Synapsesfiring

Note From The Author

2010-01-19T15:43:00.000-08:00

This blog is no longer refreshed with posts. However, there are 300 posts for you to read (see sidebar TOPICS & SUBJECTS & MISC. for orientation). I will continue to maintain the site; for instance, I will read and perhaps respond to any comments by readers. And spam? That shit'll be immediately deleted.
Regards,
Sturney

The Schmidt Sting Pain Index

2009-08-05T18:37:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I stuck my left forearm out the car window when I was driving to cool off using the "hand airplane" method. Either a hornet or a bee smacked into my wrist below the pinky and stung me. I shook him off and brought the arm in to see if the little bastard had left a stinger. He did not. The prick really smarted and did in a firey way for the rest of the day, the swelling becoming a angry red spot that I can still see today.

Last night I returned from my mom's desert scrub hillside in Osoyoos, a place ruled by hornets and wasps. In all the time I was there I was only stung once - and not by a courtyard-patrolling hornet or wasp. I took a bee's stinger in my left inner thigh - very close to things - while cycling back from a frozen yoghurt feast in Okanagan Falls. I flicked the bee off. The wound was a sharp stab, but the pain went away almost immediately. I thought about the difference between the two stings. The inner thigh should've hurt like crazy. And then, as always happens when given the sharp hind end, I started to think about the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.

I first heard about the Schmidt Sting Pain Index from two sources almost simultaneously in the mid-90's. CBC's "Quirks and Quarks" first alerted me to the amazing story of Justin O. Schmidt, a scientist at the Carl Hayden Bee Centre (bring the kids!) in Tuscon, Arizona. Soon after, I read a blurb on him and his trial-by-ordeal in Outside magazine back when it was a fine magazine with Tim Cahill and David Quammen's writing. Schmidt is a scientist with tremendous curiosity and balls like church bells.

For Schmidt sought to get stung by every wasp, hornet, bee, and ant he could find around the world and scale them using his own pain tolerance as an index. He was one smart son of a bitch to avoid arachnids. His scale goes from 1-4 with three adjectives and a comparison used, sometimes a metaphor, for the pain. He uses phrases like "light . . . almost fruity" and "slightly crunchy" to describe the sweat and honey bees respectively. Our usual bee is a 2, while the worst insect on his scale in the bullet ant which is a 4+ sting described as "intense, brilliant pain".

This is a man who suffered for a fairly esoteric and specialized reason. The common person knows only an index of "ow" "Ow!" and "OW! JESUS!" I'm still curious why one sting was a 2 and the other a mild, "almost fruity" sensation.

What It Feels Like to Read Infinite Jest In One Week

2009-07-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

Rolled up in Turkish-cut words in sheaves of paper and smoked
Clawed by clauses
Led by absurdity into transcendent cul-de-sacs
Tempted by tennis, at least the televised game
Narcotized by suspiciously detailed depictions of being high
Slightly smarter

Apt to call 2009 The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment
Accosted by acronyms
Knackered from climbing ladders of monosyllabic pharmaceutical indentification
Like a man overboard in a sea of symbols, reassured that there's a shore there's a shore
Blushed from awarding the Prettiest Girl of All Time (P.G.O.A.T.) in an elaborate mind ceremony
Paranoid that a tiny hanging number will lure me into six thousand diminutive words of footnotes
Humbled

Sorrowful and jubilant within the same sentence
Employed by literature
Sure that D.F.W. read P.G. Wodehouse
As if my eyeballs were made of marble that exceeded the holding strength of the sockets
Worried that no subsequent book will measure up.

The Postmodern Peloton: Days Six and Seven

2009-07-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

Done.
Completed.
Mission Accomplished.

I finish the novel on a pillow on a grassy hill with a bluegrass band playing below me. I rush onto the "dancefloor" to have a jig with the book in celebration.

The last two days were always going to be the hardest days. Impossible to cloister oneself at a music festival where one is riding a bike for four hours a day on security patrol. Impossible when surrounded with friends. Thankfully the friends knew what I was doing and - aside from some nagging from a couple of them - they let me devour pages while bobbing my head and tapping my foot. One friend-of-distinction cheers me on.

By the end, Don Gately surpasses Hal as the protagonist who matters the most to me. The threads are the various stories are sewn together but not too tightly; there are still loose ends and unresolved issues. Throughout it all are Wallace's painstaking words of minutia. There's a lot of pain in this novel, pain and absurdity. There's a lot of pharmacology.

It had been an incredible week. I feel somehow like I've both gain and lost something upon the Challenge's completion. Apres ca, le deluge? . All the other volumes I have leaning about the room in stacks seem paltry by comparison, but this is only an illusion. Isn't it?

*gives self high five*

The Postmodern Peloton: Day Five

2009-07-23T21:41:00.000-07:00

723 pages, 72 pages of footnotes

My copy of Infinite Jest is stained with the following: bugs (a whole mosquito preserved on the first page of blurbs), coffee, strawberries, huckleberries and good ol' soil.

One thing about plunging so deeply into such an incredible long work is that one gets to know the characters very well and care about them deeply, even if they are merely clowns or mouthpieces for Wallace's reflexive philosophizing. I don't know exactly where IJ is going in Act III, but I have a feeling someone I like is going to die.

The tennis match between Hal and Ortho Stice "The Darkness" goes on much too long but the tense scene where Don Gately gets shot is fantastic and reads like Charlie Huston channeling Thomas Pynchon. Someone from the Ennet House scene I rather want to die.

All I know is this: David Foster Wallace was a genius and I'm far from being one. This is actually calming.

I read by the river, in the gazebo at Allen Park and at home, of course. I find myself trying to explain the value of this Challenge to a couple of people and lost the thin veneer of internal logic that this mad word gluttony had five days ago. However, there's no stopping it. Not even the Kispiox Music Festival can stop me from completing this book by midnight on Saturday, so I can write about it here for very few people to read.

As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, "So it goes."

He also once wrote, "Hi ho!" all through a novel for good measure.

The Postmodern Peloton: Day Four

2009-07-22T22:02:00.000-07:00

567 pages, 61 pages of footnotes

I've learned a lot from Infinite Jest, mostly regarding tennis - tennis academies in particular - and the working of Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous. On the one hand, this reading experience has made me want to be play tennis, even though it's been exactly 13 years since I've picked up a racket. On the other hand, Infinite Jest has made me want even less to be a drug addict or drunk.

Today I read by the river and in the cafe, but mostly at home. There are less footnotes, but I still can't plow through 200 pages to give myself the buffer I need to make it through the busy weekend. At this point, I wish I had to sleep less, so I can read and do everything else that's "necessary": that which doesn't make me feel like a cloistered, obsessive hermit.

In today's pages one of the residents of the drug-rehab halfway house begins to kill pets to scratch some horrible psychological itch. Also today we finally get to see the handiwork of the Wheelchair Assassins, les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. They kill with a railroad spike to the eye. Somehow these incidents aren't any more horrific than yesterday's stories from the halfway house.

I find that I'm making notes and underlining less, though I'm still circling words that I don't know but am willing to look up. Because there are a lot of words I don't know. Wallace's knowledge is incredibly vast, and one doesn't always know if the vocabulary is perspicacity or functionless, obfuscating jargon (ha! two can play at that game).

I was amazed to find the main joke/koan from "This Is Water" used in a passage about AA. I guess when you've thrown out as many words into the universe as DFW, you're bound to repeat yourself now and again.

The Postmodern Peloton: Day Three

2009-07-21T21:39:00.000-07:00

418 pages, 48 pages of footnotes

Today is the most difficult and in some ways most "rewarding" of the Challenge. Today, the plot - the plot involving the Entertainment also known as Infinite Jest and how it relates to the setting - begins to coalesce. There are two horrible life stories from the female inhabitants of the drug rehab half balanced by the funniest scene in the book so far.

The biggest obstacle of the day was reading through two very long sections, or scenes. And they were back to back. Twenty one pages are dedicated to an introduction to the game of Eschaton in a match that gets completely out of hand for symbolic purposes. That's followed by a tedious and dense scene from the halfway house that unfolds for twenty three pages. Also today sees the longest footnote yet: footnote 110 is sixteen pages long of 6 point print, most of it involving a telephone conversation between Hal, the nearest thing we have to a protagonist, and his brother Orin. It advances the Entertainment plot, however.

In this future (technically now) world, the U.S.A., Canada and Mexico exist as O.N.A.N. (yeah, I know), the Organization of North American Nations. The U.S. has conceded a large part of its far Northeast, a place already toxically polluted, to Canada. The U.S. calls it the Great Concavity and Canada the Great Convexity. Garbage and waste is hurled into this barren, deathly landscape by enormous catapults. Quebecois separatists are battling the U.S. over this and that's where the Entertainment comes in . . .

I start the day with a half hour pedal before I settle down by the river and then, of course, Mercedes Beans and Model Teas. At the coffee shop I read a passage about football that is so much like early John Irving that I laugh and gasp at the same time. I bike up to New Town to read at Allen Park. There the weather is perfect for outside reading. That's where I tangle with the Gigantic Footnote.

I'm going to have to really have a couple of enormous days if I want to finish on Saturday. I'm reading about eight hours a day. I'm beginning to wish that there were really big illustrations distributed amongst these 1079 pages.

The Postmodern Peloton: Day Two

2009-07-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

270 pages, 17 pages of footnotes

I read down the river again today - earlier because it's the TdF's second and last rest day. I read on a bench and spy a deer on the opposite shore. Yesterday it was a coyote. I also plug away at Mercedes Beans and Allen Park and at home.

I'm struck by several things today. How I've never read so much with a mechanical pencil in hand since university ended 15 years ago. How odd it is to have two bookmarks at work. Over and over I'm amazed at Wallace's vast knowledge. At one point I write "Irony and Knowledge" in the margin. Here's only one example: Madame Psychosis's radio recitation of horrible or debilitating deformities (she herself is scarred by acid and works behind a screen): "The leukodermatic. The xanthodantic. The maxillofacially swollen . . . the besilisk-breathed and pyorrheic." (pg. 189) Wallace can always tell us what material from which an object is made.

Two of his own quotes that may explain his style or motives I underline today. "The monologues seem both free-associative and intricately structured" (pg 185). "Young Hal's monomaniacally obsessive interest and effort" (pg 999 {footnotes}). In Infinite Jest, as in his essays and reportage, one gets the sensation that DFW has to spill this stuff on to the page, that his big, effective brain is compelling him to create meticulously wrought worlds.

I'm already getting tired. The small fonts, the pressure to forge ahead and yet not miss a trick, not skim and skip. To do it right. I visit, IM with a couple of people on MSN, watch an hour of TV, help my buddy build his fence, eat, nap, shower etc. My bikes are sitting in the shed wondering what the bloody hell is going on.

This novel is ironic, funny, creative, sad as hell in its examination of longing, yearning, depression, drug abuse, and suicide. I have this feeling that by swallowing it almost whole I'm getting a different experience that the month-longers and the summer-longers. Not better, but different. Like a python who eats the tapir and has to hide out for a while.

The Postmodern Peloton: Day One

2009-07-19T21:40:00.000-07:00

135 pages, 12 pages footnotes

The day begins with the shadow of the uncracked Infinite Jest looming over my coffee as I watch the exciting first Tour de France stage in the Alps. The stage ends on the Verbier climb and, as just as I expected, Alberto Contador attacks the Heads of State and takes the yellow jersey. Several other Heads of State finish ahead of Lance Armstrong and suddenly the question of who is the big cheese of the Astana team is answered vehemently.

I lug the novel down to the shore of the Skeena River and read on a bench. A student working down there and I watch a squirrel chase a weasel. I think it's some kind of portent. Thankfully, the footnotes (more like endnotes) don't begin until page 23. All day I read what is effectively still the introduction, but down by the river, I get the introduction to the introduction. The setting: a near future (published in 1996, it's more like today and a recent yesterday) when the years are sponsored like New Year's Day college bowl games. The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (2009) is when most of the action takes place, and I imagine that it's the title that tickles most readers' fancies, but I like 2005 renaming, The Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken. The plot seems to take place mostly in Arizona, a tennis academy near Boston, a drug rehab halfway house near the academy but also in all sorts of other locales.

There's a movie that devastates people by taking over their brains, incredibly detailed drug binge scenarios, philosophizing, wildly technical jargon, Quebecois wheelchair assassins and tons of other bizarre and sublime stuff. DFW switches between first person narrative and third person limited omniscient point of view and even employes a phonetic, stream of consciousness style. As far as his famous foot/endnotes go, things didn't get too crazy until page 63 when suddenly I had to face eight pages of James Incandenza's filmography.

There have been sentences that have made me laugh aloud and sections that have gone on so tediously that my eyes have crossed with a rubbery kind of noise.

I consider this to be a good start. My brain feels odd though, likes it's shifted forward in my skull.

The Postmodern Peloton Preview Two: David Foster Wallace

2009-07-18T16:39:00.000-07:00

I didn't know whether or not to read a lot before immersing myself - drowning perhaps - in Infinite Jest. Eventually, I decided to train like the Tour de France riders who really wanted to win it: read considerable amounts a couple of weeks beforehand (The Raw Shark Texts) and then take in a moderate amount of words right up until the starting gun (magazines).

"Le Grand Depart" has been moved up one day for two reasons. First of all, I thought it would be too easy to begin on a Tour rest day, which is what Monday is. Secondly, the final weekend of the Challenge (and Tour) falls on a particularly busy one: the three day Kispiox Music Festival, which I am attending as both festival goer and bike security volunteer. Surely two days of Festival and Tour is more conducive to finishing than three. Saturday, July 24 is the finish date.

So today is the eve of the Challenge, and I can only prepare by reading and thinking about David Foster Wallace.

By the time David Foster Wallace (or DFW as he might write himself) killed himself last year, he had become an American literary giant, and not just because he penned the gigantic Infinite Jest. He was a trenchant, wise, humourous, and meticulously footnoting essayist. His detailed footnotes are what he's best known for - and theyremain one of the main obstacles of the Challenge. Because skipping them is a crime and I'm not that kind of criminal. Another reading problem are the long, multi-clause sentences that are as elusive and confusing as a hydra.

I first encountered DFW in Harper's magazine, back when Harper's was worth reading. I was hooked instantly by his keen eye for irony. It helped that the first two pieces I read were "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" about the Illinois State Fair, and "Shipping Out", about taking a cruise ship holiday. Here was a man having fun with his brain and running wild with language.

Tonight I shall reread - for the third time in three weeks - his commencement address to Kenyon College. Sometimes known as the This Is Water speech (the 3800 word speech would somehow be later turned into a 140 page book), it is one of the simplest and most powerful arguments for living life with eyes and heart open. His line "the mind is a great servant but a terrible master" is often attributed to him, but he has clearly taken it from someone else. Nevertheless, it's a wondrously astute phrase and a sadly poignant one, for his mind ended up mastering him. The "tiny kingdom of his skull" became a place to horrible to endure.

The Postmodern Peloton: Preview One - the 2009 Tour de France

2009-07-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

The distraction begins tomorrow. Reading Infinite Jest in seven days would be hard enough without the splendour of the Tour de France tugging at my attention. Let's face it: as a high school teacher with the summer off there's nothing particularly challenging about immersing myself in Wallace's magnum opus, for time is at my disposal. But with the last week of le Grand Boucle shanghai-ing my time for three hours every morning, the task becomes a little more daunting. And outside the World Cup, there's nothing that rivets me to the screen than this monstrous contest of form and will.

There are, as I see it, three main stories threading their way through the 2009 race. First of all, with Lance Armstrong hoisting the headlines away from all the other riders this season, can he also deliver his eighth victory? I say, Christ, no, I fucking hope to hell not! Readers of this blog know my hate for Lance Armstrong. Among his many wretched acts, the current threat to and distraction from his own young teammate Alberto Contador is the most grievous. Contador is the second big story. Here is a guy who won all three Grand Tours - the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a Espana - in 14 months and now he's got to compete with Armstrong for leadership of the team. Even though I'm not pulling for Contador, I think he will win this Tour de France. He's just too good. The third story is - as always - drugs. With one of main contender Cadel Evan's Dutch lieutenants already pulled from team Silence-Lotto's roster for blood doping, it's hard to see how there won't be the kind of scandals of previous years, the outrages that have become so regular that they're hardly outrageous anymore.

As usual, the real fight will come in the last week: mountain stages, including one that ends of the brutal, bare ramps of Ventoux, and a time trial that will truly be the race of truth. Last year during my own self-supported Tour, I put in long days in the Kootenays in order to watch the last five stages at my mom's place. This year the test will be one of grueling concentration, not spinning gears and pouring sweat.

Tomorrow morning at 6:30 a.m. on OLN, the slaves of the road sally forth.

Who I'm cheering for: Andy Schleck and Carlos Sastre for the general win, Ryder Hesjedal - the lone Canadian, the Cervelo team.

This Summer's Project: Literature and Cycling

2009-06-30T17:47:00.000-07:00

Last summer, synapsesfiring acted as a cycling tour diary, as I pedaled a 2600 km "big balloon on a little string" through British Columbia and a slice of Alberta. The journal injected some new energy into the blog and gave it a brief period of focus and direction.

This July I'm going to write about the Tour de France and then, in the last week of the race, when things are really on the line, I'm going to attempt to read David Foster Wallace's key post-modern work, Infinite Jest. It's a huge, sprawling, comical work with Wallace's usual elaborate footnotes and detail. From what I've gleaned, it reflects Wallace's great genius. At almost 1000 word-packed pages of text and nearly 100 pages of meticulous tiny footnotes, the novel will be a huge challenge to tackle in one week - July 20 - 26.

The "key" to this exercise is reading the tome while being utterly consumed by the Tour de France. At least 3 hours of my day will be taken up with watching OLN's coverage of the race. Watching the race makes me want to cycle. Then there are normal social interactions and working on my "Brian Griffin novel". And one must sleep I suppose.

It's been nearly a generation's worth of time since I've tried to read a shitload. Back in my English Lit. undergraduate days I had to juggle two or three novels at once - a Victorian, an early 20th century American tale and a book of Modern British literature. Sometimes I failed and had to fake it in class. Readers might recall that it took me a whole month this winter to read Drood, a slightly shorter novel.

What prompted me to try this was hearing about a website called infinitesummer.org, an online book club for people who want to read the novel over the course of three months. As an ex-student pointed out, this is one-upmanship. True, but it's got a point, even if it escapes me at the moment.

I will be priming the pump in the upcoming fortnight, getting readers prepared for the intense mayhem by writing about David Foster Wallace and regularly reporting on the Tour de France while providing some Tour history. I will write with one of my five cycling caps on my head. Stay tuned for the madness of The Postmodern Peloton.

Praising Peanut Butter

2009-06-14T19:20:00.000-07:00

A year before she died, my Granmere told me that she always laid in the peanut butter when she knew I was coming to visit as a kid. I lived on Tang, white bread and peanut butter during those summer days. I've always had a love for this "salty ointment" (as a guy I knew at UBC referred to it). And I like the stuff that's probably not good for you, the smooth, homogenized, sweetened stuff: Skippy (which took over Squirrel), Kraft "Teddy Bear" PB, Jif, Peter Pan etc. And although I don't mind the type that has oil on top and must be expertly stirred, frightful experiences with Deaf Smith peanut butter in the 70's have left me wary. I've written about Deaf Smith before on this blog, and, in fact, have mentioned it in six separate posts! Obviously, I am committed to this pasty food.

I recently discovered that peanut butter is the main ingredient of a food called Plumpy'nut, used to battle starvation in Third World countries. Peanut butter is heroic. Plumpy'nut can be stored without refrigeration for two years and contains 500 calories, not a difficult task for a food that is 100 calories per tablespoon. I can think of a single time I've used less than a tablespoon on a piece of toast. A single 500 mL jar contains over 3300 calories, which is why I ended up always packing one around on my bike tour last summer.

And to dispel the myth: George Washington Carver, the early 20th century scientist who found hundreds of uses for the peanut AND convinced Southern US farmers to plant peanuts after cotton to replace the nitrogen that cotton removed, did not actually invent peanut butter. The first patent was issued to a Canadian, an Edson of Montreal in 1887. Later, Mr. Kellogg, the cereal and general health food king found new processes to modernize the manufacture. Still later, I could be found with my little arm in a liter jar, enjoying the fruits of their labours.

This Fortnight's Photo: The Police's Zenyatta Mondatta

2009-05-23T04:56:00.001-07:00

My love of the Clash is well documented. I consider the Clash to be the first band that was "mine", not a group handed down by my cousins (Rush), absorbed from others (Kiss) or purloined from my parents (Elton John). But another band that was key to forming my musical tastes was the Police. One can't picture its lead singer Sting these days without thinking, "Pretentious twat", but surely he and Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland created some of the best reggae-tinged pop and rock of the late 70's and early 80's.

For me, their keystone album isn't their most successful one, Synchronicity, but Zenyatta Mondatta, which I purchased soon after its release in 1980, drunk with pop-love for its great and haunting single "Don't Stand So Close To Me" (a song absolutely violated when they 'reimagined' it in '88). An album by turns whimsical - "Bombs Away" - , dark - "Driven To Tears" - and hypnotic - "Voices In My Head" - I've always claimed that it's an LP all about Copeland's cymbals. The drums are high in the mix and Copeland's splashes and closed high-hat riding and sharp metallic rolls act as little alarms. Later when I moved to Hazelton, Copeland would remind me of a friend both physically and musically; Gerald was the drummer of the bands I was in during the late 80's. Anyway, I was such a devotee of ZM that I went to the mall in Kamloops one day and had the Dog's Ear print me up a t-shirt of the album's cover on an orange t. It was my first band t-shirt.

After that, I collected their first two albums, Outlandos D'Amour and Regatta de Blanc, spottier efforts but still thick with memorable singles like "Roxanne", "Walking On the Moon" and "Message In a Bottle". To this day, I can't help but to think of Eddie Murphy singing "Roxanne" upon his introduction in 48 Hours.

In 1981 the Police discovered horns and synthesizers while recording in a studio in Montserrat, a building since destroyed by the island's lethal volcano. Their album Ghost In the Machine, the first with an English title, was much more brooding, and the new instruments gave their music a new dimension. Again, the band sent forth a couple of great singles, the exuberant "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" - a precursor to their biggest hit "Every Breath You Take" - and "Spirits In the Material World".

In 1983 Synchronicity was released and the Police helped produce one of my most profound moments of pop-culture ambivalence. Here was one of my most favourite bands with their ultimate over-reaching pop opus and they go and write a single that helps to rip my heart asunder. I was horribly, desperately in love with a girl in high school (85% of it by my calculations), one who "just wanted to be friends" - you know, the no-kiss kiss off - , and the song "Every Breath You Take" seemed to tap into my miserable, self-defeating obsession. I still can't listen to it, God help me. And in the summer of '83 that tune was everywhere. I think I would've handled the whole thing better if it had been released a couple years later when I wasn't in the deepest throes of my unrequited love.

So remember: before Sting was a tantric-yoga master of the bland pretension, he helped to create some terrific music. The Police are definitely in my Pantheon. Last year, when a grade 9 student I know got to see the Police in Vancouver, I wasn't too envious; after all, they were on a reunion tour and that usually marks the death of dynamism. But I had to wonder if she really understood what she was being served.

This Fortnight's Photo: Apocalypse Now

2009-04-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" is a central monument in my personal world of art, aesthetics and psychology. It's a film that seems to have resonated through my life from the moment I first saw it in 1981. I imagine that a lot of the appeal and power of this movie derives from the fact that it was denied to me when it first came out in 1979. My father, who I think wanted to ensure that my toy-soldier-and-plastic-M16 war interest was tempered by some understanding of its inherent horror and inhumanity - previewed the movie when we lived in Kamloops and thought I wasn't quite ready for it. This is a man who escorted me to such 70's war movies as "Midway" and "A Bridge Too Far", probably realizing through media that these more conventional war movies were suitable for his marginally precocious boy. But "Apocalypse Now" had a different buzz about it. It was a little more than "a trip": it was a "mind fuck". Watching the movie is like some phantasmagorical, psychedelic malaria dream. Every time I view it I need to recover. The imagery is so effectively and viscerally wrought that you can see why Coppola said at the Cannes film festival: "This film isn't about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was like." It stands alone as a movie that delves so deeply into fantasy and metaphor that it captures something essential about its subject. How else can one see the famous line uttered by Colonel Kilgore: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning"? It's so ludicrous that it speaks volumes about the Cold War True Believer, the Rock 'n' Roll War, the Plastic Fantastic War. Perhaps it was the fact that I saw this movie at a key impressionable moment in my life, a formative age when whatever I came into contact with became a key ingredient in my make-up, but "Apocalypse Now" is my favourite movie. Not even traveling in the real Vietnam - a terrible experience that I can barely explain - could diminish it in my pantheon of influences.
"Never get out of the boat."

Assorted Spring '09 Ramblings

2009-04-07T21:02:00.000-07:00

1) It took me one slap month to read Dan Simmons' novel Drood, a book Victorian in both its length and setting. Charles Dickens is one of the protagonists, though Wilkie Collins is the narrator. The weirdest thing I learned about Dickens? He had a son named Plorn. Plorn? It sounds like something a baby babbles.
2) I like wearing black clothes, but they greatly increase the chances of me wiping my hands on myself.
3) Speaking of hands, boy, they sure bleed a lot when they're cut.
4) My cat willingly went outside for the first time of the year. Spring is definitely here.
5) Who do you think gets more exhausted in the execution of their duties: Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny? And do you think they all know one another?
6) It's a shame they don't sell laudanum at the druggists like in the 1800's...
7) Has anyone noticed that FoxNews is getting more and more insane? I'm beginning to think the whole station is one big put-on a la Stephen Colbert. Don't mistake being on the losing side of politics with living under tyranny, you nutbars.
8) What a weird thing it is that slut has gone from the number one thing catty teenage girls call one another for no good reason to an "edgy" term of endearment used by vacuous teenage girls who like to be provocative.
9) Out there somewhere tonight someone is realizing, "If everyone is special, doesn't that mean that no one is special?"
10) I will never stop being hurt that my favourite "chocolate bar", Maple Buds, no longer exists. I guess I better not get too attached to these blackberry flavoured Cheerios, eh?
p.s. Blackberry flavoured Cheerios don't actually exist.
11) If you download the following song - "52 Girls" by the B52's - you'll thank me later.
12) Every Judd Apatow and Gang movie is 15 minutes too long.

Revelation

2009-04-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

I'm an alien vampire communist raisin-pie eatin' skinhead who loves five month long winters.

This Fortnight's Photo: P.G. Wodehouse

2009-03-30T20:12:00.000-07:00

This fortnight's feature is on P.G. Wodehouse, the English writer who wrote dozens of slim novels in the first half of the 20th century and is most famous for inventing Jeeves, the efficient butler. He's certainly one of the funniest writers of the English language.
* He looked . . . as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla but had changed its mind at the last second.
* I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
* "And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need."
He was also a controversial figure: at the onset of the Second World War he was living in France to dodge the double taxation he was experiencing from both England and the U.S.A., where he lived for a time. He didn't take the Nazi threat seriously and was taken prisoner, eventually being sent to Upper Silesia, near Poland (his famous line: "If this is Upper Silesia, I'd hate to see Lower Silesia"). There he was convinced to make radio shows directed at American audiences. His take on it was that he was showing British pluck and stiff upper lip by making these non-propaganda broadcasts. After the war, however, he was tried for treason. After he was cleared, he moved back to the USA for the rest of his life.
I first read Wodehouse - a Wooster and Jeeves novel - at the age of 36 while traveling in Thailand. I fell in love and have read over twenty of his novels since. Interestingly enough, all of his plots are about the same: upper class people, often twits, extract themselves from the "pickles" that their friends and family inflict on them. Characters react by "goggling", "leaping straight up perilously close to the chandelier" and having their pince-nezes and monocles shoot from their faces. One interesting aspect of his plot style is to have a problem on its way to being solved right at the end of a chapter, only for a new one to walk through the door in the last paragraph or sentence.
Right now House is a big hit on TV. Hugh Laurie's title character seems odd to me, because I'm used to his early work - upper class twits in shows such as Blackadder and Wooster and Jeeves, where he played Bertie Wooster. The incomparable Stephen Fry played Jeeves.

Schadenfreude

2009-03-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

Today Lance Armstrong fell near the finish of the first leg of the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon five day bike race. He broke his clavicle, which is the most common debilitating injury in cycling (road rash is the most common injury, but seldom does it take a guy out of a race). He had to leave the race, and the four weeks off-the-road (but not off the indoor bike) recovery will put a hitch in his plans to race the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. Now, readers of synapsesfiring and people who know me in general realize that I hate Lance Armstrong and have been seething throughout this comeback, which I have characterized as self-serving and unnecessary. During his seven straight Tour de France victories Lance Armstrong was incredibly lucky not to crash and injure himself or fall prey to tendonitis. But it appears that his luck has run out. I'm trying not to gloat or be too celebratory; I'm due to crash my road bike anytime now myself. By the way things were looking - by his showings in the Tour Down Under and the Tour of California and last weekend's Milan-San Remo - I didn't have to worry too much about Lance returning to put the hammer down anyway. He will still be soaking up the attention, but I think as a major factor in the races his comeback will, like his collarbone, have to be put on ice. His young teammate, Alberto Contador, must be relieved.

