Children do it and poets do it (or they should) and before the Internet or television humans had been doing it since the first lazy summer afternoon was invented sometime around 31,000 B.C.E.

Staring up into the clouds is really like staring into a mirror, without the distraction of your own face. Constantly moving, constantly changing, never duplicated, amorphous, they are more like our naked selves – our selves without the flesh, our minds and our hearts – than anything else we encounter.

How much like our true selves they are. The clouds are always there, just slightly above our normal field of vision, always out of reach, ungraspable, unfathomable, unknowable in any physical way.

How much like our personal realities they are. Look into the clouds for just a few seconds, and your mind cannot help but wrap meaning around them. From clouds, our minds sculpt people, animals, cities and continents, mythical creatures only our mind could create. And as we continue to watch, our thoughts transform them again, as a continuous, ever-changing storybook, without words or substance except our bare thoughts and the inaudible whispers of our own hearts.

But you’ve forgotten something, haven’t you. There is something a child can do with clouds, that adults can’t seem to recall. When you were a child, you did it too. Do you remember?

From Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain

A child can move the clouds.

A child can pick a single cloud and decide what they want it to be. Then they watch and wait, and in less than a minute, the cloud moves and shapes itself to exactly to that shape. Poets can do it too, but I don’t know if we’re supposed to talk about it, except with children.

How many clouds have you seen that look exactly like some mythical creature you could have barely imagined otherwise, that were created by a child or a poet sitting in a field, looking up a dozen miles away.

How like our selves are the clouds.

How like the world around us are each of us.

Nietzsche once said, When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you. The same applies to the clouds. When you send your dreams, your hopes, your loves and passions into the sky, the clouds are also becoming a part of you.

More importantly, I’m watching the Red Sox taking on the Chicago White Sox. Live. On my iPad. For the cost of newspaper subscription, Major League Baseball gives you the opportunity to watch any game anywhere in North America. No blackouts. No restrictions. No hassles.

Not only has MLB.TV made this an inexpensive proposition for watching games on your computer or with an Apple TV on your television, the new MLB.com At Bat app adds all sorts of cool features. With a touch of the finger you can see all the stats. You can see the match up between the pitcher and the batter, where the ball passed over the plate, how fast it was thrown, who’s coming up next in the lineup, who’s in the field and what each player’s personal stats are. When you want to see the stats, just touch the screen and they all appear in translucent sidebars on the screen. Swipe them away and the full video is visible in startling HD. Did I mention HD? If you don’t like HD video, you can also listen to the game on the app’s radio options.

It’s been years since I’ve watched baseball, but it’s quickly made a comeback in my life. Years ago, when I lived close by, I’d go to Tiger Stadium  to sit in the sun, watch the game, eat peanuts and drink beer. I’m having so much fun with this subscription, I bought a huge bag of peanuts to have close at hand. And I’m thinking about making a trip to Toronto, Detroit or Boston just to see a live game again.

A close up of the batting lineup.

Two words sum up the entire MLB.TV and MLB.com At Bat experience: Super Cool. I highly recommend you check it out.

As a point of comparison, the NHL has a similar service at a similar price: NHL GameCenter™. But if the game is on TV, you have to wait two days to watch the replay. In Ottawa, that essentially means you can’t watch Ottawa, Toronto or Montreal — no matter what you pay — until the game is no longer interesting. But you can watch highlights, see the scores and watch out-of-market games played in Florida or Texas, provided you pay. Finding out the scores on Twitter is faster and less of a hassle.

As a way to rub in the point, the MLB.TV service has a free game every day.

*A Montreal restaurant owner  discovered the cost of supporting an NHL team the hard way in 2011. He was fined $89,000 for using the home town cheer in an amateur sign in his window. The cheer, started by fans and used by fans for nearly a century, is the legal property of the NHL — and is apparently worth a lot of money. I add this as a personal note, because the day this story came out was the day I decided to stop giving a shit about the NHL. Trying to use NHL GameCenter™ simply reassured me that I’d made the right decision.

Before looking at ways to find ideas, first here are the

Top 5 Ways Not to Fish for Ideas:

1. Wait for the idea to find you, while you carry on with your normal routines.

2. Create a committee. Unless you have people skilled at coming up with new ideas, a group setting inspires conformity (business as usual) not innovation.

