The Politics of Being Good

On Exhaustion and Critics

2009-06-24T20:47:00.000-07:00

Day three of my exile is ending, and I'm faced with the prospect of returning to the office with my lungs more-or-less back in their proper places in my chest. So I'm lying in bed listening to jazz, trying to keep enough cool air on my skin that I might be able to get some sleep tonight despite the sticky Toronto heat and the cough that hasn't quite gone away, and I'm also trying to write something.

I guess "trying" isn't really the appropriate term anymore; since recently my job has been to write every day. And I think I'd like to take a minute and discuss something that happened today pursuant to that, because I found it a little shocking.

So I've been guest writing over at State of Affairs. It's been fun. I get to write about things that piss me off, and I get to do so in a semi-humorous way, with pictures, and I get paid to do it. Right on. I try to make my stuff at least somewhat topical, because I think it's more interesting for people to read about stuff that's actually happening right now, so there's some kind of dialogue that can happen about the event or the issue. Well, up until now people have enjoyed my rants about fast-food, the war on drugs and the recent bullshit election in Iran, among other things. But today I managed to piss off several hardcore liberal friends of mine by writing about the recent to-do in France over banning burqas. If you're really interested, go read the post.

Granted, I was a little overreaching and I deliberately wrote in such a way as to cause some kind of reaction, because otherwise I'm just another bland, pedestrian blogger. But I absolutely did not expect to be called a racist, particularly not by people I know. The point I was trying to get across in my article was not that Muslims are bad (they aren't) or that freedom of religion is bad (it's not), but merely that I take serious issue with women being forced by some people's interpretations of their religious texts to take on a second-class citizen role. I like women, and I don't like it when they get abused -- that was the thrust of my argument. I applauded the French government's decision to frown upon burqas because I think that style of dress represents a step in the wrong direction for women's rights.

And for my troubles, I got told I'm an ignorant bigot. Huh?

Don't get me wrong -- I don't have any issue with criticism. I'm a writer and a musician full-time -- it's my job to take criticism. But it's one thing to attack my writing or even my opinion -- it's fully another to attack my system of values as a human being. Let me go on record saying that as far as my own bigotry goes, I see two kinds of people in this world: cool people and assholes. If you're a cool person, regardless of what colour you are, who you like to pray to and who you like to fuck, we'll get along just fine. If you're an asshole, I don't attribute that characteristic to any of the above traits -- I just think you're an asshole, and we won't get along.

I refuse to print a retraction, because I stand by my decision -- if supporting women's rights makes me a bigot, then I'll fly that flag. But I did want to address the issue, even here on this little blog that probably gets less hits than SOA, just in case any other friend reads -- or misreads -- my other post. I promise I don't hate you based on anything other than whether or not you're an asshole. You can douse the torches and put the pitchforks back in the greenhouse now.

And with that I'm tapped. I have to write another post tomorrow, and I guess I'll have to pick my topic a little more carefully if I want to avoid pissing more people off. Oh wait, I don't care about pissing people off, so I'll write what I want. But get your fucking facts straight, and don't ever call me a racist again.

Blogging Fun

2009-06-16T21:02:00.000-07:00

So for the next few weeks I'll be guest-writing on my buddy Jim's blog over at State of Affairs. It's topical, current and quite often funny (at least it is when I'm writing it). Come check it out -- it's like a Localized Irritant post every single day.

Oh, and if you haven't yet, get your tickets for Currents (21 Jun 2009 doors at 8:30). It's going to be great.

I know, I promised dick jokes.

Here's one: I'm a dick and the joke's on you.

Go read Jim's blog. I'm funny there.

(What, were you expecting more poetry? Fine:

purity

in all the lines I have read today

the purest line that I have seen

was the line of a spent cigarette

arcing into snow.

Happy now?)

Oh lord, he's not going to try his hand at poetry, is he?

2009-06-11T20:46:00.000-07:00

Yes, he is. I'm going to try my hand -- as usual -- at something the skill for which I don't necessarily possess. There will be something funny later. Dick jokes or something, I promise.

*****
11:47pm

You're going to have to give me a second (be)cause
William Burroughs and WWII are
too
much
on a Thursday night with a stomach full of beer and bad pizza.

While I dip my feet in Mister Clean Antibacterial Multi Surface I notice
it's always raining on Yonge Street;
the cleanest parts are the streetlights and even they're a muddy orange
that leave the pavement looking kind of oily.

Dust blows off my standing fan and I guess that's what I'm smelling:
sort of a burning scent like you left your pan-bread to roast just a little too long.

If you don't mind I'd like to collect my thoughts
because right now it's all heroin and opera.

And at some point it will be necessary to
go to market, I know,

but I'm much happier smelling pan-bread and rain
while I deal with complex phrasing and avoid
what you tell me is fundamentally necessary.

*****

and, a little something from the archives, just to prove I used to do this a lot:

*****
untitled (may '08)

there’s something restless in
the fine dust of butterfly creases and that
day-to-day dust we all breathe:
smoke and ashes without a filter, no
distance, no difference
and absolutely no holding back
not anymore.

filament-fine like optic wire
threads that read like spiderwebs
strung silent at sunset,
catching dust-mites and lightning bugs
that shimmer and burn and expire
while the sun slinks and winks and slips away.

monarchs’ powder; like day-to-day
breathing falls light like snow;
papery postulations written in dust on
blades of grass and stems of
dandelion heads.

restless; trembling in
swan-song reverie
shakes the shade and the long shadows:
dust-mites eat the words, kicking up
devils that spin and swirl and sway.

they settle, slowly, words digested, patterns
splayed like spilled ash, now here, now that way.

at dusk the butterfly will fold its wings and pass
into dust.

Burnout and Currents

2009-06-05T19:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, I was going to wait to post this information, but since I've spent the last two days in a non-working stupor as a result of too much self-inflicted stress, some bad gumbo and a total inability to sleep without dreaming about fascinating short stories I'll never write, I figured what the hell, might as well go ahead.

Sometimes people get what they deserve in life. Sometimes they don't even realize they deserve it (I reference the absolutely epic birthday celebration planned by my sister for my 25th birthday this past weekend), but they do. I've been friends with Randy (or Randolph, if you prefer -- he does) for just about twelve years this year. We met in high school, bonded over Smashing Pumpkins, bad poetry, Quentin Tarantino and an unhealthy love of Dr. Pepper, and we've been friends -- for the most part -- ever since. He's the guy I credit with getting me my current job. He's a great guy who's always willing to go out on a limb for a friend and help out where he can. Trouble is he's had no luck with women most of his life. Some of the girls he's dated have been great: just a bad fit. Others have had few -- if any -- redeeming qualities.

But he finally found the right girl. Her name's Michelle and she's one of the most talented women I've ever met. Plays a baker's dozen of different instruments, classically trained opera singer, gourmet chef, fluent in several languages, and she can fly. No, really, she's a flight attendant.

And now she's trying her hand at production.

The show is called Currents, and it's going to feature an amazing variety of talented musicians each hailing from very different musical backgrounds, all performing on the same stage, the same night. I'm lucky enough to open this show.

In Michelle's words, "Currents is Folk, Tango, Opera, Theatre. A love story. Currents of water flow together to create powerful forces like the music flows to move you in this extraordinary event."

That sounds just about right. I've met most of the other performers: Stephen Targett, pianist extraordinaire, Andrea Rebello (who I'm meeting tomorrow) and the composer Erika Crino. Oh, and Michelle as well, who's fantastic in any language. These people are pretty damned amazing, and at a level of musical aptitude I'm hoping will rub off when we share a stage.

The show (for those of you who didn't click the link) is happening Sunday, June 21st at the Gladstone Hotel (Ballroom). Doors open at 8, I go on at 9 to open what will be a 3 hour show. Cover is fifteen bucks, which I'm telling you right now will be well worth it. You can get tickets online here, or you can talk to me and I'll organize something for you.

These people deserve to be seen by the music-going public. Apparently I deserve to play with them. And you definitely deserve to see this show.

Hope you'll come. I'll post something in a few days that has nothing to do with me selling myself, promise.

Dream Journal? Really?

2009-05-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

Yep, really. I don't usually go in for this hippie-dippie kind of stuff, but I've decided I should start cataloging my dreams for your reading pleasure, because honestly, you can't make this shit up.

Last night I dreamed I was hanging out in my ancestral home on Gilley Road in North York (I grew up in that apartment and then moved back for the first two years of my university career. The house has since been sold) with my best friend/current roommate. I was on the phone to my sound engineer, discussing drinking plans, when who should appear but Greg's horrible former girlfriend (the one who was the catalyst for me moving back to Bradford and Greg spiraling into debt and depression for the better part of a year).

I had no idea why she was in my home, but instead of confronting her on this issue I decided instead to discuss her various shortcomings with DeGroot on the phone directly in front of her. She casually mentioned that I might hang up the phone or at least go into another room rather than trash-talking her more-or-less to her face and making myself "look like an asshole". I refused and instead started relaying her side of the conversation to DeGroot, at which point she chased me into the adjoining bedroom (that used to be my parents' bedroom) and tackled me to the floor. She began repeatedly punching me in the face and she was wearing a very sharp ring, so I told DeGroot I'd have to call him back.

I tried reasoning with her, but she wouldn't stop hitting me long enough to get a word in edgewise, so I started screaming for Greg to do something, because I was getting to the point where I was going to hit her back (she really was beating the everloving shit out of me) but I was concerned that she'd call the police and have me charged with assault if I did. Greg stood behind her and waved his arms ineffectually, not knowing what to do either.

Then I became aware of the fact that I was thirsty -- not just thirsty, but lost-in-the-desert parched. I woke up and drank a pitcher full of water.

Sigmund Freud would have a field day with me.

I don't think I'm wrong...

2009-05-05T19:27:00.000-07:00

Ever have one of those days where you get one of those great moments of self-reflection, step back and realize your life is awesome? I know, not too many people get those anymore. We're all mired in our own self-doubt, too busy grasping at higher awareness to recognize that our time is now, that this is the moment we're alive and we'd better stop and damn well pay attention before it gets away.

In the last two weeks I've written a treatment for a music video, a full script for what will become a web-televised short, and lyrics for several songs to be used in the same campaign. I had an interesting conversation the other night in which I was told I'd never make it as an artist as long as I kept being a -- I believe the quote was "corporate shill" -- and that I'd never find true happiness as a writer or a musician if this is the work I'm producing. But the fact of the matter is, this is what I do. Some people might call it bullshit, or near-art, or selling out. I don't take those people to heart, because I already know it's bullshit, near-art AND selling out. And I don't care. Because I love what I do.

Let me put it another way -- if what you love to do is make things out of wood, as several of my family and friends do, then what does it matter if you're making a table, or a cabinet, or a sculpture? The movement is the same. It's a movement of faith that drives us to create -- faith in what? Better men than me have tried to answer that question and continue to come up short, but it's faith nonetheless. Making a table with the same artistry and craftsmanship as you'd make a sculpture makes the table a sculpture, in my opinion. In fact, there's a school of thought that says the table is actually worth more because it's useful, and not just to be stared at. It's the same thing with words. I could do what's often been suggested to me -- go back to school, get my Master's degree, continue to study other people's words in the hope of one day passing them on to somebody else. I could go the route I've considered myself -- go back to school, get my Master's degree in creative writing, and be a writer as my full-time job.

But that's what I'm already doing.

I know too many people who got specialized degrees in fields of interest and, either by their own volition (or lack thereof) or by fate, wound up doing bullshit jobs for no money, never using their skills in their day-to-day. The best of them continue to pursue those passions on the side, but they're endlessly frustrated by the fact that they're doing meaningless work in the interim. Others are what the politically-correct among us term "lifelong students" which to me translates as "too shit-scared to give it a real shot so we'll stay in academia where it's safe and graded tangibly". I get tired of hearing artists piss and moan about never making a living at their art when they don't try. The ones that do make that effort (whether or not it's successful) get my full respect. But the ones that truly give me indigestion are the ones who suppose that I won't -- or can't -- "make it" (whatever that means) as an artist if I'm willing to do a job like what I do.

As far as I'm concerned, words and music are a priori tools AND products of artistry. I can look at the writing I do one of two ways, based on that premise. The lyrics I've been writing are supposed to be set to a "rap-rock" musical vibe -- not something I dig very often, and certainly a genre that's faded from popularity. I can either choose to look at what I've written for this project as shitty lyrics (which from my aesthetic standpoint they are), or I can look at them contextually and as a priori tools and products of artistry, and realize that, for what they are, they're perfectly suited. That I can alter my style to suit a genre I've no interest in, basically at will, doesn't make me a corporate shill or a sellout in my estimation -- I'd say it makes me a good craftsman. If you want me to build a table for you, I have to build the table you want, to your exact specifications. It doesn't matter if your specifications denote a shitty table -- if I can make that exact shitty table, I've done my job and I've done it well, and I can walk away with the understanding in my own mind that I've used my craft to make something that's pleased someone else.

Tell me, artists of the world, am I completely off my rocker here? Because I think I'm rather on to something. It's too late at night and I'm too burned out to expound on aesthetic philosophy, but the saying goes, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", not "beauty is in the eye of the jaded, full-of-shit-and-ego creator of the object".

I'm an actor because I act, but I'm a happy actor because I act and get paid. I'm a musician because I make music, but I'm a happy musician because I get money to make music. And I'm a writer because I write, because I have to write, because it's what I do, but I'm a happy writer because I get to eat the fruits of my writing. I do these things for a living, and I do these things for a life, and I think that makes me a blessed individual.

Self-reflection kicks ass.

Older Chests - Damien Rice cover

2009-05-05T06:34:00.001-07:00

Here's a sampling of my YouTube channel, since I haven't had the time to write anything of substance lately. Check it out; I've got a bunch of stuff up with more coming. Real blog coming soon.

T Minus 3 Hours

2009-04-03T15:01:00.000-07:00

Realistically, this is the first show I've ever played live, solo and for money. I don't know why I've spent the day being this nervous – it's something I've done a thousand times before. I know these songs like the back of my hand, because they're a part of me, and maybe that's the problem. There's more invested this time around.

This isn't some hole-in-the-wall coffeehouse in a backwater Ontario town, or a house party full of my friends who don't care if I'm almost too drunk to play but I can still weasel my way through Year Long Day well enough for the point to get across. This is as close as I'm likely to get to the “big time” – it's a venue that has been played by numerous big acts, in a city that's about as metropolitan as you're going to get in Canada. There's a cover at the door, and to get paid I've had to ask the people coming to mention specifically they're here to see Alexander James. I updated my Facebook music page today and saw that I have crested 90 “fans” – I'm actually uncomfortable using the term demarcated by the little blue box on my screen, because at the end of the day, who am I to be thinking of people gracious enough to dig what I do as “fans”?

It's different playing cover shows, you know? I can get up and play The Gambler or Sweet Home Alabama or whatever, all night, every night, until I drop dead of boredom, and it never feels like this. I've invested something into these songs; the set list I've come up with for tonight consists of some of the songs closest to me. All the same old bullshit runs through my head – what if I'm no good? What if I fuck up or break a string at the wrong time or forget words to my own damn songs? And even if I play to the absolute best of my ability, even if it goes off without a hitch, what if the people who come out who aren't already my friends (and thus biased in my favour) hate what I do? I've invested so much into this music thing: personally, emotionally, financially. To say it would be a shame if it didn't work out is something of a gross understatement.

I love what I do. I love to perform. Being onstage is the only place I want to be. I want to touch people, make people feel things when they listen to my music. And in a landscape coloured by thousands of musicians both better and worse off than I am, I desperately fear mediocrity. I either want to be great, or I want to hang it up. And I think I could be great, but I fight with my ego all the time. One part of me wants to believe, the other part is afraid of staining the art with arrogance by thinking I'm better than I am. Maybe that makes me a better artist. Maybe that makes me an amateur. Probably it makes me a little of both.

I spent the day talking to friends about my concerns, because I'm lucky enough to have friends with whom I can have that kind of dialogue, and they all did their best to reassure me. I didn't feel better, not much, but it did help to talk about it. But there's really only one person whose opinion truly colours my perceptions deeply enough to change my mood, at least on this topic. So I emailed my father.

From: Alex Krueger

To: James Krueger

Re: show tonight

So tonight is the big night; I'm going to go over to the Reverb with Sean around 8 to see what needs to be done as far as setting up goes. I have the song list in order and I think I'm ready to go. The humidifier has helped the fretboard issue somewhat (it's not perfect, but it's much better than it was) so I'll see how it is today (humidifying for the day).

On some level I'm a bit nervous as it's the first solo paid show I'm doing -- I really don't want to fuck anything up because this may be my chance to attract decent attention to start getting other shows, but on the same token I'm very excited -- I have really internalized your advice about being "real" and I think I can do that better when I'm onstage performing for a real audience. My biggest concern is the weather -- it's pissing rain down here and is expected to for the rest of the night, so I have a feeling that will affect the turnout, but really at the end of the day if I get to play a live venue I could be playing for the few friends who show up and it would be all right.

Any last-minute words of advice from a veteran bluesman?

Shortly after I received his response.