My New Fear

2009-03-22T08:44:00.000-07:00

The world seems to be designed to provide a steady supply of threat. Some of these threats are very real, and some are media-generated (just watch any newscast and see how it suggests that violence lurks everywhere). Each person will prioritize these threats, and transform some of them into full-blown phobias. For instance, I'm shit-scared of cancer, not just the chance of me getting it, but people I know and care for. I imagine the big C is a universal fear. On the other hand, I'm frightened by spiders, the bigger the badder. Other people - weirdo freaks - want to touch and hold and cuddle tarantulas.
Recently, I've developed a fear of a creature that I used to only dislike because I thought it was ugly and, when dressed up for our entertainment, silly. Chimpazees now give me the Terrors. I've always disliked how they look and wished that we had more in common DNA-wise with gorillas, who seem to have more nobility and poise. We all know how intelligent chimps are with their toolmaking and planning and fingerpainting. But, as our closest animal relative, their bestial nature also reflects ours. When I see footage of a chimp peeing into its own mouth or jumping up and down while hooting, I think "Yeah, that's us all right", the same thing I'd think if I'd viewed one fishing for termites with a stick.
The Fear derives from recent chimp attacks on humans. Last month, a chimp off its Prozac freaked out and mauled a woman in such a way that it essentially removed her face and fingers a la Hannibal Lector. A police officer had to shoot the beast. In Sweden zookeepers have noticed that a chimp collects rocks in the morning to throw later in the afternoon when it gets angry at its visitors. It plans ahead - no surprise - for a future emotional state (a little too sentient for my liking). A male chimp is goddamned strong: at least four times the strength of an adult male human. Hell, even a ten pound monkey can clean your clock. A chimp is bitey too.
In March of 2005 a man and his wife went to visit their pet chimp who had been interned in a animal shelter by the authorities after a biting episode. There they were confronted by two male chimps who had escaped from their pen. In a fit of "jealousy" (according to the April 2009 Esquire magazine) and territorialism they attacked. Not only did they inflict the usual finger-chomping, face-removal ("the primate . . . then closed his jaws on James's mouth, ripping off his lips and most of his teeth") and foot-mangling, they also gnawed off the man's genitals. Just think about that for a second. There are many things I don't wish for myself from the animal kingdom - this from a guy who's been chased by a mama bear, regularly shredded by his cat and given the hairy eyeball by a perturbed moose - but the last thing I want in the world is to have my gonads chewed off by a damned dirty ape.
Beware the troglodyte. Even the human troglodyte (come on, we all know at least one).
Secret message for a special reader: It is a golden thing, it is a twisted string.

An Invitation

2009-03-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

Please join me at my new blog The Slab. I will be concentrating my fiction on The Slab and retaining synapsesfiring for non-fiction. The new address is www.madeupword.wordpress.com. Thank you.

This Fortnight's Photo

2009-03-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

Our first picture is of Svein Tuft, a Canadian pro cyclist who rides for the American Garmin-Chipotle team. He transfered in from a pro team that only raced in North America. "Swayne Tooft" is in position to be on Garmin's Tour de France team this year; in fact, Garmin may have two Canadians on it for this July's race, as Ryder Hesjedal has been enjoying a terrific early season. There was a time just recently when there had been no Canadians in the TdF in over a decade. Both guys are B.C. boys, but Svein has a more interesting story of how he came to professional cycling fairly late in the game, his early 20's. He spent his youth camping and climbing. He would take long bicycle tours into the province's interior to go climbing, sometimes towing his dog, all its food and a bag of potatoes for himself. Anyway, he's got a big engine and can time trial like a madman, garnering a silver medal in that discipline at the World Championships last autumn, even overcoming a flat tire close to the finish. He'll be used in the Tour to drive the main group of riders at such a high pace that the group shrinks.
Chapeau, Svein!

The Road

2009-03-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

Last summer, I left for a five week cycling trip by climbing out of Hazelton and then powering the long gradual decline before the Suskwa River Road. There I stopped to mess around with the computer on the handlebars. I had neglected to set the machine for kilometesr, and wouldn't realize it was measuring miles until deep in the Kootenays. I fiddled, obviously to no avail. Then suddenly I felt I had truly left town; there was this life that was back there and one that was stretched out for 2600 km ahead. It was that vagabond rush, a ripple with the right balance of freedom, exertion, and risk. I traveled with 75 pounds - bike included - of waterproofed stuff (great line by George Carlin: "How come other people's stuff is shit and our shit is stuff?") and felt like a lycra-encased Pony Express rider.

I'm not touring this summer. I usually take 2 years off between tours to let the novelty and anticipation build up. But recently I've had this mad fantasy trip in my head called the Four Sides of America. Basically, I'd ride the perimeter of the U.S.A., starting in Washington State and moving clockwise around the nation. I'd linger in the Deep South and search out perfect BBQ. I think about imagine how much more equipment than usual I'd need for such an excursion. I once figured out the distance and how many riding days if I pedaled 100 km a day. It'd take 7 months.

It seems unlikely that four days at altitude in the Rockies last year would make me stronger, but that's how it seemed. I felt very powerful and fit on the bike in the Kootenays and had no weariness off the bike. I was lucky too: my broken spoke was changed very quickly by the bike shop in Cranbrook and I didn't get sick after all that rain and cold in the Rockies. And, of course, I had no crashes. I kept spooking deer into traffic without causing an accident too.

Next time, where ever I tour - more waterproof/warm clothes. *shivers*

The Christmas Dance

2009-02-17T16:56:00.000-08:00

An excerpt from the unfinished novel "More Than This"

The evening began at Sam's. His sister Cindy was to drive us to the school in the Volvo. Sam and I were in his room primping the plumage. We had just rewetted our hair. I wore a shirt the colour of clotted blood, ironed, heedless of my protests, on the kitchen table by my Dad's girlfriend; grey wool trousers; and my new Adidas, lovingly cleaned that afternoon.
"Here," Sam said, handing me a black metal tube with a white vertical nozzle. Looking into his dresser mirror, he ran his fingers through his hair, patting it, willing it into spikes.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It's mousse," he said. "It'll hold your mop in place."
"Where the fuck is my mousse!?" Cindy yelled from down the hall.
"Yikes," he whispered. "Better hurry. Use an egg sized squirt."
I raked the foam in and shouldered each other at the mirror. "Bingo," he pronounced at last. Sam, as the old saying goes, was done up to the nines. He wore new jeans with a crisp white shirt hung with a red and white rep tie. Over it all reigned a navy blue blazer with brass buttons.
"You look like someone from 'Dallas' who lost his cowboy hat," I declared.
"Thank you," he replied. Reaching into a drawer, he extracted a small square glass bottle with a half centimeter of whiskey-coloured liquid in the bottom.
"Is that Hai Karate cologne?" I asked.
"Vintage whore lure," he reported, rubbing a tiny trickle of it on his jawbone and neck. "Antique screw juice."
I fell on the bed laughing, and suddenly he was at my side with a mad gleam in his eye and two fingers outstretched like the Pope making a benediction.
"No way!" I cried, fending him off.
"Yes way!" he countered, reaching inside my guard to smear something moist on my Adam's apple. I lunged off the bed and we both assumed boxing stances.
"Don't muss the hair!" he yelled.
Suddenly something occurred to me. I dropped my hands and gave him a long stare.
"What?" he asked.
"Do you guys have on of those wall ends where you keep track of your heights and shit?"
"Yes, we do," he said. "All calibrated and everything."

We thundered down two flights to the den, pausing in the kitchen to exchange Mrs. Edmonds' squeals of approval for Cindy's can on mousse. "Whoa! Look at these studs! Lock up your daughters!" Mr. Edmonds said, getting up from his chair in the den and letting his belly lead him into the laundry room.
"Lock up your sheep," Sam said under his breath.
In no time we had been measureed. I was still only 5' 10". Sam had sprouted two inches since summer to 5' 8". Mr. Edmonds recorded the new level with a grease pencil. I noted that Cindy had been 5' 11" during the summer.
Mrs. Edmonds called us all upstairs and Cindy made her embarrassed entrance into the living room. Her parents gushed, praising her beauty until she moaned, "All right, all ready! Christ." Sam nodded and whistled. I stood mesmerized. She was gorgeous. Her hair, medium length like Carol's and longer than my love Niree's, was plaited and braided like some wondrous African basket or bird's nest. The front poofed out from her forehead like cotton candy. She wore a thin-strapped, nearly backless gown of Kelly green silk embossed with a lighter green vine pattern. Her skin was flawless and there was a hell of a lot of it. Her wide shoulders and big lat muscles were awe-inspiring. Her round ass was like an unripe peach. She was no wisp of a girl, but she was one of the most desirous, sensual females I'd ever seen. When her face softened, when she forgot to be hard, she was lovely.
"If you're going to take pictures, take 'em now. Let's get this show on the road."

The roads were slick that evening, causing Cindy to first snap off BVLD and then yell, "Would you two assholes shut up?" A couple of times she inhaled sharply between her teeth rounding corners. Then she'd blow the cotton candy out of her eyes. From the backseat I marveled at how much her hair changed her profile.
The halls were electric and crowded, the students either engaged in monkey-shines or strutting in their small-town finery. Boys opted mostly for white dress shirts augmented with ties: some skinny leather jobs, some printed with keyboards or fretboards, some respectable makes borrowed from fathers or grandfathers. A few guys wore leather vests. A couple of shitkickers had bolo ties and cowboy hats. Many shirts were unbuttoned to the sternum with the occasional medallion, Italian lucky horn or cross on display. The girls were jewels. Their rich dresses, gowns, blouses and skirts were bright and radiant. Hair was either woven and stacked into architectural up-dos or teased into massive topiaries. There were acres of sun-staved skin. It was the bird world reversed: the females resplendent, the males by comparison dull and forgetful. Even J.R. Ewing himself mumbled, "I should have worn a rose in my lapel." Some kids sported very understated outfits, cleaner and newer versions of what they wore every day, and you couldn't tell if they were being contrary, being poor or just not giving a shit.
It was a treat to see normally schlubby, crusty or sleazy kids formally turned out, but I was really only interested in seeing Niree. I smacked my forehead, having forgotten to bring her gift, but then I realized this wasn't the time or place.
Sam and I found Kent and Billy when we stowed our coats. We wandered into the dark gym. Only two banks of lights from the drama club, manually flicked off and on more or less in time to the music, illuminated the garlands and tinsel festooned around the walls and tables. The stands had been swung out from the wall, and were filled mostly with boys alone or in small groups, tapping their knees behind the beat of Sweeney Todd's "Roxy Roller", or smacking each other or choking guys with their own ties. No one was dancing yet. "We better set up shop," Sam yelled over the music. We walked in circles looking for a likely spot.
I spied Niree. She wore a dark turtleneck sweater with a pleated red skirt. On her feet were the same black and white patent leather numbers she wore with her Minnie Mouse costume at Halloween. She had one of those tortoise-shell combs keeping the hair off her forehead. There were a lot of jocks in her area; I could see that snake Bonnie in some Cinderella's Nightmare gown nuzzling Jason. But there was no dark featured, round shouldered Lloyd with Niree yet. She was, as usual, tugging at her thumbs and yakking with Colette, whose simple dress changed colour with the lights. I was overwhelmed with appreciation for Colette, Niree's best friend. No sporto boyfriend and a port in the storm of Bonnie and everything that was artificial, crass and mean spirited.
Billy solved our dithering problem by approaching three grade eight boys at a table and telling them to scram. We had a nice view of the front of the stage where most of the dancing would take place, the wallflowers in the stands, even a sideview of Niree's area. The girls started to arrive; there was much teasing of Billy's girl Danielle, who had obviously stuffed her bra for the occasion. Before we could get comfy, dinner was announced by the student DJ's.

The large desks had been moved out of the classrooms and into the hallways, causing everyone to trudge in narrow lines up against the lockers. We joined the line to receive the grub that had been purchased, cooked and served by the teachers. There was plenty of time to goof around and gawk at the gussied-up girls while we waited. Cindy was way ahead of us in line, and I could see her being gentle, deferential and sweet to a guy on her right but threatening to some wag in a tuxedo print t-shirt to her left. I caught glances of the understated Niree and teal green Colette already tucking into their turkey, potatoes, dressing, golden corn and canned cranberry sauce. After forever, we loaded up and ate down by the north boot room. Less teachers down there. On the way we came across George Verlaine with blushing Emily Brown on his arm - the sight of which reduced us to stammers - and the rest of the Band Room Bunch who appeared to be dressed in costume for an Agatha Christie play. Anything seemed possible on such an evening.
We gorged ourselves, returning again and again to scoop punch from a plastic garbage barrel. Sated, but now torpid from the heavy, rich meal, we repaired to the gym, my ex Roxanne and her pale pal Pam abandoning their meals to join us. Roxanne sported a red leather mini-skirt with long white socks and a lacy black blouse with opera sleeves. The look was vampire Catholic school girl. I was duly impressed.
The dance itself was interminably awful. The music reeked. Kent and I had no one to dance with. The boys were being stingy with their girlfriends, and we didn't want to dance with poor Bernadette in case Mike took exception. Grimly, I looked on as Lloyd and Niree sat together between dances, appearing to get closer and closer. When I saw them holding hands I went to seek out any leftover punch. Anya, the Queen of the Band Room, intercepted me and made me dance the Twist with her. "You're still coming to New Year's?" she asked.
I made some fuss about transportation, but she assured me that Joseph's dad was picking folks up and dropping them off again after two a.m.
I spent the next couple of hours in a state of advanced mopery that grew more acute each time I saw Niree and Lloyd become more fluent in the language of affection. They held hands, she put her arms around his neck and his on her waist, and they looked deeply into each other's eyes. I was becoming nauseated. At one point, the Native girl with the chipmunk cheeks and huge glasses from my bus, who had never said anything to me, asked me to dance to 'Knock On Wood'. She was amazing. Her dancing was crisp and busy; my thanks at the end was sincere.
The worst moments were the slow dances. Nothing in the world makes a kid feel more like a worthless loser than a partnerless slow dance. The first minor chords, the promise of almost-in-time swaying of young bodies together. For many, there's a visual search for someone acceptable and willing to pair up with. For even more, it's simply an ideal time to leave the gym for a drink or "air". I'd made it through four slow songs, vigilantly keeping sight of Niree and chimp though I was loathe to see her in his arms. Once, I was startled to see her with a chatty Joseph. When 'Stairway to Heaven' came on, I said to Kent, "Let's get our coats", but a wee Native girl grabbed his sleeve and led him out on the floor. He shrugged and smiled at me over her head.
Joining the poor huddled masses fleeing through the double door, I had just shifted my sulk into overdrive when my right hand was firmly grasped and I was firmly pulled from the departing mob.
I found myself following Cindy, her big deltoid and triceps muscles scalloped by the position of her pulling arm. She plowed us right into the very middle of the dancers and whirled on me. Her eyes were glossy and she looked pissed, as usual. "Dance with me, okay?" she bellowed over Jimmy Page's arpeggios.
I lifted my right hand to take her left and she growled, "Don't be an idiot." She picked up my left in her right and clasped my right to the small of her back. "Go below the equator," she warned, "and I'll floor you."
We were pretty snug. Slow dancers who weren't going out or not quite familiar with each other usually kept a buffer zone between their bodies, some kids exaggerating it to the extent that they appeared to be supporting an invisible beach ball with their groins. But Cindy and I were cheek to cheek, her breasts shifting against my chest, our legs once in a while leaning into the other's crotch. Then there was the hand on the back. I could feel some fat, but beneath it were firm spinal erector muscles tensing in my palm. Terrified, I moved my hand to settle on her hip, a move that, although allowing some more room between our genitals, put me in a situation of holding her upper side-bum. I smiled sheepishly. Her face was unclenched. A tear spilled down her face, so she leaned forward and wiped it on my shoulder. Just the one. I tried to slow down my breathing.
I was aware that it was vital that I didn't say anything, just hold her and spin her slowly counter-clockwise while not getting an erection and staying off her toes. This I managed to do for the entire goddamn endless song, looking over her shoulder at Sam's bulging eyed surprise; Kent's shy smile of triumph; the remarkable sight of George and Emily in full, both-hands-on-each-other-and-heads-together couple's embrace; and Joseph taking turns with Anya and Marie to execute proper ballroom waltzing to a rhythm all of their own. At the end of the song, when Robert Plant stretched out those last seven words, I tried to let go, but she wouldn't. When she did I looked in her eyes; she looked serene and untroubled. "Thank you," I said sincerely.
Her arched left eyebrow climbed a millimeter or two. "Don't mention it."
In the car she was silent, even when Sam sang, "I could have danced all night!" repeatedly until I had to slug him.

I didn't bother going to school the next day. Everything had to settle for a moment.

Lost In the Cane - Part 5

2009-01-14T17:46:00.000-08:00

I was sweating. It was just after eight in the morning and I was sweating buckets in the cane. It took a long time to make my way through the dense stalks until I was hidden in front of Dean. I couldn't tip-toe and I couldn't really run so as not to jostle the stalks and attract attention. Insects were everywhere, and I brushed them off or into my face. I startled something dog-sized deeper into the field. All the while, the pills and the Old Feeling were mixing into a bilious stew in my blood and brain, and I got that feeling like when a woman puts her hand on your leg when you're not expecting it.

Once I was in position, I backed up about ten feet and lay down. I flexed my jaw as I checked the guns. An insect with ten legs wandered up my arm and I stared at it with a violent loathing, while simultaneously taking in its joints, mandibles, segments and eye-stalks as if I were going to paint it. I understood the goddamn thing. The Bzrkr. You let it flow over you, take you over. It'll steer the ship, you just trim the sails. I leaned down and devoured the thing in two bites. My vision grew red at the edges. I was poised like a sprinter in the blocks.

Some say Bzrkr heightens your senses while it makes you a vector of mayhem, a high priest of death deliverance. Dissenters maintain that all it does is harness the fight instinct (rogue experimenters with smaller doses have found that although it also aids in the flight instinct, it severely detracts from the fornication instinct, and just makes you pissed off enough to headbutt a car), stripping away that thin patina of civilization. All I know is that I could suddenly hear rustling behind me. On both sides. Closing in.

One thing the drug isn't is cunning. It's not smart or cagey. It causes you to kill, to have to kill. It doesn't hold back when it feels threatened. It's like the kid who stands up in class, tells the teacher to cram it and pisses in her desk drawer where she keeps the gold stars.

So the next three or four minutes is a red mist. My recollection is spotty, like what a DVD looks like when you fast forward it on the 10x setting. It jumps around. I killed the two guys coming through the cane with my knives, but not before they made a bloody racket and one of them shot me through the left trapezius muscle, snapping the shoulder strap of my web gear. Gunfire started coming through the cane from the work party and I barreled right through the middle of it. I must've disarmed one of the boys I bladed because I held a WW II era carbine and I fired from the hip at whoever wasn't running like hell. That's how I came to shoot Dean. Someone was roaring like a wounded beast and I realized it was me.

I was suddenly at his side. No carbine, but the 9 mm was out and smoking from the barrel. No more gun shots. Just guys hollering. He stood there, looking straight into the cane, his beloved Labatt's Genuine Draft shirt turning a couple of shades of red. Whatever was wrecked in his side was preventing him from swinging his machete, though his zombie brain tried to make him. He was just twitching. Of course, the Bzrkr had one solution. I popped him hard on the jaw. He fell over and blinked, but he wasn't out.

"Kill him!"

I looked up. The man in the yellow shirt was leaning out of the cab of one of the trucks. Men were cowering in the back, frantically gesturing for the driver to haul ass. He yelled the order again. I shot a guy in a red hat that went for a guy's rifle. I dropped into a kneeling position and squeezed off some rounds at the yellow man. He yelped, closed the door and the truck lurched ahead. I felt something sting my ankle.

It was Dean. He had switched the machete to the other hand and was crawling toward me to get another swipe. I guess we were even. I executed a backward somersault and sprang to my feet. The other zombies were closing in at the interminable zombie pace, a calm walking speed. They looked right through me, inscrutable.

Kill the brain. This is the main thing you need to know about combating zombies, both undead and living. That and the fact that undead zombies can walk on the bottoms of lakes and other bodies of water. This was stressed to me by Agent G and Agent L of the Crystal Team. I popped the nearest one that had just raised his blade. Good thing they weren't running.

I slipped a fresh clip into the 9 mm and after two shots it jammed. I threw it at Dean, who continued to creep closer. It smacked him in the forehead, knocking off that infernal sideways baseball cap. I took out the .22 and potted the nearest zombie. The final look on its face was all too human: confusion and distress.

Suddenly the earth beside me exploded. I don't know why I didn't reckon on a zombie being able to use a rifle. I looked up to see that whoever this man was in his previous life, he'd never fired a rifle before. The next shot snapped over my head and the zombie took a couple of steps backwards.

The Bzrkr was in its downswing, but I got up and ran towards the rifle. I got to about twenty feet away, made myself small and put a small hole in the zombie's forehead. The last non-Dean zombie I was able to get behind and dispatch while it was still turning around.

Dean. He was struggling to his feet. I rushed over and kicked him in the ass. He went, "Gugh!" I dug into a pouch and took two pain killers, and evened them out with a Percodin. I dug around for something else. He required three or four good, hard rights to the head to quiet him down. The salt was good sea salt. Baliene brand I believe. He gibbered and choked and kept trying to kill me. I alternated between elbowing him in the head and stroking his throat so he'd swallow. Finally he stopped kicking.

The mid-morning was hot. A little yellow and black bird alighted on the one of the abandoned trucks and twittered something inquisitive. I didn't feel like killing it, so I knew I was coming down. I just sat there beside Dean, my muscles spasming and headache growing. I knew they'd be back but I needed a moment of repose. I was just a dog-groomer after all.

After I dressed our wounds, I carried him through the cane. He'd be out for a while. I found the road that the two sneak-attackers came in from but couldn't use it in case the baddies were searching for us. It took most of the day to retreat to a public road. I ran out of water, but didn't run out of pills. I came across another one of those ten-legged abominations, but didn't have the heart to eat him.

I pulled the gun on a car and had the poor bastard drive us to the border. I said, "No hard feelings", pulled out some Yankee dollars and have him the .22 after I had emptied it of shells. I threw a lot of dollars around both customs houses, hired a taxi on the Dominican side and fell asleep in the cab.

I woke up to Dean shaking me. "What the hell?! What the hell?!" was all he could say, raspily, because he hadn't spoken for such a long time. I had the taxi driver turn on the interior light as we began to head into the outer suburbs of the capitol. He looked at me for a long time. The crusted blood was a little more apparent in the dome light. He looked down at himself. Cleared his throat and swallowed painfully.

Finally, he unrolled his window. "Musta bin a helluva party," he croaked. And we laughed and winced and laughed again. The wind carried our laughter into the slums where it made music blowing over the tops of beer bottles.

THE END

Lost In the Cane - Part 4

2009-01-07T18:50:00.000-08:00

Wind through cane sounds like the Reaper's cloak when he comes to embrace you.
I'd been in the field for hours, observing the plantation buildings, listening for what I could pick up over the wind in the cane, watching for snakes. I took a suck of water out of the tiny Camelbak and ate a handful of walnuts along with another pill.

In 48 hours I had snuck across the border into Haiti and then stowed away in a truck full of bananas into Port-au-Prince. There, I used a combination of U.S. dollars and near-lethal force to get me the information I wanted. Paid a visit to a Tonton I'd missed in '94 too.
In the city I really had to slink around; there's something very conspicuous about a white man in a country with no tourism. And I didn't look earnest enough to be an aid worker. Of course, I was geared up to the max and that tends to draw the eye too.
I stole a ratty old Kawasaki motorcycle and full-face helmet, stuffed the web-gear into a burlap sack and headed into the country with a fistful of maps I'd taken from that fateful warehouse in Port-au-Prince. Around sundown I ditched the bike in a papaya grove, got my bearings and headed into the treeline.

"Where is the white man? The zombie?" I asked a man in Port-au-Prince with a $100 bill held between my fingers in front of him.
"Where is the white man? The zombie?" I asked another man in Port-au-Prince, holding his severed pinky, the skin and flesh of its open end withdrawing to reveal bone, in front of him.

They sent Dean to the cane fields until they could use him for their nefarious ends. It must've pleased them to have such a healthy, robust specimen to use for toil. If he'd been one of those pink, bloated Germans all over Punta Cana, they would've risked having the body give out. Because a zombie is still a human body, though the brain is rented out. The corporeal self still needs to be fed, watered, sheltered, repaired and rested.

I watched the compound. There were guards and dogs to be studied. It had to be a daytime snatch when Dean was out in the fields. He was in one of the barracks, sleeping, or whatever it is that zombies do when they are turned off for the night. It was a long wait through the night. I was low on food, so I caught a snake and ate its liver. I had forgotten how disgusting it tasted and had to dig the last of my Mike and Ikes out of the bottom of a pouch to cover up the taste.

In the morning I concealed myself in another part of the cane so as not to get glare off my binoculars. I glassed the place over. Trucks assembled in a sort of courtyard and men began to gather. The non-zombies yawned, rubbed their eyes, laughed at jokes, yelled back and forth. The first two zombies I saw were sharpening machetes on a little wheel. They moved slowly but steadily. Expressionless. A man in a boonie hat wandered over and said something and then hustled away flustered. He brought back a short old guy whose belly pushed out a gold t-shirt. He grabbed the zombies roughly by the shoulders, straightened them up and said something vehemently. Immediately, the two strode off as slowly as students in an undisciplined high school puttering off to class long after the bell has rung, arms stiff at their sides.
Then he appeared. Dean looked like he was severely hung over. His Labatt's Genuine Draft shirt ripped and stained, his shorts grimy and, oh, the ultimate desecration, a baseball cap jammed on his head with the brim a few inches off to the left. Gold T-shirt, obviously the bokor , whispered something to him, and then smacked him in the calves with a machete. Everyone nearby laughed uproariously.
A few men left on the trucks and the rest began to march to the west down a rutted, chocolate brown road. I followed in the shadows, tracking Dean, trying to spot all the zombies. Finally, they came to the edge of a cane field. The stalks were so tall and ended so abruptly that the sight reminded me of a logging show. The men fanned out and began to hack and stack. Gold T-Shirt and a few others sat beneath a canopy. Dean worked close to a few others and they were a little to the south of the main body of men. I knew I'd have to circle around and flank the operation to snatch him.
Before I moved out, I drank the rest of the water and took two more pills. One was the usual Benzadrine. The other was something rare, something secretive out of Russia. Bzrkr, developed for the front line soldier who was deep in the shit. When you needed the serrated edge of something that made you a focused but very crazed and savage killer. I'd been "holding" since '94. I gave the other pills back to the Canadian government, but kept one for a very special occasion.

Lost in the Cane - Part 3

2008-12-23T20:39:00.000-08:00

I turned out that my RCMP contact was right. I had to acknowledge that when Papi got the drop on me in his little house a few kilometers from the Punta Cana resort.
Trimming dog toenails and shaving furballs off of cats isn't going to keep you as sharp as you need to be. The time I followed around a couple of teenage B&E artists who seemed to always slip consequences and then destroyed their knees with a lead pipe one night had helped to hone the blade but that had been years ago. And I'd been feeling so good about myself too. Now there was a shotgun glaring at me and a smug man who seemed very much like he wanted to use it.
I had crept around outside his little stuccoed house peeping in windows and I had seen the back of his head in a chair with a wee cumulous cloud of smoke around it. He was watching a televised boxing match between a couple of hungry looking lightweights. I picked the lock of the back door and moved very silently in my black slippers. I peered around a corner into the living room.
A dummy. With a big cigar in an ashtray in its lap. The twin barrels coaxed me to do what Papi said. I dropped the 9 mm, raised my hands and walked into the living room. I listened carefully to how close he was behind me.
"Thank you for leaving beer bottle behind," he said behind me in Spanish. "I take to Madame Lupa, she read bottle. I know you coming."
There's certain kinds of voodoo you can't fight with a yademe.
I turned very slowly to face him. He set the shotgun down on his hip so that I couldn't swat the barrel. He wore white cotton gloves. "I'm looking for my friend," I said simply.
"You frien' no longer you frien'," he said. His features were all gathered in the middle of his face, as if they were attracted to his mustache. His forehead was shiny. "Mr. Mouth he now in 'nother line of work."
"You the bokor?"
He laughed a mirthless laugh. "No, my frien' he the bokor. I jus' deliver Mr. Small Tip."
"The cigar?"
"Yes."
"Why him? There are plenty of obnoxious tourists."
"In Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, my people need a gringo for certain jobs that black man can't do." He paused to laugh, merrier this time. "And there's always need for another worker in the cane fields."
"You don't think that people are going to find something amiss with a gringo in a cane field?"
"Ho ho! He tan nice and dark!"
"And me?" I was relaxed but my brain was processing as many objects, geometry and possibilities it could get out of my peripheral vision. The knives and the .22 all seemed to emit a heat from their concealed places.
He smiled with genuine joy. "Crocodiles." He raised the shotgun so that he could pin it under his left arm and still reach the trigger while he dug in his pants pocket with his right. I realized what the gloves were for and immediately dove to his left and towards him. I ended up doing a shoulder roll over the arm of a short sofa. He couldn't bring the shotgun around with accuracy and shot out his TV while he struggled to get his right hand out of his pocket. By the time he did, with a puff of bone coloured powder, I held the shotgun barrel with my left and the .22 stuck in his belly. I fired once, and then, knowing what agony he'd be in, quickly put two in the back of his head.
I tossed the house as quickly as I could in one minute, finding his cell phone and his wallet. I slipped out the back door, vaulted over the first wall I could find that didn't have broken glass embedded in the top and stuck to the shadows until I could take a motorcycle taxi back to my hotel. Papi's phone and wallet didn't give up much. I showered and shoved the black fatigues into a plastic bag with the phone and wallet. On the way to a cafe I found a loose brick to weigh it all down and threw it into the river. I put Papi's cash in a potted plant near a church.
I fired up my computer. Back in Quantico, Virginia, my man Maxwell was still at work. He was very surprised to hear from me again and insisted that I go on webcam and answer a few questions before he would do me a favour. I gave him Papi's phone number.
"A lot of calls to Haiti," Max wrote ten minutes later.
"I know."
"Lately, last couple of days, to something called the Le Grenouille Bleu. That mean anything?"
It took about one minute for it to sift through the years, but it finally settled to where I could grab it.
It certainly rang a bell. I once killed a man in the alley behind that transportation company. Well, he was not really a man anymore.

