A brief history of that thing waking you up every morning in Edmonton / March 7, 2017 by Tim Querengesser

If you've ever been woken by a leaf-blower at 3:45 a.m. — which happens often in Edmonton as our city encourages snow-clearing workers to use these machines at all hours rather than asking them to shovel — you may ponder how we got here.

How, you may think as you lay in the darkness, awake, at 3:45 a.m., did the leaf blower come to be Edmonton's 100-decibel carbon shovel. And how, in turn, how did I lose my right to sleep?

Well, first, let's consider a brief history of the leaf blower.

“Writers in the emerging leaf-blower genre of reportage and thinkpieces have noted, accurately, that the tragedy of the leaf blower is that, “it makes assholes of us all ...”

The always reliable source of the internet claims the first use of pressurized air to move leaves on the ground was in the 1800s, in Japan. It seems the modern interpretation of the leaf blower appeared in the 1950s, and the implement — using the crude, polluting, noisy two-stroke engine — was originally designed to spray chemicals onto crops, not blow leaves around, or snow.

People being people, though, and shovelling snow being the worst sort of soul-sucking manual labour other than digging ditches (I say this having grown up in the 'snowbelt' in Ontario and shovelling my share of white hell, as well as ditches), one day some guy (he was likely a lazy guy, let's be brutally honest here) faced a snowy walkway and thought, 'What if I just aim my leaf blower at that?'

The rest is history. We've been blowing ever since. "Progress," some would call it.

The thing about progress, procedures and rules, though, as Kafka taught us, is that they can sometimes promote behaviour that isn't all that human. With this can come indifferent shoulder-shrugging from bureaucracies.

Take 3:45 a.m. wake-ups from leaf-blower racket, as has come to be my norm in west Oliver. The city response to the my complaints about the noise of laziness waking me and other residents? Shoulder shrug.

Indifference means our city actively promotes snow-clearing workers to use leaf blowers that produce 100 decibels of noise (that's roughly the same as a jackhammer, by the way) at all hours of the day.

Now, you or I aren't allowed to use a leaf blower to clear our private patches of snow at 3:45 a.m. Noise bylaws prohibit us from making a big, loud, droning noise (say, that created by a dirty, smokey two-stroke motor powering a leaf blower) outside of the hours people are expected to be awake.

But if you're a landscape company contracted to clear snow from a company's front steps, by all means, the city says, by making exemptions to their noise bylaws, feel free to use that leaf blower at 3:45 a.m., or 4 a.m., or whenever, really.

The result for those of us who don't live in quiet suburbia but in urban settings where businesses and residences are stacked together, is essentially Leaf Blowers Gone Wild: Edmonton edition.

Now, you may have gathered that I'm in the anti camp when it comes to leaf blowers. It's a growing camp. And in said camp we use shovels and rakes. We also sleep well and at least one of us is a famous pianist who's just sick of leaf blowers.

We're also good people, we anti-blowers. Writers in the emerging leaf-blower genre of reportage and thinkpieces have noted, accurately, that the tragedy of the leaf blower isn't the noise but that, "it makes assholes of us all ..."

Indeed. All people and organizations using or condoning the use of leaf blowers to blow snow, at 3:45 a.m. in Edmonton, are behaving, more or less, like civic assholes. They are that guy, that annoying guy, that annoying guy with that f***ing leaf blower.

The anti-blower camp is mostly asshole free and it's a growing thing. In California, where they don't have much snow, many communities are speaking back to the leaf-blower racket.

I don't think we'll ever ban leaf blowers in Edmonton. We could ban when we use them, though. We could make producing 100 decibels of noise between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m., when other options (like shovels) exist, to be something you can be fined for.

Will we? I'd bet very little on that.

A critical call to council to walk the Vision Zero talk / March 6, 2017 by Tim Querengesser

All people in Edmonton should read this blog post on Vision Zero.

The wonderfully incisive and personally invested post, by an Edmonton citizen who lost his son after he was hit by a driver in a crosswalk, has some hard truths for city council to swallow about their program.

It asks why many of us haven't even heard of Vision Zero, why so little aside from some "half-hearted attempts" seems to have been done for the campaign and why so few in power speak up on the issue of walker safety in Edmonton.

As the writer notes: "... the silence from the rest of council, and the city administration is deafening and troubling. It appears the politicians are not yet sure the voters are ready to accept tougher enforcement, slower speeds and that the car (more often truck or SUV) is no longer king."

It truly is.

Edmonton is uniquely skilled at speaking a lot about things it could be doing, rather than doing them. Vision Zero is one of those things. It's an election year. Vision Zero needs to be a topic on the doorstep. It will be at my house.

The unbearable freedom of being broke / March 5, 2017 by Tim Querengesser

Being broke means you have a lot of something.

Time.

Time is something most of us say we want more of, since we feel consumed with attending to work, relationships and goals. In our dreams, time is the antidote to what ails us in these moments. If we just had more time, we think, life would feel more manageable and our goals would be achievable.

But time is relative. When you have too little of it, time is a luxury good you peer at as if in a shop window along a fancy street. When you have too much of it, though, time is a blank sheet of paper that only you can fill, if you feel up to it. For someone who's lived responding to demands for their time, a sudden blank sheet of paper and endless time to fill it can feel terrifying.

Let me tell you.

The excuses disappear. The challenge clarifies. Here is time. How you use it is what will make or break you. Time comes to be a very powerful force, like gravity.

'Time' is also a bit of a euphemism for poverty in the narrative of late-stage capitalism. Those who have a lot of time tend to have little else, unless they are uniquely lucky in life. When you have a lot of time your bank account tends to be rather small. Well, mine is at least.

I'm tempted to ask when prompted for payment, 'Do you take time?'

A man with endless time must consider his day strategically. Spending time is easy. But what will I spend my money on today while I enjoy my time? Food? A coffee? A bill? You can't spend it on all three. And you have plenty of time to mull that reality.

We call it 'free time' for a reason.

The freedom of being broke is to realize that this is the reality you have been running from, filing your dreams on a mental 'to-do' list for some time far off in the future while, right now, you find ways to trade your time for that other thing we need, the freedom from poverty. To have the audacity to throw security away and embrace the weight of endless time is to accept comfort will no longer be an option.

This morning I have chosen to buy a coffee. This afternoon, I'll buy a can of Campbell's mushroom soup and use some left-over chicken to make a hearty meal. I hope to spend less than $10 on all of this today. Still beyond my daily budget of $0 at the moment but reasonable.

In exchange for this lack of comfort I feel an awakening. Walking down the street with no schedule to keep allows you to see, hear and feel the world you ignore when you do — birds chirping, wind blowing through trees, children giggling with parents. There is a richness all around us that we need time to see.

Embracing the empty sheet of paper is what time allows. It is not a painless process. It does not pay. It is romantic only until you experience it. But it is real, raw and unfiltered. It is what free feels like.

Soon, poverty will come to demand I exchange some of my time for a modicum of comfort. But I hope to revel in this strange nowhere, on the great blank sheet of paper, for as long as I can.