From: James Krueger

To: Alex Krueger

Re: show tonight

Approach every venue like it is your first time, and play every show like it is your last....keep the facial expressions to a minimum, and engage your audience no matter how small....you will do just fine if not better. Break a leg.

I ruminated on that for most of the day. I think what my father was trying to express in his typical quotable way was that I need to be honest and not get a swelled head , but also that I need to believe in my ability to connect with an audience through this medium, and to do it with as much passion as I can muster. It's probably the best musical advice I've ever received, and I'm going to do my best to take it to heart.

In my heart I know I was born to do this – or something like this. The only thing I've ever really been any good at is writing, and songwriting allows me to take that to the stage in ways that theater or comedy never could. I know I am a decent songwriter, a solid guitar player and a passable singer. I know these things, and I believe these things, but it's sometimes hard to translate that into the moment.

But when I think about being onstage tonight; when I step up to that microphone and introduce myself to a room full of strangers who are probably there to see someone else, and when I play the first strains of a song I wrote about leaving a nowhere town to do just this very thing, I know what I'll feel.

I'll feel the heat of the lights, and see the silhouettes of the audience, and I'll run my fingers over the frets of my new guitar, and even though we haven't gotten to know one another very well, I'll know it will do its job. I'll breathe deep, slide up, hit the right note, and it will all fall into place, at least for me. And if I can't do this for me, I don't have any business doing it for any other reason.

I'm going to take a long walk on a very short limb, and damn the consequences. This is what I do; this is who I am.

2009-03-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

10:50am on Saturday, just woke up from the longest sleep I've had in two weeks, and I walk out into my front room. I like the way the inset bookshelves along the east wall are filled to the brim on one side by Greg's extensive movie collection, even if I never have any desire to watch "Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Hockey" or the third season of "Friends" (to be fair that one belongs to his girlfriend), and on the other side by my personal choices of the "best of the best" of my library. Clearly the shelf isn't close to being big enough to house every book I own, but there's enough space for a few dozen, so I picked carefully.

Don't get the wrong idea -- I'm not a character from a Martin Amis novel who has to carefully consider what he displays in his lodgings out of a desire to subliminally charm and woo women. Other than Greg's girlfriend and my sister, women don't come to this house all too often. No, I made the decisions I did because I sit in this front room a lot, maybe more than I sit in my room, because lately I've taken a liking to sunlight and open windows, and trying to organize that in my room is a logistical nightmare due to the placing of my furniture. So I sit out here, on our glorious couches, and I like to let my eyes wander over the titles and remember what I was doing when I first read this or that book; why I bought it; who gave it to me or suggested the author. If I come across something out of place, something I don't read anymore or am embarrassed to ever have owned, it interrupts my reverie, kills my buzz as it were. So I'm meticulous.

Four prevalent themes stand out: music, philosophy, science fiction and classical literature. The Victorian-era classics I'll admit I mostly ignore -- reading Anthony Trollope or the Bronte sisters once is kind of enough for me. I don't deny their talent with words, and I do enjoy some of their works, but generally speaking I simply can't identify with their characters. They're either desperately poor beggars and street urchins, or else they're fabulously wealthy and live in cottages in the countryside and their time is spent determining suitable husbands and wives for one another's children. That's not a narrative conflict, that's a tea party in the Hamptons. Sorry, not for me. Highlighted memory: reading Robert Johnson while lying on a couch at my place at Yonge and Sheppard with last night's rum still running strong through my veins, desperately trying to prepare myself for an examination in a class I'd attended maybe a half-dozen times throughout the year. Everytime I fell asleep I dreamed I was Robinson Crusoe, stuck on an island entirely populated by U of T graduate students. It was the most horrible dream I've ever had.

The rest of the classic stuff is historically important, so I include it. I've got everything from Alghieri's Divine Comedy to Tolstoy's War and Peace, and I've read all of them at least once (except for the aforementioned War and Peace which I'm still trying to get through after ten years of chipping away at it). Mark Twain might be one of my favourite writers ever -- I need to buy more of his stuff, because at the moment I've only got his seminal works. Man, what a smart guy. There's a cat who knew the beauty in simplicity, in honesty, in telling a true story (even if it wasn't true). But I digress. Highlighted memory: I was first introduced to Dante Alghieri by an old friend of mine who fancied himself a poet, and once upon a time he was one. We were standing in Chapters in Newmarket and he asked if I'd ever read Inferno. When I said no, he immediately bought me the entire set. I read it in a week and it changed the way I thought about narrative poetry forever, and would later help to inspire my stage play.

The philosophy stuff is where people start accusing me of doing the Charles Highway "literature-makes-me-look-cool" trip. But the fact of the matter is, to be frank, I took as many philosophy courses in university that my degree requirements would allow. I know on some level it's all bullshit, because it's all a circular argument with no answer, but the hell with it -- I'm foremost a rhetoretician, so bullshit is more or less what I do, and I have nothing but the greatest respect for writers who can twist the words of an opponent's argument to suit their own purposes. Also, some of these guys had really interesting ideas about the world and the existential questions that preoccupy me most days. Kierkegaard's knights of infinite resignation and of faith spring to mind; the idea that you must believe beyond your capacity to believe in something in order for it to be true or virtuous; Kant suggests something similar in his theories on morality. One of my favourite thinkers is still Friedrich Nietzsche, because he made one of the simplest, most beautiful statements regarding his own writing I've ever seen of a writer: "Vademectum, vadetectum." From The Gay Science, it's Latin. Translation: "Follow me, follow yourself." He wasn't taking credit for his ideas; he was acknowledging them as universal truths to be discovered by everyone. That is at once the most humble and most arrogant assertion I can imagine, and I love that crazy old eugenecist for it. Highlighted memory: Christmas, 1998, we were having a friendly get-together at Kym's parents' house, and in the interest of fairness and frugality Kym instituted a Secret Santa policy. My "secret" benefactor was another old writer friend who kindly thought to get me a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I was fourteen that year, and the first time I read it all the way through it blew my mind and changed the way I looked at life. I read it for a second time ten years later, and it blew my mind again.

Ah, science fiction, perhaps my oldest literary friend. As a child I had my head crammed in books all the time, and because my public, social life was so stilted and misformed, I sank further and further into fantasy worlds, usually built in this or that imagined futuristic universe. My favourite was the galaxy as it was envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek, but as I grew older my tastes in science fiction grew far past that single imagining and embraced other, more complex takes on humanity's progress. My current bookshelf is stocked with the three heavywights of "hard" science fiction -- Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. This is not Star Trek or Star Wars folks, this is serious science fiction -- take Asimov's Foundation series, which deals with the concept of psychohistorics, in which prevailing social trends viewed over a period of time and as though they were the expressions of a single organism, can be used to predict upcoming prevailing social trends or macrocosmic actions -- in essence, a scientifically-provable way to tell the future. Heady stuff, man, and not for the Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk circuit (though I'm not knocking either of those immortal characters). Sci-fi isn't really in my lexicon anymore these days as I focus more and more on existential prose and music, but I still like to go back and read Childhood's End or Starship Troopers now and again. Highlighted memory: my dad introduced me to Clarke when he got tired of hearing me drone on about this week's episode of The Next Generation. I read Childhood's End for the first time when I was still a little too young to understand the implications of what Clarke was trying to say with his story, but it hit me years later when I realized just how much modern science fiction has aped off his ideas.

I know I make a big deal out of music -- and it is a big deal, don't get me wrong, maybe the biggest deal in my whole life. I love music; I love to perform, and the more I do, the happier I am. But at the end of the day, when everyone has gone to bed and the guitar gets put back on its stand, I will go back to my inset bookshelf and visit with the friends who have been with me since I was old enough to delve into their world. I'm a writer, first and foremost, and writers will always be the artists to whom I feel closest. I'll never read everything I want to read in this life -- human history has advanced to the point where I could read eighteen hours a day, every day for the rest of my life, to the exclusion of all else, and not even scratch the surface of what's been recorded by people in history and what continues to be recorded to this day, and sometimes that bothers me. But at least I can pull any book off any shelf every day for the rest of my life, and bask in the words for a little while. It's the words that matter, you know. It's always been the words that matter.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Musicus Updatus

2009-03-15T19:56:00.001-07:00

Apologies all around for the lack of recent blog activity; my day job has seen me editing and updating everyone else's blogs to the detriment of my own, and I've been busy with my own projects as well. That's sort of the point of this post.

I know the last post I made was light on content and heavy on self-plugging, so I'm going to try and fill in some of the blanks I've missed recently. Of the personal projects I'm at liberty to talk about right now (there are more coming that I can't really discuss until they're ready to go), the music stuff has been top of the list. Those of you who know me and follow my online activity are aware that I recorded a rough demo of original songs under the name Alexander James at the end of 2008, entitled The Yonge Street Sessions, with my good friend and sometime producer Adam Grant. The recording quality wasn't great; we recorded vocals and guitar on a single track through my little board and into Garage Band, so we couldn't really do much in post and unfortunately the only mic I own (a gift from my ad-hoc P.R. agent Maggie Chu) is fine for live performances but isn't terribly suited to high-definition recording. However, the point of recording the demo was to send a big chunk of my best original work to the Songwriter's Association of Canada for registry (to copyright my work with a reputable organization, so in the event someone else steals it and makes a fortune, I can sue for rights and presumably win), so I was happy with the final product for that reason. The Yonge Street Sessions has been distributed to friends and family for word-of-mouth proliferation and as a thank you to their continued support of my music, and the feedback I've been getting has been largely very positive, despite the shaky sound quality.

I've mentioned before that I work in advertising (sort of), and as a result a lot of the people I work with are talented artists of all stripes, many of whom are musicians or at least music afficionados. Circulating TYSS around the office has led to a number of new musical opportunities, one of which was realized this week. Our company's resident sound engineer, Aaron DeGroot, is only in his early twenties, and already he's an extremely talented music producer with a real ear for detail and a passion for creating extremely high-quality work on a very small budget. TYSS reached his desk and he expressed interest in doing some work with me, especially because the downturn in the economy has led to a deficit of hours at our day job (read: he's bored and wants a project). On Tuesday of last week we got together at the studio he operates out of his home and re-recorded two of my favourite tracks from the demo that hadn't turned out as well as I'd hoped, namely Year Long Day and State I'm In.

I have worked on multimedia projects with Aaron in the past and I already knew we worked well together, but I was pleasantly surprised to note that, despite coming from very different musical backgrounds, we shared the same vision for the production of these two songs. State I'm In is a roots blues-rock number I had originally envisioned as being played with a full band, but given that most of my shows are played solo and acoustic, I had to tool the song to that effect. For the new recording I borrowed Aaron's electric and threw down some fills in addition to the acoustic rhythm, and thanks to the glory of multi-track recording, the track turned out great.

I'm told by friends who dig what I do that Year Long Day is probably going to end up being the "single", so I agonized some over what to do with it. I ended up keeping it essentially as it was, but recorded some harmonies to include on key points of the song. Unfortunately, my inexperience with multitrack resulted in my accidentally upping the tempo, changing the song from an alt-folk ballad into what one friend termed "a lost Barenaked Ladies track"; also, while the harmonies worked technically, it sounds very strange to loop my own voice over itself. As a result, YLD is still a work in progress, but despite its nitpicky problems, I still rather like the way it turned out.

The truly cool part about working with Aaron was that I found it very natural. I am not an experienced studio musician (probably 95% of everything I've done has been live) but Aaron made it very easy to learn about the process. It's going to take some work on my part and just time and experience in general, but I'm very excited to learn more about how to actually MAKE music and not just come up with and play songs. His advice on composition was also very helpful -- he made prescient points without being overbearing, and from what I understand that can be a rare commodity working with independent producers. I was honoured to work with such a talented guy; I don't know if he has anything resembling an online portfolio for his work, but once I get some links together I'm going to post them here. You should definitely check him out.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the support and input of my good friend Randy Burlton, who originally showed up to watch a soccer match and wound up making some great suggestions on both tracks. And he carried the beer.

If you happen to be interested, you can hear the new versions of both songs at my Myspace music page. For some reason, Blogger has issues with embedding Myspace URLs, so here it is again:

www.myspace.com/alexanderjamesmusiconline

So that's part one.

Part two of the music projects actually has its roots in an unusual, six-degrees-of-separation kind of friendship that is already several years old. Back in 2005 I was living with a close friend and her fiancee, who introduced me not only to the aforementioned Adam Grant but also to another buddy of his, a talented guitar player from Port Perry called Sean May. The first time I hung out with this guy I had no idea he was a musician, but I was struck by his off-beat sense of humour and his acute musical knowledge. We hit it off and eventually it came out that we both played guitar.

I was far from being a disciplined player at the time, but when I heard Sean play for the first time I realized it wouldn't have mattered -- the cat is a killer musician who would have blown me out of the water even if I was at the top of my game. We started jamming together whenever he was in town, usually for a party or get together hosted by Adam, and eventually it became a bit of a tradition that people would ask us to play this-or-that song while we were fooling around.

A year or so went by with he and I playing more and more regularly at parties, and by this time the idea of forming an official two-man acoustic band with the aptly nicknamed Guitar Sean (I knew a lot of Seans at the time and had to differentiate between them somehow) was beginning to surge to the forefront of my interests. Sean introduced me to a genre of music with which I was unfamiliar -- in some circles it's called filk, though I prefer the term Sean and I have since coined: nerd folk. It's exactly what it sounds like -- folk-oriented music whose lyrical content is in some way influenced by what a lot of people would call nerd culture: science fiction, fantasy, gaming and the like. I wouldn't identify myself as a classic nerd (though I have interest in some nerd topics), but Sean definitely fits the mould -- the only thing keeping that boy from taping his glasses and wearing a pocket protector is the fact that when he plays guitar it's like audial sex.

At any rate, after some discussion we decided to make the band official and dedicate ourselves to developing a unique style based on the nerd-folk premise, so to that end I came up with the somewhat obvious name "Nerds With Guitars" (mostly because I thought the abbreviation N.W.G. was a cute homage to early rap artists N.W.A. because we're basically their polar opposites). The name stuck, and before long the parties at Adam's started to morph into pseudo-concerts featuring "Guitar Sean" and "Big Al" (a nickname I picked up due to some serious weight gain around the same time). We developed a small word-of-mouth following that has been steadily growing since then.

To date, almost all of our recorded work has been cover-based, though we do try to put our own spin on the cover songs we play. More recently we have finally found time to start writing our own material, based on the original premise of nerd-folk. Believe it or not there's a huge subgenre of people that are really into this style of music, but sticking strictly to nerd topics isn't quite enough for Sean and I. The result of our efforts is turning Nerds With Guitars into a filk-ish outfit with a healthy dollop of guitar comedy (the likes of which can be seen in artists like Stephen Lynch or Flight of the Conchords, two of our major influences). The combination of nerd-folk and guitar comedy opens doors for us that would otherwise be closed -- "regular" musicians would be out of place playing at a comedy club or comic convention, but we'll fit right in. With Sean planning a move to Toronto this year, it looks like this project is finally going to start taking off, and I couldn't be more excited. Currently, N.W.G. plays monthly at Adam's "what month is it and what excuse can we come up with" house parties, but as we're working on original material we hope to start playing out and about in the coming months.

Once again, if you're interested, you can check out some of our stuff at the other Myspace page:

www.myspace.com/nerdswithguitars

Everything up right now is live and as recent as February 2009, and while most of it is pretty standard cover fare, if you listen closely you can see where the humour comes in. Like I said, there's really a lot of stuff coming down the pipe in the next couple of months with this project, so hopefully I'll have more to report soon.

If you've read this far, you deserve a medal. In a lot of ways this was just a really extended link-whore post, but honestly, this is where my heart and soul have been going the last few months, and where they're likely going to stay for the next while, so I felt it deserved some fleshing out. I'm really excited about expanding these music projects into the professional realm, and I finally feel like I'm starting to get somewhere on that front. As it stands right now, I'm keeping my eyes peeled for solo venues because Sean doesn't live here yet, so if you know of a good place to start looking or if you're aware of a like-minded band looking for an opening act, please feel free to let me know. You'll get a shout-out when the record goes platinum. No, seriously.

Thanks for reading; next time I post I'll try to write something funny or otherwise engaging. Promise.

In brief (link whore session)

2009-02-26T21:38:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I'm linking and running here because it's almost 1am and I'm still not quite fixed after this bout of head cold I've been writing about the last few days. I've been beating my head on the wall trying to learn CSS and HTML and whatever the hell else you need to know to make a halfway decent webpage, and all I've come up with so far is a monochromatic Myspace page with a couple of songs posted. But, if you're interested, you can check it out at www.myspace.com/alexanderjamesmusiconline. I really didn't want to go with the Myspace page because after six months of this job I can safely say Myspace is the worst social networking site ever, but it seems as though every other two-bit musician has one, so being as I'm also a two-bit musician I bowed to peer pressure.

Conversely, my Facebook music page is still up; unfortunately it has a URL that is not at all conducive to business cards. So click that link instead.

And, finally, there's nothing up on it yet save an introductory video, but I plan to post videos of covers and originals on a dedicated YouTube channel I've set up as well. Yes, this is LinkWhore Central today, and I apologize, but I promise to have proper content back on this page soon. Besides, if the big redesign of the blog hasn't tipped you off, I kind of like to play music. Maybe you'll like it too.