Lost In the Cane - Part 2

2008-12-18T20:30:00.000-08:00

It was the second time I'd been to the Dominican, but it'd been over fourteen years. I was much more familiar with the other, darker half of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti. When I disembarked from the plane two days earlier, it was Haiti I could smell. Haiti, which claimed far more of my nightmares than it had any right to.
This disappearance had Haiti's skeletal fingerprints all over it. It was like a poorly plotted story that you could figure out in its rising action phase. So when the few pieces I had of the puzzle snapped into place to outline a familiar picture of that abject horrorshow to the west, I grimaced and cleaned the guns.

The first thing I asked Helene was the same thing the cops had: "Did Dean have any disputes or run-ins with anyone?"
"Just the usual: joshing the cabana boys about having baggy pants and wearing their caps sideways."
"He does hate that," I said.
"The boys didn't make a fuss, they laughed it off, but you could see that Papi, the kind of captain of the serving staff, didn't like it too much."
I was just opening my mouth when she said, "But he's got a great alibi. He was helping the assistant manager replant a tree."
"What about the boys?"
"Baseball practice."
"Any other contact with any other service staff or any other guests?"
"We've pretty much kept to ourselves. There was a Russian couple, but they left three days before the disappearance . . ." She started to say something but instead shook her head, laughed into her fist and then took a slug of her drink.
"What?"
"Oh, you know Dean. There was Beli the chamber maid. Kind of flirting with her. But then he got a little mad one night. He couldn't find a Montesino cigar that he'd just started. He wanted to tell her not to throw the big ones out. I calmed him down."
I tried not to look too interested. "They are expensive, even here," I said.

I looked around the resort. The owners were letting Helene stay on for free and I wondered if they just wanted the free publicity, and, if so, would they worry that it was the kind of publicity that was at the core of tourists' nightmares?
I walked around and looked closely and listened carefully. Papi, a stout man with curly hair; a narrow, thick mustache; and an expression like a walrus that had eaten a decoy penguin, watched me with crossed arms. I drank a couple of Presidente beers. Around me pasty white Westerners, or burnt red Westerners, or tanned Westerners lived out their tropical beach fantasies. There were some college girls from the University of Georgia that I watched attentively.
I talked to the cabana boys. They had managed to take a square uniform of white chinos topped with a red polo shirt and baseball cap and make it look hip-hop. They looked like they were from South Central Los Angeles right down to the cheap bling around their necks. They were old enough to make me wonder whether they earned a little extra as gigolos for lonely Austrian women.
Again, I found myself asking them cop questions. They obliged in that lovely "baseball ha' been bery bery good to me" accent. They got a little nervous when I switched to Spanish. Their Spanish was accented too, just as I thought. Finally, I moved on to Creole French. They looked at one another.
"Are you legals or illegals?" I asked. The taller one smiled and shook his head and tried the Spanish, but I wasn't having any of it.
"You're both Haitian, and so is Papi and Beli, right?"
"We're legal," Taller said. "All of us. Papers, cards. Tout les choses." He was losing his cool and I reckoned that he wished he could flash me a piece and make me scram. Even I wasn't packing at the time.
I had them follow me to a little area in the sand away from everyone. I drew something in the sand. I took me a long time to get the geometry right. They chewed their lips. I pointed at it. "I saw that scrawled in chalk on the boat house. That's the veve of the loa Payat."
I stood up straight. "Voodoo."

When I was a spook I was sent into Haiti twice by the Canadian Special Intelligence Service. Once in 1986 to facilitate the exile of the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier. Once in 1994 to smooth the way for Operation Uphold Demorcracy, the stupidest and most self-servingly named military invasion by the USA up to that point. Both times I was really just eliminating the Tonton Macoute, the brutal death squads of the Duvaliers whose members stayed on after Baby Doc fled and then attempted to blend into the population, emerging on occasion to create bloody havoc.
In '86 I took out five primary targets and some auxiliary targets who got in the way. And one zombie.
The Tonton Macoute had their own bokor, or sorcerer, who controlled living zombies, those souls enslaved with a combination of tetrodotoxin from puffer fish and datura, a plant. I didn't know all this until later when I debriefed the CSIS's super-secret Crystal Team, a classified office that dealt with the paranormal. All I knew at the time was that I had to shoot this shambling mess of a man several times. It turned out that all I had to do was feed him salt or kill his master bokor. I accomplished the latter in '94.
When Helene told me about the missing cigar, my brain did a lot of twitching and sniffing at something familiar. When I found the veve, I had my defining piece of the puzzle. I had my ticket to Haiti.
I returned to my hotel, took some pills and suited up. Before I put on the black fatigue shirt and web belt I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and drew on my chest with a Sharpie the same symbol I wore back in '94. The protective symbol, yademe.
I was almost ready for Haiti.
But first, I wanted a word or two with Papi.

Lost In the Cane - Part 1

2008-12-17T19:44:00.000-08:00

I stepped off the plane in Santo Domingo onto one of those mobile staircases, and there it was again. The tropics' overwhelming wall of humidity. There was the smell of rot and hairy spiders and fruit in it. And dread.
My taxi started moving in some odd, convoluted route into the heart of the city and the driver was surprised when the gringo in the back yelled at him in Spanish to cut it out. I was surprised myself that the language came back like that so long after I'd last used it.
Everything was coming back. The furtiveness, the instinct, the readiness.
My RCMP contact in Vancouver, an old comrade from the distant past, had said, "You can't just switch back to the old ways, Sturney. You've been a legit citizen for what? Fifteen years now?"
"It's not for crown or country or democracy," I replied. "Or even cash."
"What then?"
"It's a buddy." His eyes squeezed me into a smaller frame, but I could see him nod inside.

She was waiting for me at the Raza Cafe across the Ozama River in the good part of town. She had shaken the Canadian press that had been haunting her and running all over the safe half of the island high on the fumes of foul play. She embraced me and sat down. "Dos Extra Viejo y Coke, por favor," I said to the bored waiter.
"I can't believe you came down," she exclaimed, crying for five seconds and then getting control of herself. You could tell she'd been crying automatically like this for days. "His brothers flew down and they've been such a help looking for him. They'll love the help."
"I work alone," I said, wiping my forehead on the inside of a sleeve. She stared.
"Did Dean ever tell you what I did before I was a pet groomer?" I asked. I took the rum drink from the waiter and drank half of it.
She looked perplexed. "Well, after the army you taught English in Asia and worked for NGO's all over Latin America."
"Not exactly."
She finished her drink before I could. I stuck up two fingers at the waiter, who alleviated his boredom with practicing left-left-right boxing combinations to the delight of the girl behind the bar. He stopped and said something to her. On the street to my left a man called, "Senor!" and held up an unfortunate looking iguana with two hands.
"Helene," I said, "I'm your best shot at finding Dean. He didn't run off, he didn't drown in the ocean. He rented a scooter to go out exploring the hills and he disappeared. There's an explanation and I'll find it. I find him."
Her eyes ran through three emotions quickly, like a traffic light on speed. The last one was the equivalent of green.
"I need to know a few things," I said. She nodded and knocked back her second drink.

Later that night I was standing in the open living space of some shithole off a grimy alley in the Norte section of town. I'd been led there by an eight year old boy in a Tupac Shakur t-shirt who smoked a Montesino cigar. He'd met me in front of a church at an appointed time.
My connections in Vancouver got me in touch with some Dominican heavies in Toronto. One, Mr. Gato Ortiz, made me go on Skype and converse with him for one minute by webcam so he could "look me over" before he'd give me connections down the line in the Dominican Republic.
I sat on a plastic chair in the dimly lit room off the alley. A gunshot barked a few streets over. Wee lizards ran up and down the wall. I sweated through my shirt and tried to ignore the Third World City Smell as I waited and ran through what Helene had told me.

Dean had been looking forward to a Christmas Break trip to the Dominican Republic ever since he booked in the spring. He loved the beach, loved the idea of a swim-up bar, loved the prospect of cheap, good rum and cigars. He'd been lifting weights and doing his crunches and planks so he could rock the Speedos, even if it was against the protests of his sensible wife.
The family - Dean, Helene and their two little blond girls - had a ball during the first week. The weather was superb for their vacation, and there was much fun to be had in golf, shark dinners, lounging and swimming. Dean played volleyball for the first time in decades and had even looked like he knew what he was doing, Helene reported.
One day they had taken a 4x4 tour of the backroads and sugar cane fields outside of town. Dean had sighted some interesting looking overgrown roads that he wanted to explore in the cooler late afternoon. Back at the resort he rented a scooter, grabbed a Leon Jimenes cigar for the road, kissed his wife and rode off.
He never returned.
The next day the scooter was found by the police on Las Magantines beach about ten kilometers from the Santo Domingo city limits. That's the only trace of him they found.
Helene found that the police, both federal and city, seemed indifferent and made only a perfunctory search beyond the hospitals and morgues. No one had seen a blonde, crewcutted gringo in a sleeveless Labatt Genuine Draft t-shirt.
Helene called in the Canadian media in an attempt at lighting a fire under the cops' asses, but the reporters proved to be more of a royal pain for her and her family, and elicited this response from the Turista Policia chief, Arturo Ramirez: "Sometime the men they drink too much rum, go swimming. Not good decision. Sometime the men they find a nice lady, okay? Maybe he show up soon. We don't lose many turistas but it happen."
That's when I put down the poodle shears and cat shampoo and picked up something else. Something old that had been leaning in the corner of my soul gathering cobwebs. Something no longer shiny but still usable.

The man wore a sharkskin suit and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. It's always nice to see locals sweat too. He looked like a stereotype of a smooth Latin type. He wasn't black, but cafe au lait coloured. His mustache was pencil, his hair pomaded. He had that kind of controlled movement that's like a cat. He slipped into the other plastic chair across from me and smiled mostly with one side of his mouth.
"Mr. Ortiz," he purred. "He says you are a serious man. Who needs my assistance."
"I need guns."
His smile was like a little pool of oil on a garage floor. "Of course."
"I need two. 9 mm for my waist. .22 for my ankle. An ankle hoster. Extra clips."
"A knife also, senor?" he asked with a laugh.
"I brought my own."
He ceased his goddamn grinning.

Get Me a Herpetologist or Whoever Deals With This Kind of Thing

2008-12-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

I often say that I hate winter because I don't have any winter pastimes. This is unfair and reductive of my deep loathing of winter, for it doesn't take into account how much I dislike having to shovel, scrape my windshield, drive in unsafe conditions, face reindeer attacks, live in perpetual darkness and feel my nose-hairs freezing together. Also, I DO have a winter pastime: snow hiking.
These long solo walks through snowy trails with an iPod in one pocket, some chocolate in another and an airplane bottle of rum in a third are true epics. Yesterday's - the season's first - for instance, was four and a half hours long. I was absolutely pooped by the time I got home. There are no half-measures with these meanders. I've got all the best equipment I could find: German snow-hiking boots, Gore-Tex gaiters, high-tech clothing and a sturdy hoe handle used as a walking staff.
Along the way I knock snow off bent-double trees, study animal tracks and pretend that I'm Thoreau marching around Walden Pond having deep thoughts. All while listening to music and occasionally stopping for a chocolate break. My friend Kelly likes to picture me with a big, goofy, chocolate-smeared grin as I trudge about humming loudly.
Yesterday's journey ended with a real puzzler. Once I entered the trail system behind the high school and Hospital Lake, I found that it had a single snowmobile track running along it, making it easier to walk. I looked down and saw a salamander. I stared at him for a while as he crawled with the speed of a sloth. Twenty meters later I found another salamander heading in the same direction as the first, so I picked him up and carried him back so the two of them could press on with whatever the hell they were doing together. Over a hundred meters later there was a third salamander. Since he was heading toward the duo I didn't move him. Once I turned into another spur of the trail I found a fourth amphibian.
As far as I know, this is really rare and really weird. And this odd encounter is exactly what I crave out there. Well, that and the fresh air and fatigue. Winter still can cram it with walnuts, but my weekend walkabouts mitigate the loathing.

Headlines From the Ludicrous Times

2008-11-10T15:29:00.001-08:00

Last year I began to notice really weird and stupid headlines online. There seems to be something about the sheer volume of "news" sources on the internet that generates moronic, banal news stories. As a loyal reader of The Onion, the satirical online newspaper parody, I've noticed that many of these headlines could be plucked straight from this humourous source. Most of them elicit a "this is news?" from me. Some are just ridiculous. I've been collecting these for the past month and a half.

- Girls Playing 'Pilgrim' Blistered By Weed
- Is Porn Adultery?
- Enraged Zoo Gorilla Kills His Daughter
- Obama Sign-cam Catches Gnome Abuse
- Legal Case Against God Dismissed
- Scientists Test Poisonous Frogs By Licking Them
- Charges Dropped For Ball-hogging Granny
- Scientists Erase Scary Memories In Mice
- Clumsy Elephant Wipes Out In Mud Puddle

Fred Armisen, Your Time Has Come

2008-11-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

My readers may wonder, what has woken sysnapsesfiring from its two week slumber, what has roused the wordy beast? Let me just say that this morning finds me recovering from the historical, inspiring, friggin' awesome victory of Barry Obama. These are heady days, my friends; the madness of the last seven years has been soundtracked by ominous stings and threatening oboes, and now, just registering in our minds, is a new tune, a stirring, funky tune. And I want to dance, even if it's while sporting the White Man Overbite.

John McCain and the Republicans got "owned" or "pwned" last night. Democrats: don't fuck this up. You have a lot of power and may feel like you can just go back to partisan nonsense, or Democrat-style rubbish, the kind of governing that P.J. O'Rourke once derided as "promising to get the crabgrass out of the lawn". But there's a lot of mess to clean up, and a lot of problems to face. For instance, how can Saturday Night Live remain relevant now that there's no Sarah Palin to mock?

SNL has being pulling down unprecedented ratings since Tina Fey returned to impersonate Sarah Palin, one of the most ridicule-deserving public figures of the past half-century (George W. Bush is right up there too, of course). Both Palin and McCain, in a not-entirely cringe-worthy attempt to gain a hip, urban, "East Coast" following, appeared on the show. And Fred Armisen, long time dead-pan geek, has taken on the task of portraying Obama. From Chevy Chase's clumsy Gerald Ford and Dan Ackroyd's acid-freakout-guide Jimmy Carter of the late seventies, to Will Ferrell's guileless George W, there's been a long tradition of Not Quite Ready For Prime Time Players stepping up to inhabit the fake Oval Office. And Fred Armisen, never the star, now has his spotlight. And he will step into it wearing blackface.

America, your new day is rising. Let your backbone slide.

Top Ten Reasons October 2008 Will Have the Fewest Monthly Posts Ever

2008-10-16T07:10:00.001-07:00

From the Home Office in Chimney Tickle, Labrador
10) Working on really detailed Jabba the Hut costume for Halloween, which means that I'm going all Method Actor a la Robert de Niro and eating lots of tartar sauce to get obese.
9) Fighting a multi-front, losing battle against red-headed ants.
8) Cheating on synapsesfiring with another blog called Words. Words. Words. (title pretentiously taken from Hamlet)
7) Watching every episode of All In the Family in order on YouTube.
6) Didn't pay bills; can only go online by standing really close to neighbours' house and stealing wireless.
5) Suddenly struck by the futility of existence rendering every action and inaction of equal value; base new personal philosophy on rolling ten-sided dice (yes, I know this was done originally in the book The Diceman). Dice told me to make ship in a bottle instead.
4) I got my first real six-string oh at the five and dime; played it 'til my fingers bled . . . subsequently had to heal.
3) Was paid a hundred bucks by an anonymous party not to write in my blog. Closer inspection reveals it's Canadian Tire money.
2) New Dramamine and cough syrup habit really fucking my shit up.
And the number one reason that October 2008 will have the fewest posts ever . . .
1) My chaotic and doomed run for Prime Minister! (thanks for all your support)

"I Need To Get Something Typed Up"

2008-10-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

I drove past Grandmother's old store front on Saturday as I hauled a load to the Sally Ann after our garage sale. I thought the same thing I always do: she'd be mortified to see the building occupied by Grinderz Urban Streetwear. I'm glad she didn't have to endure the age of baggy pants and sideways baseball caps and derelict looking hoodies. Thongs alone would've given her a debilitating brain aneurism.

Grandmother - who never fit the title Grandma like my Omma Hufnagel - was one of Sawknuckle's first female business people and one of the town's greatest boosters. However, she was very intimidating, some would even say cold. She had such a strong patrician bearing that she was anachronistic - a Victorian woman half a century too late. She was always different than anyone else in her family. And this is perhaps why her bachelor uncle William brought her a second hand typewriter when he took the train up from Vancouver for Christmas 1927. It turns out that the machine was hocked by struggling writer Dan Kessel before he broke it big with "Often With Certainty".

She immediately set to learning how to use it, and because Uncle William neglected to bring extra ribbon or even paper, she had to - like everyone back then - make do. She removed the existing ribbon and tore the blank pages out of the backs of her books, even convincing her teacher to allow her to raid the textbooks. She tapped away until the paper wore through. Upon acquiring some proper paper, she went into business for herself. My great-grandfather, Alex McKenzie, was a little worried about his youngest daughter. She didn't seem to be interested in the usual trappings and social circles of a young woman. He wanted all three of his daughters to be married off, of course, and while the two eldest, Colleen and Opal, were consciously grooming themselves to be good marriage material, Grandmother was conducting herself as if she didn't care. Still, he reluctantly let her have a small table and chair in the back of his dry goods store and hang out her shingle.

Although the art of the hand-written letter was still a way of life, occasion called for correspondence to be more formal and professional. Letters to lawyers, government bureaus, employers and so forth came to be her bread and butter, and evenings or Saturdays found her clacking away in the back room. Some people would supply a hand written letter for her to transcribe, or she would take dictation. It helped immensely that she had the only typewriter in Sawknuckle, nor was there one in nearby Torrent Creek where Sawknucklians went to catch the train. By the time she was 17 she had enough money to attend UBC, living with Uncle William in Point Grey while she got her business degree.

I thought of all this, even tried to tell some of the story to a disinterested pair of daughters, on Saturday. For at the garage sale, I finally got rid of my typewriter, the Olivetti Praxis 20 Grandmother gave me before I left for SFU in the fall of 1985. "I know everyone else may have computers, Peter," she said in her flinty way, "but there's less mucking about and you have your printer built right in." She herself would resist computers until she died in '88. Again, I'm glad she didn't see the day when they utterly ruled our world.

From the Sports Desk

2008-09-30T20:22:00.000-07:00

The beginning of October is a heck of a time to be a sports bozo. There's an intersection of professional baseball, hockey, Canadian and American football, European soccer and even my beloved cycling. Oh, yeah, the NBA begins too. Following this autumnal feast comes the winter doldums (hockey, basketball, soccer) and then the summer, when, thankfully, we can play more sports rather than watching them (baseball, Tour de frickin' France).

I've written recently about how I'm riding a bit of a sporto hotstreak, with four of "my" teams winning championships in the past four years (not counting Carlos Sastre winning the Tour in July). So, in gratitude of this bounty, I'm not getting greedy. The Red Sox are in the playoffs again, and I'd love to see them keep stomping on the ghosts of the past, but I also like the idea of parity, and wouldn't mind seeing the Cubs or the Brewers take a World Series. The Steelers are leading their division, but I look at their mounting injuries and think, "Playoffs. 'S bout it." And the Habs . . . oh, mes pauvre Habitants. Fifteen years of bupkes. Tabarnacle!

I haven't bothered to hook up the satellite or the cable since I moved into the House of Red Light, and though I can't watch games, I'm able to find what I want to know online, and even get some highlights. I don't bother analyzing why I even care about these inconsequential contests anymore. They bring me a little joy and distraction. Rah rah!

Fall is also time for the less considered sport of volleyball. At my school there are only girls teams, and it's been that way since 1997. Currently, there are 45 girls in a school of 440 playing volleyball on four teams: grade 8, junior A (10's) and B (9's) and senior. This year, I'm coaching the junior B's, a 15 girl platoon! There is no room on the bench for myself and my assistant coach. So far, this longggg bench is being pretty patient. Recently, I had them decorate their water bottles on top to be able to discern them in the portable rack, and they took to the task with the kind of exuberance and sense of fierce fun that is rather tempered by the time they reach senior. There is nothing in the world like a grade nine. Bananas.

This Is The Perfect Time For Natalie Portman and I To Go Out

2008-09-26T18:43:00.000-07:00

It's not like I've been waiting it out or anything, but actress Natalie Portman recently broke up with her beardo musician boyfriend Devandra Banhart. This news coincides with recent changes in my life, and this afternoon it occurred to me that the universe was lining things up for maximum compatibility. It's time that Natalie and I finally start dating.

I first noticed Natalie in the movie "Beautiful Girls", a title that was supposed to be personified by Uma Thurman, but was shared with this fourteen year old wunderkind, an actress with more presence in her hair than some have in their entire being. Of course, she was just a kid, and I was happy to watch her take on greater roles as my exes, Ally Sheedy and Winona Ryder, continued to flit in and out of my mad, uncentered life.

By the time "Garden State" came out, it was clear that planets and stars and perhaps a couple of groovy moons were aligning. "GS" is Natalie's ultimate moment as the "liberating, kooky girl", a type that's been around Hollywood almost since the advent of the Talkie. She's sublime. I'm definitely in the need of a liberating, kooky girl, especially one who can recommend good new bands.

When we get together I know it's going to be hard for a while. She's much more famous than I, and the paparazzi will always be for her. Can my infamous ego handle it? Also: she's 27 and may feel that it's time to have children before she's 30. Surely, she's aware of my notorious, thuggish children, Perseus Sheedy-Sturney and Chime Ryder-Sturney, whose exploits shriek out from every outlet of celebrity-minutia-porn. Also, she may be resentful of how much time my charity, Push a Wheelchair Bound Senior Around Town, takes, not to mention the lawn-care classes I teach at UCLA.

What I am sure of, is that she's always up for a trip to the zoo. And that's what I intend for our first day: the San Diego Zoo (with 'backstage passes') and a Padres game before jetting up to Malibu for one of those taste-tripping parties where you eat the weird little South American berry and everything tastes like candy, even vinegar.

My assistant Mimosa is on it. Meanwhile, I'm watching all those shitty recent Star Wars movies to see her portray intergalactic royalty. I'll skip "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium". I think she'll understand.

In Which I Pass a Meaningless and Shallow Magazine Personality Quiz

2008-09-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

In six days I turn 40 years old. It's a time when a man should realize that the only way the words "youth" or "young" can be made in reference to him is if the qualifier "relatively" is somehow connected to them. And please don't give me that hackneyed twaddle about "a person is only as young as he/she feels". I'm middle aged. Period.

However, because I am whom I am, there are certain elements of my personality and some of my interests that may be considered young. My endearing love of adult-oriented cartoons, for instance, or a vaguely Peter-Pan-Syndromish way of dressing: t-shirts and shorts worn with old school Adidas. Conversely, in my youth I liked things that were Old Manish, like jazz and reading and yelling at clouds.

Recently, I picked up a Details magazine (a young man's magazine that used to be much more interesting and text oriented when I started reading it 15 years ago) and saw an article called "Do You Have Grandpa Syndrome?" There were some close-to-home references in it about "being the oldest guy in the club", a long-time measure of being pathetically out of one's age element. Since I regularly visit my bar-owning buddy Ashi down in Vancouver, and I inevitably tag along with him to tour the Granville Entertainment District's nightclubs, I often am the oldest guy in the club and - unless I'm half in the bag - it's one of those naked moments in life when I feel truly worthy of derision.

At the end of the article there is a little quiz with the kind of reductive and often arbitrary questions that require a yes or no answer. These types of tests have been around forever and crop up in all sorts of magazines, from Teen Beat (Could You Be Miley Cyrus's Best Friend?) to Cosmopolitan (Can You Please Your Man With a Doily and a Stainless Steel Bowl Full of Skittles?) to Millionaire (Would You Be a Great 1920's Plutocrat?). Anyway, I took the goddamn quiz and was actually quite surprised to see that I met none of these stupid requirements of Grandpa Syndrome. I am not a man who "wears earplugs at concerts" or "is puzzled by people smoking pot at concerts". I only own Richard Ford's "The Sportswriter", not "the entire canon". Although I can't drink as much as I used to, I don't "gripe about it". I certainly don't have the skills to "build a deck". And though I'm "not turned on by Tila Tequila", I find her moronic, not "terrifying".

Maybe I'll answer "yes" more often when I'm close to 50. In the meantime, leave me alone with these damned questions, get off my lawn and pipe down, because the bloody news is on! Pass the hard candy.

Oh, Lance Armstrong, Why Can't You Just Piss Off?

2008-09-12T18:02:00.000-07:00

People who know me and read this blog are cognizant of these three things: 1) I fucking hate Lance Armstrong 2) I'm pretty good about ignoring trends and people in our culture until they lose their lustre and disappear into the slagheap of history (for instance, I had to outlive thong underwear and Eminem and am currently waiting for Amy Winehouse to fade away) 3) I'm actually not always "pretty good" about this sort of thing and often get vexed enough to become the embodiment of the Anti-Zen. And Lance Armstrong coming out of retirement after three years has set me off, man.

Now, you have to understand that I really become a huge fan of professional road cycling just before the ubiquity of Lance Armstrong in the scene. I loved the sport in spite of him, not because of him. In fact, one of the things that I loathed about that hatchet-faced shitheel was the fact that he was criticism-proof in North America because of a single fact: he survived cancer. And because of our Oprahish, cue-the-plangent-strings, oh-the-perseverance-and-strength-of-the-human-spirit fetishism no one could see him for the humourless, self-important prick that he is. Ignorant people who had no idea about the culture of cycling just saw him as some kind of American God and, way worse, the Greatest Cyclist Ever. I waited for seven years for that smug asshole to retire so I could breathe easy and watch a new era of cycling begin. And now he's back, and so is the fawning press. Carlos Who? Danilo Who? Cadel Who? Mark Caven-what? Lancelancelancelance. Bleh.

Ironically, the vast majority of people have no idea that the team he's joining, Astana, is led by an amazing cyclist named Alberto Contador, who is on the verge of winning all three grand tours - the French, the Italian and the Spanish - all within 14 months! Oh, and he came back from a huge head injury that require the insertion of a plate in his melon, if that sweetens the deal for everybody. Nobody seems to care that Lance is assuming that Contador will work for him to win his 8th Tour, because, you know, the Texan is "doing it for cancer awareness". Um . . . is anyone on this brittle sphere not aware of cancer? Excited by his recent 2nd place in the Leadville 100 mountain bike race, Lance figured we needed him back, a Texan pure of heart, who never doped like all those naughty Europeans who didn't have God cheering for them, those poor slobs who didn't have the deep insight and activation of the Human Capacity Gland that a near death experience gives you. Nope, the spotlight is back on Lance Armstrong, er, sorry, cancer.

I hope he gets beaten like a rented gong. I hope he gets humiliated. I hope he fails miserably. My voodoo sources are making a doll out of the dung of a Texas longhorn steer. Don't make me use it, Lance. Go have a Shiner Bock and think it over some more.

