My Name Is Jasper

Aqualung

Do you still remember

December's foggy freeze

When the ice that

Clings on to your beard is

Screaming agony

And you snatch your rattling last breaths

With deep-sea diver sounds,

And the flowers bloom like

Madness in the spring

Aqualung – Ian & Jenny Anderson (357)

When you are young, whether you're a child or a freshman, you should have an urge to change the world. Make this a better place for everyone. As you grow older, it often feels that it gets harder and harder to still believe that you can. It's a question I've struggled with for a long time. Do I matter? Do I have impact? Those questions made me write this book. They made me quit my job to go out in this world and find out. As a kid I had less doubts...

We must have been about ten years old. Together with friends from my class – their names were Bart, Ellen, Ingrid, Inge, and Niels – I'd spend my Wednesday afternoons cleaning up the neighborhood. We had made this master plan where we divided the neighborhood in different sectors and each Wednesday after school, armed to the teeth with garbage bags and plastic gloves, we'd make our rounds, picking up trash and recycling what we could afterwards. We even brought handmade paper signs, on which we wrote angry messages 'from the mayor' that it was illegal to dump your trash next to the road. We had asked my mom to sign those very official documents, sporting hand drawn crests of the town.

I don't remember how long we kept it up. Roaming the streets unsupervised. Somehow it feels like that was still possible all those years ago. We also never got disheartened when new trash appeared in streets we cleaned up the week before. We were making a difference. And we were proud of that.

"Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere" (358)

Unfortunately, I lost all contact with my former co-cleaners. Now only the odd Facebook alert reminds me of those good old days when the world was in our hands.

You might wonder why this sudden burst of melancholy? Well, the world has gone insane... At the very least, the members of the republican party in the United States. I guess they were never truly sane to begin with. Today Donald Trump secured enough republican delegates to become their presumptive nominee for the presidential elections later this year. 'He is the voice of the anti-establishment.' Yeah, more like the voice of bigotry, racism, and blatant ignorance. We live in scary times.

...

I miss Julie like crazy, and every text we send each other makes it worse. It's been a long time now. Too long. There aren't a lot of distractions in suburban Oakville. I've been to the one dive bar in town and played ping pong with drunk strangers, but apart from that everything feels very calm, friendly, and organized here.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful and happy to be here. It's might be a big change from the lively Toronto neighborhoods, but I am lucky to have friends like LeBaron and Nicole who take me in their home without hesitation. When I ask Nicole whether my occupancy is not too much trouble, she reassures me: "Don't worry; the reason we got a house is so we can have friends over." If that isn't available as one of those motivational frame at Walmart, it should be.