Thanks for your patience; I'm going to go die now, and hopefully be resurrected in time for work tomorrow.

More Head-Cold Philosophy

2009-02-25T15:13:00.001-08:00

There's something about the little sicknesses that seem to qualify time. I'm not talking about the big stuff – clearly there's nothing positive to be learned from a stint with cancer – I'm talking about the little ones. The colds, the sinus infections, the stomach flus. Not enough to harm you, though you feel like you're ready to die some days, but enough to polarize things you normally take for granted.

For the last two days I have felt like somebody's trying to scrape a divot through my sinus cavity into my brain with the sharp end of a hypodermic needle. It's a fascinating sensation, if you try to isolate yourself from the pain and irritation of it and really feel it for what it is. I have always been able to imagine (or imagine I imagine) the feeling of intense physical trauma – some part of me wonders whether or not I didn't have a limb cut off in a previous life, because sometimes I dream about sustaining disastrous injuries and I wake up absolutely certain my arm's gone. I remember the pain, which is bizarre because I've never experienced anything like it. It's like that with the imaginary needle in my nose – clearly, nobody has shoved a sharp piece of metal into me recently, but I believe this is exactly what it would feel like. So it's interesting to ruminate on a little bit, and it takes my mind off the fact that it hurts like hell.

The other thing mild sickness seems to do for me is make me step back a little bit and realize how good I normally have it. Major sicknesses are debilitating and they're allowed to be. Nobody's going to criticize you for missing work or failing to produce any new songs if you've got a tumor the size of a tangerine slowly eating its way out of your skull. Minor sicknesses are debilitating too, because it becomes completely impossible to focus on anything for more than a minute or two unless you really channel your energies, and then you're exhausted much more rapidly than you'd be under normal circumstances. But nobody gives you slack for a head cold or a chest cough. In fact, I'd hazard to say most people will tell you to suck it up and get back to work; I know this for a fact because I've said it to employees and coworkers and friends often enough myself. And it's tough, and it's not fun. And I'm not whining about it either, because I'm trying to make something constructive out of my tiny misery.

It's those little moments in between needle-scrapes, when your head clears and you can breathe through your nose for a minute or two and your eyes stop welling up with sick-tears because you perpetually feel like you're going to sneeze. Those moments, when you remember what it was like (because it feels like it's been weeks) to be able to function like a regular human being, without having to manually navigate your thoughts through nebulae of mucous and whatever other fluids collect and spill whenever your body's fighting a bug. Those moments make you realize that under normal circumstances, things are pretty damned good after all. Sure, you might be kind of broke and your pantry is looking a little sparse. You can't afford to hit the bar after work with your friends for a beer, and you shouldn't really justify that pack of cigarettes you're planning to buy (even though you will anyway). But all in all, you're not doing so bad, right? You've got your faculties about you; your thoughts are clean and precise and not sticky at all; you can talk to people without running watery phlegm all over your lips and chin; you're actually saving money on tissue paper; your eyes can see across the block without little blotches obscuring your view of that falcon who's been visiting the apartment building across from your work on a daily basis. Things are All Right, and you can't really complain.

Then the faucet which used to be your nose resumes its clockwork drip, your sinuses seal up like an airlock on a space shuttle and your eyes start leaking like you're watching The Notebook whilst chopping barrels of onions. You're back in your little misery, and all too quickly you forget the brief moment, the same one you should take away from any troubled time.

My intention, whenever I manage to kick this stupid nagging little virus, will be to remember those brief moments, to not take for granted my day-to-day, which is Pretty Good, Considering. I'm supposed to be all about the truth, and this is just one more truth I get to discover. Hopefully I'll learn it and be a better person for the experience.

But in the meantime, I'm going to go put a healthy dollop of vodka in my Soothing Raspberry tea, because if I'm not going to get better anytime soon, I'd rather be too drunk to care I'm sick.

Robitussin Blues

2009-02-24T12:14:00.000-08:00

Head spun on cold medication -- again -- with only forty-five minutes to go in an especially tedious day. I have some concerns about visiting my father's parents on Sunday, because they spent really a lot of money helping me through my undergraduate degree, and now I use that very expensive piece of paper to justify my over-qualification for doing the job I'm doing. I wish I could actually write for a living, but if wishes were horses we'd all be well-fed.

I have difficulty concentrating when my head isn't where it needs to be; right now it's floating in a Robitussin haze while I try to clear the yellow goo out of my face where it's collected over what I can only imagine has been a period of months. It certainly feels that way -- it's like somebody took these futile leg-weights I wear everyday and tied them to my eyebrows. Ten pounds of pressure dragging face into keyboard karjwgioawrvmawi.

Forehead typing. Now there's a thought to chew on, no?

I called this blog the Politics of Being Good because that was going to be the title of my first novel. I never did get around to figuring out what it was going to be about, but I did reckon it was a pretty happening name. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to hammer out some kind of a cogent story from the things I write down here. I don't put a lot of stock in "maybe", though, because it's really all up to me, isn't it?

To whom, I wonder, do I keep directing these questions?

It feels like somebody's driving a nail up my nose. Down another swig of Recommended By Doctor Mom. And I think I am damn close to tapped.

Going to listen to a great blues band tonight. All it's going to do is make me want to play. For my money that's a good, good thing. The new guitar sounds great; almost makes me happy I fell on the last one. Almost. Going to play some blues. Robitussin blues, I think. It's purple, though.

Okay. This is why I don't write when I'm stoned, even legally stoned. You'll forgive this, loyal readers -- I will be back tomorrow with something more reasonable. I'll review the great blues band. That's what I'll do.

Assuming my head is clear as the big blue sky above me.

Confessions of a reforming music snob.

2009-02-15T23:25:00.001-08:00

Guess what time it is. Go ahead; I'll wait. It's like magic, that I'll get the urge to throw down in this stupid little writing space, and when I look at the clock it's almost always around the same time. Patterns and lines drawn in the sand, I guess; time has a way of looping back on itself and bringing us around to the symbols that matter.

I'm feeling a little pensive. I've written at length about music recently, but I've been talking like a reporter, updating a mostly non-existent audience about the comings and goings of my projects. I don't want to do that today, not at this time of day and certainly not on this particular day.

I have never understood how people can take music for granted. At times I'm even guilty of it myself -- you're at the mall or in someone else's car and a song comes on that you patently don't like. For me that can be a lot of different things, and it becomes a distraction -- an irritant -- something to be spat out and disposed of. What a crime on my part, and on yours.

Okay, so not every genre or artist is going to appeal to everyone; it's not supposed to and it doesn't have to. But being judgmental never got anybody anywhere. It bothers me to no end that people have such specific tropes in mind when they think of musical genres: the big one is "country". Apparently, digging country music bears the stigma of also owning a home on wheels, at least five belt buckles the size of dinner plates, enjoying huntin', drankin', and other things that end with apostrophes, and being married to an existing family member. What nonsense. Clearly, "country" is a genre label that is as broad and general as any other application of the word. I don't like a lot of what you might call the "new" country; Garth Brooks has never held any appeal to me, nor has Mr. Achey Breaky Heart -- you know, Hannah Montana's dad. But there are SO many other styles and subgenres (if you want to call them that) out there, it would be foolish and -- as I said -- borderline criminal for someone to paint with such a broad, misleading brush such a rich musical tradition full of genuinely talented artists. Translation: liking country doesn't make you a hick, and in fact you're the uneducated peon if you think Shania Twain is the alpha and omega of the genre.

But alas, I am obliged to swing a little mud my own way on this point. I have a slight tendency to be a little judgmental when it comes to music I deem unworthy or lacking in some way, and sometimes I'm right -- at least insofar as my own criteria are concerned. For example, if I say that a rap song praising the street credibility garnered through the purchase of a pair of "Air Force One's" lacks any semblance of inspired artistry from a songwriting perspective, I don't think too many people would disagree with me. That's not art: that's a shoe commercial, and I'm not interested in debating the nature of art as it relates to advertising -- Hendrix never had to defend his choice of bell bottoms in a song. It's NOT art. Sorry.

See what I mean about that judgmental streak?

But going forward I try (I really do) to see the bright side. Okay, does "Air Force One" say anything important? Not in the slightest. Does it have a danceable beat and is it catchy? I guess it is -- I don't dance, so I'm not an authority on what constitutes a danceable beat, but I am a musician and I know catchy when I hear it, and that song is catchy as all get-out. So in that respect, it fulfills its function in the musical pantheon -- let's face it, to paraphrase Brendan Fraser in Airheads, "Purple Haze" doesn't exactly have much to say either, lyrically speaking. Not everything has to be some kind of important statement or rich story; sometimes it's enough for a song to rock, or in this case I (begrudgingly) admit, it's enough for a song to groove.

I like to think of myself as being in self-imposed elitism therapy.

Then there are those musical genres that I don't necessarily dislike, I just don't get. The music makes no sense to my ear, and like so many of my forefathers who listened to the Beatles and heard only discordant clashing, I just can't wrap my head around the sound enough to make music out of it in my own head. It makes so little sense to me that I can't even properly label the genre(s?)...I've heard the terms "emo", "screamo", "scene", "post-punk" and a host of others bandied around, and I'm sure none of them are correct, but hopefully you get an idea of what I'm talking about. Like an elitist asshole I have listened to a lot of the better-known bands of this dubious genre and have in the past labeled it self-aggrandizing horseshit, full of middle-class white sorrow (read: self pity) mixed with pubescent rage against perceived authority establishments. Trite, immature nonsense, I figured.

Did I mention the part where this makes me an asshole?

Once again it's unfair of me to pass judgment on a host of musicians I only know peripherally, if at all. If I'm going to live the examined life, and definitely if I ever want to be taken seriously as a musician myself, I have to drop the pretentious bullshit (the same pretentious bullshit of which I'm accusing this entire genre) and do my research. As it turns out, there's more to the "emo/screamo/whatever" genre than I had originally allowed for -- big surprise. The genre is a wealth of incredibly talented technical guitar players, drummers, bassists, keyboard and MIDI players, turn table artists, and even singers and lyricists -- a fact I'd passed over because of the screaming (I can't always understand what lyrics are being...well, screamed) and the fact that many mainstream singers who actually sing seem kind of whiny to me. But for every sub-par Dashboard Confessional lookalike there's a tight, talented rock-influenced outfit like this one or a really surprising artist who's actually in line with some of what I do myself like this guy, and when I find out about them I feel like an even bigger prick for painting the entire genre with my dislike for what MTV tells me is representative of that music scene.

This is me, trying to stay real at 3am. I have a proclivity towards arrogance (as displayed by my use of words like "proclivity") but I try very, very hard not to let that affect the most important parts of my life that aren't people -- namely, the music (mine and yours). So I'm finally asking something of the folks who read this blog -- take a look at my profile if you don't already have a good idea what I'm about, see what I'm into musically and then educate me. Send me a suggestion or a link to something I've never heard of -- it can be in any genre, just tell me why it's cool and I'll check it out and probably write about my thoughts on it. Bonus points if it's you or a friend of yours -- I like to know musicians personally.

And since I haven't link-whored myself yet, for more information on what I do and why I'm so interested in not being critical of other people, check out my temporary music page on Facebook. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

11:32pm

2009-01-20T20:32:00.000-08:00

On the one hand I wish I had more time to sit down and craft really good material for this blog. On the other hand I'm pleased that I have too much else to do.

After spending most of my life in one or another academic environment, it's kind of an unusual feeling to be overwhelmed with work that is entirely of my own construction. When I was in school it wasn't at all uncommon for me to be overloaded by essays and whatnot, usually because I was too lazy or too distracted to get the head starts I really should have on those assignments. Since moving back to Toronto in September I have been pretty lax on myself; giving myself some time to breathe and decompress from the insanity of 2008, but in and around the New Year I found myself getting bored. And bored for me equals madness -- not that good "I'm a crazy artist" kind of madness, either: more the "I am contemplating more and more often, and with greater aesthetic detail, burying a pick axe in someone's head for stealing my seat on the subway" kind of madness.

So here I am, on Obama Day, after spending several hours debating the finer points of political science with a bunch of armchair bureaucrats and half-drunk skate punks, trying to write in a blog to explain why I don't like wasting time.

Music is better than booze, for one thing. Even sitting around plucking away and trying in vain to get down the needling details of Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen is better than staring vacantly at a TV screen while my ninth drink slips slowly and inexorably toward its final resting place -- overturned on my floor to collect dust and bugs. Or, God forbid, falling prey to the Guitar Hero fanaticism that seems to have gripped my roommate of late. Talk about wasting time.

I feel at this point that I have to run to catch up with myself. I've talked my whole life about doing what I love, all day, every day -- and suddenly, with no real warning whatsoever, it's upon me. I spend my day writing -- what I'm writing doesn't matter, it's enough that I'm manipulating words and weaving rhetoric -- and when I come home I have considerable musical responsibilities to attend to. This is more fulfilling than any girlfriend, paycheque or other external satisfaction has ever been. I am thrilled, happy, grateful.

And, goddamn it, thanks for pointing it out -- yes. I am very much alone. I guess the groupies are a little farther behind trying to catch up with me, and maybe once I get to that point I'll start feeling a little more in touch with humans. But for right now I'm holed up in my head, trying to wring every last morsel of inspiration I can from everyone and everything around me. It doesn't make for terribly reciprocal romantic liaisons, I would imagine -- don't try to love me when I'm in the state I'm in.

I'm going to cram that Guitar Hero up his ass. Love him like a brother, but I'm writing real music here, on an instrument not primarily composed of plastic. Do I feel superior? Yeah. Sue me.

On some level I feel kind of bad posting this kind of nonsense in an online forum -- because some people actually deign to read this stuff, and honestly I'd rather be entertaining you (all three of you). But sometimes I need to get this out of the way so I can get to the music -- like an archaeologist sweeping dirt off a fossil, except I'm more in the leafblower camp than I am in the little-noncy-brush camp.

What? You don't like it, don't read it! I didn't ask you to show up! Get the fuck off my lawn!

up for air

2009-01-06T21:02:00.000-08:00

God, I gotta tell you. So much of this is fractal bullshit.

It's 12:02am. My alarm clock says 1:02am, because I refuse to fiddle with it twice a year when we have our arbitrary time change; I figure it'll catch up when it catches up. I'm starving myself back into clarity -- I reckon I deserved a couple months' leeway as far as steam-letting went, and now the steam has gone right the fuck back up into my neck where it used to rest, and it's making me severely uncomfortable. I distract myself with stars and streetlights.

I really, really dig the streetcorners in this city. I could just walk from corner to corner all day and especially all night. You think I'm kidding -- go stand on the corner of College and Bathurst on a really cold night, just outside Sneaky Dee's, and watch the drunks trudge by. Or swing down to Queen and Spadina and close your eyes and feel the vibration of bodies looking for something to eat, something to swallow, something to put their teeth in. You truly, truly don't need eyes to see that kind of heat rising in December, let me tell you what. It's palpable -- it's like standing next to a blast furnace. It's awesome, and not in that skater-boy kind of way, either. We could solve the energy crisis if we could determine how to catch libido in a bottle. Put your teeth in it and watch it burn.

But yes. I missed this city. It's a terrible cliche to say it's in my blood or my bones, and my friends never believe me when I talk that way anyway -- they chide me for trying to cover up nine formative years in rural Ontario and walk cool like I was always Here and never There. But I swear to God I never really left. There was always something exciting, something alive about the wild urban versus the mild suburban to me, even as a kid taking his first trips on a subway. I know it sounds romanticized, and it probably is on some level, in that very Lorca "Poet in New York" kind of way, but this ain't New York, so I feel partially liberated from that most supreme of cliches.

Blood runs under these streets, I'm convinced of it. This isn't violence the way you're thinking; this isn't gangs and mobs and bike clubs. It's not cutthroat politics or nightmare jetsetting. It's just blood, you know? Life. The good stuff. The stuff that makes me feel something, now that I kicked myself once again out of another year-long binge. It's like every so often I come up for air, before the next steam ship comes by and rolls me back under again. And every time I come up -- well, this is a lot like treading water, isn't it? I'm not saying anything, I'm not going anywhere particular: I'm describing a moment, treading water under stars and streetlights and distracting myself from my wrongheaded clock.

Yeah, a lot of this is fractal bullshit, but I think tomorrow I'm going to take a subway ride downtown and invest in a magnifying glass, some Super Glue and a couple of mincy little tweezers. See if I can't start putting some of this together -- never know, right?

You people are going to get sick of this shit, really quickly and really soon.
Funny, though, how I still find you inspiring.

Localized Irritant IV: Hey YouTube -- thanks for nothing

2009-01-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

Yes indeed, a new year, a new gripe. You'll be seeing more work from me this year, I promise, but in the meantime I have to get the juices flowing again, and I find there's no better lubricant than sheer, unadulterated irritation. Welcome back everyone. Have a seat and adjust your faces.

