Hello, hello, it's time to say goodbye
I think that I have come to the point where it's time for me to move on from this Board. It's been time for a while, but I suppose I was waiting on an event, and caught in a day to day.
Allow me to introduce myself: My real name is Den Valdron, I am a lawyer in Winnipeg, Manitoba, working in the field of aboriginal law some twenty years now. If you're ever in Winnipeg, feel free to look me up, I try to be gracious.
Many of my clients are northern, some far north, and I have vivid memories of attending a northern wedding party so far up the curvature of the world that I watched dawn break on one horizon at the same time that dusk faded. I've had close encounters with bears and men with guns, travelled a bit, met some interesting people. As a life goes, it's had a few moments to it.
Perhaps because of my work with the far north, I seem to have focused either on polar or tropical civilizations. I guess that seems about right.
I don't think I expected to end up a lawyer. I grew up in backwoods New Brunswick, at the tail end of the appalachians on by chaleur. A working class kid in a hardscrabble working class town. Very old school, very traditional, elements of Norman Rockwell, but also the dark sides backwoods small towns as well.
When I was young, I figured I'd be a mechanic like my dad. I started early, I was pumping gas and fixing flat tires when I was ten. In high school, instead of the normal teen things like sports and dating, me and my brother pulled the engines out of cars and rebuilt them.
It turns out I was smart, lucked into University, fell in love with this world of books and ideas, fell in love with the idea of civilization and civility, this notion that no matter how harshly we might address each other, it would not lead to spit out teeth and shattered bones. Anthropology, history, the way the world worked, that fascinated me.
I think that I had a fiercer drive to learn than many of my fellow students, simply because this was a genuinely undiscovered country previously out of the reach of my kind. I felt many of my peers took it for granted. Education had been a practical thing where I came from, just enough to know your letters and numbers and that was that, even that was a lot. I have cousins who can't read or write. My father's generation for the most part did no better than grade school, despite being clever men and women. I was the first of my family to go to university, to discover a new world, to fall in love with it, and to be hungry, voraciously hungry for it.
I always wanted to be a writer, that was my real avocation. I had some tiny successes, and some almost successes, came close to a book deal once or twice. That was my dream. I wanted to be a father, that didn't happen either. Was married. So it goes. I suppose the lesson is that dreams die, but we keep on going.
The law thing happened, I suppose for a bunch of reasons. I was smart enough to know that any wannabe artist needs a day job. Or by the traditional values of the place I grew up, a smart kid was going to be a lawyer, a doctor or a priest, and that was that. Fundamentally, I think I was and still am an idealist, I believed in right and wrong, I believed in justice, I believed in trying to do something that mattered. I suppose, bruised and battered as those ideals are, I still believe in all that stuff.
I believe in human nature, and I've gotten to see quite a lot of it, unfortunately. In the end, we are what we are, often for the worst. I suppose I just believe that we ought to try and be better, even if we fail at it a lot.
Why am I writing all this? I suppose its part of my process of saying goodbye.
Some of you read these these timelines, perhaps its worthwhile to finally get to know a little of the person that wrote them. Perhaps it adds a dimension to things.
I've never worked with Inuit per se, but I've worked and lived in the far north with the Swampy Cree and Dene, in a landscape of marsh and muskeg vast enough to swallow American states, was out on the water with men for whom English was a distant strange language, sat with medicine men, and interviewed elders whose family memories included the first sight of a white man, who remembered treaty payments when money was just a funny paper you stuck in a hat, but the treaty gift of twine was vital to make your nets for fishing.
I think some of that did end up in Ice and Mice, somehow. In oblique ways, it ended up influencing Green Antarctica or Empire of Mu. So maybe this adds to it for you. Or maybe it demonstrates more bona fides to the work, that between backwoods upbringing, and academic training, and work, I have a bit of mojo going on.
If there's anything I hate, it is unresolved endings. The writer in me, I suppose, or the fighter. There's an urge to wrap things up somehow, to set matters in their places, to move things to resolutions or finality.
Unrealistic, I know, neither life nor history is like that. History, of course, just goes on and on and on. And life, as I've seen far too often, simply stops. This Board all too often mimics both aspects of that.
Still, I am what I am. I have a handful of timelines, and some urge to bring them to some resolution, or at least to a place where I can say 'fine', and walk off. Some are more amenable than others. The Axis of Andes, about an actual war, desperately needs resolution and denouement. Ice and Mice, Moontrap, and Green Antarctica... I should leave them at an appropriate point. I figure it will take about a month, maybe two, to bring about the appropriate closures.
There'll be short cuts of course, no way to avoid that. The literary narrative portions were always the most creatively demanding, and I'm going to cut those out. There'll probably be other shortcuts.
What can I say? It's been fun, but it's past time. I came upon this site at a particular point in my life, a low point, and it has had its rewards. But I think that at for the last few months... it's just been accumulating. It is time to move on, time to pursue the career, or pursue the dream, or simply to live.
There will be no rancor to this departure. No giant 'fuck you's'. The internet is an unreal place - there's not enough substance to it to make enemies or hold grudges. Sadly, there's not enough substance for genuine friendships either. But having said that, there are many people here whose work I have admired, there are many people here who I have enjoyed discussions with, and I want to acknowledge them as well.
Anyway, I would invite those of you who are interested to join me, as I putter about my rooms turning out the lights. There will be more reflections and goodbyes, and perhaps a steady sequence of resolutions of this or that.
