The idea of this trip was spawned once it was announced one of my favourite cousins in Italy was planning on getting married on May 22nd, 2010. But as everyone knows, one week in Europe is never enough so I made arrangements to stay with a good friend of mine outside of Zurich, travel around Switzerland with him and then head over to jolly o’ England to meet up with a business partner for a weekend before finally making my way to the wedding and the carnival schedule of visiting relatives.

Switzerland greeted me this past Friday with cloud cover and a steady forecast of heavy rain, but still with that, I’m just happy to be here.

Not surprisingly, as Monday morning came around and my buddy went to work I found myself looking for something to do for the brief periods of time between torrential downpouring. Within this time I accomplished two things:

1) Of 4 or 5 grocery stores I managed to shop at the most expensive.

Now, I don’t know if any of you have ever been mugged at gun point but I am guessing the feeling of grocery shopping in Switzerland would make someone feel equally victimized. Mind you, as I stepped off the plane last week and saw a sign for a 25 CHF ($25 usd) club sandwich, I realized I should probably up my traveling budget for this trip.

2) I managed to find myself a nice Italian coffee shop to hang out at. Leave it to me to visit the German part of Switzerland and source a spot to eat gelato and drink espresso every afternoon. Seriously, every afternoon. They speak to me in Italian and I do my best to return the favour. So far there’s been no sour faces so I guess I’m doing ok.

Though the remainder of this week I am planning on covering Lucerne, Basel, and Bern either on my own or with my buddy this Sunday morning we really kick it into gear with a road trip that defies most logic.

Salzburg, Austria

Between Sunday and Thursday of next week I will be visiting Salzburg, Austria; Munich, Germany, and then Lugano, Switzerland, in the Italian part of Switzerland. After all of this, we will be leaving Lugano around noon so to make sure I can catch my 7pm flight to England for the weekend. should be quite the whirlwind for those few days.

But in all of this flight and travel confusion, sometimes I need to stop and realize that this is the life that I wanted the freedom to explore, these are the opportunities that I one day dreamed I would have the chance to experience.

Lugano, Switzerland

It’s hard to not take these trips or moments for granted sometimes, or get caught up in the pirate-like prices in this country or the fact that I may have to build an ark should this rain continue as it has been. The fact of the matter is that I am a very lucky guy, and for whatever reason, my trips to Europe seem to always remind me of that.

North American mentality can drag down even the best of us into the Joneses mentality, and even when I am home I have moments where I need to remind myself how pointlessly empty the race of material acquisition is.

Coincidentally enough, a few books I have read lately on success, marketing, and philosophy have touched on the same point;

There is truly only one thing on the planet that is worth having money to buy, Time (for the point of this discussion I am going to include Health in this definition of “Time”).  And within that acquired time, is the freedom to live your life as you choose. Yes, this is a much denser notion to possibly be covered in another post, but I thought I would share it now as even the past few days has made this fact crystal clear.

Time allows you, not just the luxury of spending time how you choose to spend it, but also with whomever you choose to spend it with.

Geez, I’ve only been over here for 4 days and I’m already having revelations, I’m sure after a month I’ll have the cure for cancer.

Stay tuned.

For those of you either not reading the news, or if you’re Catholic, ignoring it, Pope Benedict is in the middle of quite the disaster right now.  I call it a disaster instead of scandal because this is a very serious matter.

Tiger Woods bedding every stripper and hooker in the US is a scandal, but when you are the vicar of Christ on earth and it is now proven that you covered up multiple cases of child abuse as a Bishop and Cardinal, well, that’s a disaster.   At least it should be, but from where I’m sitting, most Catholics are still sitting in the pews acting like someone’s grandfather farted and the stink will soon pass.

Christopher Hitchens made a good point in an interview this weekend saying that, even as recent news of more and more child molestation cases come out against clergy all around the world, all Pope Benedict has done is “expressed regret” for these actions.

Am I the only one that finds this infuriating?

I “express regret” when I can’t attend someone’s birthday party, not when someone’s children are being repeatedly sexually abused.