So I'm reasonably sure, after four months working for a dot-com, that I've seen just about every permutation of YouTube videos featuring people:

a) getting hit with large, cumbersome objects
b) getting hit with small, fast-moving objects
c) getting hit with large, cumbersome and yet fast-moving objects like cars (whoever posted that gem was a little sick)
d) falling down stairs
e) falling off tables (I'm looking at you Scarlett)
f) being pushed off stairs and/or tables
g) getting struck in the nuts by small children (this one's for you guys out there)
h) slipping on banana peels
i) slipping on a buttered floor (my personal favourite this year)
j) otherwise maiming, injuring or damaging themselves, other people nearby, or property

Subjects A-J make me incredibly happy. I'll be the first to admit that pain is hilarious -- and for those of you reading this thinking, "Oh sure, wait till it happens to you"...well, apparently you haven't read any of my other stories. To me, few things are funnier than an unsuspecting younger brother being broadsided by a gigantic exercise ball, or an irritating roommate being pranked into nearly killing himself on a pre-buttered floor. I blame my propensity for this kind of humour on a childhood filled with "Three Stooges" and "Laurel and Hardy" reruns, that taught me physical abuse doesn't actually hurt or have consequences of any kind, but does make for hours of wholesome family entertainment. (At least in my family)

However, during my tenure at my current position, I've also been subjected to the other side of YouTube, the part that makes you break into hives every time you hear the words "user-generated content": I wish I had an appropriate title for these douchebags, but the only way I've heard them described (without epithets attached) are as "YouTubers".

Okay, there are a few entertaining video web logs (vlogs?) that I'll follow if I'm inclined, and one or two are real gems (the McDonalds Millionaire guy is an underrated genius), but the vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of the content on YouTube is as vapid, if not more so, than any text blog you might come across on LiveJournal or...well, Blogger, actually. Seriously, it's bad enough to have to plow through the mountains of blogging horse shit that clog up the internet without having to WATCH it too. I read about somebody's bitchy parents, or somebody's lame attempt at amateur political analysis, or somebody else shamelessly ripping off the work of known comedians, or whatever, and that starts veins pumping in my forehead. But my goodness -- it's a whole new world of rage to actually listen to these mouth-breathers speak...and to watch them is an even greater treat. I find words fail me in instances like this. They should have sent a poet. Or, contrarily, they could have just picked one out of the virtual gutter of weird-looking preteens with ninety facial piercings and a haircut that looks like it was done by Stumpy the one-legged barber (on account of the 45 degree bang-angle) who read garbage like "Twilight" and think it's a fucking documentary. I'll go there another time; that's hate within hate.

I just...I don't understand what prompts these people to share their thoughts with the world. Just because the venue is there does NOT mean you should necessarily utilize it. If you're going to blather your way through some kind of inane, half-formed opinion on Iraq or the current state of music or something (or else jump-cut your video to get rid of the hours of "ums" and "ahs" in between cogent sentences) you should at least think about maybe, I don't know, reading something other than Wikipedia for reference, or better yet, consider NOT SHARING your verbal diarrhea with the rest of the viewing public.

Same goes for all you twelve year olds who have taken it upon yourselves (or had it forced on you) to start playing guitar fifteen seconds after exiting the womb, so you now play like the bastard son of Steve Vai and an M60 machine gun. Okay, you're very good. No, I'm not jealous, but you're very good. And I don't blame you for wanting to share that skill with the world. FIND SOME NEW MATERIAL. If I have to listen to one more of you kids play Canon in D at a zillion miles an hour, or some weak metal shit that could just as easily be done through MIDI for all it sounds like decent melody, or even AC/DC at eighteen hundred times the normal tempo, I'm going to crawl through the screen and ram your Sears-brand shit festival of an axe right up your nubile, pre-teen ass.

And don't even get me started on all these gamer assholes who decide to take a good song (EVERY good song, it seems) that I'm trying to locate so I can learn it without having to download it, and set it to a video of some bullshit World of Warcraft ambush scene or -- worse -- Japanese animation of any make or model. I tried, guys, I really did. Lots of my friends are into anime, and they did everything in their power to find a series I might enjoy. No dice -- it all looks fucking stupid to me, and you're not going to change my mind. So do me a favour and keep your weirdo Full-Metal-Fruit-Basket-Ranma-Mon pseudo-porn away from the music I like. Isn't that the whole point of J-pop as a genre, so you people can learn Japanese empirically by singing along to your favourite theme song from yet another show about children piloting robots? Furthermore, who lets children pilot fifty-foot tall missile-toting death machines anyway?
...I just wrote the follow-up line to that thought six times and erased it six times because I don't want to come off as a total racist, so I'll just say "imagine your own Godzilla joke".

Anyway, I know -- why watch this stuff if it incenses me so much, right? Two reasons. First, it would probably be imprudent and potentially libelous to write about the stuff that's actually pissing me off right now, so I needed a surrogate, and internet losers are a nice, easy target (they don't move too fast on account of the years of immobility leading to muscle atrophy. Oh, and they're all fat, too). And second, like every other internet loser on the planet, if I didn't watch this stuff, I'd never know what to bitch about.

All I'm saying is that, with a little creativity and a little forethought, there could be tons of great "user-generated content" on YouTube, and maybe it would be a community that people would visit for more than just clips of their favourite films or "man-hit-in-genitals" videos. As it is now, it's just a virtual expression of the kind of talentless wasteland our culture has become. YouTubers: you make me very, very sad. And angry. Yeah, that too.

There seems to have been no real point to this post. I'll come up with something better next time.

Oh, and Happy 2009.

Fa la la la la oh fuck it.

2008-11-24T07:44:00.000-08:00

So I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. I'm prefacing this post with that statement so everyone reading this blog has fair warning that I'm about to be totally self-analytical and narcissistic. It's not entertaining, folks, but can you blame me? It's tough to be as entertaining as I am on a day-to-day basis without some kind of valve to let off a little of the existential steam now and again.

So I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. Ever since I returned to Toronto a few months ago, I've been trying to come to terms with the grand and sweeping and somewhat less-than-graceful forty-five degree segue the span of my recorded life took over the course of the last eleven months. Approaching the end of what qualifies, without a doubt, as the strangest year I've experienced in all twenty-four I've been breathing, I find myself reflecting on the spectrum of choices historically laid before me -- the ones I made consciously and the ones forced upon me -- and how they've led me to where I am, at 10:51 a.m. on 24 November, 2008.

Brief overview: this time last year I was dealing, poorly, with my move back to the home of my childhood, medicating my intense depression with too much alcohol and, contrarily, the promise of a move to warmer climes, a graduate education and -- ostensibly -- a happy marriage. I was working a comfortable job as the evening front-desk manager (read: receptionist) at a successful car dealership; my responsibilities were limited and the paycheques were sizable, particularly given the comparatively tiny sum my parents requested in the way of rent payments in exchange for food and shelter. Leaving aside the deep isolation I felt from my close friends and my fiancee (in Toronto and Texas, respectively), I had it pretty good.

But I'm not the kind of person who's satisfied with "pretty good" (in fact, I don't really know a lot of people who are). Therein lay my first choice: I could either a) take advantage of the time and relative fiscal freedom afforded me by my living arrangement and use it to create works of unimaginable brilliance, or b) drink myself into a foolish stupor at every opportunity and lament the molasses-like passage of time I felt all the more keenly due to my separation issues. So suffice to say I fumbled that ball something fierce by choosing option "b".

Fast forward to January. Relationship falls through, blah blah, I've covered this. Shortly after this revelation I discover I have not been accepted to either graduate program to which I applied. And I'm still at home, still fancying myself a receptionist, and still living most of my life in largely self-imposed artistic dearth. Relations with my family are reaching an all-time low as they see me, fucking up on a supremely grand scale, and doing little if anything to slow my descent. Their responses to my increasingly erratic and self-abusive behaviour span the gamut from concern to confusion to anger as they struggle to come to terms with the selfish, irresponsible, and ultimately pathetic choices I have begun making with reckless abandon. My family is, in a word, a saintly group of people who did their very best to support me, and deserve far better than what I handed out in those months.

Fast forward again to July. My contract at the car dealership is about to expire, and I have no employment lined up. Every ounce of my energy is invested in finding accommodations in Toronto, because somewhere in my vodka-soaked brain, one of the last neurons standing has fired, prompting me to decide that all my problems would be solved by a return to the city I have always considered on some level my home. There is no plan -- there is no forethought. There is only this overriding desire to get out: out of my ancestral home, out of the mind-numbing sameness of the cultural wasteland in which my family has established that home, and out of the artistic abstinence and emotional time-release safe into which I had placed the core of whatever constitutes me. The only way out, I reasoned, was via a Budget rental truck and a one-bedroom somewhere in the urban spread.

Of course, that line of thinking was a shining example of the kind of Grade A, not-from-concentrate, 100% farm-fresh bullshit I was feeding myself at that time. Because geography has far less to do with your state of mind than the kind of on-the-pedestal importance I was placing on my big move south. It's ridiculous to assume that if you can't be happy in one place, you'll be happy in another. I'm not downplaying the importance of having your own space -- not at all. I am a very private person (believe it or not) and I really needed personal space in which to breathe -- space I necessarily couldn't be afforded living with three other people whose schedules coincided with mine to the point that I was never really alone for more than a couple of hours at a time. But the point is, I was unhappy in my own head -- and I could have been moving into the Penthouse Mansion and it wouldn't have made me any happier. What was required was a reboot of my personality, a ground-up rebuild of what was going to be the New Direction, now that the Old Direction had detoured, Earnhardt-style, rather spectacularly into a brick wall.

Fast forward to August. I receive a call from my best friend, with whom I'd been cohabitating prior to my big move back home. Turns out the surrogate roommate I'd provided when I had to leave him holding the back at the end of August '07 was unexpectedly moving out, giving him little notice and less time to find new digs for himself. It wasn't without some trepidation that I agreed to move back in; I had made a promise to myself that I would never live with another person again. But with my finances significantly depleted by the months of self-pity to which I'd subjected myself, the chances of finding affordable accommodations on the timeline I'd set out were slim to none. So I bit the bullet and made the move. It was exactly three hundred and sixty-five days to the day that I'd moved out when I came back to the same neighbourhood, the same apartment -- even the same room I'd left a year prior when I set out to pursue the Old Direction.

Since then...since then, the New Direction has rapidly come to fruition. The tenets of the New Direction are as follows:

1) My goals are my own, and no one else's. I very nearly relocated my entire life to a foreign nation, pursued a degree in a field I had no real desire to achieve, and realized a life the dream of which was not my own. In my estimation, it was a bullet dodged, and I have no interest in revisiting such a self-debilitating course of action.

2) My art is the most important thing in my life. For too long I allowed the ambitions of other people to impede my creative outlets -- I neglected my music, my writing and my penchant for performance in favour of following a "responsible" lifestyle. I have never laboured under the misconception that my artistic endeavours will ever garner me anything resembling a secure future, I have decided unapologetically that the creation of art supercedes any desire I might have to live a life of comfortable mediocrity. It sounds painfully idealistic, but if I don't give this a fair shake I'll spend the rest of my life waking in the middle of the night with that familiar itch on the inside of my stomach wall -- the nervous insinuation of "what if".

3) I no longer make apologies for the man I have become. I have walked across coal pits of considerable distance in order to come to these realizations, and I'm not willing to compromise the wisdom I've gained through exercises of existential agony in order to placate the people around me.

4) In opposition to this, I no longer take for granted the people closest to me in my life. My close friends and my family stuck by me when people of lesser intestinal fortitude would have rightly closed the book and walked away. These are people of the highest integrity, and I am truly blessed to count these people in the number of those I can trust and on whom I can rely when times get tough, as they doubtless will again in the future.

5) Perhaps most importantly, I believe in myself and in the tenets of the New Direction. For too many years I clung to the trappings of modesty and self-deprecation in order to somehow validate my talent and my value as a person. And while I haven't necessarily walked away from that philosophy, I have come to realize that I have to look out for my own interests and sell myself on my own merits, because if left to their own devices, there are precious few people who will do it for me -- and it's not the job of those people that will. So my assumed confidence may border on the delusionally narcissistic -- but I can safely say I don't care.

My best friend nailed it the other night when I apologized for coming in late (again). I have spent considerable time out on the town, as it were, meeting new people and reacquainting myself with the city -- and, of course, getting up to all manner of hijinks that will serve to paint the silly, silly canvas of my day-to-day with engaging and entertaining material for songs and stories alike, and truth be told I'm happier than I've ever been whilst throwing myself into these situations, but I felt a degree of guilt that I have been living as I have -- in accordance with the tenets of the New Direction. My friend voiced it thus:

"Simply put, you have spent the last six or seven years living for everyone else. Relationships you tried to make work despite overwhelming odds, a university career you never enjoyed, trying to make everyone around you happy and comfortable and proud of you. This is the first time in your life that you haven't been accountable to anyone, and frankly I think you deserve the chance to live for yourself, for a change."

I had never thought of it that way, but upon reflection I think he makes a good point. I'm wired to associate my own needs and desires with some kind of weird guilt complex, like there are more valid opinions to which I should subscribe, like my time would be better served ensuring that I avoid stepping on any and all toes. Hearing my friend validate my desire to pursue self-exploration, regardless whether or not that movement lines up with what other people perceive to be the smart move, was exactly what I needed in order to finally start to feel good about myself and my day-to-day.

What the hell am I trying to say in all of this? I can't say, really. All I know is that for the first time I'm happy -- unequivocally and without the caveat of anyone else's happiness infringing on the simple, base enjoyment of waking up in the morning and doing what I love all day long.

The album is in pre-production. I'm writing new material for the page and the stage. I've even launched myself back into acting. If you'd told me a year ago this is where I'd end up I would have been shocked, dismayed that so much would fall apart in a scant twelve month span, in mortal fear of the kind of pain and self-recrimination that would be necessary to get here -- but maybe, if I'm honest, I'll admit that even a year ago I might have been just a tiny bit excited that I would get a shot at all the things I loved -- the things I was willing to give up for the sake of living into a role I would have been forced to play for the rest of my life.

I've discovered some pretty important things about myself recently. Foremost among them is that I deserve things, things I had until now ascribed strictly to other people and never to myself. I've fucked up large in my life, over and over, but the more I think about it, the more I think I might have finally afforded myself a legitimate opportunity to make good on all those things I have always said I'm about.

They say everybody gets a second chance. At long last, I'm starting to think they're right.

honesty.

2008-11-12T07:15:00.000-08:00

I

I am a liar --
I have been.

From air I called dust; phantoms;
I made them dance and
it was as though I had made them live.
They danced; not alive, they are
blown asunder in your breath.

I have stolen --
valueless, infinite.

Blood with blood I salved wounds
and taken from me I took back;
Your trust: your enduring faith,
again and again I took you,
valueless and paid for.

II

He watched himself fucking against a bed corner,
driving her into the mattress, her face away from his,
and the guilt in him, watching him, being him, denied him.
When she came, she looked back, into his face,
and he closed his eyes and wiped cooling sweat from his back.
Shortly afterwards he packed his bag.

III

I was soft --
self-determined endgame.

Father Jack and all the rest, in high
judgment seated among shadows and flags;
the impurity of mind, manufacturing ghosts,
the impurity of breath, making of them particulates.
Crushing paranoid collapse: remove the witness.

IV

He lay on his back where he had fallen in the gravel and mud,
and it seemed the stars were a cosmic baseball field mirroring the ground;
he knew fear then, by the stains on his jacket and the star-bright pins
of his eyes -- he knew his polluted mouth and his swimming teary vision,
and the words -- caution, always caution -- in his stereo-looped sense memory.
Stumble drunk Tuesday night, walking home to nothing.

V

I am called Traitor --
President-in-Exile, fraud.

Mirror-flash recognition; it's as we feared, Sir:
we've been compromised by
That -- you have always known That --
oh, his fractured Ghost, come to claim him, finally,
In His coal-mine eyes he will claw and
That will be his prison.

VI

Standing quietly with his hands muting strings, waiting for the words --
and they do not come. Hum pitch and stuttered coughs and
and
It's like waiting for dawn at two-twenty-seven a.m. Ring.
Aside-set for bruises, chair shuffle waste of time. He's choked, and
the audience has gone looking for another show.

VII

You, That -- we,
forgive him?
for
give him?
Oh, only in exchange.
Yes.

VIII

I don't know your God. I have not walked with Him; I don't understand His significance. These steps I walk alone, not in the sand. I leave no footprints to be followed, only breadcrumbs and blood.

I don't know your God, but I have run from your Devil. He is your Devil, too, after all, isn't he? A decade's worth of running, and the breadcrumbs are all consumed. That -- He -- there, behind me, cold on my shoulder like a lesson.

I have run from your Devil for ten years, and He has been My Devil; and I have been yours, and You have been His, and We are ourselves all angels.

And we forgive.

IX

Today I stand. I carve it in my arms, to remember, always to remember.

I am Myself, angel -- That. Fraud; Being; Perfect.

It's getting light. Finally, it's getting light.

X

Say it again -- make it real -- please, time is running out --

Today I stand.

Today I serve the truth.

adventures in writing

2008-10-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

(Written 28 August 2006, 8:06pm. I know I'm jumping round a little bit, but I'm finding more writing on my hard drive than I remember having. Bear with me.)

