Add  R&B singer Amy Winehouse to the infamous 27 Club - she was found dead today in London. What a loss - love that woman's voice and musical style. But some people just have too big a monkey on their back, and I always got the impression that Winehouse's was gorilla-size. 

Yes, kids, Grandma does drugs

There’s no planning for an event like Grandma’s Big Talk On Drugs, but I’ve been waiting for the opportunity for a while now as my oldest grandchildren close in on the teen years.

The chance came on Monday, while I was driving four of my five grandsons home to the Comox Valley after a couple weeks of Island travel and camping.

The oldest two are 11 and 12, and well familiar with kids not much older than them using alcohol and illegal drugs.  I knew there’d be a moment one day soon when I could jump in with a word or two on the subject.

I don’t know how it came up - not at my behest, that’s for sure, because the only hope you’ve got of getting a fledgling adolescent to hear you is if you wait for them to bring something up. At any rate, one of the boys said something about drug use, and all of a sudden the door opened.

As was the case when I was their age, my two oldest grandsons are surrounded by people who drink and use illegal drugs. I was 13 when I smoked my first joint, introduced to it by a school pal whose older brother was a teenage science whiz cranking out acid for eager buyers.

I’d already started drinking to get drunk by that point, which I would continue with great enthusiasm for the next three years. I know my mother will be deeply embarrassed that I’m admitting such a thing, but Mom, it’s not your fault. I just came of age in the ‘70s.

My grandsons’ generation have had the added impact of being completely immersed in cultural references to drug use, from TV shows to movies to Web sites like YouTube. This is the generation that can check out photos of their dopey older cousin with a joint in his mouth just by clicking on his Facebook site. No kid today grows up in a vacuum about drugs.

So I figure the options are to either have a frank conversation to prepare kids for those intense teen years, or assume responsibility for sending the poor little sods into high-risk territory without a lick of sense to fall back on.

I have fairly vivid memories of being that kid, teenage drug use being something that my parents’ generation simply hadn’t considered much. In the end, nothing too bad happened to me.  But that was sheer luck.

I always wanted better for my own kids and grandkids - and yours. But I fear that in the 40 years since my generation was being scared with bad-acid movies in guidance class, “just say no” still prevails as the central message to young people. It remains an important message, of course, but hardly the only one.

Years ago a young relative of mine, in Grade 6 at the time, pinned a “Just Say No” poster from a school presentation to his bedroom door, declaring with conviction that he would never use drugs. It hung there for years, through the earnest times and on into irony.

Like me, and maybe you, he has grown into a good and responsible person despite having used drugs as a teen. Most people do. Would it kill us to mention that to our kids once in a while?

My grandsons wanted to know if it was true that crack and crystal meth were addictive after just one use, and whether I agreed that heroin was the worst drug of all. I parsed that first answer carefully, wanting to stress what rotten drugs crack and crystal meth are without portraying them as instant tickets to doom.

Heroin - well, that took a little longer, and gave me the chance to talk about the drug with the most catastrophic potential, alcohol. “Alcohol is a drug?” asked the 11-year-old with much surprise.

As for marijuana, what’s left to say? It’s not a harmless drug, but most B.C. kids over the age of five could probably name that scent what with so many of their parents and grandparents still smoking the stuff. I settled for telling the boys that some studies have found chronic, heavy marijuana use during adolescence is detrimental to brain function.

I doubt they’ll retain much of our talk, but I hope they got my point about making informed choices should it come to that. Kids, just say know.

How are we doing in B.C. now that government is fixated on getting rock-bottom prices from the private sector for contract work? Not so good, apparently, as these immigrants hung out to dry have found out after being exploited and then stiffed by a silviculture company hired by the province.
This one won't turn out to be such a "deal" for taxpayers by the time lost wages and seriously substandard work standards are accounted for. Have to wonder how it's worked out for the new forest these guys were supposed to be planting, too. 