Diseased Pariah

2008-09-04T17:27:00.001-07:00

Stay back! Do not lean forward towards your computer screen, for I am writing this unfortunate dispatch while nursing a case of conjunctivitis. Yes, Pink Eye. Now, granted the affliction hasn't had the wherewithall to jump the 1.15 inch summit of my nose bridge to bring the pink from the right eye to the left, but I'm still worried about infecting you, the reading public. I don't want to be responsible for a pandemic of itchy irritation, bloodshot orbs and weeping. God knows we need less weeping.
It's a damn good thing that it's only in my right, as I've had to forgo one contact lens. Since I don't have glasses as backup (note to self: spring for the $600 glasses) I've been walking around slightly more disoriented than normal. Driving is a little tricky, but the rubber side has stayed down, so all is well.
Besides the eyedrops prescribed by the doctor, I've been pursuing a few folk remedies. According to "RC Cola and Pistachio Butter: A White Trash Guide to Fixin' What Ails You" by Loleen Suggs of Crawler's Gulch, West Virginia, "A poultice of creamed corn and carrot juice soaked into a Bounty paper towel works wonders." My attorney Eugene Theramin, whose parents were born in the Bahamas, texted me the following: "Pour choc syrup into peanut butter eat w/ fingers til slightly nauseous listen to 2nd side of Beatle's rubber soul album repeat."
The last time I had Pink Eye was in grade 6 soon after I moved to Kamloops and entered Arthur Stevenson Elementary. I hadn't cemented my friendships with Kent, Shawn and the other goofballs yet, and I hadn't fallen in love with the overdeveloped grade seven girl who moved away by the end of the school year, so I was happy to stay at home for a few days, watching JP Patches in the morning and rubbing my eyes.
Horribly, I've had this condition for close to a week and attributed it to some kind of scratch, odd allergy or gypsy curse. I've been telling people that a chicken talon gouged it, the result of an ill-advised voodoo ritual. Finally, after two days of popping in to my old school workplace - and possibly infecting the staff and students - the head receptionist insisted that I actually go to the hospital.
Those of you who I regularly engage in butterfly kisses with: don't worry, I'm on the mend. Limber up those lashes . . .

Bears and Berries

2008-09-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

I've just crested a little rise on the mountain bike and am beginning to accelerate when I see him. It's one of those many moments when you think, "Oh, look at that black lab" and it turns out to be a bear or vice versa. He's sniffing down a fence-line facing away from me and upwind, so he doesn't know I'm coming. I yell, "Hey, buddy, what's the big idea?" and he turns to me and then takes off running in a spirited gallop towards the other side of the road. Unfortunately, bears' eyesight is poor, so he doesn't notice the wire fence and runs into it headfirst. He springs back two feet, the fence rings out like rusty bedsprings and he makes a little grunt. For a moment I brake; I'm about fifty feet from him and realize that a freaked out, cornered-feeling bear is the one who'll mess you up. But he scurries on down the fence line, ramming into it with his shoulder every so often. I follow yelling encouragement, for I can see that the fence runs out and then he'll have nothing but sweet bush to hide in. I laugh myself giddy when it's all done.
It's fall and the bears are everywhere. Their shit is everywhere too, heaps of heavily seeded dung, sometimes with the berries mostly intact, like no one taught them to masticate. In fact, off-road riding is practically a feces slalom right now. Berries and salmon are the main dishes in this annual oink-out to layer their bodies with fat for hibernation.
Sometimes humans and bears share the same berry patch. My aunt and uncle found themselves feasting at the same table as a grizzly the other day, all of them after the lovely huckleberries. I got to eat some of those berries with vanilla ice cream soon after, and you've got to complement the taste of the big silverback. We don't have a lot of naturally growing fruit in B.C., but we are lucky to have many kinds of berries. One of my favourite memories of the Vancouver Island Bike Tour of 2005 was realizing I had been cruising beside kilometers of uninterrupted blackberry bushes. I found myself distracted after that and had to stop many times to graze.
One of my uncle's delights is to have a huckleberry sandwich. He insists the bread absorbs the tartness of the berry, but to be sure I'd add a light sprinkling of powdered sugar. It's a delicate sandwich to eat, and he once explained that the method to ensure the sandwich keeps all together is to carefully unwrap it from its Saran Wrap like "a reverse French safe". Now, no one has used the term "French safe" since the sixties, but it's a lot less clinical that the ubiquitous AIDS-era "condom".

The Black Dog

2008-08-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

WITH APOLOGIES TO WINSTON CHURCHILL AND LED ZEPPELIN

He comes at dusk,
Slithering in under the skirting,
Wriggling beneath my foundation,
Lies in the dank dirt
And sets to whining,
The sound like a metal heart tearing.

His noise usurps all,
And soon I can't hear music
Which turns to an A minor drone anyway.
My mind is marred,
Dragged low
To seep through the floorboards
And settle into the soil around him.
Together they grow a black fungus
Like you see on everything in the tropics.

It may take a week
Or a good English fortnight,
But the red dog finds him
And worries him until he uncurls
And stretches his fetid legs.
I watch him slinking off down the road
Towards someone else's house.

What a shame that he's so hard
To kill
And that he came from such a large brood.
Even as the runt of the litter
He couldn't be drowned.

I scratch the red dog on the sunpressed porch.
I offer her the run of the place.
She sniffs through the open door
And I stand stiffly,
Waiting to see what she'll do.

The Rocky Mountain/Kootenay Tour 2008: The Fizzled End and the Highlights

2008-08-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

Prince George to Vanderhoof (101 km): It wasn't the end I was hoping for or even expecting. At the last entry I was very blue to learn that one of my volleyball players was on life support and her mother dead after a car wreck in Ontario. At 12:30 that night an ex-student texted me to reveal that the girl had died. So I start what ended up being the last stage of the tour with very little sleep and a pierced heart. There was a slight drizzle as I climbed out of Prince George. By Bednesti Lake the rain was pouring, and past the last rest stop the rain was assisted in its path to my face by a horrible head wind. I broke down mentally at that point, using every bit of whatever fitness I had developed in the previous six week to slog on, but yelling tearfully at the sky, calling it all sorts of horrible things. Stopping caused me to shiver, so I shlepped on. Finally, I got to Vanderhoof, checked into another hotel, had a shower, laid my things out to dry, and then made the decision to stop. The next morning I took the train home. Sorrow permeated the air, dissolving a little only today, the day the funeral was broadcast from back east to our school.

So. The journey was 2800 km long over 26 cycling days. It was epic, monumental, gorgeous and very difficult. I lost almost 15 pounds and came to some very important decisions. I drank about 30 liters of Pepsi! Here are some of the highlights:
* running into Sarah Onischak in McBride and staying at her house
* eating a huge strawberry cheesecake Blizzard in Creston
* descending to Mom's house in Osoyoos and then chugging a beer
* having my spoke fixed so quickly in Cranbrook
* various animal sightings including multiple deer, bears both black and grizzly, mountain goats, mountain sheep, goats, coyotes, turkey buzzards and something that may have been a badger
* the entire day riding from Creston to Nelson with a ferry ride 2/3 of the way through
* a rodeo forming around me in Williams Lake: a cool surprise
* getting the last campground in Lake Louise
* texting Ashi and Sam almost every night

In all it was a very adventurous and arduous tour. It's funny that it became almost a mundane lifestyle after a while; it was like a job that I performed willingly. There were very few times when I didn't want to do it, and I always sprang out of the tent ready to have another day in the saddle. It left me in good physical shape, but, probably because of the awful ending, not good mental shape. Life seems kind of a letdown now that it's over. Summer is almost over too! How did that happen?

The Return Leg: Osoyoos to Prince George (864 km)

2008-08-09T14:55:00.000-07:00

Osoyoos to Kelowna (140 km): After a week off (with a 3 hour ride tucked in there to keep fresh), I head back out on to the road. I'm horrified to find that I'm very weak from Osoyoos to Oliver, though I knew the knee would continue to hurt. The knee is The Pain. Very quickly things pick up and I feel stronger. I stop in Penticton but am skunked at finding some chamois creme. This fine product (called Butt'r) prevents saddle sores, one of which can completely ruin a tour. The day gets hotter and the two big climbs - into Summerland and out of Peachland - leave me with white salt waves on my jersey and gloves. During the Summerland climb I make the mistake of looking at my chain, and the pressure of my helmet pressing on my saturated bandana causes a stream of salt water into my eyes. It's a good reason to stop. In Kelowna I still can't find chamois creme. My brow furrows.
Kelowna to Vernon (60 km): Short but intense, this ride finds me mixing it with thick traffic as the shoulder disappears. My jacket falls out of my previously infallible retention system and a guy pulls over to tell me it's laying about a half kilometer behind me. With much cursing and waiting for a break in traffic, I retrieve it. Chamois creme is found. There is much rejoicing.
Vernon to Kamloops (112 km): After three days of lakeside idleness, I climb out of Vernon and start the fairly enjoyable leg to Kamloops.As usual, I drink Pepsi all day. It just feels "cleaner" in my mouth than Gatorade or juice. Anyway, the old standard campground in Kamloops has run to ruin since the last tour. Still, I get a whole gazebo to myself. Discovering that I've left my coffee filter holder thing at the lake, I pout for a while and then experiment with using just a paper filter sitting in the cup. The success is mixed.
Kamloops to Cache Creek (94 km): Although short on kilometers, this ballbuster of a ride is extremely hot and hilly. The heat grabs you like a fist or a really dumb anaconda. I don't even make 20 km/h for the day. I shove a lot of soft serve into my mouth and then set up at the ol' favourite campsite. A couple has a huge fight at one the morning and the dude roars off for an hour.
Cache Creek to 100 Mile House (116 km): It's another one of those "Jesus, can I do this?" mornings, for the first 42 km are a constant, gradual climb. After Clinton, I begin to fly, and even the sharp rise to Begbie Summit seems mild. The lousy camping space behind a motel doesn't even have a bloody picnic table, so I have to haul one up the little hill. A seemingly permanent tent resident tells me it's going to rain, and I poo-poo him. At 3 a.m. a very slight sprinkle begins and I takes me only a minute to put the fly on. Still, the effort makes me sleep in to 6.
100 Mile House to Williams Lake (94 km): This is an easy day. I sing all day even without the iPod, and I must have some kind of cowboy radar or something because I sing "Blue Moon Over Kentucky" a lot. At the Stampede Ground I'm very surprised to find out that the Western Canada High School Rodeo Championships is just getting under way. All afternoon people arrive, and the grounds are filled with young fellas taking turns practicing their roping on little model calves, teenage girls wrestle goats (for real) and the whole area is shimmering with that great excitement and anticipation that only youth can bring. I meet Miss Alberta Rodeo and am pleased to find that she's Ruebenesque. Good for her. There's a wild lightning storm that more or less misses the Stampede Grounds. I cower in my tent.
Williams Lake to Quesnel (128 km): I skip breakfast and climb up to Tim Hortons. There a gnomelike German man begins to loudly converse with me from across the room. Since I realize he's annoying people and won't be shutting up, I move over to hear with lusty tales of cycling adventure. He's kind of a dick. It's cold enough to put my jacket and long fingered gloves on for the first time since the Rockies. The vegetation changes considerably, becoming greener. I realize that I haven't seen a deer since Vernon. Why? What have I done? I get a head start on the next day's climb by covering about 2.5 km of it to reach the motel camp ground. There's no shade, so I have to kind of hide under the picnic table. Soon clouds form ranks to the north and by 8 an even more wild lightning storm begins. It's kind of scary. It rains to beat the band too, especially if the band is the Eagles.
Quesnel to P.G.(119 km): The rain and the smelly pulpmill clouds provide some intense fog in the morning. I make the long climb out of time with a flashing light climbed to the back of my helmet By Hixon the high cirrus clouds hide the sun for the whole show. It's a very tiring day, probably because it's the sixth in a row. At Red Rock, with 27 km to go, I bonk and end up spooning peanut butter into myself until the jitters and shallow, rapid breathing stops. I check into a hotel and then get some very bad news from back home. I can't eat the pizza I bought. Once again, for perhaps the 10,000th time, I'm reminded of the brittle, bittersweet quality of this mortal coil. Tomorrow I'll cycle to Vanderhoof and finally take a day off, do some laundry, stare into the merciless sky, to bolster myself for the last push back to Hazelton.

The View From the Shoulder

2008-07-26T14:31:00.000-07:00

First, you notice the flora. Riding along at an average of 21 km per hour, you look at a lot of vegetation, and very early on you note patterns and variations. Along Highway 16 the Indian Paintbrush is in profusion, its red brigades huddle against the treeline or the fenceline. Closer to the highway stand millions of pink clover flowers and yellow and white flowers I can't name. Recently I've been very conscious of the immense gap in my flower identification skills. I know they are lovely and that they inspire both great and terrible art. In Osoyoos the hills are crowded with sage, its powdered green bushes growing to a height and density resembling that of plantation tea.
You see the detritus of the road. There are CD's on every stretch and turn. They are mostly burned CD's which people consider somewhat disposable. I've only been able to read the Jiffy Marked title of two so far: Thin Lizzy and, grandly, The Shit. Truck tire fragments appear like schools of rubber piranha. You pray not to be beside a truck when a tire shreds. You dodge bungee cords, broken glass, animal feces, orange peels, discarded clothing and towels, and bird carcasses. The freakiest shoulder junk of this Tour - so far - has been a series of ribboned figure skating medals spread out along ten kilometers between Houston and Burns Lake, and dead bees in the Rockies for fifteen km.
You spot all the L's and N's on the backs of vehicles and think, "Thanks for not hitting me, kid." You can't read many bumper stickers.
You study the clouds and terrain ahead and think about what clothes you need to change into or out of. You see the daymoon and aim for it.

Radium to Osoyoos (Kootenays to Okanagan): Leg 4 (609 km)

2008-07-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Radium to Cranbrook (142 km): Upon climbing out of Radium, I quickly saw the surrounding country was more like the Cariboo than the Okanagan. Invermere contained the first Tim Hortons I had seen since Prince George, so after eighteen kilometers, I stopped in for a coffee before running through a few more small towns, the wind at my back. The weather had been clearing for the past couple of days, and this day was the hottest yet. After Wasa the road began to climb and the shoulder began to crumble. It was a long day, and I was worried that arriving at 3:00 in Cranbrook would too late to hope for a bike shop to replace my broken spoke and true my wheel. I was wrong: Gerrick Sports had it done in two hours. Meanwhile I walked to the campsite in a ridiculously circuitous route. Most of the lawns in town were covered with small white flowers that resembled trumpet bells. I ate a small pizza at a Boston Pizza establishment really suited to deliver pizza, not facilitate eating them. The staff were all teenagers who were obviously at the culmination of an in-house face piercing contest. I had gone four days straight from Jasper and I was surprised that I wanted to carry on.
Cranbrook to Creston (110 km): It was hot again today, but I cycled 40 km before the rays reached me. Traffic stopped for a gaggle of Canadian honkers as I rose out of Cranbrook, and a deer stood on the side of the road wondering whether or not to cross. I yelled him away. After 10 km I felt fatigued and stopped to wonder what was wrong. Right then I made the decision to take a day off in Creston. Farther along I found a young buck that had just been hit by a car. He was lying in the ditch bleeding out of his rear end and he tried to get up when I stopped my bike. "Lie down!" I pleaded. I flagged down a BCRail guy in a truck and he got out and took a look. "If I had some tools we could put him down," the guy said and I thought about the Leatherman blade I had. But readers of my Off-Centre articles will know that a) I can't be trusted to put a creature "down" and b) a Leatherman knife is a poor match versus ungulate hide. Again, the buck with the thumb sized velveted horns struggled to get up. "No, no, stay down, buddy," BCRail guy said, as if to a punch drunk barroom hero who didn't know when he was finished. The fellow called it in to Fish and Wildlife and I pedalled away. The deer looked into the forest on the other side of the road, waiting.
Creston to Nelson (120 km): The rest day did me a heap of good, because I handled the very ripply highway that ran north up the east side of Kootenay Lake with gusto. The shoulder disappeared and I had to mix it with traffic. The extreme roller-coaster nature of the road reminded me of Galiano Island. After a very tough climb, a steep downhill led me right to the ferry at Kootenay Bay to Balfour. I practically rolled straight onto the boat. In Balfour I ate and drank and then continued on to Nelson, feeling strong and fit. In the same way that I read a magazine per day in Creston, I read a whole Esquire before bed.
Nelson to Grand Forks (146 km): Truly an epic and exhausting day. The day started with a very pleasant roll through several Doukabour communities on the 48 km road to Castlegar. I ate at Tim Hortons in anticipation of the monster climb I had ahead: Paulson Summit, an almost 35 km climb. The beginning was very steep and relentless. I found myself taking breaks after a half hour of ascending and then forty five minutes later. I would just make it to Nancy Green provincial park with the fluids I had. I made sure to eat granola bars and the donut I had picked up at breakfast. The hill was very hard in the hot sun, but I was rewarded with a very long drop of lethal grade. I concluded that people climbing from this side had a more difficult task. A couple of short climbs brought me to Christina Lake just after noon, where I inhaled a lot of soft serve. Grand Forks was still 22 km away, and the heat of the afternoon was peaking. On a section of steep rise, I was overwhelmed by superheated air cooked up by the road and the very close rock face to my right. In Grand Forks, after 7 hours of riding, I gorged and then lied about in the park grunting contentedly.
Grand Forks to Osoyoos (91 km): When I woke up I noticed that there were four deer gracefully feeding in the park and that my left knee hurt. My campstove ran out of IsoPro before the water could fully boil, so the coffee and oatmeal were sub-par, even with Creamo in them. Immediately, there was a very long climb of 25 km and my knee was killing me. At the top of the climb - where I met three older gents who were cycling converted railbeds in the area - I wrapped the knee, although I didn't have a Tensor bandage. Even on the downhill and flat path through Greenwood and Midway, the joint drove me crazy. Soon after leaving Midway I saw two turkey vultures on a slight rise, making them the most obscure creatures sighted on this expedition. At Rock Creek I made a radical decision. With an astonishingly relentless climb of 20 km facing that knee, I took the bags off the bike, turned the machine upside down, and hitchhiked. I only had to wait a half hour until a very nice couple, their pickup already full of stuff, stopped and took me on. It turned out that the fellow and I knew some mutual Comox Valley people that I met tree-planting. They dropped me off at the summit and I flew the eleven km to my ma's place on Anarchist Mountain. What was waiting for me in my mom's 12% grade driveway? A deer, of course. "Oh, you again," I gasped. "Stay away from the road!"
The first stage of this trip has been dramatic and hard. I've really enjoyed the vagabond/camping lifestyle and the simplicity, although the panniers feel like they have too much stuff! 1800 kms in 17 days of cycling. After a week of R 'n' R, I shall continue, heading North/Northwest back to Hazelton, before moving away in the last week of August.

Jasper to Radium Hot Springs (The Parks): Leg 3 (366 km)

2008-07-15T16:31:00.000-07:00

They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, which must mean that after I recover a bit I'll be able to wrestle a moose, with the winner getting a heaping plate of mango pieces. Let me just summarize the last three days for those who want to get back to Facebook:
WOW! This is so beautiful and majestic and humbling!
MAN! Is this ever hard!
CHRIST! Is this ever expensive!
Jasper to the Columbia Ice Fields (100 km): This arduous day was set up the previous night by a bunch of asshole Quebecois backpackers who started setting up their camp at 10:30 and didn't shut their tortiere-holes until after 1:30 when finally a Parks worker came by to tell them to pipe down. My yelling, "Be quiet!" didn't work, that's for sure. Anyway, I allowed myself to sleep until 6:00 and then headed off into the peaceful Parkway. I had the road to myself until about 8:00 or so, and I saw a deer and a bear along the way. The mountains and little lakes lined up on either side like a grand palace guard for inspection. It was a little cold and cloudy, but pleasant. As I approached the Ice Field, a squall hit, bringing a blustery wind. I changed into more clothes and approached the Sunwapta Pass. The climb up the pass was excrutiating; I hadn't used my smallest gear at all on this trip until I began to roll up those 7 and 8% steeps. I grunted and gasped and weaved a little, until finally the huge ice tongue sticking from between the peaks appeared. I collapsed at a picnic table at the Center, watching the tiny specks of people wander over the Ice Field. Soon I was joined by a couple from Ontario who were "credit card touring", that is, cycling with very little and sleeping in hotels and inns (you know, normal-ish travel). We talked Tour de France until they got hungry. I found a spot at a nearby campground and it started to tip down rain as I set up the tent and ate my beans under a sheltering tree. So close to a rushing stream, I slept deeply between the thunder blasts.
Columbia Ice Fields to Lake Louise (126 km): The rain made that sigh-inducing patter-splat on my tent upon conciousness, but when I emerged from the tent, I found slush all around. Another morning starting off soaked. After a couple of kilometers of slight rise, a wild and wet 14 km descent found me gritting my teeth and cramping my hands. I was freezing, but at least I wasn't climbing. On this day, the climb would come just after the middle of the day. I bombed along and took my first rest at 45 km., where the sun, which I'd been chasing all morning, awaited me. When I opened my right rear pannier to get lighter clothes, a mouse scampered out! Closer inspection revealed that this little stowaway had been in my sugar supply! Now he's hopelessly lost and has to start his little world all over again. The climb (Bow Pass) was again very nasty, and the sun was broiling my brain and giving me a little burn to prove it had been out. At the summit there was no rest stop, so I leaned the bike against a road sign and stayed supine, eating Pirate cookies. Finally, I reached Lake Louise and ate pizza at the little mall there. A German girl I had met in Jasper showed up and complained about the friggin' Quebecois too. She was staying at a hostel because the campground was full. I tried the campground anyway and they had one spot left ($28.50). A shower left me feeling more human. I ate a large can of Irish Stew, read and then sacked out. No animals except for the mouse this day.
Lake Louise to Radium Hot Springs (140 km): Again, rain upon rising at 5:00, but I managed to stay out of it by using a cooking shelter. By the time I started whizzing down Highway 1, the clouds were dumping water. I was soon soaked to the bone and growly. I boogied as fast as I could just to keep warm. At Castle Junction, I knew the first climb would begin. I stopped at a pullout and made a defeated video to record "the low point of the trip" by sticking my upper body and the camera in a large metal garbage can to protect it from the rain. The climb was wretched - more 8%stuff - and my legs protested, "Hey, aren't we doing this a little too often lately? Take a break, guy." Around a bend there was the Stormy Mountain Lodge where I stopped for a coffee, dripping and steaming ludicrously in the cozy, "log cabin" interior. The hostess was a stone cold fox and I wished I'd made a less snot-ridden, damp first impression. Outside I looked at the mountains and pressed the coffee cup against my face. A guy came out and claimed I only had a km to go before I could drop downhill. He was thankfully correct, and, in fact, I stormed the next 80 km. Three interesting things happened in that time: 1) I saw a freshly dead deer in a ditch with a red ear tag, so I wrote a note at a ranger station reporting where it was 2) I noticed that I broke a spoke, making the wheel a little less than true; since Radium has no bike shop I'll have to look for a repair down the road and carry more stuff in the front 3) I came across a huge conglomeration of tourists taking pictures of some friendly mountain goats. I stopped too, of course, to take pics and video. The climb: wickedly steep, deceptively cruel and horribly long. Just when you think you're done SURPRISE! there's almost 2 more km to go. The descent was actually quite dangerous. Another conglomeration revealed longhorn sheep being herded off the road by a ranger. I told her about the deer and she'd got the message. They scoured the area, but the deer was gone. In town - a tourist clogged joint that reminds me of Osoyoos somehow - I ate pizza, got a spot, cleaned the bike, did laundry and looked at tomorrow's profile. More on that later.
I have made it through the roughest patch and desire to be done in a week. 1200 km so far.

Prince George to Jasper: Leg Two (370 km)

2008-07-12T08:03:00.000-07:00

I am here in Jasper for my second day off. It was so cold last night, and I have been so very cold several times on this trip, that I am buying longsleeve polypro underwear today. The last 370 kms have been pretty wild and wooly . . .
P.G. to Purden Lake (64 km): I woke up at my usual 5 a.m. in the motel, not to roll, but to watch the Tour de France. It was a great time trial stage and after four hours it made me anxious to get going. Rain had fallen all night, which was discouraging, but only the roads were a little damp as I climbed out of town (quicker past the prison!) It was a short day, so it was an opportunity to stretch the legs. Again, I caused a deer to bolt up on to the highway, this time in front of a car heading in the same direction as both the deer and I. From now on, I am going to frantically point at any deer to alert the drivers. Later on I came across a huge cow moose eating tranquilly by the side of the road with a couple of vehicles pulled over onto the shoulder to take pictures. Soon there was a big clog of cars with people pointing cellphone cameras out their windows, and me, of course. She had enough: she high-stepped it over to the treeline, looked over her shoulder, peed mightily and then disappeared.
Purden Lake to McBride (154 km): This monster haul started with a deer sighting before I even pulled out of the campground. I knew I had to be smart with the food and the rests on this day. At 17 km a lanky black bear appeared on the road and appeared to be getting ready to shit on the yellow line. I yelled in an outrageous French accent until he scuttled off. About 60% of the way through the day there was a huge descent, which I knew would lead to a huge climb. The sun, incredibly, was out, so I stripped down at a rest stop, even taking off my helmet, and ate some oatmeal to brace myself. It was nasty, but not a killer. I exchanged some words with a coyote just before it started to rain. I was ambling along when I noticed very close to me in the ditch something that at first appeared to me a huge, unkempt sheep. I realized it was a small grizzly bear and shouted, JESUS CHRIST! He scampered off, I accelerated and we both avoided would surely would have been a showdown of mutual destruction. The rain turned deluge-y. My bandana became so saturated with water and sweat that both liquids began to seep into my eyes. I had to stop. After this, the road tilted down and I got my second wind as I closed in on McBride. There, I ate a burger at the Beanery, a swell little cafe located in the old train station. Stopping for groceries, I was amazed and delighted to see little Sarah Onischek, a beloved ex-student. She invited me to spend the night and what a wonderful visit it was. Kudos, Sarah!
McBride to Mt. Robson (80 km): When I started in the rain the morning, I immediately noticed the right knee that was a little sore the day before was killing me. In fact, stopping at the 12 km mark, I began to fear it was tendonitis brought on by the cold, wet weather on my bare knees. It really hurt and I began to have doomthoughts. I rode on, and at the rest stop at the 20 km mark, I had to take shelter from a vicious downpour. I even had to gouge little channels with my heel to redirect the water from the little roofed display that I was hiding under. I was thrilled with the scenery, my knee and my fitness that day (though I did have a kind tail wind). At the campground at Mt. Robson, I met a guy named Doug from South Carolina who is touring B.C. by recumbent (laid back) tricycle. We talked about climbing Red Pass the next morning. The first big beast.
Mt. Robson to Jasper (90 km): Doug left a half hour before me, but I passed him just about at the crest of the hill (12 km). It was not too terrible, but I had to baby that knee. Just after we met up again at Moose Lake, I saw a black bear. By then the scenery had changed into marshes on the sides of the road with mountain after mountain looming left and right. I felt judged by these peaks, like I had to put on a good show for them. The other constant was the amazing construction project by North American construction from Ottawa: the oil pipeline from Edmonton to Prince Rupert. I stopped and talked with some of the workers. There was a headwind for a while which made me pump like hell on slight downhills. Then, by God, I was in Alberta. At the park gates, I paid to be in the series of parks that run all the way down to Radium - almost 40 bucks for four days. The campground Ièm in is $22.50 per day. Even the Subway is expensive here! I cannot complain too much though; I have got to save my energy for the long, mountainous passage through the Icefield and down to Radium. Big big days ahead. I shall rest today and watch the two types of squirrels chase each other around the campground.