An exercise, right? Okay. Three glasses of water: Check. Cigarette: double Check. Sustenance: In Transit. Shower to feel human. Built like a human so I better act like one. Beer number one: yet to be cracked. Might avoid for the evening, might go with water instead. Doesn’t rot my brain like beer. John Coltrane on the tape deck. Will switch to Psychedelic Furs later, but fuck music for the moment. I remember making the transition from writer to musician. Kind of a cop-out, allowed me out of the writing gig. Letters are infuriating. Sound is painful, right? I talk and I talk and I remember standing and talking in Hart House summer 1999 and I remember the infuriation of the standing placation I received. It’s like comedy, right? It’s like making people laugh, except there are tears. There should be tears. There weren’t any tears summer 1999, except maybe mine when I went back to the concrete basement at 60 Gilley Road and wrote my first song. It started there, I think. I couldn’t imagine more placation and I heard that musicians are above contention. When I was sixteen that was true. More water. Somehow it’s intoxicating me, not the same way as beer and gin, intoxicating like I’m cleaning out my insides. It’s kind of a contradiction. I put in my eyes earlier and now they’re gumming up. I always get gummed up when I can see. Short staccato sentences, that’s what stream of consciousness is about, right? Who am I asking? Maybe I’m asking her. Maybe I’m performing to a sold-out show of one. I have to stop doing that, I think. I think I have to stop making my day-to-day an exercise in theater. Should I stop doing that? I think it makes me happy, I think it makes it safe to glance at the mirror beside me. My eyes are always worried, I think as I look sideways at myself: that profile in the mirror. I remember writing about the mirrors a couple years back, when I first moved here. When everything was different, right? Adding “right” to a sentence makes it less cliché. “When everything was different” on its own sounds like it walked of its own volition out of a Harlequin Romance novel and onto my page. I don’t know how it got here, don’t ask me. I thought I buried cliché back when I burned secret cigarettes outside my parents’ house and then ate leaves from trees hoping the chlorophyll would cover up the smell. From what I understand it didn’t. I find myself going back and correcting small errors in continuity as I move along because the goddamn green squiggly lines on the Microsoft Word screen irritate the shit out of me. Stop don’t think. Don’t read back over. She said it’s a bad idea, and I believe her. She could tell me the sky was fuchsia and I’d probably believe her, at this point. It’s getting hard to concentrate around the burning pit of my stomach. It’s not hunger, you understand. Humans get hungry and I’m a freezing cold animal machine, just because I’m not as hot as Henry Rollins, who is and was and will be the Hot Animal Machine. I’m gears and wires and faulty circuit boards wrapped in a chewy mammal shell. I read yesterday that pollution is shrinking the genitals right off of polar bears and it makes me remember the polar bear tales my dad brought back from Churchill Manitoba 1979. I don’t know why dates are that important to me, but for some reason they give me something to hold onto. Dates are important – history is important. It’s history that makes us. That’s what I was trying to explain to Crazy Sean, that all the Buddhism in the world can’t eradicate memory. It reminds me of that movie, the one with Jim Carrey, the one I actually liked. Erase the memory, erase the experience, erase the importance, live in a vacuum, grow like astronauts, come back to earth with back problems, you dig?

Burned the motherfucking chili. Spent ten minutes scrubbing the pot, the new one I’ve been trying to keep in good shape for the sake of the married couple it belongs to. Now my hand doesn’t work right, won’t type properly. People wonder why I’m tied to the mundane – here’s the proof. Writing, even writing like this, dragged me out of synch with the rest of the world, and as a result I damaged something important to somebody else. Isn’t that always how it works out one way or another? Decided on beer after all. For whatever reason, alcohol keeps me in touch with the mundane, reminds me to eat even while telling me I shouldn’t, gives me an excuse to burn the chili. Now my hands are shaking, probably not from withdrawal Fucking green squiggly lines are telling me that I should have written “and gives me an excuse…”. Like I didn’t goddamn know that. You’d be surprised what I’m aware of, given the opportunity to elucidate it. I’m feeling it now, the desire and intense drive to stop right here, go eat my burned-ass chili, maybe watch a movie, maybe the rest of American History X that I started the other day. It’s overwhelming, the desire to stop. I don’t think there’s any real reason for it other than laziness, at least I hope there isn’t. Otherwise there might be some – fuck, some validity to the idea that something’s trying to stop me. It certainly feels that way. My hands are fucking up and making me go back and fix typos, I couldn’t even think of the word “validity” a second ago. I’m concentrating on John Coltrane, I’m trying not to give in. My eyes are getting gummed up again, make me leave, make me go take out my contacts, then go wander, go wander around my apartment, maybe have a smoke, maybe finish this beer, maybe go eat and watch TV and kill kill kill my brain. Rot it out, replace this pain with the Simpsons or something. Don’t think, for God’s sake don’t think, right? There I go asking questions again to people that aren’t there. I am holding on to an image of her and trying to remember what makes me this way. I’m not that deep, goddamn it. I’m not that tortured, I have no reason to be. There’s this little Jim Morrison that lives in my head and stares in the Narcissus pool all damn day. I’m not this important for fuck’s sake. I’m performing, I’m a parody of whatever I’m trying to be. I’m the ice-cold animal machine and I’m programmed to do nothing other than what’s required. I’m trying so hard to break this ceramic cover that I can see through and can’t reach through, you dig? Like I have to get through it, like I sealed it up and then forgot that I needed to get in and out of that room. Drink of beer, drink of water. Eyes squeeze shut. They open again and nothing is solved, nothing is clearer. I don’t want it to be clear, I want to obfuscate this and everything so I can not do what I’m trying to do to myself right now. That’s what it is: if I get back in touch with this, with whatever it was that made me that way, I get back in touch with all of it. If I write I touch it and I’m really trying to be a better person. Here’s the next step now, an intense desire to drink. It’s like a cold pit in my stomach, a prelude to burning that cools down to a nice warm expanding feeling in my limbs. The cold animal machine powers down and simmers lukewarm in gin and maybe a little bit of lime or something like that. I can smile then. The beer is a mild approximation, but it feels good. I’m calmer, now. The ceramic is loosening up a little around the edges and the words are starting to come more smoothly. A deep breath, then I let it out. I feel better. The only problem is now I’m more susceptible to that intense desire to stop, now it’s more of a “why keep going” than a directive to stop goddamnit for whatever reason. Now it’s more of a time to relax vibe, put your feet up, you’ve got Coltrane on the deck, put on something else, put on something you can halfheartedly play along to, pick the same old strings in the same old way, don’t think, don’t create, birth is painful. It’s easier to play somebody else’s songs, you know that? It’s easier to read other people’s poetry, even easier to read my old work, because I’m comfortable in the notion that it wasn’t me that wrote it, you know, it wasn’t me that traced lines and lines and lines and lines along my arms and along the mirror with a rolled-up twenty, it wasn’t me that did those things, that monster poetry thing isn’t me you know? It doesn’t have to be me, at least, I can be a better person, I can change and I can get better and I can leave it behind leave it behind leave it behind safely in the past where it can’t get anybody. Of course I’m lying, of course I have to take responsibility, of course I can’t put it off any longer because I’m trying to be a better person because that’s my thing, servo verum and all that, got to make it true if it’s going to be true. It’s only going to be true if I can say it in the mirror so say it in the mirror. It’s true it’s true. I take responsibility and I accept the consequences and I won’t do it again, not ever. I’m leaving it behind, I’m stopping, I’m stopping, I won’t hurt you anymore, I promise and please believe me when I say I promise because I promise. My hands are shaking and I can’t control it because it all comes back. This is why I stopped, don’t you understand that? I mean, come on, who wants to live like this? Who wants to have to exert this kind of control all the time, who wants to be this way? I know. This is unhealthy, this isn’t an exercise it’s a waste of time, I’m going to drink my beer and pick my old songs and be obscure and be obscured, why won’t you let me? Can you still love me if I’m obscured? Can you still love me if I’m not a poet? Can I be normal and still experience the extraordinary with you? I don’t know if I can, I don’t know if you’ll let me lobotomize myself that way, or let me keep lobotomizing myself that way, because that’s what I’m doing you know, I’m flushing it out, that’s why I like water because it’s flushing out all the disease. I’m never ever going to read this again after today, I’m never ever going to do this again after today, this is disgusting, this is a waste of time and energy and a waste of electricity, why can’t I just go play a video game or drink more beer or something? Since when do I have a code to live by? Since when do I have anything to prove to anybody? Fuck you for making me do this. I don’t mean that. This is so hard. My skin feels like it’s crawling, I don’t know how much more of this I can take. Maybe I should eat the burned-ass chili and step back for a minute, I think at this point it might be healthy. I promise I promise to come back to it, I promise, okay? I’m going to just eat and come back. I’m going to just try to feel more human again and kill the pit in my stomach and then I’ll come back. Deep breath.

10:33PM

My Psychedelic Furs tape is dead. It’s twenty odd years old, I guess I can’t blame it for crapping out. It’s too bad though; I like that band. Iggy Pop also went down for the count as Real Wild Child was on the other side. I’ve decided that Iggy Pop is what I’m into for the moment, though, and so I’m rewinding another tape…it’s Iggy with Bowie somewhere live I think. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t care. Long as it’s loud and grating. I was just outside on the deck for a cigarette and the skyline looks like the world’s longest bleeding mouth. Looks like some sadistic city planner took an Exacto knife right across the horizon and plated it with glaring orange lights. I’m beginning to wonder whether it was a good idea to fuel the ice cold animal machine because the deeper I dig the more regret I find. The gin is helping, but not much. I feel it chewing at the corners of my perception, like something I can only see out of the corner of my eye. I seriously considered the amount of time it’d take me to get to the first floor if I stepped off the balcony. This is part three. If it can’t stop me from writing through laziness and booze I suppose it’ll do whatever it takes, right? I’m not asking you, I’m sorry. You don’t know the answer. Lock me up. Seriously, I think I need some time away. Nice white walls and a padded room. If there’s one thing this has taken away from me it’s the desire to avoid cliché. I can honestly say that I don’t give a fuck anymore. I’m sweating right now and yet I’m freezing cold. Maybe I am getting sick. Maybe I’ve been sick all along. What if this is some kind of mental illness? What if none of this is any good, it’s just symptoms of a disease and I don’t even know I have it? I want to feed this music directly into my head and turn it up as loud as it’ll go. Iggy’s got a fever and so do I.

just play

2008-10-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

(Written 27 March 2007, 11:53am)

Slide up, hit the right note and the band comes in just as sure as if I was holding up the little stick, that magic wand they give symphony conductors. Watch me for the changes. And I can’t help but think, who the fuck put me in charge? What do I know about lonesome highways east of anywhere, let alone some state so foreign to me it might as well be Mars?

But it is magic, after all, isn’t it, when thirty years’ worth of stale smoke and freezing midnight load outs comes in, in unison right behind me, waiting to execute that progression and give me room to sing about what’s more or less fiction to me. It’s like war: you have to trust your brothers to keep you safe, out of the line of scrimmage, to give you some covering fire to get you through to a foxhole between verse and bridge where you can’t do any more damage to the words, where you can slide up and hit the right note and let that be your validation.

My fingers form chords like prayers; please forgive me father for I am a sinner doing wicked acts, but I just can’t seem to stop. This is my alleluia, can you understand that, this is my movement of faith. It’s God talking through us in a minor key, all of us together like we’re a bummed-out, small-time host, holding secret worship under cover of sticky tables and tobacco clouds. It’s a whiskey confessional: forgive me, let me do my penance right here. It’ll be stigmata fretboard and sacramental bourbon, and I’ll bow down to you, I’ll be the altar boy in your church. It’s magic, isn’t it, a sacred mystery, Father, Son and Holy Gibson.

Raise my voice, crack and waver, imperfect until I slide up, hit the right note, and it all comes in behind me. And if that’s not sacrifice, then forgive me one more time. Count it in: one, two, three, four.

notes on notes

2008-10-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

(Written 27 March 2007, 9:28am)

“The most important thing you can remember,” my father said, “is that it’s not what you play.” He paused then, exhaled twin columns of blue smoke from his nostrils. “It’s what you don’t play.” He never moved when he talked that way except to bring his cigarette to and from his mouth, red dot glowing in the dark of the garage from out of swiftly graying beard, and then it’s all lost behind a cloud, blue on black and fuzzed out. He never looked around either, when he did this; he stared straight ahead like he was building the fourth wall, like he was on TV and his only audience was a camera lens. Nobody’s there but everybody’s watching. Like a VH1 special: “Behind the Sophist”. Everything was about life lessons, he use to say, or at least he did through his talking. His words would articulate in shapes out of the smoke and I always wondered how anybody could get that much distance out of a single drag; it was like his lungs were full of dry ice. Iron lungs producing fog, iron brain forging new tools out of melted-down old cliché. Listening to him talk was like a soliloquy entirely built out of quotable one-liners. It’s what you don’t play. Take care of the pennies. Let people think you’re stupid. If you’re warm and comfortable. Look at yourself in the mirror. It’s not what you play.

“One note.” Pause, exhale. “One note, held the right way by the right player, fills a room in a way the Steve Vai’s of the world never could, no matter how many sixteenth-notes they played in a second.” Inhale. Ember lights up eyes boring through east wall. “You can play with anyone if you’re a respectful player because – ” Exhale. I mouth the next words with him, safe because he’s focused on the audience he can’t see. “ – because there will always be people who are better and people who are not as good as you are.” More or less, I think. But I don’t say it. Instead I say, teach me. I imagine he’s smiling wryly at the lens, in the dark, while he mechanically raises and lights another smoke. Zippo flash. He’s looking right at me and he’s not smiling. Lighter flashes out: ember bounces like a laser sight and I hear the chair creak as he leans back.

“I can’t do that.” Says it like I should already know. I don’t, and I tell him so. Exhale, through the teeth this time, like a filter on a coffee pot. “I’m not qualified.” There are always people better. Let them think you’re stupid. But I didn’t get that.

If I could have thought “self-effacing modesty” I would have, but instead I look for the camera, the teleprompter that convinced him this was what I wanted to hear. Good for ratings, but too cerebral for the target audience. And anyway I was thirteen and had never played a bar, not yet, because who wants to listen to halting scales and “Boogie Bass” exercises when there were a million tiny rock stars to choose from, all playing “Texas Flood” almost convincingly enough for me to believe the telephone lines really were down.

“Better you develop your own style,” like he read my mind, “rather than parroting somebody else’s. But it takes time.” How much time? If thirty years isn’t qualification enough. Smile for the people watching at home. One more cliché – to thine own self.

The smoke hung in the air after he went inside to mix a demo tape for the young singer-songwriter who was living with us. It’s what you don’t play, Dad, I said to the east wall, tasting the blue smoke, unfiltered, the whole atmosphere of the tired cliché.

the joys of self-analysis

2008-10-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

(Written 21 January, 2008, front desk, Dave Wood Mazda)

I am officially sick of self-analysis. My stomach feels like I swallowed a length of tubing and my mind churns in its ever-efficient mechanics but it's as though something in the wiring has been stuck or rerouted so all that work just turns into a degenerative feedback loop. I'm almost certain it causes damage: definitely it causes the wires to overheat.

I spent the weekend taking part in wedding festivities for some close family friends who tied the knot on Saturday. I even played a song for the couple's first dance and danced with the bride myself. I drank some vodka. I ate some cake and smiled at everyone. I stood beside the dance floor and watched people dance.

Almost everyone there is engaged to be married or is already there. The people who are engaged are so excited, the energy is almost palpable. The people who are married are either very happy or totally despondent and on the edge of a divorce. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of middle ground.

I talked to a friend of mine whose wife left him for his brother a couple of years ago. It took him a long time, but he lost a lot of weight, got his life in order and now has a beautiful girlfriend with two children of her own, and he loves all of them dearly. Obviously there is no fixed bar by which to measure the varying levels of misery and joy that come from interpersonal relations.

The words people speak at weddings are so powerful even though they've become clichés thanks to thousands of Hollywood romances. Until death, to have and to hold, cherish, love, protect. This is heavy stuff, not to be taken lightly or undertaken for the wrong reasons. I really hope the new Mister and Missus have enough of their shit together to be able to persevere in the face of odds that lean farther and farther against them with every passing fiscal year and every newly released set of statistics.

The funny part is I don't even know them that well, personally speaking, but I just think so highly of their commitment to one another and the way they present themselves publicly that I can't help but hope every good thing for them. It makes me happy to know that some people are still good for other people, and that even in such a jaded age we can still have something as neat as the concept of undying love.

I'm not sure I know what that is, empirically. Everybody thinks they know; everybody says when you know you just know, and that's all there is to it. Of course that isn't true: it's hard work, loving people. Humans are a vast tapestry and all that, but people seem to share certain characteristics in common with one another, and almost all of those fall under the category of weaknesses. Jealousy – God, that's a big one. Possessiveness has got to be the worst feeling in the world for a lot of reasons, but the most difficult part of possessiveness is the instability it introduces into your life. You can't control anything, not really – you can wish as hard as you can to the contrary, and even devote your whole life to working against it, but chances are the sun is going to rise and there's nothing you can do to stop it. So, not being able to control it can be frustrating, especially if you really, really don't want the sun to come up for some reason. In Alcoholics Anonymous they equate getting over that feeling with "serenity". That's an interesting idea.