3. Surf the Web. Watch YouTube videos and funny or sensational pictures that lead to more videos and more pictures.

4. Watch television.

5. Use someone else’s idea.

Again, you need to be proactive when looking for ideas. While many claim a new idea “just came to me!”, the truth is they only come to those who are looking for them. Few have caught a monster of a fish who did not have at least one line in the water.

5 Ways to Fish for Ideas

1. Decide to Find an Idea – Make this your priority and don’t rest until you find it. If you find yourself becoming distracted, remind yourself that you are looking for an idea, refocus, and start again. A famous songwriter once quipped that he found his best ideas while on the toilet. This isn’t really that surprising, because there isn’t too much else to do there and there aren’t many distractions. If you get distracted, change your scenery. Go for a walk. Go outside, look up and set your thoughts bouncing off clouds.

2. Find Some Bad Ideas – Brainstorm as many bad, corny, outlandish, impossible ideas for your situation you can. Number them. When you have as many as you can think of, or a dozen (whichever comes first), set the list aside for a few minutes. When you come back, look at each bad idea and ask yourself, why is this a bad idea? Then, on a new piece of paper, write down the opposite of each idea. Mix the ideas together. Play with them! Let them run, roam and breed. Often the worst idea, when you really start to think about it, can become your best idea ever. Remember, the ATM was invented after a banker was asked to think of the most outlandish idea he could – he pictured himself standing on the sidewalk, handing out money to anyone who asked.

3. Create a Mind Map – On a piece of paper, draw a map of your problem or situation, writing down each component in point form, and connecting them with lines and arrows. This will give you a fresh, topographical perspective of the situation, which will help foster fresh ideas. Most importantly, it will keep you focused in your quest for ideas.

4. Cross Pollinate – Look at a field, or business completely different than yours and examine what they do and how they do it, then ask yourself how you can use similar ideas for your situation. Jack Kerouac came up with a new style of fiction from his love for jazz music, and asking himself how he could make his prose sound like a saxophone. How many paintings or songs have been inspired by novels or films? How many books have been inspired by music or works of art? Don’t just copy an idea, but certainly let yourself become inspired.

5. Practice – Creativity is like anything else we do. The more we do it, the better we become. If you’re out of practice your first few ideas may not be that great. Don’t throw them away. Keep them and try again and again. You’ll soon be able to replace the mediocre ideas with something wondrous, I assure you.

Commander Hadfield has done more while in orbit than anyone I can recall in recent memory to bring space flight home to children and to the public at large, from his video calls with students and tweets with William Shatner (ie. Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek series), he has made space exploration cool to many who may not have thought much about it.

Here is his final YouTube video made while in orbit, a bittersweet but mostly happy goodbye to the space station that was his home, singing his own rendition of David Bowie’s Space Oddity.

You can check out his other videos on YouTube, including how to brush your teeth in orbit, and why it’s hard to wring out a washcloth in zero gravity.

Here is an inspiring personal favourite about his dream of becoming an astronaut and his lessons in perseverance.

Hadfield, along with American Tom Marshburn and Russian Roman Romanenko, landed back on earth in a Soyuz capsule. They landed under a large parachute in the flat steppes of Kazakhstan at 10:31 p.m. ET, May 12th 2013.

I tried. I really tried.

Years ago, we started off with the basic package and, finding nothing worth watching, upgraded to some specialty channels. Unfortunately, we were naive. For anyone doing research on the subject, you should know that the History channel doesn’t really offer anything about history, unless you count car restorations, pawn shops and aliens. The Arts and Entertainment channel seems to define itself in an Andy Warhol kind of way, wherein the commercials are considered modern art and entertainment is defined as day-long marathons about people haggling for abandoned storage lockers in between the commercials.

So we upgraded again. Finally! About 800 channels to choose from! So we can now watch Ricki Lake or Doctor Phil on 12 different channels in three time zones. We can watch an aquarium or a fireplace. We can watch the same football or hockey game on six different channels. We can watch movies that were on iTunes last year, or are currently playing on Netflix. We can also watch all of these shows at any time of day, 24/7 through an on-demand service. When it’s working. Often for an additional rental fee.

All of this for only $169/month.

So after postponing the ugly truth for a couple years, we finally did a quick inventory of the shows we turn on because we want to see them, rather than the shows we use as background noise. Doctor Who, Sherlock, Parade’s End, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Girls, Bill Maher… all told about 80 episodes each year. Doing the math, this works out to about $25 per episode.