Two-Mile to Prince George (430 km): Leg One

2008-07-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

I'm here in P.G. for a day off and finger examination ("Say, Doc, will I ever be able to squish a mosquito one handed again?"). I'm nearly ashamed to say I've taken a motel room. The hell with it . . . Here's the low-down so far:
1) Two-Mile to Smithers (72 km): I started this "journey of a thousand miles with a single step" at my buddy Dean's place in Two-Mile. He whipped up the best hot cereal in the house and accompanied me to New Town. Right away I noticed that my cyclocomputer, which I thought I'd set properly, was REALLY off. All day I farted around with it. I immediately began to internalize the Way of the Road: hills are hard going up, cruisy going down; take a break every 20 km or so; and keep drinking. It was the last day of a real hot streak, but since I left really early, I wasn't too beaten up by it. In Smithers I ate a meatloaf sandwich, bought some supplies, drank a protein shake and then sought out my cousin Dennis's house, where I was wonderfully fed and entertained by his lovely family.
2) Smithers to Houston (64 km): Woke up and had the first of what will be dozens of coffee and oatmeal breakfasts. It was a short day, with only Hungry Hill as a looming threat. But even that was handled promptly, at 25 minutes from the point I turned the corner and saw it to its peak. Halfway up I yelled at a momma deer and her two younguns to get the hell off the road. Up there I met a guy from Kamloops about to drop HH. He knew one of my ex-students (the lovely and talented Robynne Giguere), so I told him what cafe she works at in Hazelton. The downhill into town was great, with a light rain (yes, Devyn and Daryn, again!). In town I ate two Mozzas for $6 and then set up at my old standard, the Silverthorne Campground. The shower was great. There, I met two gals from Whitehorse who were making their way to P.G.
3) Houston to Burns Lake (84 km): I've long maintained that the barely 2 km Six Mile Hill is a worse affair than Hungry Hill. There's no bloody shoulder and it's at least 8%. At the top I kept going even though a guy stopped at the brake check kept hollering friendly questions at me. I made camp at the free municipal campground, eating cold quiche for dinner. The Whitehorse girls showed up and waited - endlessly, it seemed - for a friend to bring them dinner. But what a dinner! They shared the bounty too!
4) Burns Lake to Vanderhoof (126 km): The day began with a stiff, sore back. I consumed a lot of Ibuprofen with my coffee and got on the road. A buck with small velvety horns let me talk to him and take his picture as he nibbled.Just before Endako it started to rain, and then pour, and then bloody well tip down. I sought refuge at the roadhouse in Endako, chewing granola bars and bracing myself. I had miles to go before I slept, so I put on almost every layer of clothing I had and steamed out to get soaked! At Fraser lake and Fort Fraser I stopped for coffee and snacks, but still had a big run left. I was dog-tired, but at least it stopped raining. Again, I had to yell a deer and her baby off the road. In town I threw a bunch of chile and buttered buns down my throat, bought some baked goods and then faced the wall-like climb up to good ol' Dave's RV Park. I hastily threw the tent up and had a long shower (shaved the legs too ;)). As I was starting the laundry, a boiling, black storm came rushing in from the east. Jesus, it was nasty! The clouds threw down thunderbolts like they were seeding the earth. I watched astonished from the laundry house as the storm lashed the park, twirling my poor little tent around like a balloon attached to a string; I'd only staked down the vestibule! A guy placed a propane tank on the back to keep it from tumbling into the forest. The rain, and then BB sized hail poured down like a Bangkok monsoon (eh, Heather?). Wild. After the storm, I straightened everything out and had a terrific and well-deserved sleep.
5) Vanderhoof to P.G. (100 km). The first 25 km were reeled off in an hour. I felt strong and pure of heart. A bigger buck than Mr. Calm from the day before - with a bigger rack - bounced along beside me for about 50 meters before crossing the road in front of me and disappearing. It rained a bit, but it wasn't a big deal today. The recent rain makes everything fresh and green and gorgeous. The Indian paintbrush is out, along with dozens of other types of flora I can't name, and the whole rolling vista makes the occasional grunt well worth it. I arrived in town and tried to get a cheap room at the College of New Caledonia, but with no luck. I resigned myself to Gramma's Inn. I ate at Quizno's (my sandwich expertly made by Denny Huynh) and later ate with Sam Dahl after a drop into town on the unloaded bike to get a few items. And now, the rest day . . .

Equipment For Tour

2008-06-24T17:43:00.000-07:00

Four waterproof panniers
MEC Tarn 2 tent, 3/4 length Thermarest ground pad, down sleeping bag, flannel pillow case
3 cycling shorts, 1 overshort, 1 cotton short, knee warmers
3 cycling jerseys, 1 t-shirt, arm warmers, vest, jacket
3 pairs cycling socks, wool socks, white cotton socks
3 bandanas, 1 cycling cap
MSR stove, collapsable pot, spoon, Tim Hortons travel mug, really small coffee filter
first aid kit, sunscreen, chamois cream, toiletries, bug dope, camp towel
bike lock
bike tools, degreaser, rag, chain oil, Leatherman
pocketbook, Moleskine notepad, pens
camera w/ extra battery
cell phone and charger, 2 iPods and charger
watch
3 750 ml. water bottles
spare Oakleys
two fingerless gloves, one pair full gloves
two emergency meals
extra tube and patches
headlamp
some kinda odd but fun mojo like a moose pinky pickle puppet
money!

All Creatures Great and Small and Cuddly

2008-06-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

I was cycling - a late evening, let's-groove-on-the-first-day-of-summer ride - when I saw a black bear about a kilometer outside of town. It was the first bear I'd seen all year, setting a new record for the latest I've ever seen the first bear of the year. I also saw the Coyote Gang, a ragtag handful of coyotes that hangs out about five kilometers from town.
Longtime readers of this blog know that I write about animals quite regularly. The truth is that I love animals, especially mammals, for a rather ludicrous reason: I want to pet and scratch and rub the tummies of all the animals and make them feel good. And make them like me.
I have this desire to be nice to animals, even the really stupid, awkward ones like chickens. If chickens were disposed to hop up on your lap and allow you to stroke their heads, I'd really like them and not just as a meal. Every time I see a cow I want to rub its bony forehead while it slips its tongue up its nostrils. I entertain a fantasy where I set a cougar a-purring with a good chin scratching. When I see wild beasts like bears, coyotes or moose, I make that rapid little kissy sound to draw them over for a thorough patting.
Part of this, I'm sure, is a way of ensuring that I never have conflict with members of the animal kingdom. If they know that I just want to provide them with happiness, they'll be less likely to chew, trample, sting, pummel or impale me. Another reason behind this is the affection that I've received from domestic animals like cats and dogs throughout my life. Unless a dog is growling and barking or a cat is hissing, I seek to give it a little joy. I've also had good results with rabbits, sheep and friendly bovines. I've even stroked the back of a wild red fox, although he was sated by ham.
Of course, just like the greatest prey is "man", the ultimate mammals to pet are the female homo sapiens and the common chinchilla. Alas, not all like their tummies rubbed.

Pre-Trip Check List

2008-06-17T22:19:00.000-07:00

If you look at the "masthead" of this blog, you'll find an addition to the description: "During Summer '08, A Tour Journal". In exactly two weeks I leave on my fourth cycling tour of B.C. Recent finger surgery stilted my training for the Rocky Mountain-Kootenays (RMK) Tour, but a strong 100 km Bike For Books ride last Sunday suggests that I've got the legs for it. I've added and subtracted items from the pile of equipment for the last two weeks, second guessing: Do I have too many clothes? Not enough water capacity?
For the past month or so, I've been following the journeys of a pair of sisters and a separate ex-student as they roll across Canada. The sisters are in Saskatchewan after leaving in early May and the young fellow, who has a on-line ride journal, is tip-toeing his way into Alberta. I've been energized by their exploits, although the guy's accounts of climbing are harrowing. RMK is the longest tour I've ever done, with the most amount of climbing. I know I can handle long, hard ascents with a loaded bike, having climbed out of Ashcroft and grunted from Hope to Princeton (my hardest ever day on a bike). But a pass a day for three days in a row?
I shan't be taking the laptop with me, so I won't be as plugged in (though I'm taking two iPods with charger, cell-phone with charger and digital camera, all new additions to the Touring Gear). In fact, there's only a few items returning to the road from the Vancouver Island Tour of '05: back panniers, blue jersey, tools, sleeping bag, ground pad, gloves and saddle. When I'm able to access a computer I'll be giving updates (after the e-mail and Tour de France reports). I'm sending off the next articles to Northword and Off-Centre before I split.
I'm thankful that I was able to get the finger surgery so quickly and be able to heal in time for the ride. Although I still can't make a fist or play any Rush on guitar (except for the opening riff of "Working Man"), I'm handy and not sore after nearly four hours of riding. The big rolling camping trip is a go.
P.S. Tonight the Boston Celtics won the NBA championship. Now, the Celtics are my boys, so I'm pleased as punch, and their victory means that I've had a favourite team win a title in each of the last four years: the Red Sox in '05, the Steelers in '06, the Red Sox in '07 and the Celtics in '08. Store it up for the future, pal, because it isn't going to shine every year.

Leonard the Poet

2008-06-11T21:44:00.000-07:00

Leonard Hupp lived just down the hill from us when I was a kid. He was a teen when I was still in elementary school, but he'd left behind legacy of minor fame at Lucerne Elementary. He'd won a contest to have a poem about migrating sandhill cranes printed in Owl magazine in fifth grade and the page - his poem alongside some captioned photos of cranes - was mounted in a frame near the gym doors. I remember him as a shambling, loose-limbed kid who paced around town in a navy pea coat blowing his thin hair out of his eyes and smirking. They say that he became a poet in part because he grew up in a house with nothing to read but the lyrics on record covers. The lyrics and the kids' books he encountered at his cousins' suggested that writing was properly arranged in short lines and sentences butted up against a flat left margin. The paragraphs of elementary school vexed him, and although he got so worn down by successive teachers that he learned to write them, he refused to outside of class. By the time the Owl poem was published, he had this notoriety as a Talented One, so he was allowed to use up way more paper than anyone else, and though he was quietly arrogant, the teachers loved him. Because he had notoriety outside the accepted area of sports, logging sports and 4H shit, the kids didn't like him much, though he was too big to pick on. Predictably, his poetry became large unbearably self-absorbed (see "Who Am I? Who Am I? You Want to Know, Do You?" and "The Unjust Creation") when he became a teenager. But he still wrote in his stenographer pads about whatever was his particular interest at the time, including 187 poems about the seven girls he liked in high school who wouldn't go out with him and sixteen poems about Donna, the one who would. When his buddy Griffin started playing fastball in grade nine, Leonard attended the games and wrote a series of poems about the game (see "A Long Slide For a Quick Out" and "Two Base Rule") that he collected in handwritten booklets with mimeographed covers depicting a swinging Willie Stargell standing on a bear to sell at the games for a buck. After graduation, Leonard lit out on his own with a single suitcase, hitchhiking his way down to Summerland to pick tomatoes and onions. This is when Leonard's subject matter became less tied to what he was doing, sparing the world from turgid poems about vegetables. Camping among the peach trees, he wrote "Once There Was a House Here" and "Lock Rusted Shut", his most fully realized verse so far. A Quebecois girl named Madelaine, his summertime lover, insisted that he send them out to magazines and journals, though he suspected that she thought they were great only because her English was so lousy. At the end of summer, when the harvesting was about to turn to apples, Leonard was offered a framing job by his old pal Griffin's grandfather in Nelson, though it turned out to be only three houses. Wondering what to do, Leonard made his usual call home and heard from his mom that "Western Exposure", a small literary journal in Alberta had accepted "Lock Rusted Shut" and would publish it. They offered him $75.
To Leonard, he had made it. He actually told that story last month when he gave the commencement speech at U.N.B.C.

Bricks, Denver and Your Own Body Are Gradually Irradiating You

2008-06-04T20:25:00.000-07:00

I couldn't believe my eyes. Cycling the Tour de Smithers Loop, I was halfway between Telkwa and Smithers when I saw for the first time a billboard claiming a connection between abortions and breast cancer. "Oh, fer fuck's sake!" I spat, furiously picking up the pace. It was the kind of billboard face-slap favoured by more crank-oriented limb of Christianity, the kind that displays a six-foot mangled fetus in full-colour.
I'm terrified of cancer, more terrified of it than my imminent death. The mere notion that my body would suddenly grow such an extreme, deathly invader I find to be one of existence's true horrors. It's killed and maimed so many people I've known that it makes the car-accident casualties in my life seem relatively minor, and that's saying something. I'm also afraid of what I'd be like if I were diagnosed with cancer. Something tells me that I wouldn't be one of the ones who fight it with the kind of braveness and pluck that inspires people. I have the feeling I'd whine about it - possibly online - and play a lot of Pink Floyd's "The Wall". I'd even start liking Lance Armstrong.
People seem to always get this disease for no reason. Non-smokers, healthy eaters, the pure of heart and soul - it just appears and takes over. But, of course, there are risk activities and sources that cause cancer. Radiation is one of the causes, yet one of cures. Hiroshima and Nagasaki's bombs killed more with cancers than the first 160 000 people by heat and blast, and even bomb testing of the mid-twentieth century caused cancer in thousands. Chernobyl's meltdown in the 80's led directly to four thousand cases. It was while reading an article about another infamous meltdown, Three Mile Island, a comparatively benign episode, that I found some interesting numbers regarding irradiation. Radiation is measured in units called millirems. We get radiation from the sun, though folks who live at higher elevations, like Denver, Colorado, get up to six times as many units (180 a year) as those at sea level (20 -30). People in stone or brick houses get 50 - 100 more millirems a year than people in wood houses. X-rays chip in 5 to 15 units, though PET scans contribute 650! And here's the two kickers: a cigarette smoker receives 3 000 millirems a year from the isotope polonium-210 (recently used to kill a Russian counterspy in London, Cold War style) in tobacco and your own body emits 40!

My Right Hand Goes On Vacation (Please, No Obvious Dirty Jokes, Y'all!)

2008-05-22T18:51:00.000-07:00

Well, dammit, it looks like I'll be out of writing commission for a week or so ,because tomorrow morning I'm having an operation on my right ring finger (Ringy or Ringo) and possibly my palm to reattach a tendon to the tip of the finger. There's some bone drilling involved and I'll be given a cast which I'll use to club students and feral dogs in the too-many-painkiller stupor that I plan to be in at least for the day of my Granmere's funeral and until the administration calls me into their offices at work.
Folks in the know have long endured my hand and wrist injuries. My students openly mock my mutilated right index finger, the one I sliced in Thailand. I broke my right arm twelve years ago, broke both thumbs simultaneously in a leg-press machine and last year I sprained my left pinky and hyperextended my left thumb - all in P.E. classes. One would reckon that the Powers That Be would cease to assign me such a perilous task, but at this point I believe that the staff are involved in an elaborate betting ring that wagers every September as to which body part I'll wreck next. I hope they enjoy the show, the bastards.
However, this is the first operation I've had since my famous hernia (Sturnia, anyone?) of fifteen years ago. With only a local anesthetic, I'll have the opportunity to watch my finger gutted like a mackerel. I haven't decided whether I will, though it's tempting to investigate the body/mind disconnection of the situation. But then again, I don't want to puke on the nurse's shoes. They love their shoes.
I'll have to take a week off of cycling; this is fine because I've put in a lot of kms recently, and my legs feel "wooden" with no real snap to them. But I've been thinking of all the stuff I won't be able to do, and it sets my mind back to my Broken Arm era when Lefty really stepped to the plate and delivered. It'll certainly make life interesting, but in a Chinese curse kind of way.
Anyway, I'll keep you abreast of the recovery. I wish I knew how to put pictures on this site so I can show everyone the thin mustache of stitches.
And, please, no high fives. Please.

Remembrances of (Every)Things Past

2008-05-19T18:10:00.000-07:00

There's a fellow named Brad Williams in the United States who can remember everything. EVERYTHING. Williams has hyperthymestic syndrome, which means that he has an amazing capacity to remember details. Ask him what happened to him specifically and the world in general on October 18, 1964 and he'll instantly reel off the ephemera of the day. In the articles written about Brad Williams, there's no indication that this ability is overwhelming for him. One might speculate that his memory is like a bladder than can hold much more than others, but the pressure of its stream of minutiae makes it difficult to control.
I've never had great memory and it seems to be getting worse. I have a swell selective memory, like most folks, and I have excellent memory for where certain passages are in books. But otherwise I'm weak. Earlier this year I asked a student about which instruments she'd played as a kid. When she mentioned flute, I made a dumb joke referring to Will Ferrell playing jazz flute in "Anchorman". She informed me that we'd had the exact same conversation a month previous, and I'd made the exact same "Anchorman" reference. I was horrified. Not long after that, an old high school friend reminded me that my friends and I had mocked a Jehovah Witness girl for her beliefs. I had buried that, along with some other dishonourable incidents, although the two or three really awful things I did as a teenager are always there up front and accessible.
I realize these two examples are two very different contexts. The flute incident is a brutal example of C.R.S. Syndrome (Can't Remember Shit), also known as Halfzeimer's Disease. Unlike Brad Williams, the wine racks of my mind are full of bottles with contents ranging from La Petite Grenouille '57 to Lonesome Charlie, and the crowded vessels are beginning to tumble to the cellar floor. I suppose that growing older, various head injuries and all that ether I huffed in the late '80's are catching up to me. I need to write things down more often, and occasionally find myself marching into rooms and then having to spend time refocusing my task.
Maybe the ability to forget some things is better than the ability to remember everything. As long as those forgotten things aren't birthdays, access codes and all the dialogue from "The Big Lebowski".

Two Years of Kinda Being a Writer

2008-05-13T19:16:00.000-07:00

Two years ago I had my first article published in Off-Centre magazine. I'd been writing ever since I was a kid, but upon being paid seventy bucks for a piece that had a real deadline and everything, I felt that I'd finally made the Medium Time. If you've never read "Givin' 'Er: An Analysis of the Bush Party", you're really missing out. The 700 word article was sort of an homage to my students and my friends twenty-plus years ago and their enthusiasm for drinking in a field. It's frickin' awesome.
SInce then I've added the local magazine Northword to my portfolio, not to mention this lovely blog. synapsesfiring, from what I can gather, isn't the kind of blog that one usually sees in the blogosphere. It has no real point: it's not here to celebrate or scorn the Democratic Party, it doesn't advertise anything except what's projected on the inside of my skull, and it isn't focused on any particular topic or subject. Knowing that "blogger" is a career for some doesn't fill me with envy, for it seems that you need someone pulling your strings to make cash from it, though I could be wrong.
Meanwhile, there's a file on my hard drive that mocks any pretension I have of being a Writer. It's a novel I've been trying to finish for two years. At 73 000 words, it just sits there like an unfinished basement. I used to believe in it, but now I'm not so sure. I made the mistake of letting someone read it, and the lukewarm reception convinced me of its inadequacy. There's that long sequence in "Family Guy" where Stewie mocks Brian's unfinished novel in an increasingly high pitched voice; it always makes me cringe and not just because it goes on too long. It cuts too close to the bone.
There are other novel ideas ricocheting around my cerebral cortex, but they seem diminished by the monumental disappointment of the Novel With No Climax and Conclusion. It's got the typically heavy autobiographical lean of a first novel, yet it's not a memoir (haven't we all learned to distrust the memoir since the James Frey/JT LeRoy fiascos?). Often I reckon that I should pen something in the non-fiction vein, since the writing I've done for money is ALL non-fiction.
Until I can finish a book, published or not, fiction or non-fiction, I'm an amateur or, at best, a semi-pro. Am I wrong?
p.s. I've injured my right ring-finger in a flag football incident. The tip does not move. But like any plucky kid in the minors trying to break into the majors, I'll play through the injury, baby.

An Introduction to Bachelor Cleaning Methodology

2008-05-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Every year, millions of men become new bachelors, some even armed with a Bachelor Degree. However, just because a guy takes four years of philosophy and media studies doesn't mean that he is prepared for life on his own. And by "on his own" I mean even with male roommates, because research has shown that the same amount of cleaning is done to a domicile no matter how many men live in it. Now that mom or the residence cleaning service isn't picking up after him, he's got to harness those slovenly instincts in order to maintain a minimum level of hygiene and to keep "the nest" presentable. For not every bachelor continues to be so for two decades like your author; most bachelors are on their way to being something else.
The best way for a bachelor to keep the kitchen clean is to limit himself to using one plate, mug, glass, butter knife, fork, spoon, pot and frying pan. He should wash each item under an open tap every time it's used and put it in the drainage rack. A loyal dog or particularly smart cat can be utilized to "biovacuum" the tile whenever food hits the ground.
If a bachelor doesn't want to spring for a vacuum cleaner, it's marginally effective to get down on hands and knees to pick up any noticeable detritus and then chuck it in the garbage. Speaking of the garbage, it's amazing how much he can fit into whichever sort of bag he lines the kitchen can with if he pushes down really hard on a Chunky Soup can riding on top.
The bathroom is always a troublesome place. One would think with all that soap and water flying about that the area would stay relatively tidy. Unfortunately, not just the toilet needs to be scrubbed. The shower curtain is a real bitch, so the bachelor might consider just leaving it alone and replacing it every three years. Now, back to the toilet: invest in an actual brush and one of those cool "duck" bottles. If the bachelor can't bring himself to buy a spray bottle of privy cleaner, he should just splash around the blue duck fluid. It's terribly transparent to thoroughly clean the bathroom just before a gal or curious mother comes over, but by all means the toilet should be given attention with wet t.p. Woe is he who doesn't wipe the floor around the bowl too!
Clutter tends to be a major bachelor problem. If possible, purchase coffee tables and end tables that have cabinet doors in order to hide objects.
With a minimum of preparation, equipment and attention, the unwed male can give the illusion that a responsible and reasonable king is in the castle.
Tune in next time for Feeding The Bachelor: Or, How Pouring Salad Dressing On a Head of Lettuce While Leaning Over the Kitchen Sink Can Serve As A Pseudo-Salad.

Recent Items In the News

2008-05-06T04:45:00.000-07:00

1) Barack vs Hillary: I wish that the U.S.A. wasn't so overbearing, but I'm sure huge chunks of the world felt that way about the British and Roman Empires, too. In a sense, it's important which special-interest conduit is in the White House; look at Bush Jr. and Iraq. But I get the sense that 'mere anarchy (has been) loosed upon the world' already and the beast is 'slouching toward Bethlehem', and neither Democrat, nor John McCain for that matter, can stop it. But I suppose my desire for an Obama nomination either reveals some deep-seated dislike of uptight women in pantsuits or some simplistic notion that it's preferable to have a Prez who is both from outside the Beltway and marginally funky. All this shit about his reverend is just more of the same sleight-of-hand one expects from politics.
2) Miley Cyrus's revealing pictures: It's difficult for a male high-school teacher to talk about teenage girls' sexuality without a few amateur psychologists thinking, "Hmmm, he's spent a LOT of time thinking about this . . . ", but I'll just say that every teen girl star, whether she's a singer or actress, is attractive. That's one of the main reasons that she's a star. To deny that there isn't a covert - or overt - attempt to cash in on this attractiveness, to ride it like a wave to some high mark on the beach, is pretty naive. Maybe it's because I've already come across pics Cyrus took of herself in her underwear (another "whoopsie", yet something teens do for fun anyway), but everyone's outrage seems a little overwrought, like he or she is trying to put the spilled wine of innocence and discretion back in the bottle. Her barebacked, come-hither pose seems like a natural step in a culture that allows its girls to dress like skanks. It's too late, people, the jailbait cat is out of the bag.
3) Second Place Horse is Euthanized at the Kentucky Derby: I'll just use Hunter S. Thompson's 1970 article title to speak for itself: "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved".
4) Food Prices Rise: This is the beginning of the end of a consumer culture -and by extension a petroleum culture - based on hauling stuff from thousands of miles away. I recommend that everybody start little neo-Victory Gardens and learn to live without bloody Walmart. Get a sturdy bike suitable for carrying goods. And stop hoarding rice, or buy a bag and send it in the mail to a village in Myanmar.
5) So as not to end on a doom note: internet footage of a bear cub falling asleep is nearly as cute as the famous kitten-falling-asleep footage that Steven Colbert utilizes on his show.

Stevie Teevee

2008-04-30T19:42:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow the TV returns. I don't know when - maybe right at midnight -but I expect to be able to turn the set on and find my Starchoice satellite selections there again. I phoned in five weeks ago to announce that I was off to Europe on a business trip and had it shut off. I was curious to see the effect that it would have on me, on my daily routine. Would it be that big of a deal in the Internet Age? Would I read more? Write more? What, in particular, would I hanker for the most in this period of denial?
The time passed quickly. Beyond the first couple of days, when the Usual Timetable was disrupted, there was no real longing, not even as the English Premiership is coming to a thrilling, balls-out race between a resurgent Chelsea and those filthy shitbirds of Manchester United.
The second night of the moratorium I stumbled across a website that contained every single episode of South Park. I immediately watched the first four episodes of the new season and continued to "tune in" mid-week when the latest one was posted. Also, I viewed eight older episodes during the Break. Later, I found a lot more old Tour de France footage that had been recently added to YouTube, so I viewed that intensely. I even tried The Daily Show and The Colbert Report online, but it never "took". So the internet didn't exactly replace TV, it was more like downing vitamins instead of eating mangos (see Fruit Salad, last entry).
There were a couple of incidents when I pretended I was watching TV to people on the phone, not wanting to be bothered with a lengthy explanation of the rationale of the experiment. And as far as I can remember - at this has proved a faulty faculty of late - I only informed one person of this weird endeavour.
As far as reading and writing, I'm still reading the same two books, "Fear And Loathing In America" by Hunter S. Thompson and "Reporting Vietnam", that I was at the Break's inception, and you can just look to the number of this site's April entries to figure out the effect of writing. Unimpressive on both fronts.
This week I received an account statement from Starchoice showing that I had a $75 credit, since I had paid the last bill. I was pleased to know that May's viewing would be covered, then saddened when it hit me that I spend just under a thousand dollars for television a year. It seems out of whack, n'est pas?
Anyway, I'm glad that this sociology experiment was conceived and executed. I'll mull over that bill, too. But in just over a week the Giro d'Italia, second only to the Tour de France, will be on RAI in Italian, and the climaxes and conclusions are due in all the European leagues. These events will feel like little rewards for a run of self-control. Maybe if I watch the Habs they'll stop playing like oafs and come back on the Flyers.

Fruit Salad

2008-04-27T11:47:00.001-07:00

There's a liter of guava juice in my refrigerator, and whenever I take a pull from the brick shaped tetrapak I am briefly transported to Hawaii, Christmas 1984. I first tasted guava on our family trip - one that included the Aloha Bowl where Notre Dame lost, some NCAA basketball and a Ratt concert - becoming so obsessed with the exotic fruit that I spent the last night in Waikiki trying to cram in a gallon of guava sherbet. I tried it in every form I could find, even dried, powderized and snorted.
Back in Canada, I could only find weak, Snapple-like drinks including guava; when I moved to Vancouver for school I tried various cans of the nectar imported from Asia, but I could never conjure up the sweeping rush of guava in Hawaii.
Since then, the mango has wrested the title of Fave Tropical fruit from the guava. This coronation came in part because of how much fun it is to eat a mango, and how disappointing it is to eat a guava. I learned how to cut the sides off a mango - around the flat seed - and then deeply score the garish flesh to create little cubes. Sometimes, I just peel the whole thing and eat it over the sink.
I read the other day that the mangosteen is becoming popular in the United States. This is the far-out tropical fruit that Queen Victoria once offered a princely sum for if delivered while still edible. I've eaten it in Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, and it is rather amazing. From the outside it resembles a dark pomegranate. Inside there are soft wide lobes, like the cloves of a garlic. The taste is custardy.
Every time I go to Southeast Asia, I try to have some durian, a rank-smelling, but compelling fruit. Usually, I'm not in Asia when it's in season, but I stumble across it and must partake. It's a big, spiky sonofabitch and the yellow meat tastes a little like it stinks, but there's a weird perfumed-pumpkin side to it. Hard to explain both in taste and odor. Let's just say that its open consumption is banned in a lot of places.
Thankfully, some of my favourite fruits doesn't have to travel from the other side of the world, though they may have originated from there. Apples, strawberries and blackberries are very toothsome. One of my favourite experiences while cycling Vancouver Island was stopping to graze on blackberries. If anyone reading it wants to send me something with blackberries in it, I'd praise you in epic, Viking-style ballad.

Lament of the Lefty

2008-04-19T08:00:00.001-07:00

I roamed around the nearest guitar store yesterday, looking for lefties. There was one kelly green bass guitar that's been in there since before I bought my crappy left-hand bass from a fellow teacher last year. As usual, the proprietor showed me a few solid-top acoustics, knowing damn well that I'm a southpaw. People just say, "Oh, buy a right handed guitar and re-string it [they never mention that the nut needs to be turned upside down too] so it's a lefty like Hendrix used to." But it's not just the odd and inconvenient arrangement of dials and knobs that get in the way of the flipped righty, it's the awful lack of consideration for lefties that there never seems to be enough left hand guitars. The cupboard is bare.
My buddy JB and I will always have a unique and resilient bond: even though we share a love for good music, food, books and movies; even though we played in a couple of bands together, the fact that we're both lefties will always unite us the most. In fact, we bought our first guitars together in 1984 from a shop in Terrace, B.C. We tested out a cheap Strat copy by Hondo. It was right handed, but we found out that Hondo offered the same model in left. I believe JB ordered a red one and I wanted a sky blue ax. We plopped down $300 each for a rig and a hard case. When JB went to pick them up with his folks five weeks later, he was dismayed to find that they were not the colours we ordered. One was black with a white pick guard and the other was . . . eggnog coloured with a tobacco burst pick guard. Not being an idiot, JB claimed the black one. Undeterred, I rocked that ugly goddamned guitar for six years, finally selling it when I converted to acoustic.
Again, JB and I had our lefty sympatico in college. When we were roommates at Okanagan College, he already had a lovely acoustic and brought it treeplanting with us. Unfortunately, we attempted to share a tent with our gear and his guitar case. Soon after we each had our own tent, which is good because I purchased a lefty Yamaha acoustic in Prince George with one of my first big planting cheques. For eighteen years, my Yamaha has given my right fingers tips nice calluses.
Last year I bought a Seagull electric-acoustic from the same dude I got the bass from. He's a lefty who buys guitars off e-Bay, fixes them up and then resells them. I'm not sure what kind of a market he's got locally besides me and a kid at our school who is the best guitarist of all the students - and, unfortunately, one of those invasive Guitar Bores. I've had to keep myself in some control from buying at least two of the teacher's electrics that interested me; the Epiphone Dot-copy was the better of the two, for certain.
There's a special affinity I have for other lefties, and there's something exciting about seeing one in a band. Besides Hendrix, I consider Kurt Cobain's left-handedness to be one of his strengths as a Rock Figure. The Cars' guitarist was a lefty. The bass player for Dropkick Murphys. I must acknowledge the legendary southpaw status of both Los Lobos and UB40 who have TWO lefties! It's hard not to hate what a shitty band Avenged Sevenfold has become, but this is mitigated by the fact that it has a lefty. I must agree with my buddy Ashi, who thinks a lefty looks "weird". It's jarring, but that's why it's so rock and roll.

