So, I’m Still Here…

[looks at the last time I updated my website…coughs nervously] I think in the future, people will look at the years of the pandemic as a really rough decade. It was a difficult time, but to quote Michael Caine, I “used the difficulty”. Background: Actor Michael Caine was rehearsing a play early in his career. He was to enter a room where 2 people were arguing. But the two had gotten so into the characters one had thrown a chair and partially blocked the entrance. When he stopped rehearsal by mentioned to the director the chair was blocking him, he

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Christmas Song of my youth, missing my sister, other thoughts

Back in the late 60s/early 70s, Zellers sold A Very Merry Christmas: Volume 3. It was an album with a lot of big name stars (at the time) and other talent belting out seasonal songs. Mom bought it, and every Christmas growing up, she pulled this one out to play it. It’s actually quite a good album, with the music arranged mid-20th Century orchestral style only slightly veering into elevator music (more on that in a moment). As we got older and left home we heard this less and less, depending on whether or not we could get home for

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Posting to EvanKayne.com not Facebook…how “meta”

TL; DR: Found pizza, found some joy, but someone else lost theirs. Burp. This just happened a few weeks ago. I had just finished a closing shift at ye olde cannabis dispensary, it had been a week since they told us they were closing this location due to low sales (we’re unionized so most of us selected transfers to other stores). I had the weekend off and really just wanted to shower and crawl into bed so I could forget the world for 8 hours. I live in a 3 story walk-up apartment block built in the 1950s. Dragging my

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COVID-19, Writing, and Edits

April 2021 will always be the lost month, as I was hospitalized with double pneumonia due to being infected with the South African variant of COVID-19. I was hospitalized for 13 days at the Rockyview hospital here in Calgary. It gave me time to think about my priorities in life. I will be doing more writing, pushing myself to find ways (grants/online work, other) to live as a writer, even though I may have to work part-time at other jobs. There is a casualty to this – the whole “Alone Plague” journal I was writing (and then – nervous cough

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