Benedict does not ask for the arrest of these Cardinals, or further prosecution… or not even reparation for the families.  This is mainly because if the Pope supports criminal prosecution for these child molesting criminals he is effectively supporting prosecution of himself.

Pope Benedict is not just the leader of the church, but also the head of a nation, a political leader, yet we still allow a  proven accomplice to child abuse travel freely, and live without consequences.  This action alone looks at every child that has ever been abused by a member of the clergy (and the number is now well into the thousands), and says… “You don’t matter to us. We don’t care”

Christians that claim otherwise are fooling themselves.

These cases of abuse are not “rumours” or “heresay” they are recognized and documented FACTS.  Everytime you walk into a church and give money to your parish and volunteer at mass you are supporting an organization that is clearly and blatantly sexually abusing children on a massive scale all over the world.

This entire issue has been a real blood boiler for me for a long time, mainly because it is obviously a HUGE problem within the Catholic church, yet Christians seem to look past it as if its nothing.

More than one Bishop and/or Cardinal have been allowed to flee their communities and take refuge within the Vatican City. So, is that what the Vatican City is allowed to become now; a refugee state for child molestors and sexually predators? Yes, it is.

And every Catholic worth their Sunday missal should be, as far as i am concerned, up in arms enraged over this world wide acceptance of child abuse.

So the next time you hand over your donation to the collection plate, know that you are doing your part to make sure that future generations of volunteers and alter boys can experience all the torture and therapy that every other generation has.

You just better pray its not someone in your family that gets to reap the nightmare and consequences of your own apathy.

Aaaand that pretty much sums up the creative writing process.

Especially if you are very critical about your writing, no matter the form, it makes the process so much more painful at times. As most of you have noticed I have not been blogging with the frequency that I once did and there are a few reasons for that.  The least of which is that my priorities recently are focused more on my budding and sputtering online business. The life of an entrepreneur is nothing if not challenging, both to make the business a success and also in self-management.

Once you work for yourself you start with two major problems…

#1 Your only employee is lazy.

#2 Your boss is an asshole.

But aside from that, my writing has suffered because for the last year or so I have found the creative process very daunting.

Basically, I am out of practice.

Its like my jump shop. I could be sinking 3-balls for all of August, but take me off the court for a year and I could start building schools in Haiti with all the bricks I clank off the backboard.

The more we practice, the more defined the neural pathways in our brain become regarding whatever task we happen to be challenging ourselves with.  It doesn’t matter if its something simple like finding our way to the bathroom in a new office, or sitting down to write your first screenplay.

I used to write so often that making the transition between thought and blog post were nearly seemless, yet now it seems I am dragging myself through the mud with lead boots, chained to an anchor.

Now I have to find ways to force myself to write.

Its no shock that I have a lot of opinions, everyone should. Our entire lives should be a perpetual dance of assessing and reassessing our perspective of the world around us in comparison with the perspective of others.

And in deconstructing certain topics on Perfectly Turbulent I find my opinions evolving, and begrudgingly having to accept that sometimes time honoured opinions must be left in the dust.

If you have any topics you’d like me to deconstruct, or questions you’d care to hear me sound off on, please let me know.

Let’s dance…

It seems to be something everyone has an opinion on, and rightfully they should.

We all have our favourite writers, or `’authors’ if you will.  We all own a million words placed between covers that we`ve absorbed that has resonated so deeply within us that it has awoken something we never knew existed.  

Inspiration rising from the ether.

Perhaps these words have released a pattern of thought that has waited decades to reach your fragile mind, and for that, you`ll always be grateful.

Perhaps a new novel has given you solace in a time you were not quite sure there was light on the other side, and for that, you`ll forever embrace the memory and the gift of hope.

Perhaps a chance meeting with a short story has given you some intangible insight, some hidden knowledge, that dared change the direction of your once certain mind.

It is these emotions that make every reader a viable and valuable critic.

Those that remain in their editorial ivory towers only carry so much significance.  Their value is in their ability to dissect the awful and grammatically handicapped authors from those that offer enough substance and depth in a legible format to their work to give any reader the opportunity to create their own moment. 

The author provides the words and the story, yet it`s still the reader that provides the magic.