A Three-Year Period of Relative Prosperity

During a three-year period of relative prosperity, my parents owned a house in Regina, Saskatchewan. A couple of towering coniferous trees flanked the walkway that ran perpendicularly up from the sidewalk to the concrete porch at the front of the house. No grass grew beneath the trees, and tiny wriggling green worms dangled from whatever horrendous stuff tiny wriggling green worms use to dangle from the spiny brown needles of coniferous trees.  

The house had a basement apartment, and when there was no tenant, which was often, we would play hide and seek in the empty rooms. I once shimmied my way up the walls of a bedroom closet and hid on the top shelf and no one could find me. I liked being unfound. There was a fist-sized hole in the plaster of one of the walls from when a renter had punched through it.
 
The boy who lived next door was named Regan Doyle. He went to my school and had straight brown hair that hung in his eyes and wore thick glasses and I would climb the tree next to the back porch and spy on him while he played in his backyard. I was good at climbing trees.

The house sat on a corner lot. One year, my parents decided to put a curving concrete path leading from the sidewalk at the side of the house to the backyard. During the construction of this path, my father accidentally smashed my mother's middle finger with a sledgehammer. If you feel the end of her finger, you can feel the bone there, too close to the surface. They planted a Japanese maple next to the curve in the path.

My little brother and I used my dad's old trailer as a clubhouse. We normally used the trailer to pack our stuff into when we moved from one basement apartment to the next, but we were stationary at present. The trailer was enclosed and painted bright blue on the outside and had a padlock on the door and sloped down where the hitch rested on the ground. We hung posters on the interior walls and sat on the sloping floor and read Archie comic books and my brother filled empty Windex bottles with grasshoppers from the field behind our house and then filled them up with water and shook them. When we ran through the field, which was a hockey rink in the winter, a blizzard of grasshoppers would rise up around us like a biblical plague.

In basement rec rooms, we kids watched black and white zombie movies and listened to KISS and Madonna on cassette, fast forwarding and rewinding to get to the good songs. We played Spin the Bottle with empty Pic-A-Pops, and one day I tripped my best friend while she was slow dancing with her boyfriend so that they would fall on top of each other and she broke all the bones in her right foot.

In the winter, sometimes the older boys would let me play goalie. In the small wooden building we would change into our skates in so our feet and fingers didn't freeze off, they smoked cigarettes that didn't smell like my parents' cigarettes and swore and showed me the Playboy magazines they brought with them.    

One afternoon I came home from school to find my mother standing at the sink in the kitchen, silently smashing dinner plates on the linoleum floor.

Another afternoon I came home from school to find my mother standing at the sink in the kitchen, my father standing behind her with his hands up under her shirt, holding her small breasts.

Shortly after my twelfth birthday, my dad lost his job again and we put the house up for sale and my brother and I took down the posters and I said goodbye to the trees and the tiny wriggling green worms and the boy next door and the Japanese maple and the neighbourhood kids and the hockey rink and my parents packed our stuff into the old blue trailer and we set out east across the endless Canadian prairie.

The Mundane and the Transcendent

Until the day that some brilliant/bonkers Scandinavian scientist finally cracks the time/space continuum, we humans must relegate our personal histories to the series of moments, both mundane and transcendent, that shape us into the ever-evolving creatures we are. There are, as even the most cursory glance at any social media website will reveal, a fuck of a lot of mundane moments out there. And, while I firmly believe in the transcendent power latent in the mundane, those transcendent moments, the ones we recognize either at the time or in hindsight to be truly life-altering, those are the moments that matter. 

As an aside, the first time I tried lemonade Vitamin Water was on a road trip either to or from Toronto. I purchased it from a vending machine at a rest stop, and it was the iciest, most divine beverage ever to have quenched a thirst. It was everything I'd ever dreamed a drink could be, and even more remarkable because it was so unexpected. All subsequent lemonade Vitamin Waters have paled in comparison, but, like Ahab, I have not stopped chasing after that elusive white whale. (As an aside inside of an aside, I really hated reading Moby Dick, but Melville is good for an allusion or two.) 