I think that I have come to the point where it's time for me to move on from this Board. It's been time for a while, but I suppose I was waiting on an event, and caught in a day to day.
Allow me to introduce myself: My real name is Den Valdron, I am a lawyer in Winnipeg, Manitoba, working in the field of aboriginal law some twenty years now. If you're ever in Winnipeg, feel free to look me up, I try to be gracious.
Many of my clients are northern, some far north, and I have vivid memories of attending a northern wedding party so far up the curvature of the world that I watched dawn break on one horizon at the same time that dusk faded. I've had close encounters with bears and men with guns, travelled a bit, met some interesting people. As a life goes, it's had a few moments to it.
Perhaps because of my work with the far north, I seem to have focused either on polar or tropical civilizations. I guess that seems about right.
I don't think I expected to end up a lawyer. I grew up in backwoods New Brunswick, at the tail end of the appalachians on by chaleur. A working class kid in a hardscrabble working class town. Very old school, very traditional, elements of Norman Rockwell, but also the dark sides backwoods small towns as well.
When I was young, I figured I'd be a mechanic like my dad. I started early, I was pumping gas and fixing flat tires when I was ten. In high school, instead of the normal teen things like sports and dating, me and my brother pulled the engines out of cars and rebuilt them.
It turns out I was smart, lucked into University, fell in love with this world of books and ideas, fell in love with the idea of civilization and civility, this notion that no matter how harshly we might address each other, it would not lead to spit out teeth and shattered bones. Anthropology, history, the way the world worked, that fascinated me.
I think that I had a fiercer drive to learn than many of my fellow students, simply because this was a genuinely undiscovered country previously out of the reach of my kind. I felt many of my peers took it for granted. Education had been a practical thing where I came from, just enough to know your letters and numbers and that was that, even that was a lot. I have cousins who can't read or write. My father's generation for the most part did no better than grade school, despite being clever men and women. I was the first of my family to go to university, to discover a new world, to fall in love with it, and to be hungry, voraciously hungry for it.
I always wanted to be a writer, that was my real avocation. I had some tiny successes, and some almost successes, came close to a book deal once or twice. That was my dream. I wanted to be a father, that didn't happen either. Was married. So it goes. I suppose the lesson is that dreams die, but we keep on going.
The law thing happened, I suppose for a bunch of reasons. I was smart enough to know that any wannabe artist needs a day job. Or by the traditional values of the place I grew up, a smart kid was going to be a lawyer, a doctor or a priest, and that was that. Fundamentally, I think I was and still am an idealist, I believed in right and wrong, I believed in justice, I believed in trying to do something that mattered. I suppose, bruised and battered as those ideals are, I still believe in all that stuff.
I believe in human nature, and I've gotten to see quite a lot of it, unfortunately. In the end, we are what we are, often for the worst. I suppose I just believe that we ought to try and be better, even if we fail at it a lot.
Why am I writing all this? I suppose its part of my process of saying goodbye.
Some of you read these these timelines, perhaps its worthwhile to finally get to know a little of the person that wrote them. Perhaps it adds a dimension to things.
I've never worked with Inuit per se, but I've worked and lived in the far north with the Swampy Cree and Dene, in a landscape of marsh and muskeg vast enough to swallow American states, was out on the water with men for whom English was a distant strange language, sat with medicine men, and interviewed elders whose family memories included the first sight of a white man, who remembered treaty payments when money was just a funny paper you stuck in a hat, but the treaty gift of twine was vital to make your nets for fishing.
I think some of that did end up in Ice and Mice, somehow. In oblique ways, it ended up influencing Green Antarctica or Empire of Mu. So maybe this adds to it for you. Or maybe it demonstrates more bona fides to the work, that between backwoods upbringing, and academic training, and work, I have a bit of mojo going on.
If there's anything I hate, it is unresolved endings. The writer in me, I suppose, or the fighter. There's an urge to wrap things up somehow, to set matters in their places, to move things to resolutions or finality.
Unrealistic, I know, neither life nor history is like that. History, of course, just goes on and on and on. And life, as I've seen far too often, simply stops. This Board all too often mimics both aspects of that.
Still, I am what I am. I have a handful of timelines, and some urge to bring them to some resolution, or at least to a place where I can say 'fine', and walk off. Some are more amenable than others. The Axis of Andes, about an actual war, desperately needs resolution and denouement. Ice and Mice, Moontrap, and Green Antarctica... I should leave them at an appropriate point. I figure it will take about a month, maybe two, to bring about the appropriate closures.
There'll be short cuts of course, no way to avoid that. The literary narrative portions were always the most creatively demanding, and I'm going to cut those out. There'll probably be other shortcuts.
What can I say? It's been fun, but it's past time. I came upon this site at a particular point in my life, a low point, and it has had its rewards. But I think that at for the last few months... it's just been accumulating. It is time to move on, time to pursue the career, or pursue the dream, or simply to live.
There will be no rancor to this departure. No giant 'fuck you's'. The internet is an unreal place - there's not enough substance to it to make enemies or hold grudges. Sadly, there's not enough substance for genuine friendships either. But having said that, there are many people here whose work I have admired, there are many people here who I have enjoyed discussions with, and I want to acknowledge them as well.
Anyway, I would invite those of you who are interested to join me, as I putter about my rooms turning out the lights. There will be more reflections and goodbyes, and perhaps a steady sequence of resolutions of this or that.