Are these shows really worth $25 per episode? Absolutely.

The problem is trying to justify supporting all of the other shows.

Of course, this isn’t the cable company’s fault. They are trying to provide a reasonable service for a reasonable fee that the majority of people want and need, crave and desire. And I just don’t fit into that demographic.

First, I’m a lousy consumer. I’ve never taken pride in paying to watch commercials every 15, 12, 8 and then 4 minutes as a show or a movie progresses.

Secondly, I don’t really get most shows anyway. NCIS: Cleveland, Deplorable Housewives, talk shows, cooking shows, shopping shows… I don’t watch these things. I’ve tried, but I don’t get them. Not even Dr. Phil or Ricki Lake. Are people really entertained when you can predict what is going to happen or what’s going to be said before it happens? I’m glad if they are. Let me know, because it would make it a lot easier writing this novel.

Thirdly, while I really liked the clock on our cable box, I found I have one on my computer already. And my phone. And one on the wall.

Fourthly, if I’m going to pay for a show, why wouldn’t I pay the $2 to $4 per episode on iTunes, or Google, or any of the other available services to watch it when I want. If I want to pay for commercials, I can always see them on YouTube… for free.

If  someone in the 15th century wanted two copies of the same printed book, it was not uncommon to take a copy from a printing press and hand it to a scribe for reproduction.

It took time for people to regard books as something other than just a new way of writing. Similarly, motorists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, referred to the new contraption as a horseless carriage.

In the early days of the Internet, when Netscape was still the preferred browser of choice, one of the most commonly used features was the “Print” command. How to properly format pages, adjust page breaks and margins when transferring websites to paper was a common point of discussion in forums even among webmasters. (That link is just an archived example from 1996, if you’re feeling nostalgic).

The possibilities presented by new technologies aren’t always obvious. This begs the question: What are you trying to do with today’s technology that will seem archaic, if not downright ridiculous, a few years from now? How many of us bought a smartphone because it was a fast way to respond to emails? Will your children remember what an e-reader was?

Some of the most extraordinary people I know don’t use social media*. And that’s a shame because it makes it unlikely that you will ever get to know most of them.

As an experiment I took most of a year off from social media in 2012, including this blog. I visited Twitter once a week or so at most, deactivated my Facebook account, and put my focus on writing, paying my rent and other poet-slash-novelist things. Drawing, walks through the woods and talking with people who were within arms-reach. I discovered I had several Sharpies and a couple of blank Moleskins just begging to be used again. For me, the process of unplugging was just as exhilarating as the first year (2007-2008) I discovered Twitter.

Upon my gradual return, one of the things I decided to keep doing was to disable comments on this blog. That may appear to be unsocial of me, but I really have two options — write blog posts, or not. The problem is that once a blog reaches a modest level of popularity, it becomes a magnet for spam — tremendous amounts of spam, requiring a couple of hours each week doing administration instead of writing.

Comments are Anti-Social

I’ve also discovered that people with something interesting to say seldom use the comment form on the bottom of a blog post. They send emails (I always reply), send me a tweet, or a message on Facebook. While I have seen several exceptions, the comment fields on the majority of websites are primarily used by trolls, or those who invested less than a half-minute reading the headline and first paragraph before spouting off an opinion. Most comments come from people who believe that possessing a keyboard and an Internet connection are the only prerequisites for expressing an opinion.

For anyone in a creative field, if you have ever been tempted to disable the comments on your own website, I strongly encourage you to do so. (If you enjoy comments, engaging with them, moderating them, that’s fine too. I’m talking about the many people I know who find it a drain on their creativity.)  If you are an artist, create art. If you produce videos, make more videos. If you’re a writer, write. I’d much rather see one more painting, photograph, video, poem or article, than to know you’re spending time doing admin work instead, or — worse! — not posting things because of the hassles the comments will be the next day!

This is also a plea to the half-dozen or so creative people who have told me that they avoid social media, including their own blogs, because it’s become such a “chore,” so “depressing” and so “predictable.” Don’t let the bots and trolls invade your life. Don’t let the spam crowd out all of the beauty you want to bring to the world.

P.S. Because I was already uploading a picture from my journal, I wanted to show you a drawing I did of my dog, Pablo. Something else I enjoy rather than moderating comments and deleting spam.

*I should add that avoiding social media isn’t necessarily a virtue. Some of the most dull people I’ve met don’t use social media either.