Not So Funny, Is He?

2008-04-13T19:46:00.000-07:00

"A survey determined that children universally dislike clown wallpaper and find it "frightening" and "unknowable".
- From "Findings" in the April, 2008 Harper's Magazine
At some point in North American culture (ah, hell, let's go with Western culture) the clown officially crossed over from funny to scary. Some might trace this to Joker in the Batman comics, and those with Heavy Knowledge (or Wikipedia) will tell you that the Ute Natives used to have a terrifying clown demon in their mythology. But for myself and many others, the switch came with Pogo the Clown, the infamous alter ego of John Wayne Gacy, the prolific serial killer. Since then we've had Pennywise the malevolent clown of Stephen King's "It", the god-awful clown bed that traumatizes toddler Bart in The Simpsons ("Can't sleep - clown will eat me") and a general turn towards clown evil.
What gives? Well, the outsized smiles or frowns painted on their faces, their enormous shoes and noses, and an all-around exaggeration of features will scare any child. And in the right circumstances, these physical aspects will freak out adults too. I'll never forget going to a Grateful Dead concert in Eugene, Oregon in the summer of 1990. My friends Ratter and Fro took too much acid (and weed, nitrous oxide, beer and the pollen of some Ecuadorian jungle flower) and wigged out. When we took them to the "Chill Out Tent", I was startled to see that their medic was dressed as a clown. Fro ran off into the crowd, and Ratter was distrustful (another poor tactic with Ratter was threatening to strap him down when he spat).
But the interesting part of the Harper's quote is the term "unknowable". This adjective seems to summarize so much about everything that scares us. Spiders are "unknowable". The minds of the insane too. The objectives and intentions of that which might harm us is often hidden behind a benign front. The clown is supposed to bring us joy and laughter, but who really knows what lurks in those dark corners? Gacy said, "A clown can get away with murder". Maybe the clown must mask his pain to the extent where he turns against the audience. Unable to be the kind of spiteful clown Dill envisions in "To Kill a Mockingbird": "I'm gonna just laugh at all the people", the evil clown instead harbours hostility.
Anyway, for whatever the reason, the role of the clown - the conventional old-school clown, not the fey Cirque du Soleil variety - has changed enough since the Second World War that terror, not amusement, is its most common association.

Being Aware

2008-04-08T19:49:00.000-07:00

" I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is'" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
This post begins with one of the wisest things I've ever read, and discovering it after Kurt died makes me love him even more. I'd like to modify his thought slightly by inserting "or lucky" by "happy", because I don't think that people notice their good luck, instead they tend to dwell on their bad luck. It's like taking green lights for granted only to grouse at red ones. Fortune is in a kind of balance, except for those who behave stupidly, can't accept the consequences and chalk it up to bad luck: "I just can't buy a break." So when the timing of something is perfect, or there's just one or something left, or if a parcel comes in way before I expect it, or "the best laid plans of mice and men" actually come to fruition, I acknowledge it.
Recently, I've had a lot of flat tires on my bike. Six, in fact, in the last five weeks. Three have been patch blowouts, which makes me question the wisdom of keeping the glue outside in the shed over winter. Two have been violent piercings, one by a jagged mini-arrow of rock that required strenuous tugging to extract from the tire it ruined. This is a baffling streak of ill-fortune, but only when placed beside the good fortune I usually have. Six flats is a lot for a year. One year I had nary a single popped tube in 3500 km of cycling. On the cycling tour I took with my twin nephews in 2002, we had a collective three flats in combined 7800 km.
In the meantime, I'm getting very good at changing and inflating a tube in about six minutes. Lucky me!
Vonnegut in, Vonnegut out:
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"
A message to a special reader: "Flies. Big ol' flies. All ovah me."

Grammar, Spelling and The Poor Old Apostrophe

2008-04-07T20:09:00.000-07:00

For certain students, nothing is more satisfying that catching an English teacher make a writing mistake. I tend to catch my errors on handouts and worksheets before they are distributed to the class, and make a preemptive strike by pointing them out. Kids catch me on the white board, where I tend to print very quickly. Sometimes my head gets a little too ahead of my marker, so I combine the word I'm thinking of with the one I've started to print or I skip a word entirely. But I must piss in my territory's corners on occasion. I chewed a kid out in the first semester for insisting that I'd scribbled a run-on sentence on the white board. Step off. I put the punk in punctuation.
I can appreciate it, though. At least he cares about the quality of the product. I certainly get excited when I see an error on television - especially the 'tickers' running along the bottom of the screen - and downright indignant encountering one in a magazine. So you can dig how the typo in the first sentence of "Bed Side Table" from earlier in the evening grinds my gear and makes me want to rend my garment (the leisure suit, Ashi!).
Here's a few pet peeves (no bete noirs though):
*keep in mind that many of these mistakes were rampant before texting and on-line shorthand, but the wretchedness grows*
1) Most people aren't sure when to use an apostrophe. They don't use it to show possession (Jacks boots), yet they do use it at the end of plural nouns (Jack's boot's). It's a hellish time to be the "comma that leapt in the air".
2) Should of. Should Of?! What the hell does that mean?
3) Folks are dropping capital letters from proper nouns like fred, vancouver, mars. The beginning of a sentence still gets them.
4) The usual synonyms like there, their and they're.
5) The word "because" has been beaten to hell recently, what with cause, cuz and b/c all engaged in identity theft.
Well, there you go, my people. Two posts in one day. You deserve it.

What's On the Bed Side Table

2008-04-07T18:23:00.000-07:00

"You gotta be shittin' me," Zeke sasy, trying to catch the waitress' eye with a "we're number one" hand gesture.
"I don't know what to tell you," I admit. It's a truly gorgeous mid-September Sunday morning in Vancouver, the kind the gives you the twin illusions that nothing that happened the previous Saturday night had any bearing on anything at all and that maybe the sun could hang on in perpetuity, that every Sunday for the next six months wouldn't be a colourless, drizzling graveyard for your dreams.
The waitress, a voluptuous, olive-skinned beauty with rich black ringlets of hair and a look that said she could chew you up and spit you out, brings us the huge laminated menus. A light breeze rises up from Burrard Inlet and Zeke and I are at the prime outdoor table to catch its salty push. "I was just hoping that as we grew older we'd get less and less like Seinfeld and George Costanza, not more."
"What are you babbling about?"
"Well, here you are, getting together with this beautiful blonde girl, who has a career, who own fuckin' real estate in, what, Creston?"
"Castlegar," I say, taking the coffees from the Greek goddess' tray.
"And you say she's generous, good-hearted . . . screws like a mink -"
"I didn't say mink," I point out.
"Well, some eastern woodland mammal," Zeke exclaims. He starts patting his wool plaid jacket. It's 1992 and we're dressed like a couple of longshoremen. He wants to smoke but he knows someone will pull a face. Besides, for financial reasons he's trying to give up half of his vices.
I like Kitsilano even though it was a place I'd never be able to afford, except as a renter with a pretentious English human geography grad student roommate, as was my situation at the moment. Here we are at Sophie's Cosmic Cafe, watching the yuppies feed, about to assault ourselves with eggs Benedict, twenty-four years old in some kind of weird limbo between School and Work. I feel like sobbing, and it's not just because I broke up with Siobhan and my mind loops the very vivid image of a tear building up on her left eye, the fluid held for a moment by surface tension before it made a fast slide past her nose to rest briefly at the corner of her mouth where she licked it.
"So what was it?" Zeke says finally. "What molehill was blown up into a mountain this time? Wouldn't stop cleaning the toaster? Eyes slightly too close together? Uses the word 'problematic' too often?"
"No." I sigh. Someone ties a golden lab to the wrought iron fence near us and everyone looks over and makes a big, warm-smiling deal. "She had this book by her bed, on her side, right? The clock side. My side had shit. I'm curious about it, but I never have any real reason to be over there. She didn't like to cuddle after, at least not in the bedroom. We'd drag a couple of blankets onto the couch and watch The X-Files or something. So last week she gets up to use the bathroom. I roll over and take a look at it. I'm prepared for any airport bookstore fare, right? Not gonna be judgemental. And it's a book of daily affirmations."
"What?"
"It's like a daily journal, but each day there's some little positive message for her about her worth and abilities and shit."
"So?"
"I can't be with somebody who needs a little shot of optimism to keep her going every day, and actually believes that kind of thing can be found in some New Age bookstore. It's absurd."
Zeke chews this in lieu of breakfast, and you can see that he's trying to fit this revelation in with the machinery of his concepts of me, Siobhan, and women in general. He nods like it's a valid reason, not a trivial reason. Good. Now he'll shut the fuck up about it and we get back to what matinee we're going to see downtown.
I don't tell him this: the only thing written in the journal besides the birthdays of every single person she ever met was scrawled in big loop letters on June 13, 1992, the day we met: "Today I met the man that I'm going to marry!"
The Greek refills my coffee mug. I look into it, wishing it were Irish. I catch the lab's eye and he looks like he gets it, he understands, but he still feels ashamed for me.

Song of the Rat King

2008-03-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

All Arts majors at UBC had to take some kind of science during my era. Mostly, these were "soft sciences", and I don't necessarily mean the social sciences like anthropology, sociology or Abnormal Psychology (Nuts and Sluts). This was, I imagine, to ensure that we had a well-rounded education and could understand or discuss more than the evils of patriarchal society and the "nothing has any inherent truth or meaning" line of Derrida, Foucault and the rest. I chose Oceanography 210, a very interesting class that was taught in a huge theatre to a couple of hundred of us Artsies. I'm glad I chose it, because the subject matter was captivating (even long-shore drift) and taught in a stimulating manner by the professor. On Fridays he would play a piece of music that had something to do with the sea and students were asked to name it. One fine day I identified Tangerine Dream's "The Beach". Even though my term paper "Our Friend the Krill" didn't earn me a very distinguished grade, I still had fun drawing and colouring one of the magnified creatures.
A guest lecturer came in one day. He was a crytozoologist - one who studies and searches for mythical animals - who specialized in sea beasts like Nessie and the Ogopogo and Champy. I was fascinated, having grown up watching old "In Search Of" episodes about such creatures. A long-time Sasquatch fan, the prospect of sharing our planet with unknown, mysterious animals provides hope that there is much still to discover. And since new species are found regularly, there's always the slim chance that there is a big ol' neo-dinosaur floating around out there somewhere. I hope he's friendly.
I was reminded of this class when I came across an amazing entry of Wikipedia, the "democratic encyclopedia" site. I'd never heard of a rat king, a conglomeration of rats attached at the tail. Their tails, often broken, have knotted together with the aid of dirt, feces and other filth. A rat king is supposedly the portent for something awful . . . such as the existence of a wad of rats that live as one! Although there are several preserved rat kings in Germany, no one is sure if they actually exist or if they are a clever taxidermy hoax like a jackalope. The logistics of a bunch of rats able to survive such an living arrangement are wondrous to contemplate. This much is clear: nature conjures up some bizarre experiments. Perhaps this is one of them. May your shed and sewer be rat king free!

War All the Time

2008-03-23T20:46:00.000-07:00

Today the U.S. death toll for the five year old Iraq War reached 4,000. There's plenty of web sites that display photos of all the men (and handful of women - yeah, there's your obligatory qualifier), along with their hometowns, ages and even the circumstances of their deaths. Even as one scrolls through the pictures, one can't help to think - even though one isn't supposed to - that 4,000 isn't that bad for a five year war. America lost more than that on 9/11 and more than that on D-Day. It's a shitty thing to think, but sometimes life forms little eddies of logic where the shitty thing to think is the most lucid, or the truest.
War is homo sapiens' great disease. It is our tragedy, the one fundamental folly we can't seem to shake. We'll keep killing each other over land or resources or concepts, and perhaps war will be our extinction, freeing things up for the birds and the bunnies.
I have always had an obsession with war, perhaps because I'm male and war tends to hover over men like a malevolent spirit. Last night I sent an e-mail to a friend relating that four of my top fifteen movies were about the Vietnam War, and although it seems ghoulish to be a war "buff", I've been a Vietnam War buff since I could process my father's old Time magazines in the early seventies. Hell, I spent the first half of Spring Break watching the entire PBS "Vietnam: A Television History".
As I child, I possessed and sought what my mom once called "the arsenal". Not only did I always have a pile of toy pistols, rifles and machine guns (including a Tommy Gun with a round clip, a WW II Thompson sub-machine gun and two M-16's), but I also owned legions of plastic toy soldiers. Mom still marvels: "You had great big ones and little tiny ones and all sorts of medium ones, and they turned up everywhere!" I wonder how many survived the traumatic trip through the vacuum cleaner.
Thankfully, I outgrew this war interest in my teens, before people began to suspect me as a candidate for a proto-Columbine, berserk shooting. However, there was a period of three years on the cusp of adolescence when it was touch and go, when toys gave way not to real weaponry, but to a magazine that espoused the glory and adventure of the mercenary life. From grades 7 to 9 I bought Soldier of Fortune every month. This was the time when the American right was in love with the Afghani mujahudeen who fought the Soviets, before the beard and turban brigades became the Taliban. Saddam Hussein bravely fought Iran, and the South African Army kept the savages at bay. "SoF" also championed the Israeli Defense Forces because they were so thoroughly kick ass. For a while, this magazine informed my blossoming political ideology, so you can imagine what kind of crank conversations I led. Quite simply, Soldier of Fortune was war porn. And I lapped it up (please: no obvious jokes, bg).
At some point, I became the kind of guy who read Sport Illustrated, National Geographic, Psychology Today (no shitting) other publications that placed at least one of my feet firmly in the Nerd Nation. I gave all my Soldier of Fortunes (and SoF's offshoot, Survivalist) to a guy in my grade who was rabidly right wing. My buddy Dean, hoping to awaken this rather Christian fellow to the pleasures of sin, slipped a few Hustlers and Swanks into the pile.
Now I'm almost 40, and although the Canadian Armed Forces might still accept recruits my age, I know that my chances of having to "forge my manhood in the crucible of combat" are paper thin. This is comforting. My nephew is in basic training in Quebec at the moment, and since he's a future Seaman (okay, obvious jokes are fine at this point) I can feel a guarded sense of relief that he won't be dodging RPG's in Afghanistan. But once in a while I look at the faces of my callow male students and think that maybe one day they'll be grist for the mill, fodder for the cannons.

Arthur C. Clarke: I Hardly Read You

2008-03-18T20:29:00.000-07:00

Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, died today in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. A good run, as they say.
Though I've never presented myself as a lover of science fiction, I do feel that I'm missing something by not reading the Asimovs, the Frank Herberts, the Piers Anthonys etc. However, I read Clarke's 2010 - another Book of the Month Club selection belonging to my father -in grade 11; in fact, I can remember reading it REALLY WELL, with a extended clarity way out of proportion to its actual importance and impact.
For me, the most interesting aspect of Arthur C. Clarke was that he'd lived in Sri Lanka since the 1950's. The older I get, the more fantastic it seems to live in such a place. Every time I see something about the Tamils vs the Sinhalese people, I think, "Gee, I hope Arthur C. Clarke is okay." When the SEA Tsunami hit several years ago, Clarke's well-being was on my mind, along with that of every Thai I ever met on the West Coast. I wonder if he was a big cricket fan.
Anyway, I'll always think of him in a white linen shirt, tapping away on an old typewriter on the verandah of his Sri Lankan house, a refreshing afternoon cocktail beside him and a pet monkey on his shoulder. Go easy, underappreciated-by-me writer.

The Funeral Thief

2008-03-15T06:54:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to JB and ClipClop:
Kendall Earnshaw's funeral took place on a day seemingly at odds with death. It was mid-July, blazing hot with a lovely breeze stirring the leaves, still clean and bright, that festooned the trees. People sweat through their suits, and the crowd gathered at the Blue Point Cemetery was a sea of sunglasses. From the angle where I stood, I could see little kids outside the gates riding their bikes, so used to black gatherings in their neighbourhood cemetery that they didn't bother to rubberneck.
Later, Kendall's mom hosted a reception at their house. His uncles, stout and red men with shaved heads, brought in large bottles of whiskey and started handing out drinks that people may have imbibed in simply because of the ice. The old gang assembled in the dining room. Except for Kendall and Winnie, we had scattered to the four corners of academia Canada, so we gave brief accounts of our first years away. I had managed to find a good job on campus at McGill, so I hadn't returned to Kelowna to work at the golf club like Mike and Drew. Cali was looking more beautiful than ever, and her occasional outbreaks of gentle, silent weeping made her even lovelier. She kept leaning into me and I would embrace her with the arm that didn't feed me drink, drawing a mild stink-eye from Mike. All the usual social games that we played in high school, the subtle thrust and parry, the lattice of passive and aggressive commentary that we climbed - it all seemed too garishly inadequate and petty in the time following the death of an nineteen year old guy who we all assumed would grow up and pass all the usual milestones with us.
I excused myself, only to find the downstairs bathroom occupied. I squeezed Kendall's mom on the shoulder as I mounted the stairs to check the second bathroom. I met a frail lady coming down. Most of the time was spent bathing my face and head in cold water and meeting my own mirrored stare. There was no one waiting outside, and no one on the second story at all. I found myself turning into Kendall's room.
I chuckled when I saw the same Tool and Sublime posters he'd had up since grade eight. As usual, his clothes were draped and heaped on every surface. I gave an involuntary gasp when I recognized some neoprene kayaking gear, and had to fight my mind not to picture him drowning under his flipped boat while the drunken water-skiers hesitated on the deck on the vessel that hit him. I peered around, sniffing, remembering Grandpa Eric's tale of how the house simply stopped smelling of Grammy - even her clothes became neutral garments - forcing him to move to a condo. Kendall's room still had the odor of feet and marijuana and the cologne sheets he liked to rip out of Details, Esquire and GQ to lay about and "class the joint up". Then I saw something that had me tip-toeing across the room. A latest-model green iPod sans earphones sat alone on his pine dresser. I picked it up and poked it with my thumb enough to know that its battery was dead. He once had a matte black iPod, and for some reason this green one intrigued me. I put it in my pocket and walked out.
I was burdened with guilt for a spell. I had stolen something from a dead friend, from his mom more specifically. Paranoia set in too. Kendall's mom saw me go upstairs. How many people used the upstairs bathroom? How many young people who would covet such an object?
I listened to it for the rest of the summer. There was plenty of Sublime, of course, and lots of the band's leftover project, The Long Beach Dub All-Stars. There was an album's worth of shitty tunes from a pale imitation of Sublime called Pepper. I was surprised to find Haydn and Mozart on there. He seemed to have developed a taste for the 80's band Echo and the Bunnymen. Then I started to listen to his Jeff Buckley cuts from "Grace". Buckley's wavering voice, running from soprano to tenor, stuck its hooks into me. I Googled him and found out he'd drowned in the Mississippi River. That's when I finally cried. I bawled, realizing that at some point I'd cease to think of the music therein as his and believe it was mine. Like it had lost his scent.
Eventually, I erased the music and replaced it with the songs on my computer that I couldn't fit on my other iPod. Erased everything except the Jeff Buckley, that is.

It's Not Just a Train

2008-03-10T19:16:00.000-07:00

I have steel rails in my bones. There are trains in my blood, tiny ones delivering all the chemicals that make me serene and joyful. My grandfather on my mother's side was a conductor on C.N. lines for decades and, as a child, I traveled around B.C. regularly on the family discount. Today a train rumbling through town or the sound of the horn in the night is somehow reassuring, as if the noises declare that all is as it should be. It's odd then how little I travel by train in Canada, the last time over fifteen years ago.
Trains fill an odd transportation niche. It's classier than the bus, but takes longer. Obviously, it's much longer than a plane trip, but not hugely cheaper. It's for unhurried people who want to sleep with relative comfort (the only effective way to sleep on a Greyhound is during a night trip with a pillow and a Valium) and look meditatively out the windows.
Of course, I love both solid naps and meditative looking, so this is why I love train travel, though only indulge my love in Asia. On every trip, I've spent at least a full day on trains, and it's a bloody shame there's no railway in Laos, because it would've sweetened an already delectable country. The food is always decent (I especially loved the noodle soup in Vietnam), the people are friendly, and the continual rocking is conducive to a refreshing catnap or two. I must admit that there's some romanticized post-colonial satisfaction to railing in the Third World. The feeling I get is akin to Murder on the Orient Express + Bridge on the River Kwai + Jewel In the Crown + On the Road - but minus the hoboing, the murder, the subjugation, and the grueling slave labour. You know? Anyway, this post is being written with "The Darjeeling Limited", a movie set on a train trip through India, glimmering in the background.
But I have no idea why I haven't jumped on Via Rail or B.C. Rail since the early 90's when I was a tree-planter/student who didn't have a car. I'm terribly due but I can see opportunities in the next year to rectify this neglect. And if I ever live out my travel fantasy and ramble through Europe, you know exactly how I'll do it. Rocking.
* Please make comments regaling the site with stories about trains. I thank you*

A Press Release From the Recreation Department

2008-03-08T18:31:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce that the Rocky Mountain/Kootenays (or RMK) Bike Tour will be taking place this July and August. My fourth - and longest - tour of B.C., this is the first to include Alberta and the first where the first part is considerably longer than the second. Also the touring equipment has changed considerably since the Vancouver Island Tour of 2005.
The Itinerary: Canada Day will see the launch of the first leg, which is Hazelton to Prince George. After a rest day in P.G. I'll keep following Highway 16 east, biking through McBride on my way to Jasper. From Jasper I'll take two days to cycle through the Ice Park before dropping into the Northern Kootenays. The Kootenays through to the first destination Osoyoos will take a week and will include a day off in Nelson. Of the 1800 km of the first leg, 1350 are brand new. After a week visiting my Ma, I'll head north on the traditional Okanagan/Cariboo Return Leg.
The Equipment: Not only will the bike be completely different (an old frame which has already taken two tours and it's original solid fork built up with old and new components), and the tent no longer a glorified bivy sack, but the new electronics will also make for a very different tour. I'll have a cell phone, a digital camera and an iPod instead of the usual cassette walkman and a half dozen 90 minute tapes. The chargers will certainly make up for the loss of space of the old music system. I'm trying to find a method to affix the camera to the handlebars to take footage of certain appealing stretches.
Old Friends: The blue M.E.C. jersey is proud to be serving in its third tour, as is the plush Specialized saddle and black . . er . . polyester action pants or whatever. However, all of these cagey old vets must bow down to the camping pot set in which I've been boiling water and heating soup since 1998.
Perhaps I'll see some of you somewhere along the way. Some of my favourite moments while touring are unexpected meetings with people I know. And they usually give me a beverage.

Point/Counterpoint

2008-03-07T21:22:00.000-08:00

My Stepfather Chet's Oakleys Are Freaking Weak
by Dawson Coates, age 14

Of all the uberlame things about my stepfather Chet, and there are a lot of them, the worst is how he always wears a pair of Oakley Halfjackets. The whole thing is a horrible disgrace, the stupidest use of high-end sporting equipment in the history of Mankind. His neverending donning of the kind of eyewear better suited to a P.G.A. golfer or a Detroit Tigers second basemen fills me with a disgusted rage that either falls on deaf ears or gets me banned from the computer for a couple of days.
Chet Mounard may golf thrice a summer and get the occasional thrashing at tennis from his best friend, the much more athletic Mark Dawson, but surely a much less performance-oriented pair of sunglasses would suffice. It's bad enough that he wears them every single time he goes outdoors in the daytime, but I've seen him wear them in a store and once in my school when he had to come pick me up for a acupuncturist appointment. I guess he likes to pretend that he's in the Secret Service or some shit. God!

I Get A Lot of Practical Use Out of My Shades
by Chet Mounard, 38

Hey, man, what gives? You seem to be harbouring a lot of unnecessary anger inside. I've never asked you to call me "Dad" and I've let you have your space. When you pick some weird, stark movie like "Gummo" or "River's Edge" for family DVD night and it turns out to be too much for your little sister Denise, I've never said to your mom, "Does Dawson ever freak you out a little?" But maybe it's time.
You've picked a strange thing to focus on. These Oakleys are the greatest pair of shades I've ever had, and I had a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers in college (I'm wearing them and a Spuds McKenzie t-shirt in that framed photo near the clock of Mark and I in Mexico). With the sun more of a danger to people than ever, it's a good idea to protect one's eyes from harmful rays. You should try it, although I guess that curtain of hair that's always hanging over your eyes would "suffice".
In general I'd try to relax on the resentment, because we're going to be driving around the American West in a rented RV for the better part of July and it's going to be no fun if you're sullen, okay?

Cleaning Out My Brain Closet

2008-03-02T19:07:00.000-08:00

1) Occasionally, and once I've set the tone in the classroom, I'll let a new class ask me Twenty Questions. They get a bit of a kick out of it, if not for the merely because they don't have to learn about Medieval law for several minutes. I usually get the same kinds of questions: Do you have a wife? kids? a girlfriend? What's with the finger? Do you drink? Smoke weed? Worship satan? Sometimes the questions are very unique: Did you have enemies in high school? What's your favourite word? When's the last time your heart was torn asunder? If you could have only one volume of an encyclopedia, what letter would you choose?
2) Recently I had my computer upgraded for both space and power, thus I didn't have it for 27 hours. It was weird, but not insanely so. Since October of 2006, this MacBook has been a central part of my life, and like anything on which I become reliant, it worries me. It seems that there's always several things I wish I did less and several things I wish I did more. Mostly, I wish I had the self-discipline to do both!
3) As most of y'all know, I'm on the verge of a radical departure in my life. What I'll be doing is still rather nebulous, but whatever it is, I'm sure it'll involve much less wearing of my housecoat.
4) In Saskatchewan, some people call a hooded sweatshirt a "bunnyhug". Although I loath the sloppy hoodie look that saturates youth culture (no, seriously, kids, enough already), I believe that thinking of and referring to this garment as a bunnyhug will make it 10% more tolerable.
5) Why are there so many movie trailers on TV with some guy yelling, "THIS IS __________!!!" ? And while were at it, don't advertising agencies understand how stale the "needle abruptly scratching across the record" sound is? I mean some kids don't even understand how record albums work (this is true, believe me).
6) Kurt Cobain wrote the lyric, "I miss the comfort of being sad." It's one of my favourites.
7) I have never looked forward to a Spring Break more in my life. And not just because it's the season for Shamrock Shakes at McDonald's.
8) I recommend the site stuffwhitepeoplelike. It really has to do with upper-middle class and up people, but it's insightful satire, albeit a little mean spirited and oblivious to the fact that upper-middle class white people also like to point out how lame and spoiled they are.

MegaBeasties

2008-02-24T15:47:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my posts about animals. My thoughts on the animal kingdom have been spattered about in articles of awe (Christ, Hedgehogs Are Cute!), caution (The Weasel: Nature's Most Aptly Named), and even pure fear (How Am I Supposed to Give a Shit About Something Called a Killer Whale?). Usually, something I read or see on video prompts these ruminations. As the snow begins to disappear, my mind's mill has been grinding up two recent readings: the article "Violence of the Lambs" in January's GQ, and the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. The first text elicited The Fear, the second The Awe.
In "Violence of the Lambs" we are given a harrowing account of recent increased animals attacks on humans - extremely rare or unheard-of assaults and killings. Jaguars maraud in Mumbai (dammit - Bombay!), chimps stone a man to death, and even beavers get in on the carnage (the mention a European incident, but a B.C. man was chewed to hell a few years back). The weirdest recent killing is the Steve Irwin stinging. Such an attack by a stingray had never been recorded. Yet a man was killed in the exact same heart-pierced manner only six months later by a ray that jumped into his boat. Again, visions of the seventies movie "The Day of the Animals" flicker inside. It's all very Boo!, of course, but I can't help it.
Weisman's book asks, "What would happen to the world if human beings died off or disappeared?" Part archeology, part botany and part civil engineering, it's a gripping, fascinating read. To make a full inquiry, Weisman writes a lot about what the Earth was like before human beings, concentrating on the Western Hemisphere's fossil record since homo sapiens have only been kicking around the West Side for a maximum of 35 000 years. In that time the flora and fauna of the Americas have changed, most notably from the extinction of many megamammals like mammoths (the last ones - a pygmy form - lived 4000 years ago) and sabre-toothed tigers. It seems like every kind of megamammal we have in North America today had a MegaMega or Super Sized form that died off. Weisman describes "giant short-faced bears, nearly double the size of grizzlies, and, with extra long limbs, much faster". He lists giant peccaries; American lions, bigger than their African cousins; cow and moose sized sloths (South American sloths grew to 13 000 pounds), stag moose, megabison and the dire wolf, the biggest ever canine.
The dire wolf: a title that ranks up there in frightfulness with the killer whale and the Irish punching cat.

