Obscurity Becomes Us

 Aldous Huxley once uttered this pithy wisdom:

 "I am afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."

To which I added my own snarky wisdom which is that over a million Canadian artists and writers

understand and concur. It doesn't matter if we like blanched celery or not. Half our working lives

are spent in shadow and darkness and that's due to the sheer lack of sunlight in the northern hemisphere.

Ha! Had you going there didn't I? 

It's up to us to figure out how to get our particular creations to market, like the unfortunate piggy 

in the old time nursery rhyme played on the toes of infants round the world

'This little piggy goes to market (if she can find a publisher for her deathless prose or rice paper sculptures or West Coast Interpretive Dance, and et cetera)

'This little piggy stayed home (and raised a family, worked part-time for cash if she could manage it, volunteered to look after aging elders or other family members in a state of dependency and/or incompetence, oh, and kept the household humming with meals, chauffeuring, laundry, cleaning and possibly grew a garden and maintained an orchard with all the production and preserving work that entails, if she is rural or of that practical bent anywhere else)

'This little piggy had roast beef...(but considering what we know about red meats and our gastro-intestinal tracts and soaring colorectal cancer statistics in the western world, we may need to amend this to 'this little piggy became a free-range gluten-free vegan and a righteous pain in the ass to everyone near by when she shopped at the market')

 'This little piggy had none...(and this is why we have to make school lunch programs and thank those stalwart women and a few good men who show up and feed kids, women and men at the Salvation Army and Mustard Seed and community food banks across this resource-rich nation because there is no sense blaming the poor, like Thatcher and Reagan infamously did with their mean-spirited divide and conquer politics, 'the poor you have always with you', as Matthew said and John and many other kind leaders and front line workers have reiterated for centuries)

'And this little piggy …” (and here the exhausted mother or father on bedtime duty seizes the pinkie toe, voice rising to falsetto, “… cried wee wee wee all the way home which is good because it means the piggy in question escaped the market and ran away from the would-be butchers but then had to go through it all again the next time the market called and the piggy's family desperately needed the money, said the pragmatic prose poem writer and snarky social commentator, moi. But I can do that because nobody is paying me, I don't run ads and I am writing today for the pleasure of it and tossing this piggy into the mudbath of its dreams to happily amuse itself and lose track of time and obligations!)