Hope is far more demanding and requires much more effort. It is an uphill climb to find purpose in tragedy and failure.

If you can’t yet see purpose in tragedy, you have not yet climbed high enough.

Only from the top of the hill can you see the bigger picture of the valley below.

My father, being a wise man for his years, understood more about human nature than I had dreamed possible. He didn’t ask what I was going to do with the money – he told me what I was not going to do with it.

“You are not,” he said, “going to spend that all on comic books and candy.”

With that, he took me to the car and announced that it was time I begin to care for my money. He drove me to Lethbridge’s Department Store and led me to a glass case containing watches, cuff links, tie pins, silk handkerchiefs and assorted finery. The elderly Mr. Lethbridge, smelling of a discreet, fine cologne, stepped behind the counter, wearing a silk tie, gold cuff links and tie pin. He wore new suit, with a silk handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket.

My father pointed to the edge of the case, towards a selection of crisp, gleaning leather.

“My son is here to buy a wallet,” he said.

Mr. Lethbridge began taking wallets from the case, one by one, placing them on the glass before us. I remember clearly how shiny they were, each made of “Genuine Leather,” or calfskin, imported from Italy, from France, or “Made in Canada.” Some had compartments for change with zippers, some had what looked like plastic file folders for carrying pictures, identification and credit cards. None of them had ever been folded. Each felt as stiff as a school textbook in my hands. For a few moments, I felt empowered. I marveled at the thought of owning my own wallet. I wondered if this would be the first of many trips to this same store, to later buy a watch, or cuff links, or tie pins as an adult, and to become a sort of gentleman myself one day.

The wallet I selected was not the most expensive, but it was not the cheapest either. It had a white piece of cardboard tucked inside where a driver’s license would be. The card had a tab on the top right corner, with the price printed in a bold, but elegant font. I purchased it, refused a bag, and folded my wallet carefully in half before pressing it into my back pocket. I remember well how my father nodded, approvingly.

It was a memorable summer, but no memorable than most. I played with my friends, rode my bike, explored the shore of Lake Erie, got sunburned often, and skinned my knees more than once. I never ventured into that department store again until I was 13, when I got a job there sweeping the floors, cleaning the toilets, and taking out the garbage after school.

That wallet stayed in my drawer for more than two years, hated throughout the long summer, and then forgotten. The white card with the price tag was still inside. The wallet cost $18 and, with sales tax, it remained empty through that long summer. My twenty dollars was gone.

Money, in a way, is really time – captured and preserved to be used later at our leisure. Yet how often do we spend our time on things we really don’t need, to temporarily feed our egos. Afterwards, our savings are drained, and the memories left behind are shallow, forgettable, unsatisfying.

When I was 18 I moved to Toronto from a small town and lived on Spadina Avenue where the rent was atrocious and traffic seldom slowed down. There is no such thing as silence in the core of a large city. Unable to sleep, I had learned a trick to cope with the revving engines, horns, shouts and sirens.

I would turn on the TV and tune it to an empty space between channels. Immersed in the constant stream of static, I would fall asleep quite easily. If I was restless – which was often in those days – I would watch the screen.

As I slowly moved towards dreams, I became intrigued with the patterns that  would briefly emerge on the screen, and then fade, emerge and fade, like waves cascading through my imagination.

A fascinating tidbit of information about static on a TV screen, which you may not know and which I didn’t know then, is that a part of it comes from the origins of our universe exploding into existence from nothing. Well, many say “nothing,” but it is what I would describe as a field of pure potentiality.

Stare at a static TV screen long enough, stare into the scattered breadcrumbs left behind from the origins of creation,  and you will see things too – faces, shapes, gestures and patterns And nothing you see comes from any place other than your own memories, your dreams, your hopes, your fears, perceptions, prejudices, and passions, as well as the physical structure of your ever-evolving human nervous system.

The same thing happens when you gaze upon the clouds above you, or look at your own face in the mirror, or the faces of anyone nearby, or into your memories, or into the future.

We see and hear mostly what we are wired to perceive. It takes more time to see things in a static TV screen only because we’re unaccustomed to staring at such a thing and because its such an obviously blank canvas to work from.

If you find this hard to believe, try staring into the static for five minutes. Ask yourself what you see while you remind yourself that you are witnessing the origins of creation.

Then do exactly the same thing, staring into the eyes of the person you love most in this world.