The Language of Sandwiches

2008-02-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

A few days ago it was Valentine's Day, a holiday that causes florists the world over to celebrate. The mainstay flower of Valentine's Day is the rose, usually the red rose. However, what the flower giver may not realize is that the message of a red rose is "passionate love". This may be the exact sentiment for some, yet "too much too soon" for others. Instead, one might have sent the more conservative pink rose which means "friendship". Just be easy with the dill - yeah, I know, it had never occurred to you to send anyone dill - the gift of which sends a message of "lust". Must be the pickle association.
The language of flowers is not one which many are fluent in, but it's been spoken at least since the age of Shakespeare. In "Hamlet", poor old bananas Ophelia gives out some flowers (in the Mel Gibson "Mad Max" Hamlet, the adorable Helen Bonham Carter hands out sticks and chicken bones as flowers): "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance . . . and there's pansies, that's for thoughts" (IV, v, 186 - 187). She could have given out a daisy for "innocence and purity", a pink carnation for "gratitude", and threw some yellow carnations in a vase for herself ("rejection").
Anyone who's a fanatic of the great "Band of Brothers" TV series knows that edelweiss symbolizes "courage and daring", but "Apocalypse Now" scholars would be interested to know that gardenias (Kurtz: "I though heaven had fallen to earth in the form of gardenias") mean "secret love and joy".
Fewer people understand that many of the sandwiches that inhabit our culinary universe have their own secret language. Since the practice of giving this particular food as a gift hasn't really caught from the time that the Earl of Sandwich concocted this dish in order to keep his cards clean, this language remains a subtle, even secret one. Nevertheless, the language of sandwiches is fascinating.
The Po' Boy: fried oysters make this sandwich the most suggestive of all. Be careful about handing this large, unwieldy and erotic sandwich over to a girl you just met.
The Denver: Open: You have nothing to hide and treasure honesty.Closed: "Don't be poking around the files on my computer." May have switched genders, perhaps even switched back.
The El Cubano: Generous amounts of roast beef, ham and Swiss cheese won't hide the fact that you're not allowed entry into the U.S.A.
The Rueben: Signals intimacy. Why? Because the sauerkraut in this baby is going to give someone gas.
The Monte Cristo: Essentially a sandwich made with French toast, the Monte Cristo says, "Hey, I love ya. Just let yourself go."
Bonus: Trailer Park Monte Cristo: Dip a PBJ into pancake batter and then dunk it into a deep fryer, dust with powdered sugar. Message? "Hey, Little Mama, get that tube top and them panties off".
Any McSandwich: "I'm dumping you."

A Form Letter Valentine

2008-02-13T19:56:00.000-08:00

Dearest ________:

Wow. It's hard to believe that it's been __________ years since we met at ___________. Remember how you had that little glob of _______ on your ________? How cute was that? This introduction led to us _______ing a mere __________ days later. Of course, more importantly than impassioned ______ing, it led to many _______s of blissful love. You mean the world to me. Every time I hear our song, _____________ by Elvis Costello, my heart surges with love. Oh, my little _________ Bear, was I truly living before I met you? My cousin __________ says yes, but he was struck in the head by a _________ when he was young, so whatever.
I know that I'm intoxicated by my overwhelming love for you, not to mention the strong scent of the dozen red ________s accompanying this Valentine, but I think it's time to take our relationship to a new level. I want you and I to ____________________________________________. Maybe in Hawaii. Whaddaya say?
Okay, I'm going to dab this Valentine's envelope with my favourite cologne, ____ Spice, seal it and send it over with this guy in the __________ costume. He's already been tipped. I will think of you all night while I labour away at the _____________ factory. I look forward to our special dinner __________ night at Chez _________. I'm going to take your advice and try the grilled ___________ in chipotle and chocolate sauce sprinkled with shaved _________!
A ton of love,
_________________
P.S. _____________ cuddling ______________ wine ____________the cat!

Can't Figure It Out

2008-02-12T12:36:00.001-08:00

Who is bg?

Waiting Out Amy Winehouse

2008-02-09T08:10:00.000-08:00

When I first traveled to South East Asia with my pals Harry and Dale in the autumn of 1988, Western mass media was still extremely limited in that corner of the world. This is no more: computers, satellite TV, and the improved distribution of English newspapers and magazines have erased the "media shadow". When I returned to Canada in January of 1989, my experience was akin to one who has been living in a cave. Suddenly I was wading into a sea that was completely unfamiliar. Songs, movies, and other aspects of popular culture saturated my world, and they were all fresh and strange. I had to catch up.
Nearly twenty years later, pop culture is more ubiquitous than ever. It's impossible to escape, like a run-away fungus that runs riot over the landscape. Sure, you can turn off, unplug, stop your ears with wax and back into your cave, but who does? Obviously, there are going to be fashions, styles and crazes in all aspects of culture that you hate, and I have learned that eventually these detestable trends simply disappear, or at least retreat into the background, becoming less of a shouting voice than a diminished whimper. Sometimes the trend will be tempered or mutated into something else. For instance, the Boy Band craze of the late 90's eventually disappeared, but not completely: dreadful, bland, corporate pop still rules the music world. Those moronic Trucker Hats pissed off, but I'm still waiting out the Military Cap. Unfortunately, I had to wait for nearly a decade for Low Rise Pants to quit revealing rolls of female belly fat and Ass Floss. And God knows how long teenagers are going to dress in the Hip Hop style, including the done-to-death Hoodie (including its new form, the Busy, Nay, Garish Print Hoodie). Jesus Christ, future generations will wonder, what the hell was wrong with kids' head and necks back then that they had to drape them with extra material? We'll see: after all, Fubu and Ecko eventually went extinct, so maybe all that G-Unit shit will die off too.
Right now, you can't escape Amy Winehouse, the naughty, Bride-of-Frankenstein's-Monster-haired chanteuse. She's clearly a despicable and wearying figure, the kind of celebrity seemingly custom made to rise and then fall disasterously. Thankfully, I've never heard a single song from her, but that doesn't prevent me from loathing her and praying for her demise. I know I just have to wait. Patience. Oh, and if you could take the whole Dance Contest Movie genre with you too, Amy, that'd be a big help.

The Six Word Memoir/Biography/Autobiography

2008-02-07T17:52:00.000-08:00

Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway was asked to write a story in six words. The king of brevity, he wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never used". These half dozen words are so evocative that they pave numerous paths that all lead to a house of sadness. Recently, the NPR website featured a story about yet another site that solicited different writers and artists to write six word memoirs, or the briefest of autobiographies, that summarized their lives. Is such a thing possible? Can one represent oneself - or someone else - in such a short and concise thumbnail? Well, we're about to find out. And by "we", I mean me, my beloved readers and my unsuspecting English 12 class on Monday (sinister chuckle and malevolent tenting of fingers).

First, some memorials.
My grandfather, George "Topsy" Robinson: Fishing and carpentry followed the rails.
My grandmother, Winnie Robinson: Thanks for Squeezey Cheesey, Smoked Oysters
My friend Mike Valachy: Big man on bass laughing heartily.
My cousin Cathy: Always wanted Harleys; riding heaven contentedly.
My stepsister Joli: Four years of big hugs ruled.
My student Meghan Apps: Crazy red, food stained chuckle factory.
My cat Louie: Hopped in car, received petting galore.

Oh, sure, you say: Easy to do someone else, but what about six-pack of words for yourself? Fine, then.
HIS PERFECT MATCH LIVED DURING RENAISSANCE
CYCLED, SCATTERING COFFEE STAINED BOOKS, GOOFINESS
LIVED FOR HIS FRUSTRATIONS, DIED FINGERPICKING
FELL OFF LOOKOUT ONE LAST TIME
DID I DREAM THOSE FOUR DECADES?
MIGHT'VE DONE SOMETHING TRUER, GUTSIER EARLIER

Please submit, dear readers.

Come Home O Valued Hero-Manager!

2008-01-31T18:03:00.000-08:00

Dear Nick,
As the trees bud and the birds return to perch adjacent to the buds, it's a relief to know that these months of upheaval and mayhem are behind us. We've had a difficult time, haven't we?
Being the CEO of a dynamic, state-of-the-art shoe factory like Gold River Shoes, it's hard to make sure one hands out the kudos and praise when they're warranted. Sometimes an IM or e-mail just doesn't have that personal, warm touch. Which is why I'm writing you this letter.
Your work as a Middle Management Drone has been exemplary since you came aboard from Formidable Toy Inc. in 1998. Nick, you spearheaded many innovative sales techniques and helped to cut costs when globalization threatened to destroy the company that my beloved great-grandfather started after the First World War. Obviously, your heroic actions during that dark, horrible day in November will never be forgotten. There's a huge framed photo of you holding one of our nurse shoes in the foyer next to the memorial plaque to November's victims, and everybody treats it like a shrine, but the kind where you don't leave any offerings.
We'll never know exactly why Leonard Spring snapped like he did, shooting his family (and dog) before driving here and murdering poor Carlos and Billy at the loading dock. Although the media has suggested that Leonard's layoff in September was some kind of catalyst for his berserk spree, I doubt it highly, for it occurred fifty-five days before his violent outburst. Regardless, your quick thinking, unparalleled bravery and accurate aim with a full coffee pot certainly saved lives, even though it couldn't save Bradley's arm and the photocopier towards which Leonard seemed to harbour so much resentment.
Even though I was leaping out my office window at the time (the ankle is about 80% I'd say) I've seen the footage from the security camera, and I must say that it certainly takes a soul of steel to crawl over to your scalded assailant and bludgeon him with a hole puncher, even though you'd been shot through the neck and spleen. And even though I had to fire two members of our security team for posting the footage on Youtube, one should be proud that it's a very popular viewing on the site.
In light of this, the next part of this letter is very difficult. I understand that you had to take time off after such a traumatizing event - the counselor who came in to help the surviving staff with post-traumatic stress said as much. But it's been five months, Nick, plenty of time for your neck and the hole where your spleen once was to heal! From what we've been able to piece together, you've been 'backpacking' around Mexico and India 'looking for yourself' as your ex-wife put it. It's time to come home, Nick, or I'm afraid that I have no choice but to terminate your employment, heroism be damned. Even a cynical press can fathom why it's necessary to cut someone loose who can't pull himself together.
I look forward to your response and hope very strongly that you're willing to come back. Feel free to contact me in any manner that you choose. I hope that this letter reaches you in Madras. Remember what my great-grandfather always said: "You have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again."
Sincerely,
Stanley Duluth

There's Hemingway, And Then There's Me

2008-01-28T16:21:00.000-08:00

This is a poem I wrote as a student at UBC. Occasionally I use it in my classes as an anonymous poem.

Climbing.
Packboard digging in
Leaning into the hill
Thighs beginning to flutter
My uncle's eyes are alert.
Mine are on my boots
And uncomfortably on my rifle.
The weight of it nagging:
Like a deep bruise,
Like a wool suit.
And then his hand tight on my shoulder
And I'm aware of the sky,
The tiny shredded clouds
The cold on my ears
And then I follow my uncle's finger
Already aiming at the deer
That stands, unaware, upwind by a poplar tree.
And then me (who would've thunk it?)
Like a soldier, as in a war game,
I step away and forget to drop my pack.
The safety makes a massive mechanical snick
And all the metal is heavy
It feels like raising a barbell to my eye.
And I sight the deer through the scope
It's huge in the cylinder
And the flanks twitch off horseflies
The long muscles like seashores.
I forget not to breath,
I forget to sight the shoulder blade.
I dislodge an alarming rock,
And the scope is filled
With dark dark eyes, bottomless, ageless.
And then the scope only sights the poplar tree.
Uncle sighs, I sigh a vibration in return.
Descending.
Light as rain down the hill
Empty packboard, full clip, full heart.
And I'm aware of the sky,
Its rabbit-shaped clouds
And the warmth of the sun on my eyes.

One Scary Dude

2008-01-25T15:37:00.000-08:00

My first Stephen King novel was "The Shining". I was 11 years old and had already seen the movie while accompanied by a liberal minded relative. It was a pocket paperback with a bright yellow cover and black graphics. A strong reader, I still missed plenty that I caught when I reread it as a teen. By the second reading I had become a full-on King fanatic. "Night Shift" is one of several King books belonging to my mom's neighbour that I read the summer before grade seven. This collection of eerie, grotesque short stories - killer toy soldiers, killer giant rats, killer clothes-folding machine - made me King's slave. I devoured "Carrie", "Salem's Lot", "Cugo", "Pet Semetary", "Christine" and so forth, staying loyal until 1987, the year of the Last Stephen King Novel I Ever Read.

It was the September of my second year at UBC, and I was adjusting to living in the Alpha Delta Phi house, having been kicked out of residence for drunken destruction. I was listening to Def Leppard's Hysteria tape a lot, but like the way that metal was gradually being replaced with classic rock, jazz, blues and "college rock", my reading tastes were changing. "It", the ultra-disturbing story of a killer clown who transcends time, was a huge novel, though not as thick as "The Stand". It creeped me out more than any other horror novel, and by this time I had read James Herbert (The Rats, The Dark), Peter Straub, Graham Masterson (The Wells of Hell, for example) and other ghoulies, not to mention "Helter Skelter". I finished the tome, added it to the library downstairs - the Alpha Delts fancied themselves as the "literary frat" - and went to the UBC bookstore to pick up whatever books I'd either read half-assed or ignore in the next eight months. I was a dreadful student at the time, but I was reading for pleasure insatiably. But not a single King, nor any horror novel, was in that year's selection. For example, I read "Gorky Park" and "The Lords of Discipline" from the Alpha Delt library.

Years ago I was charmed by King's old school serial novel "The Green Mile", though I never read my roomy's collection. Recently I've been tempted by "Bag of Bones", which gained a reputation as a tale that could stand up to his early work. He's so prolific that I don't even retain the titles of most of his books. They just keep appearing on revolving paperback racks in grocery stores.

Ten Remedies for January 21

2008-01-21T05:40:00.000-08:00

Some social scientist/mental health wonk has declared that January 21 is the "most depressing day of the year". Now, there are going to be some very indignant folks in the U.S.A. pointing out that this year Jan. 21 happens to be on Martin Luther King Day, one of those unhappy coincidences. Why January 21? Several factors such as the weight of Christmas bills, the oppression of winter, and the goddamn Patriots going to the Super Bowl again have been cited. Not to mention the existential burden of being upright with all its attendant woes and dreads. Oh, and it's Monday (in a related story, sleep researchers have determined that the Sunday night sleep in the least settled of the week). Here's a few dollops of Monday, January 21 medicine.
1) Lie on the floor and let at least three kittens crawl on you. Hopefully, they'll all fall asleep on your tummy while purring.
2) Listen to some celebratory 60's/70's funk like "Celebrate" or "I Just Want to Celebrate". Strut. Get funky. Older, whiter people should consult a doctor first. While in the doctor's office, pilfer a prescription pad. Go nuts.
3) If you have the resources, fly to somewhere warm. Not too warm or you'll get a really awful heat rash in terrible places.
4) Eat a hell of a lot of chocolate. When someone points out that you're eating a lot of chocolate, dip them in liquid chocolate and eat their fingers.
5) Declare to everyone within earshot that it's your birthday or that you're engaged or having a baby (men should avoid the last one). Let folks garland you with praise and, hopefully, gifts.
6) Avoid going to work. Instead, go somewhere you've never been or haven't been lately. When you're there, drink a little brandy or something out of a flask.
7) Buy cops doughnuts. Buy criminals doughnuts, but without sprinkles.
8) Begin tickling your boss. Allow your boss to tickle you back. If there's cake nearby, playfully shove a little in his/her face, but be careful to not get much on the suit.
9) If you're a boss of some sort, cut your people some slack. If they lack the fundamental caginess enough to ask why, tell them it's because they're a swell lot and deserve it. When they carry you about on their shoulders with robust cheers, be careful that you don't hit your head on light fixtures.
10) Make out with someone willing. Don't get gross, but feel free to squeeze some bum. Afterwards, watch a musical. Repeat as needed.
Have a friggin' great Depression/M.L.K. Day! You're a swell lot and you deserve it. Now where's that prescription pad?

A.K.A.

2008-01-15T18:39:00.000-08:00

Hi. My name is Rob. This is according to the amount (and percentage) of people who know me as Rob. Rob is something I evolved into from Robbie (1968-1974), although some people might have been calling me Robby all along without realizing it. Hardly anybody calls me Robbie anymore, except for a few holdouts in the immediate family. I miss Robbie; he was the kind of kid who turned over a footstool, climbed in and paddled away with a wooden spoon. For hours.
A strange occurrence in my early days of university created Bob, a completely new fellow, but it was Boz who begat Bob. Let me give you a rather frightful picture of 18-year old Boz. He was a thick-necked, sweatpants and band t-shirt clad, oddly-coifed guy with a shitty beer in his hand. Thankfully, I gave Boz the slip. When I traveled to Southeast Asia in 1988, I found that the only version of my name that was pronounceable was Bob. If fact, I've found that Asians like the name Bob, and occasionally will say it aloud a couple of times, as if bouncing it on their tongues: "Bob. Bob." Eventually, I became known to the whole U.B.C. gang and six planting crews that followed as Bob.
Bobby never caught on.
Robert is only used by a few, very disparate people, never by an identifiable group. My current landlord, a guy I went to school with, refers to me by this most formal of the breed. I had an Irish-as-hell professor of British Literature (heavy on the Yeats and Joyce) who called me Robert with a lovely lilt I could object to. My sister drags out "Boobert" once in a while; it's based on an old Wendy the Witch comic (part of the Richie/Casper/Hot Stuff gang). Roberto is used conservatively by my old pal Dean.
Of course, I've ignored the teeming horde that calls me Sturney. And that is nearly everyone involved in my fourteen years of teaching. I'm so rarely called "Mr. Sturney" that I'm surprised when other teachers and parents admonish their kids for clipping the title. I really couldn't care less. Sorry: Sturney couldn't care less.

The Little Green Book

2008-01-14T05:24:00.000-08:00

I've amassed quite a stack of printed and written records of my life in 39 years, as if I've left an ink spoor behind me. Somewhere my mom's kept some old reports on skunks and hummingbirds I made in grade one. From high school I've managed to retain some old stories of The Furious Five - madcap adventures involving my friends and I. I used to have an essay on which I received a B during my first year at U.B.C., evidence that I didn't completely piss my time up a tree. From 1988 on I've kept nearly continuous journals. And now I have my writing "portfolio". But my favourite little item is a small, spiral-bound, green laminated-cover booklet titled "The Treeplanter's Daily Record Book". Inside it has pages to record one's progress with specialized columns. The back features an index with a little Forestry plot sheet, a visual guide to planting faults, and a list of company addresses. It also contains the records of my first four years of treeplanting.
FIRST DAY, 1990 SEASON: March 30, # of trees planted: 450, price per tree: 9 c, Total: $20
No one has a great rookie season on the block. I remember how awkward the first couple of days felt. I didn't have the Eye for the 2.7 meter spacing. My technique had no Economy of Movement. I hadn't developed my own Style yet either: no left hand glove on the wooden handle of my shovel, yellow glove on my picking hand, opening wide holes and dropping the seedling into the right hand side from over a foot up. Each new contract is given its own page in the record book. The first two weeks are spent working for L&M, and I break the $100 barrier thrice in this first contract. My maximum is $185 that first season. My buddy Jord and I come back for a long Summer Plant on July 18 to try to salvage something out of our rookie year. It's a long, hot grinding Summer Plant and eventually we both quit before it's done, citing our friend Mike's wedding as our reason to go. We buy him the Black Crowes first CD as a wedding gift. Jordan gets his own pages for the Summer Plant (Dunkley and Polar contracts). It may interest Jordan to know that he made $856 with a maximum of $87 during this time. I pull in 5268 for the entire rookie year before going off to work for the Forestry fight fires for the rest of the summer. Jord retires from the game.
DAY 1 1991: May 1, # of trees: 500, price per tree: 9 c, Total: 25.
When I see 9 cents I think trenches. Trenches were great because of the exposed soil, but terrible because of the accumulated mud on the bottom and the weird, wide-leg striding and straddling they required. My hips often hurt doing this. Regardless, my second year is my best year out of the four. I'm having $200 days by the second week and earn $7500 for the year, even with an eight day Summer Plant. Kelly comes for the end of the season and keeps pages in my book. We drop half a tab of acid on the last day of the Spring Plant. Traditionally, one buries one's gloves and plants the last tree upside down on the last day before drinking warm Lucky beer around the vans.
DAY 1, 1992: May 3, # of trees: 675, prices per tree: 9 c, Total: $41 (half day)
By now, I'm on my third crew. I started with my friend Harry as my foreman (Screefing Buddhas). When he retires I join Jono Lineen's Crew X. Jono becomes the field boss, so I get in with Warren Fleener's Red Rot Tree Lepers, where I'll stay for the remaining four years. This season gets going late, has too many days off in the first two weeks and has the shortest Summer Plant ever (five days, $605). In all it's a decent season, although I 'm head over heels in love with Karen Elliott and she gives me the high hat. The year before I was gaga over Dawn Ashby. It's my fate to fall in unrequited love in almost every season; it's a horrible thing. I make $6843.
DAY 1, 1993: May 3, # of trees: 450, price per tree: 15 c, Total: $47
This year is bittersweet. On the plus side I've got a van to stay in (good ol' Igor, purchased for $350). On the minus side the planting is shit. I start to print tiny comments in the daily "Block" square which had previously gone empty. During the rugged L&M contract from May 19 to June 6 I write: "Shit Bedrock . . . Hiball/Low NRG . . . Clean Up . . . Aarrgh!" Nevertheless, I make almost as much as Season 2 and get to keep more because I pay only half of camp costs as my crew's Tallyman. I also reach my personal best of $280. Again, a decent Summer Plant salvages the year. I'm not in love this year, so that helps.

Confessions of a Fake Jew

2008-01-08T21:25:00.000-08:00

It all started with a garage sale in South Hazelton in the mid-90's. My friend Dean and I waded into the cluttered carport seeking kitchen goodies. I was building a "life-equipment" set nearly from scratch; years of roommates in Vancouver had made me complacent when it came to owning items beyond a coffee pot and a raggedy grey tea towel. We poked around, making fun of the kitschy knick knacks and fingering a waffle iron. I turned a plastic juice jug over in my hands. "Five bucks," the woman said.
"How about three?" I asked.
"Oh, don't Jew me," she replied.
Without missing a beat, I muttered darkly, "I AM Jewish, lady." I tipped the juice jug over on its side and stared at her with a marked indignance.
She stammered something and then gave it to me for a toonie. Returning to the car we snickered like hell.
I guess I just got tired of people using the word Jew - either as a noun or a verb - as a synonym for "cheap", assuming that there's no Jews in Northwest B.C. to be offended. I have the same problem with the use of "gay" in place of "weak", "dumb" or "vaguely effeminate". So I decided to take a stand. I began to pretend I was Jewish around strangers who choose this pejorative conversational route. Confronted by this tactic, the victim backpedals and goes away from the encounter a little shyer in throwing around "Jew".
Wait. It started before that. In high school, a couple of guys I knew - Native dudes a year behind me - started calling me "Jewy", again based on an ignorance of the sons and daughters of Abraham. Used as an affectionate nickname, it was supposed to reflect my curly hair and generous nose, a honker considerably smaller than some of the prow-like beaks leading a number of my family members through life's waters. Anyone who knows me and has a decent concept of "heritage features" can see that I'm obviously an Irish/Scottish/English mutt, with the kind of complexion and hair that would look at home on a moor or in a field of heather or being ejected from a murky pub. Nevertheless, there it is in my grad write up in the 1986 Hazelton Secondary yearbook: "Nickname: Gewy (sic)".
Admittedly, I didn't know any Jews until I attended U.B.C. Fellow students would invite me to Hillel House for knishes and blintzes. Perhaps my casual use of Yiddish ( "Oy, that guy's such a schnorrer . . . the chutzpah of that guy . . . so funny I could've plotzed") and my loud championing of cultural figures such as Woody Allen, Mordecai Richler, Joseph Heller etc. suggested that I was a good potential Jew, or at least a Goyim with a schmeer of class. I also had the fortune of being circumcised, so I was physically set to cross over if need be. There were times when my Goyishness broke through at inopportune times, such as when my roommate Phil Maerov was forced to ask me not to boil a ham hock to make pea soup, or the incident with the frisbeed yamulke (again, my apologies, Rabbi Goldstein). But for the most part, I was well prepared for my future as a faux Hebrew. L'chaim!
Yours in religious and ethnic tolerance,
Rob "Schlomo" Sturney

Another Post About Food (This Time: Malevolent Grub)

2008-01-06T19:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday afternoon I reached into the ol' pantry and grabbed a tetrapak of sweet corn and chipotle soup. Oh, and a sleeve of crackers. Immediately I could tell something was afoul, for my hand was smeared with something and the tetrapak had a decidedly bloated feel. Upon inspection, I could see that there was a tiny black hole in the container that was leaking. Obviously the tetrapak was swollen with some sort of noxious gas. I gingerly cut the top open and emptied the potentially lethal, spoiled soup into the toilet. Crisis averted.
It's a shame that such a sumptious dish could turn deadly. Recently there's been toxic spinach, poisonous dog food and E coli laced pudding cups in the news (okay, I made that last one up). It's bad enough that supersized fast food accumulates in our system to take us out at a indeterminate time in the future.
Travel in the third world is always made more exciting by the prospect of ingesting some weird bacteria or bug that draws one closer to death. And I'm not just talking about Montezuma's Revenge or Delhi Belly or Casablanca Lower Intestine either. Around a year ago I wrote "The Woman In the Yellow Sari" where I mentioned India's laudable effort to eliminate me as a living being. Although infected scabies and amoebic dysentery were both clever attempts at eradication, it was good old-fashioned food poisoning in Ahmedebad that came closest to ending twenty-five consecutive years of breathing.
Early in my journey and enthusiastic about mixing with the natives, I accepted some food from a Parsi family on the train from Bombay (now Mumbai). It seemed like some harmless curried potatoes and other unidentified objects, but lurking inside was a sinister entity ready to hang its shingle in my gastrointestinal system and wreak havoc. Reaching Ahmedabad in the middle of the night, I soon found a nice hotel and hit the sack. Within the hour, though, I awoke, reeling, and . . . (how can I put this delicately?) . . . puked all over myself and shit the bed simultaneously like a tube of toothpaste squeezed in the middle with the Jaws of Life. Oddly enough, things just got worse. My attempt at rousing the hotel staff for water and fresh linen caused me to enter a hall that was open on one end to the city streets below. The thick miasma of pollution stimulated my little internal guest and I collapsed at a nonplussed young fellow's feet, dry heaving among the alarmed cockroaches.
The staff was stellar. They brought me trays of bottled water, yoghurt and plain rice over the next couple of days. They even hauled in a little black and white TV so I could watch Magnum P.I. and Remington Steele in Hindi. Meanwhile, the bug hung on tenaciously as my natural defenses valiently counterattacked. I thought I was going to die. Excerpts from my journal during these three days read as follows: "I'm going to die . . . death is imminent . . . Oh, God, why do you mock me? . . . and I'll kick off without ever having kissed ***** . . . I've vomited the lining of my stomach. No, wait, that's a chappati . . . Jesus, Tom Selleck really is a handsome fellow . . . I've been spared by Vishnu. Or is that Shiva? Hell, I really gotta get this nutty trinity straight . . . kept down a Kingfisher beer today".
I was so very thankful to have survived, if not for the simple fact that the logistics of prying my corpse away from those whose first impulse is to burn it on the banks of the Ganges river in order to return it to Canada would've been a bitch for my family. The sad thing? This was only the first of three illnesses.