Two weeks of camping are now behind me, and the hordes of grandsons that I seem to have accumulated (OK, five, but they've got big energy) have made their way back to their respective homes. And isn't it just like the sun to start shining on the very day that I return to my work.
But I've promised myself to quit griping about the bad weather - it's tedious, I'm sure. I've got a new project, to write a daily haiku as a way of detailing some aspect of each day, and am determined to find the "poetry" in life's simple moments for at least as long as I manage to stick to this new discipline of haiku journalling.
Here's the link to the site, should you want to take a look. I wouldn't call it art, but hey, it's authentic.

Keep the wrinkles

I watched part of “Burlesque” the other night on TV. The movie was quite awful, but never mind - the really terrible part was seeing what beautiful wild-child Cher has done to herself.

With my aging face looking back at me every morning from the mirror, I completely get the pull of cosmetic surgery. A tuck here, a lift there - would that be so wrong?

Fortunately, Cher and a long line of other celebrity beauties who have tried to stave off aging are out there to remind me of the enormous price to be paid for giving up your real face.

I’m as susceptible to wildly overpriced potions as the next person when it comes to promises of firmer skin, fewer wrinkles, more lustre or less droop. I don’t pass judgment on any woman for the crazy things she may try in an attempt to stop a completely unstoppable process.

But cosmetic surgery - that’s just not going to be my thing. And I’m thankful to the celebrities for helping me see that. As much as I hate the aging process, I know from looking at them that I’d hate even more to go through it with a face that didn’t belong to me.

I read a magazine article years ago offering tips for preventing wrinkles. The main advice was to smile less, because every smile pressed wrinkles into the skin.

You can laugh at advice like that, as I did (and wrinkle up a little more). But cosmetic surgery and toxins like Botox take that article’s premise to a whole new level. We’re actually altering our faces’ ability to smile at all.

When Cher smiles now, what you see is a slight lifting at the corners of her mouth, a Mona Lisa version of the great big smile she once had. A heavily altered face like hers is just too tight, too stuffed, too deadened to produce a full-on smile anymore.

I can hear every anti-aging salon and cosmetic surgeon in town - and there are a lot of them - preparing retorts right now declaring that great progress has been made in cosmetic procedures, and that there’s no need to look anything other than “refreshed” if you get the right work at the right time, done by the right people.

And that’s probably true to a point.

But think about this, people: Celebrities have all the money they need to buy the best cosmetic procedures out there. They’ve got access to the latest stuff and the most renowned professionals.

And yet their faces still end up ruined. They get maybe five or 10 more years of looking better than expected for someone their age, but then it’s a hard, rough fall from there. 

You think it’s going to be any different for the rest of us?

As the procedures pile up - because really, is one facelift, one eyelid tuck, ever going to be enough? - the price of messing with Mother Nature is revealed.

There are the ridges up high on the cheekbones. The tugged, cat-like eyes. Lips so big and tight they look painful to the touch. A mouth line that pulls horizontally rather than vertically.

Cosmetic surgery doesn’t stop you from feeling emotion, of course. Just don’t expect them to play across your face like they used to. Excess cosmetic work leads to a face so devoid of affect, it wouldn’t be out of place on someone with Parkinson’s disease.

Worse still, everyone starts to look alike. It’s as though Kenny Rogers and Joan Rivers and Dolly Parton were siblings from an odd-looking mannequin family, having given up their former faces for the remarkably similar one that emerges after too much cosmetic surgery.

 At this point, I wish I could trot out the old saw about taking pride in each and every one of my hard-won wrinkles.  Truthfully, were it really possible to hang on to a firm, fabulous face at 54 through some Benjamin Button-like miracle of science, I’d definitely be checking it out.

So I won’t lie and say I like the two crescent lines that now bracket my mouth. But I do like the thought that they’re there because I smile a lot.  I don’t like the furrow between my brows, either. But if that’s what a rich, emotion-filled life with frequent eyebrow contractions leads to, so be it.

Youth is a beautiful thing. But only on youth. Hate the wrinkles, love your face.