So anyway, the mundane moments make up most of our time, obviously (unless maybe you are independently wealthy and can afford to fly off to the sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica whenever the urge strikes), so the transcendent ones are a pretty big deal. These are the stories we tell when we are getting to know someone. Tales of trauma, often, but also tales of knowledge and growth. Morality, even. I enjoy hearing these stories, making connections between that thing that happened and the effect it has had on the teller. Ever a student of my own human condition, I also enjoy telling my own tales and sussing out the impact on my psyche, an intellectual/emotional exercise in expression and understanding. 

So in the coming weeks, I think I will use this inter-space to share with you my moments of epiphany. Maybe you will tell me yours. That'd be cool. For now, however, I am going to bed, because it's 1:30 a.m. new time, which is 2:30 a.m. old time, and I am tired as hell, despite that extra hour. Daylight Savings Time jet lag is a bitch.     

    

In Defense of Offensive Halloween Decorations

It is the witching hour, and I have slept for approximately 18 hours today, so I am currently wide awake, thinking Halloween thoughts because someone in my town put up a Halloween decoration of a man hanging from a gallows that enraged a bunch of people.

If you have known me for any length of time, you will know that I am not easily offended (horking being the notable exception), so my natural inclination was to not be offended. And here is why: death is fucking scary.

The only thing we really know about death is that it will happen and that there is sweet fuck-all that we can do about it. There are lots of horrible ways to die: you could get your head sawn off by a nutbar on a Greyhound bus, you could be shot by  a police officer who thinks you are reaching for a gun when you are reaching for your insurance, your airplane could crash in the middle of the ocean, you could have a ruptured brain aneurysm, you could step on a rusty nail and not bother getting a tetanus shot, you could be executed for your religious or political beliefs. Or you could die at home in bed of old age while dreaming a nice dream about that time you watched a giant sea turtle laying her eggs on the beach in Costa Rica. Either way, death sucks.

Halloween helps us deal with the scary shit in life. It forces us to look at the thing we are most afraid of and, for one night, laugh in its face. Celebrate it, even. And sure, it's become just as silly and commercialized as the rest of the holidays, but its essence, that spirit of acknowledging the dark unknown, is more important than any other holiday except maybe Thanksgiving, the life-yin to the death-yang of All Hallow's Eve.

If it makes you uncomfortable to look at death, congratulations! You are probably a relatively well-adjusted human being. But there's a reason we buy kids goldfish as pets. That little fishy, like Grandpa, will die, and so will you, someday. Death doesn't give a shit about how old you are, or about how good you are, or about how you make a concerted effort to reduce your carbon footprint. He's kind of a dick, and he's often pretty ugly. You don't have to like looking at him, but that doesn't mean that you should hide your eyes, either, because he's real and he'll come for you eventually and you should know that. So in the meantime, let's play dress-up and look that rat-bastard in the eye and knock on the doors of strangers and have them give us a little something sweet to help soften the inevitable death-blow.

Happy Halloween, and riot on.

Billy T and the Silver Sale

Ever in search of adventure, dude and I decided to pay a visit to Billy T's Tap and Grill this evening. A neighbourhood watering hole if ever there was one, Billy T's promises Good Talk, Good Times, and something else that starts with a T that I can't remember. Taste? Tuna? Something like that, anyway. (It's probably not Tuna.)

We wandered in around 8:30 on a Saturday night. There were some regulars-types sitting at the end of the bar, big boisterous men with bald spots and beer bellies. Mediocre pop music played on the radio and the football game played on various tv sets around the room. We settled on a table near the back (after sitting down and then wondering if maybe we shouldn't try the restaurant side and getting up again and trying the restaurant door and then being informed, after the pretty bottle-blonde waitress asked us if we were looking for someone because we were obviously interlopers and maybe we should get the hell out and leave the place to people from the goddamned neighbourhood because this is a neighbourhood bar (she didn't actually say that last part), that the restaurant was closed but that we could order from a limited menu in the bar side of the establishment. One of the regulars informed us that we could still get a steak and fries, and that the wings were good, which was comforting to hear, since wings were what we were after.  