Leggo My Eggo

2008-01-03T19:48:00.000-08:00

Since I was brought up in the 70's, I got to experience both the concentrated and diluted aspects of the "everything that is natural is groovy" movement. Hence, I was dressed from head to toe in corduroy, since that is cotton's rawest state. If you look closely at a cotton boll, you'll see parallel wales running across it. Another example is that even as a five year old, I was encouraged to let my armpit and leg hair grow wildly . . . which is weird now that I think about it.
In the kitchen, mom worked hard to ensure that refined sugar, chemical preservatives and other gross crap was kept from our diet. This wasn't too hard on my sister and I, because we had little conception of just how wide the junk food world was. Ignorance is bliss sometimes. In a previous posting, I discussed how Special K and Rice Crispies were the standard cereals of my childhood. But I also remember that the "treat" of over 400 elementary school lunches was Sesame Snaps, a wafer of sesame seeds suspended in a solid honey glaze, with Wagon Wheels making a rare guest appearance. Sesame Snaps were definitely NOT the kind of treat you could trade. Although I could occasionally access my favourite brands of creamy, homogenized, god-knows-what-these-chemicals-on-the-label-are peanut butter (my Granmere tells me that she always laid in the Kraft and Squirrel jars when I was about to visit), my mom insisted on the kind where you have to stir in the oil on top. Sometimes eating a PBJ at school required all the milk in my Bobby Orr thermos (do you remember the old thermoses with the glass inside that always broke when you inevitably dropped them?) and some of my friends' too. The absolute worst peanut butter - a brand which still haunts me in fevered malaria dreams - was Deaf Smith, a paste that was better suited for home repairs than toast.
I sound ungrateful and whiney, but really I'm thankful that my mom - and to a lesser extent my dad - kept a diligent watch over our diets. For things haven't always been healthy and organic in my food life. Even today, I'm self-conscious about my grocery cart; there's a lot of meat in there and an inordinate amount of fruits and vegetables. So thanks for the good start you guys!
I was thinking about this the other day as I ate blueberry Eggos smeared with liberal gobs of Skippy peanut butter, a taboo breakfast (let alone for dinner) during my childhood. To top it all off, I chased it down with Coke. Sorry, ma.

2008: Oh, Great, The Year I Turn Forty

2007-12-31T18:53:00.000-08:00

Best New Years wishes to all y'all out there. I hope that your upcoming year is filled with good health, fine wines, harmless animal encounters, discolourations of the skin that turn out to be nothing, unexpected embraces, palatable food, kind cops who look the other way, pastries, pasties, and one particular aspect of popular culture that drives you nuts simply fading away . . .
Cheers!

The Hornman

2007-12-30T07:16:00.000-08:00

It was the era of Chuck Mangione. Before I even knew who Miles Davis and Clifford Brown were - before I was fully aware of jazz, and I don't mean jazz-lite, elevator music jazz - there was Chuck Mangione, best known for Nadia's Theme from the 1976 Montreal Olympics. He was the reason that I chose the trumpet.
The school that I teach in doesn't have a music program anymore. Well, it has Strings classes, guitar lessons which at first I fully championed, but which now I'm a little ambivalent about as more and more sad-sack, woe-is-me strummers lay about in our halls playing A minor chords and warbling lyrics of how no one understands them. But our institution lacks a Band and has for about eight years. The sound-proof, windowless and terraced band room first was relegated to a classroom for rookies (they put me in there once and I made loud noises until I was moved), then it was a detention room for people serving in-school suspensions. Now it's the Strings room. It's a shame that Band was one of the first programs axed when the Liberals came to power and decided that public education sucked too much to deserve proper funding (we didn't have Drama for a few years either). It's said that kids who learn to read music become better at math etc., but for me its utility is more about providing a niche for kids who aren't interested in sports or the ritualized popularity contest/domination festival of student government. And, if they're lucky, they'll get to play something weird like a Black Sabbath song arranged for a little orchestra. Or Chuck Mangione!
I wasn't in Band during high school, not necessarily because I was into sports (3 years of track and field, 1 year curling, 1 year volleyball) or that I served student government, but because I was more suited for listening to music, and if I was going to be in a band, it was going to be a punk band perhaps called Spaghetti.
My trumpet career began and ended at Heritage Elementary in Prince George during the 1978-1979 school year. My mom paid for trumpet rental or some such thing and I honked away for a few months at lessons, band practices and half-assedly in my room at home. Surely having to endure the wretched beginning noises of new musicians acts as a deterrent for many a parent tempted to sign a kid up for lessons. Good thing it wasn't a violin, eh, Ma? Anyway, though I was obsessed with the trumpet's spit valve and the disassembly and oiling process, I didn't have the forceful lips of Louis Armstrong (or much in the way of any lips at all, some would argue) or fundamental discipline to go anywhere with the horn. Eventually we moved to a place where the school didn't even have a gym. Mom must've dealt with the poor ignored (though spit free and generously oiled) trumpet. From what I can gather, Chuck Mangione had no comment about this loss of potential.

"It Never Got Weird Enough For Me"

2007-12-28T20:18:00.000-08:00

It's coming on two years now - once the football season ends - that Hunter S. Thompson, one of my literary and cultural heroes, committed suicide. He's been on my mind lately for many reasons, one of which is recently finishing a book of his early letters (1956 - 1967). Another reason is that I viewed a documentary two weeks ago called "Pay Your Money, Take the Ride", a biography and a filmography that once again confirmed the existence of a persona that threatened to take over Hunter's real life. No one wants to become a caricature of himself, and as early as 1977 Thompson realized that it would be better for the myth if the real guy was out of the way.
Of course, it's hard to pinpoint where the man separates from the myth. From the earliest letters, we see the turbocharged hyperbole, the use of words as bludgeons and shanks to assault the world of hypocrisy, conformity and the desire of Cold War North Americans to live like pets. Hunter S. Thompson seems to embody the title of a biography of Philip K. Dick called "You Are All Dead and I Am Alive". Hunter was full of a restless vitality that obviously slipped from him in his later years. Like Hemingway, a writer that Thompson admired greatly, he could no longer stand the vagaries of his physical being unable to convey the energy of his mind. In the end he wrote his final letter, admitting that life was "no more fun".
Regardless, Thompson leaves behind a prolific body of work that surely takes the written word from being a flat, two-dimensional entity and making it leap off the paper and towards our adrenal glands. Although the conventional wisdom in writing is to use strong verbs and nouns instead of relying on adjectives and adverbs, Thompson's modifiers are often the sharpest knives in his drawer. This is not to say that his verbs lacked a finely honed edge: my favourite H.S.T. standards are "stomped" and "lashed".
As a writer - yeah, it was inevitable that I start referring to myself by this title, but in truth I feel more like a writer than I do a teacher, a role which earns me tens of thousands of dollars a year - I feel perfectly fine that I'll probably never attain the literary heights of my favourite writers. Even less likely is the chance of becoming a "writing personality". And I don't mean a famous writer. John Grisham and Toni Morrison are famous writers and they are as boring as fuck. I mean someone like Wilde, Capote, Hemingway or Thompson: guys who had reputations that always needed to be cultivated, pruned and harvested. As Hunter would say, "Saleh."

Like a Bowl Full of Jelly

2007-12-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

This is the one year anniversary of the site (210 posts) and the official start of winter (yeah, right), but this posting discusses neither of these subjects. It's about Santa Claus.
I'm not trying to curry favour with the big guy either. I stopped fully believing in Santa when I was seven. This weekend a friend of mine related a sad and compelling story about her ten-year old son. The smart and good-natured little dude had just found out that Santa did not exist in his "magical" form. Frankly, I was surprised that he made it all the way to grade five before his revelation. With general media saturation and the chiding from his better informed peers, I reckoned that his natural curiosity would've prompted him to confront this "cognitive dissonance". Finally, after championing his fat, bearded hero for a couple of years against the jeers of his friends, a teacher's cynical but accurate depiction of Santa had him posing the Big Christmas Question.
I think the teacher did him a favour. The Answer would just become more jarring the longer it was delayed. We need young people to have the capacity of critical thinking, if not just to deal with the onslaught of advertising, imagery and superfluous information. Maintaining a faith in a magical entity that supplies a kid with gifts - in spite of multiple signifiers in the culture that suggest otherwise - is just whistling through the graveyard. Ask the hard questions.
Santa is a great, wide legend that is fun for kids at the stage when their parents are everything. As the child grows more independent and capable, the legend must change into its "symbolic" form. After I found out about Santa, I realized that regardless of the Knowledge, Christmas was still a joyful, gifty time. It was then when I started to become more of a gift giver, although it was still pretty much on Mom and Dad's dime.
I'll never forget the Christmas when Santa brought a fish tank for my sister. I saw it bubbling away in my folk's room when I went to awake Dad from a nap. That year I received an excellent toy shotgun and a Venus fly trap that I gruesomely supplied with snacks for about a year.
Merry Christmas to everyone.

My Gears Are Officially Ground

2007-12-12T22:13:00.000-08:00

For some reason I've been unable to edit my posts for the last month or so. I'm dying to make changes to "It's Magic" and When I "Got the Jazz", but I cannot. Whenever I attempt to edit, Safari closes down and I have to re-enter cyberspace. So just know that these posts are exactly as I'd have them. Research has shown that the Cars' song is just "Magic". I'd also like to enter the name of another song from their "Heartbeat City" album: "You Might Think". In "Jazz", I want to change "whiskey. Neat" to "whiskey. Straight. No chaser" which is the name of a jazz standard (hear Thelonius Monk's version). That's the two most pressing things. And now for a hot chocolate.

"Magic"

2007-12-12T04:52:00.000-08:00

They say truth is stranger than fiction. I suppose this is true. But when my older brother Mike was in high school, something happened to him that seems to me to BE fictional. It seems like something that would be in a movie with lots of violins gently groaning in the background. I guess it could also be in the plot of a book or a play or something, but I tend to compare things to movies because I watch a lot of them. Even, my wife and kids tell me, shit.
Mike was is semi-secret love (they were 'just friends') with a girl named Rose Bennis, who, I've been told, may have been a year older but was definitely in his league. This wasn't some bullshit Hollywood script where the Audio/Visual Club member who ran track (which pretty much summarizes Mike in 1985) aspires to some buxom blond cheerleading fox. Rose lived in a geodesic dome next to a geodesic turkey coop on a dirt road deep in the toolies. I guess she was famous for having a pet moose when she was little, and kids called her "Moose Girl" until she was in high school.
This story is a tragedy, and not just because he was a poor slob who'd lost his mind to a girl who made her own snowshoes, but because she drowned while swimming in a lake during a summer visit to Oregon. Wait, it gets worse. By the second week of summer break, Mike started missing seeing her everyday at school and doing whatever fantasizing or light stalking he was up to. So he made her a mix tape up at John Noaks' place and carefully decorated the cover, waiting for her to return so he could work himself up into a froth over the thought of actually giving it to her.
Since I saw "High Fidelity" I've considered the romantically-motivated mixed tape a lot. Sixty minutes is enough. Ninety minutes not only says too much but has a better chance of getting tightly wound or snagging and being ruined. A mixed C.D. doesn't quite have the same impact as the cassette tape, because unless you're a huge fan of rewinding and fast-forwarding for several minutes, you have to listen to all the songs on a tape in the order they were intended, not just hit a button to jump around the songs. Mike mixed a bunch of fairly standard mid-eighties songs of acceptable rock and pop: "On the Dark Side" by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, an older Bryan Adams song, and heavy on late Cars like "Magic". In fact, instead of naming the mix "Tunes for Rose" or "Summer '85" or something, he dubbed it "Magic".
Anyway, the funny thing is I know these details only second hand, and through John Noaks himself. I'm close to six years younger than Mike, and he'd cleared out of high school long before I showed up. It's a good thing too, because it would've embarrassed him to be connected to this little juvenile delinquent who only stuck with school because Uncle Sheldon promised me his Lincoln if I made it to grade eleven. About six years ago Noaks and I were at a wedding and he got pretty lit up and told me the story of the undelivered mix tape. How Mike spent a lot of time alone on Spencer Hill, looking down at the town in the valley and listening to "It's Magic" on a borrowed Walkman. How she was buried down in Oregon, where her folks were from originally, and how her parents had a little service at the end of August for her friends which Mike bitterly complained was not well-attended. Noaks said he was a "sad bastard" for all of grade ten, a description that made me chuckle, because that phrase was used in "High Fidelity" too.
I wouldn't mention any of this, except for Christmas last year. We spent it up in Merritt with Mike and Linda and the boys. Good eats considering that Linda got loaded on mimosas Christmas day while she cooked. I had to check my work e-mail, so Mike set me up on his computer downstairs. I had to answer three of the messages, so I opened Mike's iTunes and searched quickly for something good to hear. It was tough. A lot of goddamn country and the boys' Papa Roach and shit. I figured Mike might keep a good playlist so I scanned them. There it was. "Magic". I clicked into it to examine the fourteen songs without listening to them. I don't know why I couldn't turn them on. I watched myself with the whiskey for the rest of the visit, because I knew I'd bring it up, and I thought it was better kept on that little stitch of memory in his computer.

Arsenal

2007-12-10T20:28:00.001-08:00

I was sorting and stapling some articles that I've cut from magazines when I saw an obituary for Dimebag Darrel, the guitarist for Pantera and Damageplan who was shot and killed onstage (a rock and roll first) in Ohio by a "crazed gunman". The media is still piecing together the Colorado Double Church Shootings on the heels of the Omaha Mall Shooting. One barely gets breathing spaces between these spree or "berserker/amok" shootings in the United States of America. Along with the massive general firearm murder rate in America, these public explosions of insane violence are symptoms of an ill society; this is practically a cliche. Any reasonable, liberal-bent person is supposed to abhor American gun culture and condemn its lax legislature. However, I'm increasingly prone to let my Inner American out when it comes to one specific aspect of this gun fetishism. I want one. You know, for defensive purposes. I know plenty of people with hunting rifles, be they single shot "deer rifles" or shotguns. But I also know a few folks with the kind of weapon I'd like to keep: the handgun. Nothing says America like a pistol. Now, this firearm is designed to shoot people, not animals (make your own obviously cynical comment), and this singularity of purpose is what makes it marvelous. The pistol aspires to nothing else than protecting you from people who have slipped over the thin red line into murderousness. Right now I have a hammer under the bed to repel any sudden attacks. I'm thinking of bringing a mulberry wood field hockey stick home from school to augment the arsenal. It's good to know that I can borrow from my family if the occasion for my protection is known ahead of time. Around fifteen years ago a man threatened over the phone to enter my dad's house and take something. In turn, my father promised shoot him. Upon hanging up, pop decided he now needed a gun, and was able to hit up a member of the family for a revolver. I love this story, not just for the good-honest-man-who-won't-be-bullied angle, but also because it informs me who to go to for arms. Of course, if I had my own Glock (one of two handguns I've ever fired) I could partake in the time honoured tradition of shooting objects in a gravel pit. I have two extremely willing nephews who'd join me. I'm not saying I could take on the world with such a machine, but since we don't have assault weapons to contend with in Canada, I think I might be able to hold my own. And really mess up some signs on the backroads.

When I Got "The Jazz"

2007-12-08T05:59:00.000-08:00

At first everyone just thought I had the Blues, which is understandable since I was wearing the dark suits (a too small high school grad suit and some dark grey thing I picked up at the Sally Ann) and fedoras associated with bluesmen. Others, understanding the sensibilites and warning signs of the blues, believed I was bi-polar, for sometimes I was melancholy and prone to sighs ("He could be listening to the Smiths," speculated my little sister Beth) and other times I was jubilant and energetic, spouting machine-gun Kerouacian phrases ("He could be taking bennies," mused my older brother Keith). But no. I had the Jazz.
Perhaps it was autumn weather, a grim onslaught of continual Vancouver drizzle and muted skies. I had been like anybody else, squishing my way across the slowly rotting leaves of the UBC campus in my second year of General Arts, listening to the Doors and CSNY on my Walkman, living for Friday afternoon beer gardens where I would drink myself into the courage to go talk to some of the philosophy-major goddesses in their crude Peruvian wool sweaters and leggings under their skirts. Then I'd go back to residence, fill up on bland cafeteria food and try not to think about how far behind I was in readings and essays already. But more likely it was Dr. Sweldon.
I had been summoned to my American History 211 professor's office in Buchanan Tower by a note scribbled on the back of my first essay. He had written "Could be a C, but the idiosyncratic punctuation makes it a D. Come see me today." I climbed the stair to the second floor and found his office door. Inside, Sweldon, who looked like Pacino in "Serpico" but about twenty-five years older, pushed books and papers around his desk. "Why do they keep putting these plastic covers on their essays, Feagal?" he asked me. He extracted a composition from its cover, placed the cover in his trash can and stapled the papers together. It was at that moment, as I awaited his judgement or decree or whatever dressing-down I was about to receive, that I noticed the papery music gently unfolding itself from the tapedeck on his shelf. It was the sound of a heart resigned to being a shut-in. The sound of the unbearable lightness of being, the title of a popular book on campus that I never got around to pretending to read. The dulcimer tones of a dignified sorrow. Brushed drums, slowly wandering upright bass, sparse piano chords and a saxophone being gently breathed into, as if the man on the horn wanted to leave something for himself. It was like being shown a crucial part of your body that you never even knew existed, perhaps a square inch of the brain that makes you cognizant of the concept of bittersweet.
Sweldon murmured about my overuse of commas and misuse of semi-colons while I let the music help me translate the damp campus concrete outside his window: the limp leaves, the lone girl in the green raincoat who shlepped her bookbag like a sore limb. The next thing I knew he was giving me a note inscribed with the titles of two "slim volumes" he entreated me to buy at the bookstore: The Elements of Style and The Practical Stylist. I stood up and mumbled something inane before pointing at the tapedeck. "Who is that?" I asked.
"Charlie Parker," he said. I backed out of his office, wandered over to the Student Union Building, got on a bus for downtown, entered A&B Sound on Seymour and bought two Charlie Parker tapes.
The next month was a blur. Bird took up residence in my Walkman and the boombox in my room. For the first time at UBC I started doing deep research, but it had nothing to do with Canadian Literature or Problems in Human Geography. I immersed myself in the history of jazz, spending hours pouring over books in Sedgewick and the Main library. I found a few videos to watch in the little carrels, studying clothing and poise of the musicians. The Listening Library provided me with the foundations of Ragtime, Swing, Bebop, Cool and Free jazz. I returned again and again to A&B and Sam the Record Man to splurge on Armstrong, Ellington, Coltrane, Holliday, Brubeck and Davis. Never one for drugs, I bought a bag of marijuana after reading about "reefer" and "muggles". The grass helped. Long a beer drinker, I switched to whiskey, neat. Saturday nights found me at joints like the Glass Slipper and the Highball, tapping my cheap oxfords in time. I went home with older women who found my precocious world-weariness charming. For Christmas, I asked my bemused parents for a pork pie hat like Lester Young's, giving them my hat-size. I'd had no idea I had a hat size until that fall.
Since what I was listening to varied from "Autumn In New York" to "Salt Peanuts", I was swinging from contemplation and woe to vigourous hyperactivity. Sometimes I walked around in the rain as it was my fate and other times I dominated class discussions with a torrent of barely coherent words. Unlike the Blues that you can express with a line like "She left me down in Memphis with a sliver in my heart," the Jazz left me without focused words. I couldn't just tell people, "A minor." It was awkward inhabiting this ineffable world.
I was saved - the first of several times - by a girl. Linda was of Chinese background and lived on the floor below me. She was also in my Abnormal Psychology (Nuts and Sluts) class. "I like your style," she said one afternoon as we filed out of the lecture hall into the perpetual gloom. She dropped in a couple of times and we smoked, chatted and listened to Sarah Vaughn. One evening we made love in her room. The earth moved, as poor old academically-maligned Hemingway would say. I felt as if I been turned inside out like a glove. She leaned over and turned on her ghetto blaster. Something essential roared out, punching me in the gut. "Who is that?" I asked.
"Jane's Addiction," she replied, releasing one slender arm to point to her desk. "The case is up there."
I extracted myself from her, crushing the crown of my hat with my foot as I strode to her desk. "Jesus Christ," I said under my breath, "This is the greatest thing I've ever heard."

The Nemesis

2007-12-07T06:24:00.000-08:00

Norman Mailer died recently and one of my first thoughts was, "I bet there's a few people who are quite pleased by this." Mailer had an enormous ego and seemed to actively seek pissing matches with public figures and other writers. I wondered if there was someone out there who was in fact Mailer's Nemesis. A nemesis is like an arch-rival, but one who specifically drives you towards a goal or purpose. Inspiring. And I'm not talking about foils either. Think Lennon and McCartney - they are the ultimate in collaborating nemesises. So at first I thought Mailer's nemesis might be Gore Vidal, but they were more like contemporaries. Besides, I'm sure Vidal was too busy loathing William F. Buckley - a guy who once said to him on national TV during the 1968 Democratic Convention, "Listen, you queer. You quit calling me a crypto-fascist or I'll sock you in the goddamn face" - to have provide dynamism for Mailer. Maybe Gloria Steinem was Mailer's nemesis. Perhaps it was Rip Torn, the actor who engaged Mailer in a brutal fistfight on the set of some ill-conceived Warholian movie (look it up on Youtube). In the end, something shiny caught my eye and I stopped seeking the mystery person. Regardless of who it was, Mailer's death must've caused a sense of loss in his nemesis and a deeper apprehension of his or her mortality. With no one to help define his or herself, the surviving nemesis might feel obsolete or disassociated. Perhaps the survivor had cultivated other nemesises and will recover. But the true nemesis is singular and doesn't even have to reciprocate, a la Hunter S. Thompson and Nixon. Nixon was practically Thompson's white whale, even though they'd chatted amiably about the NFL, but I'm sure Nixon had his own nemesis (undoubtedly JFK for a while).
Anyway, the mulling of Mailer's nemesis made me think about my own. I had a nemesis in high school and one at university, but they were low-key nemesises who were narrow in scope and, in fact, friends. But I did, in a callow manner, define myself against them. At the school where I teach, I have a nemesis, one who replaced another in the same specific (and admittedly petty) arena as the original rival. And I just realized this recently, as it rose bubbling and spattering from my subconscious. These two nemesises drove me to excel. But I can use the past tense now, since I'm soon to leave my school and gradually beginning to not give a flying fuck anymore.
Now I need a writing nemesis. I'm thinking of James Frey, because he's not only a goddamned fraud or because he was an Oprah-approved author, but also because he had the shrunken honour to participate in the Modern Confessional of taking Oprah's high-horse browbeating. What a punk. Perhaps it should be Susan Juby, who writes cute, Young Adult novels regarding high school students in Smithers, all very PG rated. And, hey, Buckley's still alive, the crypto-fascist. I'm taking applications.

Movie, Song, and Book

2007-11-29T17:27:00.000-08:00

I like the word "reductive" when used to undermine somebody's analysis or viewpoint. Reducing an issue, idea or person down to one narrow point is derided as a shallow oversimplification. However, I can understand why humans do this in general; there are so many Post-It notes of information slapped up willy-nilly inside our heads that we've got to stick them into the most convenient of files. My inquiry is this: can I understand something significant about someone by knowing his or her FAVOURITE MOVIE, SONG AND BOOK? Sorry, that upper casing is obnoxious and pretentious, but I really want to assure that my readers participate in this posting and the capitals are my way of showing my earnestness. I really want to know! Anyway, I'd be appreciative if everyone submits a comment or response that reveals their three champions. To start it off I'd like to list my own:
MOVIE: Apocalypse Now. I can recite the entire thing.
SONG: "Train In Vain" by The Clash. They were my first "own thing" in music appreciation. I had loved Rush pre-1979, but the band had been introduced to me by the Jacksons, my beloved cousins, in the summer of 1977. The Clash were my mine.
BOOK: "A Prayer For Owen Meany" by John Irving. Everybody who is close to me knows this already. Too bad you suck now, John Irving! You broke my heart.
Regular commentators are encouraged to respond to my triumvirate. Oddly enough, all three of my choices are tied to my pa. My dad previewed "Apocalypse Now" when it hit the screens in 1979 and decided I shouldn't see it. I later watched it on HBO in Hazelton. It was the first movie, along with "1942", that I ever recorded on Beta. "Train In Vain": I saw the Clash play this on Fridays, ABC's manic answer to Saturday Night Live. I had recently moved to Kamloops with my dad after a couple of years bouncing around Northern B.C. with my mom and a step-family. Almost immediately, I started picking up cast-off babysitting jobs from my sister, who was beginning to understand the meaning of the phrase, "WHOOOOOO! PARTYYY!" I saw the Clash play this and "Clampdown" one night as I kept vigil over a two year old. The next day, I got my dad to drive me to the Thompson Park Mall where I bought "The Clash" and "London Calling". "Owen Meany": Dad belonged to the Book of the Month Club and he acquired "The World According to Garp" and "The Hotel New Hampshire". I read them both. When we moved to Hazelton I bought him the three-pack of Irving's early novels for Father's Day, and it was clearly the last present I ever bought that was secretly for me. By the time "Owen Meany" emerged, I was a college student. I bought it for my dad, but gently read it beforehand, a task exceedingly difficult since I was hauling it everywhere across UBC and in and out of coffeehouses. Removing the dust jacket helped immensely. The original hardcover depicted the stuffed armadillo on its dusk jacket. Subsequent editions have left the armadillo in the wings. A shame.
Two of my three picks debuted within six months of one another.

"All I Know Is That I Don't Know Nothin'" - Operation Ivy

2007-11-24T07:20:00.000-08:00

I love irony. Not verbal irony necessarily, or its more petulant incarnation sarcasm, but the classic "opposite of what was intended" variety. It helps to bolster the absurdist view I have of mankind; nature seems to have a logic or reasonableness to it, but society often strikes me as ludicrous in its manner. One weighty bit of recent irony is that of the "Information Age" brought about by digital technology. Let me put it like this: it seems that the deeper we get into this Age of Information, the more that our frame of reference shrinks. To simplify: we don't know shit. In particular my students don't know shit. Their knowledge is limited to the very recent; they can tell you the minutiae of Halo 3, the latest Timbaland single and the lives of whichever celebrity the media lens is currently focusing on, but they cannot put any of it into context. They know nothing of the past, which in itself isn't unheard of in adolescents, for they tend to devalue the wisdom and experience of those who came before them. Over time I've learned to make the questions I ask in "Jeopardy"-type trivia contests multiple choice, so that the students and I both avoid the frustration of them unable to answer. For years, students have been begging for an updated Trivial Pursuit set to be used in the annual contest that's part of our Fun Day competition between house teams. At one point the contest was only for students, but over time teachers were brought into it, and they naturally are the only one who can answer most of the questions. When Trivial Pursuit came out in the 80's I recall playing with my chums and everyone earning quite a few "slices of pie". Perhaps this is because the events and historical figures in question were closer in time to our era. Or it could be because we were better read and informed? Now, people might analyze this post and say to themselves, "Well, who really gives a damn whether or not a kid knows that Nixon had a bowling alley in the White House? It's TRIVIA, by definition unimportant." I would respond thusly: at the beginning of this year's Social Studies 8 class, we were studying the end of the Roman Empire and at some point (as my mind tends to go off on tangents) I leapt from the Jews of Jesus's time to the Holocaust. Brows were furrowed en masse. I tried again, "You know, the German persecution and murder of Jews during the Second World War?" Blank stares. I asked students to raise their hands if they'd ever even heard of such a thing. Three hands went up. Another example: I asked grade nines which continent they thought Algeria was in. "China?" responded one. "Brazil?" answered another. These aren't isolated examples, but only recent ones. Computers, long seen as a panacea for the lacunae of education, are hype. For the average person, they are much better suited for stealing music, viewing videos of precious kittens falling asleep while standing, accessing porn and checking football scores. And, yes, I recognize the irony of using a computer to decry that very thing.

The Four Horsemen of the Agepocalypse

2007-11-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

The other day I was shaving when a glob of shaving cream plopped onto my chest. The glob drew my eyes and then settled on something nearly unbelievable. A grey chest hair. I pulled it out and closely examined it as if it held buried knowledge. It was an odd moment comparable to another last winter when I started to grow a negligence beard over Christmas and noticed for the first time that 17% of my chin stubble was grey. Those encounters with the irrefutable signs of age are disturbing not only because they remind me of my imminent demise, but also because they reveal something deeper about my existence. They're like the moment described by William S. Burroughs in "Naked Lunch" when everyone at the table finally realizes what's skewered on the end of his fork.
After fourteen years I'm in my final year of teaching at the very same high school I attended for five years. It's time for something different. Very different. When I first stepped into the classroom wearing my Doc Martens and a hopeful grin, I was a young man. No longer can you describe me as young, unless, of course, I'm standing beside my dad. The job has consumed my youth, used it as fuel. As I stood leaned up against the bathroom sink staring at that grey chest hair, I finally and truly realized what I had merely said glibly before: that the last fourteen years have raced by with a fearsome velocity, punctuated with precious few moments of pure illumination. At this point, not imparting on a new expedition with some risk and discomfort would surely lead to a debilitating and wretched stasis.
On the other hand, the epiphanal hair instance bolstered my belief that it's possible to prevent yourself from decaying in the important areas. I will continue to wrinkle and whiten and sag, but I'm resolved to do it with some dignity. My health and fitness - both physical and intellectual - is paramount. As an active, sporting guy, I'm well aware that I take longer to recuperate from the more frequent aches and pains. I'm also cognizant of how fucking forgetful and flustered I can be, but that might be the long term effects of the whopping loads of psychedelics I took in the 1990's. (Although I don't use emoticoms, I'd like to type this instead: WINK WINK!). I intend on being fit and sharp - engaged in life - as long as possible.
A lot of post-WW II people in the industrialized world have declared, "My second half of my life is going to be even better than the first half." By "better" they often mean more comfortable, more prosperous, or, if we're talking about aging hippies, more meaningful. All I know is that after fourteen years at the expense of my youth, I'd settle for "different". So if there's any women out there reading this who want to get married, move to the Dominican Republic and raise Daschunds, drop me a line. WINK WINK!