Initially the word "serenity" calls to mind images of transcendence or at least elevation – you have to be above pettiness and insecurity in order to really let it go. I don't know how you go about elevating yourself that way, and honestly I don't know if I agree with the idea anyway. I don't like to think that you have to get out of your body or out of your head in order to accept the things you can't change. In fact, that sounds a lot like an excuse an alcoholic might offer for drinking: I have to get out of my body or out of my head to let it go, and alcohol is a vessel through which I can do that, albeit temporarily. The fact is they're only half-right, because you don't actually go anywhere – you just put blinders on for a while and convince yourself that if you squint real hard and turn the lights down you'll see something that isn't there, or more often, you won't see what is there.

So what do you do instead? Alcohol and drugs and exercise and sex and anything physical don't give you the ability to get out of your head, they just focus your energies elsewhere. And that's evasion. I have always been the kind of person that feels an intense need to meet problems head-on, but my characteristic risk-aversion makes it a formidable and sometimes seemingly-impossible task.

That's why serenity as I've imagined it here has always been so attractive to me. It's easier to cloud your vision or concentrate elsewhere than it is to face up to something unpleasant and "deal" with it, so to speak. In fact, I'm not sure I even know how to face up to certain things. I do know everything that the books say, everything shrinks tell you. I do know every tactic that has been turned into a cliché by the Doctor Phil generation.

I think the problem is that I, like most people, believe in their heart of hearts that there has to be a pain-free solution to a problem. That's where that nasty control habit comes back in to play. I figure if I can control enough elements of a situation I can make it turn out the way I want it to, and barring that, I believe if I can control enough elements of myself – particularly my subconscious and my emotions – then I can get better faster, skip the mourning process, hop over all the innate pain of that process, and get to the good part. If I can just shut myself off and stop self-analyzing to the point where I'm dissecting my own organs, if I can just shut myself off and stop feeling things – things I think about too much – then I'll get through just fine. Of course, that's all malarkey, because nobody can do that, least of all me with the way my brain works.

So serenity is out, control is out. I have no idea what that leaves. Except – maybe writing, and music. I've stopped counting clichés at this point, but I think it might have a kernel of truth to it. Unlike whiskey or mile-long runs, I am not focusing my energies elsewhere or hiding from anything when I write, or when I play. Last night when I played the wedding, the song I performed was a somewhat less saccharine love song than others I've heard at similar functions, and it was goddamn hard to get through because all I could do was think about how it has applied to my life. So I sure as hell wasn't avoiding by playing that song. In this particular situation I was giving someone a gift – expressing hope for their life together by playing a song that voices a lot of positive sentiments. It was no longer "my" song in that regard; the pain that I associate with it didn't matter anymore in the face of its importance to the two people for whom I played it. It became "their" song instead, and was imbued with all the strength of their feelings for each other. I'm not trying to be overly emotive or melodramatic, because if you think about it that's what songs do. They suggest tones but their true life is in what the listener invests.

When I listen to the music of my youth I am almost overwhelmed by very strong sensory memories because of the relation I have, personally, to that song. Wonderwall was a chart-topper in 1995, and every time I hear that song on the radio I am, in a very real sense, transported back to that time, nearly fifteen years ago, and I can smell stale cigarettes and taste the stickiness of Coke in my mouth and feel my stomach churn with familiar, pubescent anxiety. Other songs I relate to differently, and those relations change over time. Your Winter was a song I couldn't listen to for years because it brought back painful memories of a failed relationship that I had desperately wanted, at the time, to succeed. When I listened I could see her eyes and smell the detergent she used to clean her clothes and feel the roughness of the second-hand sheets on her bed, and it felt like somebody was stabbing me over and over again just like it did the day she broke it off. But time changes people. I listen to that song now, and I still really like it, but I no longer get the stabbing feeling, because I've since built other relations with that piece of music.

Can you do the same thing with people? Can you relegate your relations, the trappings of what feels like a totally different life, into a particular partitioned area, leave them there, and start fresh? Shit, I don't know. But I do know that I am starting to notice patterns of weakness in myself, and to reference AA again, the first step is admitting to it – seeing through the blown glass that you put up in front of your face to distort the world and yourself to your liking. I want to smash that glass so that I can see what's beyond it, what's actually there. I want to listen to people the way I listen to a song and impart my own meaning, get something out of it other than what was given. Above everything else, I want to feel this, not shut it out or hide. Congratulations to my friends on their marriage. I got something out of it too.

two years in pictures

2008-10-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

(Written mid-January, 2008, front desk, Dave Wood Mazda)

Snapshot – let it go. Flutters, falls into the trash can. There are too many reminders floating around this room as it is, so it’s a damn good thing that most of my life is packed into boxes. One of these days, when I get settled somewhere, I’m going to have to take everything out of those boxes and figure out what to do with it. I guess I’ll have to let it go. I would love to leave everything in storage, but unfortunately I have to face it sooner or later. I think about the way her skin smells. I don’t want to remember these things but I have to, otherwise the last two years really were a waste of time, and I think that would make it even harder.

Snapshot – drinking coffee outside of Starbucks in the Target plaza, because she thought the coffee from the store inside was inferior. I took a picture of the Starbucks sign, jokingly trying to insert myself into another one of those things that she’s good at and I’m not. She held my hand and we took pictures of ourselves. Later I would tell her she looked like an angel when the pictures came out.

Looking out the big bay window at the car dealership, I am coming to the realization that, while the months from January to March are always hardest for me, this year might be the worst to date. The weather is up and down like a toilet seat; warm and rainy one day and freezing cold and snowing the next. It’s playing havoc with my health, I think. All the trees are brown and gray and they match the sky and the pavement. Snow falls like Styrofoam, some of it melting on the ground, the rest collecting in mushy half-water on the windshields of the display cars in the front lot. It looks like shit, and it does nothing to improve my mood.

Snapshot – lying in her bed despite the fact that my greater weight causes the mattress to slant almost imperceptibly. She calls herself the Princess and the Pea, and I laugh. She is so sensitive to everything, and I am so careful. We move the mattress, switch it around so the slant doesn’t bother her. We can make anything work, I tell her, if we can make this damn mattress comfortable. She says this is the best New Years ever.

Tonight I am leaving work directly to go see my best friend in the city. I don’t know what we’re going to do, since everyone else in the area has other plans. I’m bringing my guitar with me, not out of any real desire to play it, but more because I don’t want to be without it if our plans suddenly involve women and drinking and song. I realize that I have neglected my playing a lot lately; I’ll have to rectify that if I’m to play at that wedding next weekend. I’d like to make a good showing for the bride and groom, even though a wedding is probably the absolute last place on earth I’d like to be. I want to ask my friend for advice, but his track record makes him the wrong person to ask.

Snapshot – she’s screaming into the phone, long and loud, like she’s emptying out. She’s been sobbing for an hour, but she hasn’t hung up. I stay quiet while she screams, and in between I tell her everything is going to be okay, that I love her, that I’m not going anywhere, that I’ll always be there, on the other end of the phone, when she has to scream and no one else can bear to listen. She hangs up on me. Later, when she’s calm, she’ll apologize, and I’ll tell her again that there’s no reason to.

There’s something about this weather that makes everything feel vague. I’m vaguely tired, my stomach feels vaguely ill, my eyes are vaguely sore. I have only a vague idea of what I’m going to do next, now that my graduate applications have been mailed to two very different places. If I get accepted to York I guess I’ll move back to the city, but I don’t know how I’m going to afford it. It might make more fiscal sense for me to stay at my parents’ house while I go to school, but I don’t think I could deal with living in that little box, constantly surrounded by people who watch my every move. I’m starting to hope more, surprisingly, that I get accepted in Texas. The prospect of moving alone to live with strangers and attend school in what basically qualifies as a foreign country is starting to become more and more appealing. The weather is good there; every time I’ve visited the Fort Worth area the sun has been shining, even in the wintertime. It gets a little hot for my taste in the summer, but I’d gladly deal with the cost of air conditioning if it means my world isn’t white on gray on brown for nine months out of the year.

Snapshot – we’ve been fighting again and I tell her to take me to the airport, that I’ve had enough. We face each other from a few feet away, my coat already on and my bag in my hand, her eyes denoting a solid wall of anger and indifference. But I know better. It takes me only a second to drop my bag and pull her to me, and when I do she collapses into tears, and so do I. We whisper I love you over and over, mingled with I’m sorry and I’m scared. For once I am totally honest with myself and another human being. That kind of honesty is liberating, like a crushing weight you didn’t even know was there is suddenly removed. I feel stronger than I have ever felt. I hold her to me and we promise that we will hang onto that honesty, that finally, things are going our way. We reaffirm forever to one another. Two weeks later, she will end our relationship via an email.

I consider myself something of an expert on fear. I’m scared of all sorts of things, mostly people and my own emotions. I’m not very good at expressing myself in an everyday way. I am very good at talking, even better than I am on the page, but I never say anything. I can talk for hours and say nothing, because I am afraid of what might come out if I actually said something real. But since you never get very far if you aren’t willing to face up to your fears, I’m trying it out. As it happens, saying real things is both the hardest and the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Fear paralyzes some people and it catalyzes others. It will freeze me in place if I let it, and it jolts other people into a dead run. But understanding a situation doesn’t count for anything if you can’t come to terms with it.

So what do I have to show for it? Two years’ worth of snapshots, a lot of wasted time and effort, a “sadder but wiser” mentality? No. I just understand fear even better now than I did two weeks ago, and I know what I have to do. Snapshot – let it go.

meditations on desire

2008-10-02T11:49:00.000-07:00

(Written 11 January 2008, front desk of Dave Wood Mazda)

This isn't really what you'd call a creative piece, but somewhere between answering service calls and staring at a room full of cars I don't want to drive, this came out of me, so I figured I might as well throw it out there.

* * *

It's come to my attention in the last couple of weeks that I am terrified of writing, absolutely scared to death of the whole thing. If you like, you can stand up and jeer now. It's ridiculous, I know. I mean, I'm pretty good at it, or at least better than average, and with some work I could probably be really good. You'd think that something I'm good at would be attractive, would be something I'd want to spend all my free time doing. But the problem with being a good writer is that it's nothing like being good at math or sports or anything causal that other people seem to be good at and enjoy. Math works in a particular way, and if your brain is wired the same way, numbers and calculations are easy. Sports work in a particular way, too – only with physical activity there's some necessary training. You might be born with an affinity for baseball, but you sure as hell aren't born with the muscle structure required to play it. Writing is like a combination of both: your brain needs to be wired to process stimuli in a very specific way in order to translate thoughts and images and whatnot into text that is not just readable, but enjoyable or useful in some way. Writing also takes training – again, you can be born with an innate understanding of the way language works and what sounds "right", but if you don't practice you'll never get past relying strictly on instinct. But there's a third variable when it comes to writing something really good, I think. It's not inspiration, because writer's block is basically equal parts laziness and inattention. I have no problem with inspiration personally, because I figure I can get it anywhere as long as I write what I know and supplement it with a healthy dose of imagination (also a critical item on the will-call list for a writer).

Maybe it's desire. I guess it goes without saying that you have to want to write in order to do it, because anything you do under duress (regardless what you hear from high-powered executives that feed on stress and top-grade cocaine) isn't likely going to be your best work. I convinced myself for years that all I needed to produce a good academic paper was a bottle of cheap wine, a pack of cigarettes, and the last possible twelve-hour block before the deadline. A long string of "B" grades tells you what good I got out of that line of thinking. But then again, maybe that's a bad analogy because the papers I did for school rarely fell into the category of things I wanted to write about. Sure, the stuff I was reading was interesting, if for no other reason than I hadn't necessarily read it before. But compound the act of writing with all that expectation: grades, grammar, the ever-changing Modern Language Association stipulations on margin width and where to put the parentheses – whatever – and you immediately make the business of getting your ideas across on paper infinitely more complicated.

It's that attitude in myself, though, that makes me question whether I really should be doing what I'm doing – I mean, shouldn't that all be spurious when I put it up against my alleged desire to write? Shouldn't I want to do it bad enough that it doesn't matter whether or not I have to conform myself to all these rules and regulations? Like I said, maybe academic writing is a bad analogy, because if I'm cut out for anything to do with the written word, it's probably not scholarly work. I love reading and learning, but I really don't like research in the pure form.

Okay, now I'm getting to it. Why don't I like research? Not because of the act, but because of the complications – the rules, maybe. The strictness of it – it's the same reason I don't like wearing ties. I feel like I'm being throttled. Now that is a sentiment of which I am expressly not proud. I don't like the rules? Boo hoo, right? Nobody else seems to have any problem with the rules. Who the hell am I?

Maybe that's the biggest part of my utter failure to produce anything of real worth so far. I have this juvenile issue with my conception of my own abilities. Despite repeated attempts by friends and family to assure me of my competence and talent, I steadfastly refuse to believe them, and I don't know why. That's part of the reason I'm pushing myself to write this thing, right this very second, because I really, really want to get to the bottom of this problem and solve it so I can go on about the business of writing my ass off. Now, it's been suggested to me that my refusal to accept what ability I have is a direct result of the fear I talked about when I started out. I'm scared of failure, but maybe I'm just as scared of success, because then things will be expected of me. I feel like Michael Douglas' character in Wonder Boys, who gets stuck trying to write a follow-up to his first novel, which was critically acclaimed across the board. He winds up spending years working on this absurdly long, meandering text that doesn't really go anywhere, because he is paralyzed by the idea that it won't live up to the standard set by his first book. So he writes and writes and writes and in all that writing says essentially nothing. He's basically killing time while pretending – even to himself – to be productive, and all he gets for his trouble are boxes of pages that are more-or-less useless to everybody, especially to him. I'm in the same holding pattern, but unlike Douglas, I don't have a good reason: I never wrote the critically acclaimed anything, so where's the standard? In my head, that's where. What a truly ridiculous notion: to think so much about thinking that you cease to think at all.

And, I just noticed, everything I've written here is an expression of the same paralysis. I'm on my way to writing Douglas' box-book, under the auspices of self-analysis and, presumably, self-improvement. What am I accomplishing here, by writing these words at this moment, sitting at my desk in the showroom of Dave Wood Mazda on a Thursday night in January, right after sending off graduate applications to two universities where, if accepted, I will specialize in rhetoric and theory and eventually go on to teach other people how to write effectively? I guess people are right to tell me to get my shit together, because if this isn't really what I should be doing, I sure as hell shouldn't be trying to teach it to anybody.

And there it is again: the ultimate, incontrovertible excuse of not being good enough. It's all avoidance, I'm starting to notice, and it's consequently all bullshit.

I was sitting on the bus today, heading to work and listening to music while staring out the window at what passes for scenery in the Bradford, Ontario area, and it came to me that maybe my biggest problem is the problem itself. I think it's fair to say that I've identified what's wrong with me: yes, I'm afraid to sit down and do the thing. But I get caught up in the narcissistic masturbation of self-analysis; I focus on the problem per se – why it's a problem and how it came to be a problem. In doing this I spiral cheerfully into this bizarre Catch-22 in which I can't get by the problem because I can't get to the bottom of it, but the bottom is that I can't get to the bottom.

So what do I do? Well, exercise like this helps build my muscle construction so I can swing the bat better, but right now I'm just doing the exercise so I can look good naked. What is required is a movement of faith, sort of like what Kierkegaard talked about. I have to stop looking over myself with a microscope and take a step back, look at the big picture.

Who am I? Okay, it's pithy, but it's something that's occupied a lot of my brain power lately. Actually, that's a lie. Avoiding thinking about it has taken a lot of my brain power. Like I keep saying, it's absurd. It's like spending all my time trying to convince myself that the sky is purple. What purpose does that serve? Forget it, it doesn't matter – that's the whole point. Insidious, isn't it? It's like crawling around in Jello trying to find a marble.

Maybe the bottom line isn't "who am I". Maybe it's "what do I want". Actually, it's definitely "what do I want" because the things we want – really want – define who we are. So what do I want? I want to keep doing this my whole life. Not the narcissistic autopsy part, the writing part. I think with a little work and a little faith I could be really good at it, if I'm not yet. Am I scared? Yes, terrified. And yet, it's like broaching any anxiety, for me: once I get past the initial instinct to run like a motherfucker far away as I can from a pen or any kind of word processor, it starts to feel right again, like sleeping in your own bed after an extended stay at a hotel or on a friend's couch.

Once upon a time not only was I pretty good, I had actually started to believe I was pretty good – not in that head-expanding Harold Bloom kind of way, but in that legitimate, "this feels right so I'm going to keep doing it" kind of way. It's amazing how hard people try to tear that shit down when they see it. People, particularly people who fashion themselves artists, hate it when somebody comes along who makes them feel like a fraud or a half-asser just by virtue of being there. Because it wasn't my abilities that made me special at that time, it was my passion for it. I really, really cared about writing and I really, really loved to do it – even if most of it was below-par hormonal/depressive "poetry". I read everything, all the time, I took courses with other writers twenty or thirty years my senior – not because I was trying to threaten them or make them look bad, but because I wanted to learn from everyone and everything I possibly could – and I loved every second of it.