So we settled on a table near the back and ordered some wings and mozzarella sticks, which is what you order in neighbourhood watering holes. (Whatever you do, don't go ordering a sandwich or, god forbid, a salad; breaded and deep-fried is the only way to go. Trust me on this.) Now before I lose you completely, let me describe what was happening at the tables behind us, because it was pretty weird and I'm still not completely sure exactly what was going on, and this story isn't really about the mediocre bar food anyway.  

The scene: on four tables pushed together, an extensive array of black felt-bottomed trays, and, in these trays, an extensive array of sparkling silver jewelry. Rings, ID bracelets, chains, tray after tray of them. (Is this some sort of tiny trade show? I wonder.) A tall man with thinning hair pulled back into a frazzled grey ponytail, wearing camouflage shorts, dirty sneakers, and an old T-shirt, stands with a middle-aged brunette woman in middle-aged woman attire (ergo nondescript). Together, they are attempting to sell a heavy silver chain to a young Italian? Greek? man in chef's whites. Young man exits via the bathroom, returns dragging a doddering old gentleman with him. (Is this Billy T himself? I wonder.) 

"Grandpa, this is," and the young man introduces Ponytail and the woman but I can't quite catch their names, except he gets the woman's name wrong and she is kind of a bitch about it in that way that people are bitchy about things when they are trying not to appear as if they are being bitchy about them. Grandpa dodders back off to the bathroom. 

"Can you make it longer? I want it longer," voices the young man. 

"No, no, look. Bend over. If it was longer, it would fall into everything," assures the woman. 

"This length looks perfect with a polo, or a nice shirt," advises Ponytail. "You don't want it longer. Otherwise you'd look like Eminem or Tupac." 

"I just want it two links longer. Can you do it two links longer?" and the young man goes off to seek the fashion advice of his brother. 

While he is gone, Nondescript hisses to Ponytail, "Stop trying to get him to buy it. He doesn't want it." 

The bottle-blonde waitress brings two cups of coffee and a glass that she identifies as the bourbon on the rocks. Ponytail tries to give her a ring. She (wisely) declines. He sips his bourbon.  

At the table directly behind us sits an older gentleman (who has been silent until this point) who introduces himself to the newly-returned young man and his brother as Sal or Silvio or something close to that but not quite that, but a name that suggests that he is certainly a member of whatever mafia currently exists in my hometown that is behind this bizarre silver-jewelry fencing operation. 

The wings and cheese sticks arrive and I lose track of the conversation for a while. (The wings were pretty good: a little too heavily-breaded for my taste, but with a decent medium sauce that only made my nose run a little bit.) When I pick it up again, the young man is still trying to decide on the chain (which looked ridiculous, by the way), so Ponytail tells him he can wear it for the week and then decide. 

"No, no. I'll pay you for it if I decide to buy it, but you gotta give me a deal. I wouldn't wanna go over a hundred and fifty bucks."

Ponytail looks to Nondescript. "How much do you think this would be?"

"At least two," she says. "I don't have my scale. Silver is expensive you know. It goes by weight." 

And now dude and I have given up all pretense of conversation and are blatantly eavesdropping on this most unusual of activities for your average, every-day neighbourhood watering hole. (Or is it? Maybe this kind of stuff happens in neighbourhood watering holes every night and I have just never witnessed it before.) I am reminded of the drug-dealer in St. Lucia who promised us whatever we wanted even though we were wandering down the beach with no money, assuring us that we could just pay him later at the jump-up. Sure, wear it for a week, and then you can pay us five hundred bucks or we'll break your deep-frying arm. 

