Few words in the vernacular excite the mind more fully than the word “SOLD” when seen on a real estate yard sign. Naturally the owners and their agents have already shared the intelligence. For the rest of us – that is, those outside looking in; or, in our case, those inside looking out – the notification constitutes a favourable domestic remark regarding commerce and current economic buoyancy. As a former real estate lawyer I can attest to the fact that nothing contaminates the business world more toxically than prolonged yard signs accumulating tall blades of grass. A professional client of mine for example had the disheartening experience to withstand upwards of four years of economic stagnation before her otherwise charming solid-brick home finally slipped into the economic stream. For even those who, during the same period, sold at a loss in order to facilitate purchase of a new home in Europe, the SOLD sign on their property was at the time and in retrospect a welcome alternative. The machinery of the world functions far more appropriately when the word SOLD is visited upon the equipment!

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I am a hopeless addict. My addiction affects every particle of my being, everything from pill-popping to chocolate and I’m an especial devotee of JD Salinger. While I have at least quit drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes – Oh, how I miss those frozen martinis in bathtubs on sticks with the giant bluish green olives! – I nonetheless preserve my assignment and enslavement to almost every other habit one can possibly cultivate from the moment of arising from the virginal lair to the evening descent thereto. This so-called creature of habit is visibly one who long ago created for himself what he perceives to be the ideal circumstance and behaviour. Why remold the perfect design?

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After graduating from law school in 1973 – and beginning Articles at MacDonald, Affleck 100 Sparks Street in Ottawa – the least of my preoccupations was a holiday weekend. Indeed having just begun my employment in June of that year my focus was entirely upon my work at the law office. Generally speaking my work was that of a domestic servant; that is, rudimentary employment to which was attached little profound significance. Much of what I did was closing real estate transactions – which was nothing more distinguished than personal delivery of documentation to the Land Registry Office in central downtown Ottawa. It was a common quip that the legal secretaries knew more about the practice of law than the articling students who were labelled “Gophers”.

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If you’re what I imagine most of us are (which for purposes of this thesis might be described as malleable or impressionable), the transition from one group of society to another frequently invites alteration and accommodation. When I say a group of society it is but a convenient reference to klatches, those so-called sloppy lumps or masses of people normally devoted to one particular enterprise or undertaking. The variance of these groups can range from the bluntness of fraternity or sport to the ceremony of religion or diplomacy. Straddling the boundaries of these groups of society regularly forces the participants to blend or manipulate their conduct to reflect the tone of the group to which they have been transferred.

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All day I have dawdled and drifted. The gossamer sheers swell in the withdrawing room. The air is uncommonly fresh and clean, the temperature acceptably warm, the cumulus is breaking up to give a lovely summer evening. I squared my Protestantism with an early morning bicycle ride followed by a blissful lounge on the garden patio in the midday sunshine spilling from the azure sky above as I ritually pointed my face into eternity.

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“Like too many other men, who are not to be turned from the path of right by pleasure, by lucre or by danger, he mistook the impulses of his pride and resentment for the monitions of conscience, and deceived himself into a belief that, in treating friends and foes with indiscriminate insolence and asperity, he was merely showing his Christian faithfulness and courage.”

Excerpt From
The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 3
Thomas Babington Macaulay

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On a late July warm and breezy summer morning in Ramsay Township there is nothing that surpasses the idle pleasure of a substantial breakfast from Wendy MacDonald Catering at the Mississippi Golf Club in the Village of Appleton adjacent the meandering Mississippi River. Once again today we were propelled from our domestic habitation to the welcome flagstone patio of the club overlooking the first tee and the tranquil waters of the nearby river. The effulgent sunshine partly impeded the clarity of my forward view but it was a qualification I happily endured as I nestled into my lounge chair, sipping strong black coffee awaiting the arrival of homemade blueberry pancakes with maple syrup and butter.

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It is I find a singular feature of most bloodyminded people (and by the way I include myself in that blunt assessment) that they go on and on about the charisma of the place where they happen to live, as though there were no other, as though the rest of the world were God’s insouciant production just to see if He/She/They got it right the first time. It’s called the “no place like home” eulogy, that seemingly warm and congenial endorsement meant to legitimize one’s return from a foreign land or as a commendation of the universe to which one is currently moored.

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“when the old boughs wither,
we thrust new ones into a chimney”

Excerpt From
The Dunciad: An heroic poem. In three books.
Alexander Pope

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Knowing when to quit is a banausic philosophic adage of broad application which advances the seemingly unpopular admonition of retirement or withdrawal. Often it runs together with the metaphorical encouragement to abandon ship while there is still time.  It is accordingly both a substantive and temporal admonition. The warning has been associated with almost every critical aspect of human endeavour and relationships. Most often, because of the prerequisite of involvement, the harangue applies to what for the moment at least is important to us. Accordingly the decision to “jump ship” at what is likely an inopportune instance is regularly equated with an element of possible indiscretion at the very least or the more probable abbreviation of what is already a bad or ineffective alliance.

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