And people tore me down, told me I wouldn't make it, told me I was idealistic, which is basically the worst insult you could have leveled on me at that time. So what if I wanted to be like Jack Kerouac and go gallivanting all over the nation, writing and drinking and learning the language of people? (This was before I realized there was a lot more drinking and a lot less learning that went on for people like that.) If I could have done it at that time I would have. My tastes are a little different now, but the fact remains – the fact remains – that I still really, really care about writing and I still really, really love to do it. Even now I feel the tension draining out of my hands, the fog lifting from where it collects at the mid-point in my skull. I had no idea that just letting it all go and writing – for real, not for all the other bullshit reasons I've managed to find over the years – would feel more like coming home than, well, coming home.

In a lot of ways this is a hard realization to come to, because it means I have to admit that I spent the better part of ten years pissing on the thing I love to do, and much as I talk about the other writers I met and the effects, positive and negative, they had on me, I still have to own that nasty little bit of history. It doesn't taste good, but I can't justify it away. If I'm smart I won't dwell and instead I'll make use of it, inasmuch as I can. Experience is experience, after all, and it built the man I am today, who I'm happy to say I'm starting to quite like.

So maybe I'm scared and maybe I'm not quite fermented enough to qualify as good wine. If that's so, then so be it. I'm getting there. I will get there. And when I do, damned if I'm not going to taste good.

The Horny Creek Chronicles, V: Meat, Mafia and Mayhem

2008-10-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

One of the more frustrating elements to my position at the Beggar's Market location, over and above the abysmal music and the smelly, cheap customers, was the close proximity of the company's head office. Horny Creek HQ was located directly across the street, placing all the upper-echelon management literally within spitting distance of my front door – our spit or theirs, depending on the day.

HQ was built inside a renovated warehouse, because Beggar's Market is made up exclusively of industrial buildings (so they didn't have a lot of choice), and besides, rent is cheaper. The ramshackle offices, more-or-less makeshift cubicles separated from one another by fabric-covered dividers on wheels, were home to the highest-paid members of the Horny Creek team, including the President, VP of Marketing, VP of Advertising (I know they're the same thing, but they had a different person working each role), Area Manager, District Manager, and a host of sundry corporate-level types. The place looked less like the functioning nerve center of a nation-wide clothing chain, and more like a college dorm room hastily converted into a workspace. Posters and promotional materials that were literally years out of date lay strewn around the common areas, sun-faded and half-torn. Discarded Styrofoam coffee cups were left all over every conceivable surface, where those surfaces weren't taken up by stacks of "confidential" documents carelessly left out for anyone to casually pick up and look over (which I did). Corporate drones could be seen wandering between the cubicles, looking very much like a bunch of confused Israelites without a Moses. Set this scene to a "Worst of the mid-90s Pop-Punk" soundtrack, and you begin to understand why Horny Creek worked the way it did. Or didn't, depending on your perspective.

Horny Creek was owned by a much larger international conglomerate, called "Worldwide Tailors". It so happened that the WT head office shared the same space as Horny Creek's HQ, so in addition to the head honchos of our own company, we also had to deal with the evil overlord of Worldwide Tailors, the owner of Horny Creek and its affiliates. This man's influence is vast and his agents are frighteningly efficient, so I will refer to him by the moniker Jebediah. Seriously, I'm actually afraid to talk about this guy even using a pseudonym, but in the interest of sharing a good story, my fear won't stop me. I'll get back to Jebediah later.

When I started work at Beggar's Market, I had no idea the big cheeses for the whole company were just a hop, skip and bumblefuck away. That is, not until I met my good friend "Ivan". I mentioned earlier that the buildings of Beggar's Market were all industrial space – warehouses and the like. Areas like that in Toronto are notoriously devoid of any other kind of business space, so that means no restaurants, no convenience stores, no coffee shops – basically nowhere to get food or drinks within a fifteen-minute walking radius. But Beggar's Market got a lot of pedestrian traffic, especially in the summer, so you wind up with a great untapped market of hungry, thirsty bargain-hunters who are willing to leg it all day long up and down the street looking for the right deal, but who are too lazy to walk out to a main road to grab a bite to eat. As a result, the sidewalks of Beggar's Market became a popular staging ground for the meccas of Torontonian roadside dining: the street meat vendor.

Every big city has street meat vendors. Everywhere you go, you're basically guaranteed to get the same general menu (sausage, hot sausage, veggie sausage, cans of cola) and the same level of quality (somewhere just above ground-up dog). For a measly two or three dollars, you can enjoy a "Polish" sausage on a bun with your choice of various over-salted, sun-sogged condiments, and a warm can of Sprite. It might not sound appetizing, but Beggars can't really be choosers (har har). Besides, there's nothing like getting your lunch from a cart that looks like it should have a horse attached to it.

The proprietor of our local cart, stationed just outside Horny Creek HQ, was a very large, imposing man of Ukrainian descent called Ivan. I feel safe using his real name in this context because let's face it: Ukrainian street-meat vendors called Ivan aren't exactly in short supply in this city. I first met Ivan while out for a smoke break some time after the Horrible Tent Day. I had just lit up when a huge, thick-accented voice came booming across the street.

Ivan: HEY! HEY YOU!

Alex: Who? Me?

Ivan: YES! YES! YOU!

Alex: …can I help you?

Ivan: YOU COME OVER HERE!

Alex: Um…why?

Ivan: YOU COME OVER HERE NOW!

Alex: …okay.

I don't really know what possessed me to come when called by a huge European brandishing tongs and a big knife, especially since there was a street separating us and I probably could have safely ignored him or ducked back into the store and hidden under a clothing unit for the rest of the day. I can only put it down to the conditioning I received working my first-ever job at a Greek restaurant (story coming soon). At any rate, I crossed the street against my better judgment. I was discomfited to see that Ivan was even bigger and hairier than he had appeared from a distance, a fact exacerbated by his absolutely enormous, piercing blue eyes, that rolled wildly in his head as I cautiously approached the cart.

Ivan: HELLO! I HAVE NEVER SEEN YOU BEFORE! WHO ARE YOU?

The volume of his voice didn't change despite the fact that we were no longer conversing across a street. I jumped again.

Alex: Ah, my name's Alex. I just started working at Horny Creek across the street.

Ivan: (sticking out his huge, meaty paw) ALEX! I AM IVAN! WE ARE FRIENDS NOW!

Alex: It's…a pleasure to meet you Ivan.

I awkwardly tried to shake his hand, which was difficult since it was covered in soot and dwarfed my own by about three sizes. When we clasped palms, his fingers crunched inward like a vise, and I physically had to refrain from wincing as I heard the unmistakable popping noise of dislocated bones.

Ivan: TELL ME MY FRIEND, DO YOU HAVE AN EXTRA CIGARETTE?

Normally I make it a rule not to give out cigarettes to anyone, unless they happen to be a very attractive woman who is also nice to me. It's an expensive habit, I'm not a vending machine, and anyway I'm possessive of my cancer. But in this situation, especially since Ivan's Right Hand of Doom was still strangling my precious guitar-playing fingers, I decided that rules were made to be broken. Kind of like my hand, apparently.

Alex: Sure thing Ivan, here you go.

Ivan: THANK YOU MY NEW FRIEND! IN RETURN FOR YOUR KINDNESS I WILL GIVE YOU A SAUSAGE AND A CARBONATED BEVERAGE OF YOUR CHOICE!

Prior to this day, I had never met anyone who spoke like an NPC from a Zelda game. Ivan finally released his death grip on my right hand, which had been rapidly turning blue and losing feeling. He expertly sliced up and cooked my hot dog and rapidly produced it along with a can of Dr. Pepper for my culinary enjoyment. During this time he filled me in on his background (emigrated from the Ukraine ten years ago, has been running the street meat stand all over the city since then), spoke proudly of his children (both in medical school – probably on financial aid) and his wife (also a street-meat vendor, go figure). He spoke around the bobbing cigarette in his lips like a pro, and his large, intense eyes never left mine for a second of the whole exchange. He also never lowered the volume of his voice. I decided that even though Ivan was probably functionally deaf and maybe a little too friendly for my liking, he was still a pretty cool guy. Then he dropped this bomb on me:

Ivan: SO I HAVE BEEN GETTING TO KNOW YOUR EMPLOYERS LATELY, HA HA HA!

I forgot to mention that Ivan laughed a lot, very loudly, and I'm willing to bet the cadence of his infectious-yet-frightening guffaw is a dead ringer for Rasputin.

Alex: Oh yeah? Which ones? We seem to go through a lot of managers around here.

Ivan: NO MY FRIEND! I REFER TO THE OVERSEERS OF YOUR COMPANY, WHO WORK IN THE BUILDING DIRECTLY BEHIND ME! HA HA HA!

Alex: Wait a minute. You're telling me that Head Office is right here? (pointing) Like, right there?

Ivan: (pointing to the next building in line) ACTUALLY, OVER THERE.

I froze in place, unsure how to proceed. Thanks to meeting Tony, my general outlook on the Horny Creek job was improving (if by "improving" I mean "fewer thoughts of suicide", which I do), but this news was unsettling to say the least. When I worked at Horny Creek up north years prior, an impending visit from the Head Office team meant days of feverish preparation – in other words, actual work. I had become quite complacent in my position at the warehouse, and didn't want to see my days of hanging out with Tony and ragging on customers curtailed by the presence of Horny Creek brass right across the street.

As if on cue, Lisa (the tiny Asian manager of the week) burst through the door of the warehouse, eyes open as wide as I'd ever seen in her people, screaming my name. I thanked Ivan and dashed back across the road, thinking some psychotic customer had invaded the "damaged rack" and was trying on the blood-covered boxer shorts. Breathless, I charged up to Lisa and demanded to know the cause for alarm. She grabbed my arm and dragged me inside.

Lisa: They're coming! They're coming?

Alex: …What? Who's coming? The army of the dead? The body snatchers? S-Club 7?

Lisa: The head office team, idiot!

Alex: Really? Which ones?

Lisa: ALL OF THEM!

Oh boy, here we go. Now, to be fair, I wasn't really as concerned as I later discovered I should have been. As I mentioned before I was used to periodic visits from head office bigwigs when I worked up north, so I assumed this would be a similar visit: a lot of snooty remarks about the state of the floor plan, a few patronizing "hints" on customer approach techniques, and a brief meeting / pep rally to halfheartedly attempt to improve morale, and that would be it. The whole ordeal could be sped along by an appropriate application of lips-to-ass, and head office would be on their way so I could get back to doing nothing. I said as much to Lisa, and she looked at me like I had just told her I was a card-carrying member of the Flat Earth Society.

Lisa: I know you worked at Horny North, so you don't understand what it's like to work for a store in the city. Up there, you got visits from – what, a district manager now and again?

Alex: Well, actually, I met the President of the company once.

Lisa: Which one?

Alex: Gary.

Lisa: Gary hasn't been President in years, probably not since you left Horny North. In fact, I think we've had three presidents since him.

We were talking about a three-year time span. The company had had three presidents in three years. The whole Mary/Shawna debacle was beginning to make more and more sense.

Alex: Okay, so what should I expect out of this visit?

Lisa: Ever heard of the Spanish Inquisition?

Alex: Well, yeah, but it can't be that bad.

Lisa: (stony glare)

Alex: When do they arrive?

Lisa: Whenever they want. And before you ask they'll probably be here the rest of the day. In fact they'll definitely be here the rest of the day.

Alex: How often do they tend to come by?

Lisa: At least four times a week. You should probably invest in a hip flask.

With that the front door swung open, and the people who were to command my destiny in the coming months tramped into my life with all the subtlety of a cadre of Hannibal's elephants. The Freak Parade continues.

The Horny Creek Chronicles, IV: Burning The Bridge Behind Us

2008-10-02T09:15:00.000-07:00

Horny Creek, like most retail companies, is based almost exclusively around its "bottom line". I can understand this; I might not have a head for business, but I dig the fact that there's no point in entering into a venture without any prospects of making money - presumably, a lot of money. So, even though it pissed me off at the time, I can now look back and see the logic in peddling sub-par merchandise to people stupid enough to buy it, in order to fulfill some kind of image deficiency the media or whoever has convinced them they're suffering from.

What I can't abide to this day is the poor treatment of employees that seem to plague these companies. Granted, it's a well-known fact that anyone who works in all but the highest echelons of retail services is expendable and easily replaceable (I mentioned before that Horny Creek clothes basically sell themselves, so it isn't exactly a skill-driven position), but it's been my experience that if you treat people like people and not like soulless automatons, they're more likely to work harder and thus make more money for your company. You know, treat your employees with just the barest modicum of respect and civility that you'd extend to anyone on the street, pay them a little more than minimum wage to keep them motivated (if they're working hard) and I think you'd see real productivity increase. Seems fairly logical to me.

There is a reason for that preamble. I mentioned before that Horny Creek employees come and go with the tides, and I may have given the impression that this referred only to floor-walking part-timers. Not so. In fact, of all the companies I or anyone I know ever worked for, Horny Creek had the highest upper-management turnover rate any of us have ever heard of. Just guess where this is going.

So the morning after my disastrous first day at the Horny Creek warehouse outlet, I called up Mary the Coked-Out DM to "discuss" a change in my employment status (read: move me to New Money or I'm fucking quitting). I'm not sure what I hoped to gain from yelling at her on the phone, because as I said earlier I too was replaceable, but at the time the only thing on my mind was the white-hot rage that twelve hours of broke-down units, fucked-up tents and unfathomably bad music had stoked within my brain. So I called the New Money location and had my first conversation with the Captain, though neither of us would figure that out until almost a year later:

Cap: Horny Creek New Money, this is the Captain.

Al: Yeah, hi. Is Mary around?

Cap: Mary? Mary who?

I had never gotten her last name, but I frantically shuffled through my paperwork, hoping to find some inkling. Nothing.

Al: Ah, um, fuck…I don't know. She's the District Manager.

Cap: Oh, that Mary. Yeah, she quit.

I was thunderstruck. When I worked at the other Horny Creek location years prior, it wasn't uncommon for managers and assistant managers to be "reassigned" or simply to walk out of the job entirely, but we had a pretty solid upper-management team in place. I had never heard of an area manager or DM simply quitting out of the blue. Later I'd make the connection that the turnover rate of management types increased exponentially the closer they were stationed to Head Office. More on that later. In the meantime I was experiencing a gamut of emotions which included shock, dawning understanding and an overriding, even more searing wrath than what was currently consuming my gray matter.

Al: She…she QUIT?

Cap: Yeah man, she just came in this morning, threw down her keys in the middle of the floor, cursed at me and walked out.

Al: But…but…but she was supposed to transfer me out of that godforsaken warehouse! What in the hell am I supposed to do now?

Cap: Look, I don't know what to tell you, but I have customers that require my attention. Sorry I can't help. *click*

I guess I can't blame the Captain for being abrupt on the phone; if it had been me I would have been just as short. But at the time it did nothing to improve my mood. Over the next ten minutes I engaged in a wide variety of embarrassing activities, including (but not limited to) cursing like a sailor at the top of my lungs, waving my arms around and hitting random pieces of furniture, throwing my phone to the floor with such force that the battery pack popped out and to this day doesn't fit right, cursing some more, hitting a door and scraping my knuckles, cursing about that, and leaping up and down like a madman. It was probably an overreaction, but at the time it felt justified. Thank god I didn't have a roommate at the time, or there would probably be filmed evidence of my little dance of fury.

Once I calmed down a little, I began to go over my options. I was faced with the prospect of an indeterminate amount of time - perhaps even the entire summer's worth - working at the Horny Creek Warehouse, which would quite likely be followed by suicide. I could either suck it up, hope that someone else took notice of my hard work, and have me transferred to New Money, or I could decide to find another job.

Like most people, I detest the job search process. I always feel like such a whore, dressing myself up like a goddamn monkey and going to interviews that are almost always conducted by either a bored temporary staff member or over-amped upper-management type. I hate having to pretend to be "really excited about using the skills I've developed servicing other blowhards in order to continue gobbling corporate penis in this entirely original and challenging position". Most places don't care about my past service record, even though it is pretty good: as long as I have a pulse and not too much drool on my chin, they're basically going to hire me anyway, which isn't nearly as rewarding an experience as my high-school guidance counselor made it out to be.

That, and I'm terminally lazy. Given I might actually have to work at a new position, it became a question of the devil I know versus the devil I don't: and Horny Creek was just a devil I knew intimately. So new job was out. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

When I arrived at work the following day, it was with renewed hope and vigor for my current position. Okay, so I'm exaggerating a little: at the very least, I didn't cry all the way there or go in drunk or anything. By the time I managed to get in the front door, my lack of a hip-flask started looking like a really bad decision. At the back of the store was a large Filipino man, probably in his mid-twenties and decked out in ghetto gear, repeatedly smashing his foot into one of the change room doors and swearing very loudly. It took me a minute for this image to process correctly, at which point I hauled ass across the warehouse, screaming at him. In the time it took me to get across the warehouse floor, the guy had managed to break the shitty particle-board door completely off its hinges and was in the process of stomping it into pieces.

Al: Hey! HEY! What the fuck, man?

FM: What? Get the hell out of my face!

Al: You're breaking my store! What the fuck do you think you're doing?

FM: Your store? What, are you the new manager?

Al: No, but I do work here, and I'm just as permitted as any manager to kick you the

fuck out for busting up my change room.

FM: You work here? What's your name?