As an aside, throughout the proceedings, a large man in an overly-large Kid Rock concert T wanders from table to table, chatting up a pair of older women, buying a couple of shots for some people at another table, but he never gets involved in the sales pitch. It's like they aren't there. (At one point, he glances at us, identifies us immediately as non-neighbourhood interlopers, and moves on.)  

The silver-mafia don sits silently at the table and slurps his coffee, the guy with the thinning grey ponytail tries to tell the dopey young man about fashion, and we suck hot sauce off our fingers while Pink sings in the background and the boisterous balding beer-bellied regulars laugh over at the bar, seemingly oblivious to the odd goings-on. 

Eventually the world's weirdest sales team packs up their black felt-bottomed trays, but not (to my silent hilarity) before the young man's brother gets sucked into the wear-it-for-a-week-we-don't-have-our-scale scam (he seems okay about the length, though), and we pay our bill and slip out into the night.  

So, anybody up for a date next Saturday? I want to see how this turns out. Billy T's: Good Talk, Good Times, Good Tuna!

  

  

    

Seriously? Another post about language?

I criticized the excessive use of superlatives in internet conversation the other day, and then I read a couple of posts from a couple of people about language, and then I watched Stephen Fry's grammar video, and then the Weird Al Yankovic grammar video came out, and then I read another post about grammar from someone else, so I guess language has been in the air lately, or at least on some people's minds.

So I've been thinking about it even more than usual lately, wondering why I care so much, why I want the people I care about to care about it, too. I guess I find it frustrating that so many people are content to revert to prehistoric grunts and monosyllables and pictograms instead of using sentences when language is so interesting and (obviously, since expression is its purpose) expressive.

(As an aside, nothing drives me quite so crazy as seeing the word "Want." all on its own like that, followed by the period. Such unadulterated greed and desire. It's as sophisticated as a caveman clubbing a cavewoman over the head and dragging her off to rape her. Which, to be fair, communicates the emotion 100% effectively. I just fucking hate it, both the consumerism and the laziness of it.)  

I honestly don't care about your grammar mistakes. I will notice them, yes, but that is because there is an editor/proofreader in my brain that I am unable to turn off. But unless the content of your writing is clearly that of an idiot, I am not judging you on your misuse of "it's". There are a bunch of formal grammatical errors in this very blog, as a matter of fact. I would be perfectly content never to use "whom" again, and I have a mental block with the past tense of "lie"/"lay" that I seem unable to shake. I found it adorable when my nephew used the phrase "totes jelly" and I knew what he meant when he said it even though when I type it I think that someone is carrying a jar of jam.   

As a language, English is fucking bonkers. It makes no goddamn sense most of the time, and it is changing at an astonishing rate, so to insist on following the rules seems kind of goofy. We can certainly make language simpler and more direct, not to mention easier to type on tiny keyboards when we're in a hurry, by using abbreviations and emoticons. Brevity has its place. But I worry about what we're losing on a deeper level. I love language too much not to fight for it.

This is what I want from communication, even internet communication: honesty and emotion and thought, and maybe even originality every now and then. Maybe not all the time, but not NONE of the time, you know?    

Dull

I know, in my heart and in my head, that I have nothing of import to impart, but I spit things out anyway, like those bits of puke that get stuck in the back of your throat and make you gag: a piece of undigested spaghetti, maybe, or a fragment of spinach.

I load the dishwasher, careful to place the forks tines-up, wipe the crumbs from the counter, clean the sink, feed the cat. No one posts pictures of loaded dishwashers on the internet. Or not to my knowledge anyway. Maybe I'll google it later. In this era of cats and coffee mugs, loaded dishwashers can't be far behind.

Watching video footage of a cycling tour through Italy while running in place seems unfathomably ridiculous. I wonder how many people are concerned about their heart health and how many people just want to look good at the beach. Why are there kids on the treadmills?

Ah, the drudgery of life. This is not the first time I've written about minutiae, about ennui. Only boring people get bored. Am I boring? Iggy Pop is the self-proclaimed chairman of the bored, and he's had a pretty exciting life, all things considered. He probably loads his dishwasher. I bet he even goes to the gym. 

