I was thrilled to receive your invitation to join orkut. The blog I am going to keep private - whatever that means - and very simple.

I have no idea what I’ll blog about. Then again I never did. Which was the fun part. Like: when did ‘character’ become the defining criteria in choosing a political leader. I’m reading this from all sorts of people I like and dislike. And how far is character from ‘look’ and ‘feel’ really
anyway?

But ultimately politics drives me nuts. I’m okay if I don’t read the papers. But then I wake up today and that haughty pompous fuck Blair is all full of himself and triumphant post Lord Hutton and we here in Canada have an unelected dickhead as PM who makes Dick Cheney look no worse than some yob stealing a bottle of malt liqour from the corner store.

And what bugs me most is that no one seems to care. Our unelected multibillionaire PM, or at least the shipping companies he owns, received over 161 million dollars from the federal government over a ten year period while this fuck was a Cabinet minister. It had been reported to Parliament last year that his companies had received 137,000 dollars over that period.

WTF!!!

Criminals. All of them.

I have to ignore this stuff or my head will explode.

And on the local scene, bikers have taken over the downtown core of our town. Money laundered through some holding company. Some guy from the other side of the province comes in, buys up a couple of pubs, then one by one buys a strip of historic buildings and goes into business with some of the locals/tenants. Boom! Buddy raises the rent by as much as fifty percent overnight, abuses them when questioned, and threatens to lock out the business owners - his socalled partners - and sticks them with the renovation costs. Can anybody get the attention of the media? Well, let’s see, the local paper - Canada’s oldest daily - is now a joke thanks to Lord Black - wait a minute, are we beginning to see a trend here? Cerf’s up. Maybe that should be the title of my next blog. Because I certainly feel like a cerf. And the hair on the back of my neck is up.

And that’s not even mentioning how angry I am at the entire education system. My eldest just the other day delivered his first speech. It was supposed to be five minutes long. It ended up timing out at 5:03. For that felony he got a zero. 0.

Of course it had everything to do with his subject matter. Rap music. And his point being that you can’t make moral judgements about people because of their social circumstances. Guns, violence, drugs, booze. That’s their world and they are only relating their stories, in their own language. I mean even I had to stop and think about it for a second. He drew a parallel with Brazilian street kids. Can you really blame them for stealing food if they have no parents? And then singing about it. I mean I could abstract his thesis into a aesthetic/morality argument - is James Joyce a rotten person because he wrote filth? Or Hemingway a crappy artist because he hunted?

[minor snippage]

anywho more later,

thanks for writing, I’m still keeping up with your blog when I can - I’m using Yule Heibel’s blogroll as mine - I guess I should let her know about that. Squatter that I am. Terrible isn’t it?

Anyway, Love the photo of you on your John Deere with gang mower in tow. Unless it’s a Cockshutt painted to look like a John Deere. Unless that’s not you in the saddle. Ah, just details.

And who’s that Betsy Devine woman. She’s a babe. Talking about your tractor like that. Shame on her.

mo later,

Brian