I often catch a glimpse of something dark in my peripheral vision, something too tiny or moving too quickly for me to see. This time it was an ant, which I picked up, tossed in the toilet, and drowned in urine. If it finds something, a counter crumb I missed, maybe, it will relay that message to the surprisingly-hardy colony that lives just outside the garage door. Best not to take the chance by letting it live. The urine drowning was incidental; I had to pee. Two birds.

But it's not always an ant. Sometimes it's nothing. Which makes me wonder what it is that I am seeing out of the corner of my eye. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe I blinked and didn't realize it. Sweet mother of fuck, is this what I've sunk to? Wondering if I've just blinked?

Tomorrow I will be vivacious, witty, vibrant. Today I'm going to try to beat my score in computer mah-jong.













   

End of June Blues

I do this thing where I meet with kids once or twice a week and help them with their English homework. I also double as a counsellor a lot of the time, because being a kid these days is rough, man. (Being a kid is always rough, but I think it's even harder today. If you think navigating the labyrinth that is social media is tough as an adult, imagine trying to fumble your way through it as an awkward teenager. I thank my lucky stars that my adolescence was pre-internet.)

We share a secret, these students and I, because they know that I am on their side, not the side of their parents or teachers. More rewarding than an A+ essay is helping these kids realize that they are more than just the marks they get in school. Marks are important, I tell them, but only insofar as they are stepping stones to one possible future. You have so many more possible futures than you can imagine. There is no single path to success, despite what your parents or teachers might tell you. It might take you a while to find your thing. Some people never find it. It sucks, but that's life. Trust me. I know. But if I can help you find it, I will do everything I can. Now remember to use present tense and active verbs.

One of my kids plays hockey and broke his two front teeth. I noticed right away, and I also noticed how he avoided looking directly at me, frequently putting his hand in front of his mouth. Hey! I said, after a few minutes. Did you break your teeth? Playing hockey? That's awesome! All the best hockey players have no front teeth. Are you getting them fixed soon? And the kid relaxed and we read another chapter in Lord of the Flies. Sometimes you break your teeth. There's no point in trying to hide it. (I'm pretty sure that's a metaphor for something. Life, maybe.)

Twice I have had girls get their periods on my furniture. They are mortified, but I am cool. Periods happen. Sometimes they happen on someone else's couch. (I'm pretty sure that's another metaphor for something.)

My favourite student will be leaving me soon for university. On Friday she asked if she could come for the next couple of weeks, even though her final exams are finished and we have nothing to work on. She said that she can't imagine not seeing me, she doesn't want to stop. And I know that part of this is just the anxiety that accompanies this next step, but part of me also knows that I have played a role in shaping this gorgeous, confident creature who is about to go off into the world and help make it a better place, and she doesn't want to go without me. And that feeling, man. It's indescribable.

It's watching their reaction that moment at the end of Of Mice and Men.  Listening to them complain about the pressure their parents are putting on them and reminding them that soon they will be out of the house. Introducing them to Ray Bradbury. Congratulating them on getting 27 on the speaking section of the TOEFL. Discussing the blow-your-mind ending of Life of Pi. Assuaging their fears about university. Reminding them not to procrastinate. Playing poker as a reward for memorizing their vocab lists. Sharing bands. Assuring them that they are not alone in feeling alone. Explaining the symbolism of colours and seasons. Watching comma splices disappear. Having them point something out that I hadn't thought of even though I'd read the book sixteen times.

This, I think, is my strength and my purpose: to help people feel confident and beautiful and smart when they feel self-conscious and ugly and stupid. So when they leave me and fly off to university or (as so often happens) back to Korea, I feel tiny splinters jabbing at me from inside my chest. My darlings, I am so proud of you. Good luck out there in the world. Don't worry too much if you break your teeth or get your period on someone else's couch. Try not to procrastinate. Be confident. Be bold. Keep reading. And riot on.