Al: Why, you want to lodge a complaint?

FM: No, I'm "Tony", the assistant manager.

It turns out that, in the scant twelve hours I'd been at home since my last shift, not only had Shawna quit the company with absolutely no notice (starting to notice a pattern folks?), but Tony, the aforementioned assistant manager of Horny Creek Warehouse, had been passed over for her job in favour of outsourcing the position to a public interview process. Tony had been working for the company for several years, scraping his way up from part-time temporary employee to the vaunted Second In Command position, and so was understandably incensed when his years of eating shit failed to pay off in scoring a manager-ship.

Al: Shit man, I'm really sorry to hear about that.

Tony: Yeah, it sucks.

Al: ...sooo. Who's going to fix the door?

Tony: Fix it? We'll tell Head Office that some psychotic customer fucked it up when we told him that we couldn't take the tax off his purchase, even if he offered to pay cash.

I decided I liked Tony.

Over the next couple of weeks, I started to have a better understanding of how Horny Creeks' internal politics functioned. Tony never was offered the management position, but was still required to fulfill the management role until Head Office found a suitable replacement for Shawna. You can file this under "bitch-slapped by the man". As a result, I was granted what basically amounted to a field-commission to the rank of Third Key, which ironically was the job I was promised at the New Money store. I didn't get a pay raise, of course, even though I was for all intents and purposes serving as Assistant Manager to Tony's Manager. Tony and I developed a good working relationship: he was vehemently opposed to many of the practices Shawna had required, including tent set-up, shitty music and generally working.

Until such time as the new manager (a tiny Asian girl named "Lisa") appeared on the scene, the job was actually marginally enjoyable. Once Lisa took over the reins it started to get unbearable again, as she had these silly ideas in her head about "upselling" being a good thing, and "standing around shit-talking the customers" being a bad thing. Ironically it was she who would prompt my first meeting with the MENSA candidates who ran Head Office. It was this bizarre chain of events that eventually lead me to take my new role at New Money, which I'll relate in the next chapter. Keep marching with the Freak Parade.

The Horny Creek Chronicles, III: Welcome to Hell, Now Pitch A Tent

2008-10-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

The morning I arrived at the Horny Creek Warehouse location, my new boss was a full forty-five minutes late. I walked up to the front doors around 7:15 (an abysmally early time of day, in my opinion, that shouldn't exist unless you haven't gone to bed yet) and, given I didn't have a key, I was forced to sit around on wet concrete waiting for Her Highness to show up.

I was desperately trying to stave off smoking a cigarette; it's been suggested to me in the past that some people don't have the same appreciation for tar and nicotine that I have, and I wanted to make a good first impression. Keep in mind: this was a few years back, when I still gave a shit about things like that. But as time wore on and the sun kept rising, melting the morning dew on the lawn into noxious clouds of the Toronto ass-gas that passes for "mist", I eventually decided that if she was going to be this late on my first day, then it was she who had made the bad impression and not yours truly. So I lit up and was just enjoying my very first drag of the day on my sweet, sweet cancer stick, when true to form a beat-up Subaru pulled into the parking lot. There are few things that irritate smokers more than being interrupted mid-smoke and having to throw the rest away (those things are expensive), and so I was understandably irked by her untimely arrival.

"Shawna" came running up the walkway - smoking a cigarette, much to my continued irritation - and apologized profusely for her tardiness. I noticed that she was carrying a Tim Horton's coffee and bagel, and resisted the urge to point out the fact that if she hadn't stopped for breakfast (which I had foregone in the interest of being on time) my ass mightn't be as wet as it was now. She unlocked the door, disarmed the ADT system (which I would later discover was a complete goddamn sham - there was absolutely nothing worth stealing in this place) and immediately directed me to start moving large units full of shirts and pants outside and onto the patio that fronted the warehouse.

Al: Wait - outside?

Sh: Yeah, what's the problem?

Al: Why are we moving the clothing outside? Isn't that sort of inviting people to make off with the merchandise?

Sh: Oh no, see, you'll be spending the day outside, selling to passersby. So it'll be part of your job to see that no one steals anything.

What the fuck? "Selling to passersby"? What is this, the Agrabah Bazaar? Do I get a
megaphone?

Al: So how many of these units need to be moved out there?

Sh: We usually move about fifteen or so onto the patio for the day.

I paused at this point to take stock of the "units". Basically, when a retailer refers to a
unit, they're talking about those large, often cumbersome metal constructs on which you'd hang thirty or forty shirts, or pairs of jeans or whatever. They're usually round and have a T-shaped base to them. If they're good quality, the base has rollers to make moving them around a store easier and more efficient. Guess what level of quality these were?

Al: These units are falling apart. Half of them don't have arms to hang things on, and it looks like none of them actually have rollers.

Sh: Oh, I know. What you have to do is take all the clothes off the units first, put on the extra arms that we keep in a box in the back, move the units outside, bring the clothes outside and then put everything back on again.

She couldn't be serious. Arms in a box in the back? By the time I got all that finished it would be damn near time to bring them all back in again. Which reminded me:

Al: You know it's supposed to rain today, right?

Sh: Oh, that's okay, what we'll do then is put up the tent.

Al: Wait - the tent?

This is the Agrabah Bazaar.

Sh: Yeah, we keep a tent in the back so that if it rains we only have to bring the units in that won't fit under the tent.

Al: How many units fit under the tent?

Sh: About five or so.

Al: Let me get this straight. We're going to completely strip down fifteen units full of clothing -

Sh: And two tables. For the teeshirts.

Al: - And two tables for the teeshirts. We're going to move them all outside, where it will doubtless be raining in an hour, but that's okay because we can put up a tent that should cover about five units -

Sh: Minus the teeshirt tables.

Al: - minus the teeshirt tables, and then we'll have to take all the rest of it down again and move it inside.

Sh: Just until it stops raining.

Al: Until it -

Sh: Yeah, Head Office likes to see us have as much product as possible outside for the customers to be attracted by, for as long as we can in a day. It really bumps up the sales.

Al: But who's going to be shopping outside if it's raining?

Sh: That's why we wait until it stops and then we put it back!

Al: Right. Okay. So how many times a day are we supposed to do this? How long do we leave the stuff outside?

Sh: Well, we usually start moving things back in once it gets dark, but as long as there's a bit of light left Head Office wants those units out there and visible.

Al: So at the end of the night, once we've spent the day carting this stuff in and out, we have to take it all down in the dark?

Sh: Well, actually you have to take it down in the dark. I'll be gone by then.

There's this saying I heard somewhere once, something about the writing on the wall. If I was smart I would have told her to shove it and gone back home to my bed, where I probably could have caught a few more hours of sleep and woken up at a more reasonable time. But in my youthful naivety I decided that somehow, this would be worthwhile.

So I got to work, hauling what amounted to rickety-ass sharp metal sculptures out onto the patio - sculptures which had to be placed just so because Head Office had sent us a "floor plan" to follow - and then dragging out piles of discounted merchandise to hang haphazardly on these crooked fucked-up units. The trick was to make sure you balanced the unit correctly: too many shirts hung on one side would cause the whole unit to keel over, and Head Office apparently frowned on dropping "THE PRODUCT" on the ground. Here's a hint you dipshits: if you don't want your PRODUCT to make contact with concrete, leave it the fuck inside.

The really fun part was when an overburdened unit would fall over of its own accord when I wasn't looking, and then hit a second unit which would also fall over, hitting a third unit which would fall over, and before I knew it the domino effect had taken out my entire "floor plan". This actually happened several times in the first day alone. Twice, it was due to some asshole's misbehaved kids dodging in and out of the units and hiding in the shirts and whatnot until one of them tackled the other and took out half the storefront. The funny part was it was the same kids both times. I eventually got fed up and told their dad to get his fucking ankle-biters out of my hair, and alluded to the fact that he might have more luck controlling them if he beat them more regularly. He acted all offended and stalked off down the street. Whatever, good riddance.

My absolute favourite was when my earlier estimation of the state of the units was proven correct: about mid-day, the unit holding all the silly-ass wide-leg jeans (a pair of which weighs in around seventy pounds: and we wonder why these wigger's pants are always falling off) utterly collapsed under the combined pressure. Seriously, the metal arms ripped right off the main trunk of the unit and hit the ground collectively, nearly crushing some woman's Shitzu to death in the process. I was ordered to take the devastated unit into the back room, colloquially known as the Fixture Graveyard, and try to find some other broke-down piece of shit that looked vaguely sturdy enough to take the weight.

The other Head Office "requirement" which would serve to make a term in the funny farm look like a vacation compared to this job, was the need for music to "attract" patrons. While this sounds like a good idea on paper, there were two major problems with the equation.

a) The sheer size and magnitude of the speaker system. The warehouse was of course not fitted with an internal sound system like most mall stores would be, so the powers that be decided it would be a good idea to purchase the largest speakers in history to put outside our door and blast music through them at 9000 decibels to try to get people to come in and look around. I don't know enough about electronics to tell you what the wattage was or anything, but I can tell you that each of the two speakers stood almost as tall as me (I'm close to being an even 6 feet) and were significantly wider. Anyone that managed to make it to the door at all was a step ahead of the game: the speakers were so set loud that my rib cage would actually start to vibrate in time with the bass line anytime I happened to step into their event horizon, which extended about ten feet from the actual heads. I observed several small children stepping too close and being blown halfway across the street by the bald-faced power of these stupid things.

b) The utter shit festival of music we were required to play. I mentioned in an earlier post that Horny Creek used to sell to the mid-20s crowd, and at that time we were allowed to play mostly mid-90's alternative rock and even some classic rock from time to time, which is more than palatable to me. Not so at good old Beggar's Market. The Head Office pencil-heads decided that middle-of-the-road modern music didn't fit the demographic they were trying to target in this area, so we were given three CDs which we were allowed - nay, required - to play ad nauseum all day, every day: "Best of the 80's, Vol. 2", "YTV Party Zone, Vol. 3" and "Random Wal-Mart Gangsta Rap Mix" (I say Wal-Mart because all the naughty words were edited out - kind of funny when half the song turns into an instrumental that way). To this day, I'd rather plunge electric carving knives into my ears than listen to Soft Cell, 50 Cent or that goddamn asinine Hamster Dance. If I never hear "I Come From A Land Down Under" again for as long as I live, it'll be too fucking soon.

Needless to say, this musical ploy sort of served the opposite function to what it was intended: after enough people had been blasted in the face to the point where they incurred permanent ear damage from this aural Howitzer, customers avoided our mini-Block Party like the plague. Kind of good, kind of bad: less customers equaled happier me, but it didn't save me from exposure to this noise pollution each and every shift I worked.

Finally, around two o'clock, the sky clouded over and the thunder started. It didn't immediately start raining, but you could smell that fishy aroma in the air that signifies Toronto precipitation on the way. The shoppers all over the street scattered like cockroaches, trying to find shelter from the approaching March shower - it was kind of funny to watch, because really, I know that Toronto rain smells like shit and irritates your skin a little, but it's still just water falling from the sky. It's not as though we're about to be rained down upon by meteors or scissors or something. Bunch of wusses.

The smell of rain prompted Shawna to order me to put up the tent. After I hauled in all the units that wouldn't be sheltered, I wheeled out the hijacked grocery buggy that doubled as the tent storage unit (amusingly enough, the only thing in the whole warehouse that actually had wheels) and started yanking out random poles. When I spread the actual fabric of the tent out on the lawn, I had to laugh. It looked like the Ringling Brothers had a yardsale. It was white and green striped and covered the better part of ten square meters. Judging by the smell and the random stains all over the white parts, I was pretty sure that vagrants had used it as bedding at some point in its operational life. All in all I was fairly certain that putting this tent up would serve to drive patrons away, perhaps even more than the godawful music had, but then I remembered that fully half our customers lived in trailers that probably smelled like this on a good day. So I went about setting up this tent.

To anyone who has ever tried to set up a tent that size without assistance: I applaud your efforts. It took me goddamn forever to get this stupid thing to stand up straight without collapsing on me and wrapping me in Eau d'Hobo canvas romance. It didn't help that several of the key poles were actually missing from the set, which prompted me to makeshift additional supports using castoff broken arms from units and a healthy amount of duct tape. By the time I finished I was fairly convinced the Little Tent That Could would probably withstand the impact of falling space debris without significant loss of structural integrity. It looked hideous, but it was functional. I hoisted the whole mess and half-walked, half-crawled over to the main patio where I stood it precariously over the remaining units (which had doubtless been picked through by thieving hoodlums while I was busy battling the tent), and collapsed on the pavement.

Much to no one's surprise, it was at this moment that the sun came back out and the clouds started to clear. I'm not even kidding. It sounds like something out of a bad Three Stooges routine, but I'm one hundred percent serious. It fucking sucked, and I remember being violently angry about it for the rest of the day.

At the end of the night, once my boss had finished doing whatever the hell it was she did all day, I threw the units back in the door, not really giving a fiddler's damn where they landed. I just about had to kick the tent to the ground and stuff it back into its grocery cart, because once it was up that fucker wasn't coming back down if I had anything to say about it.

With everything finally finished, I looked at my watch and saw that I was a full hour late leaving my shift, an hour that (I would discover later) I would not be paid for. I stalked home, fuming, with every intention of calling Mary the following morning and politely requesting (har har) that she immediately move me to a more civilized location, because this shit was quite frankly not worth the minimum wage they were paying me.

And this was when Horny Creek truly started to mess with me. The Freak Parade continues.

The Horny Creek Chronicles, II: You're Hired, Sucker

2008-10-02T09:07:00.000-07:00

Our story starts when I decided to finally attend a post-secondary educational institute after a year of being out of high school. I moved from the little nowhere town in which I'd spent the past ten years, back to the city of Toronto and immediately started looking for supplementary work. For further background, see "The Horny Creek Chronicles, I".

To make a long and really unimportant story short, I used to work for a Horny Creek store located closer to that small Ontario town in which I grew up (but in which I must make absolutely clear I was not born). It was a boring, uneventful job that was not worth the money I spent taking a bus to attend. However, it was the only prior retail experience I had when I arrived in Toronto, so I figured, rather than waste my valuable time (har har) running around and applying for positions I'd likely have to work to maintain, I would just drop off a resume at Horny Creek (New Money Mall location) and wait for the inevitable re-hiring to occur.

It's a well-known fact that Horny Creek, like many retailers who hire under-age mouth-breathers to sell garbage to other under-age mouth-breathers, cycles through employees faster than some people go through clean underwear. There's a revolving-door policy in effect which stresses the hiring of bodies to fill positions on the floor, rather than hiring people who have some degree of competence - or at least an IQ level which comfortably exceeds that of the average goldfish. The result of this policy, of course, is the hiring of a continuous flow of sixteen year-old high school dropouts who smoke way too much pot and spend most of the time on the floor yanking their droopy-ass pants up from around their knees and talking to their loser friends on their Raspberries or whatever. These Darwinian exceptions are usually fired within two weeks of being brought on, to be replaced in short order by more just like them, and on and on into the annals of retail history.

Therefore, if a former employee who previously showed a penchant for following orders with a reasonable degree of accuracy (and who doesn't mind working for peanuts) returns seeking a job, and has not recently committed any federal offences they're willing to admit to, the policy is to basically re-hire him or her on-the-spot.

This is precisely what happened to me: I was re-hired by a District Manager called "Mary" approximately three minutes into my interview. I could have picked Mary out as a Horny Creek DM from a veritable line-up of corporate drones. It wasn't just her pasty face and hollow cheeks. It wasn't the way her mousey hair hung down in tired strands like defeated blades of grass. Mostly, it was due to her excitable (read: cocaine-addled) facade of a personality, and the light of false hope for advancement that shone in her eyes like Christmas lights from a redneck porch in July. An equal giveaway was her fanatical dedication to the company that would inevitably bend her over a counter, roll up the stock options she never did receive regardless how many times they were promised, and proceed to...to fire her. This dedication was easily observable by the sheer volume of prepackaged company propaganda that spewed from her well-meaning but ultimately vexing talk-hole. The conversation went something like this.

Mary: So you used to work *twitch* for Horny Creek at another of our sixty-five fine locations across Canada?

Al: Yes ma'am, I worked as a part-timer for store #(XXX) for six months.

Mary: (absolutely horrified) It says here *twitch twitch* that you voluntarily resigned from that position! Do you mind telling me why??

Al: Well, I had just finished high school and needed a full-time job, but at the time they weren't able to offer me those kinds of hours.

Bullshit. The assistant manager of that store was a meth'd-out psychosis poster-child who hated me because I was far more capable of doing her job than she was, mostly because I wasn't stealing out of the cash register every second sale in order to get out of giving blowjobs to large angry white men in exchange for powdered glass. She didn't have any real excuse to fire me because my three-month probationary period was up, and I was selling on average $400.00 worth of clothing every time they threw me the obligatory three-hour shift (did I mention I wasn't getting hours? More on the poor treatment of part-timers later), so she just made sure I came last on the list of people who got the budgeted hours per week, basically railroading me into quitting. But I wasn't going to tell Mary that. Particularly because at this point, Mary looked as though she'd hit the three o'clock wall and needed another line to make it through the next thirty-five minutes.

Mary: I'm sorry to hear that *snort, wipe*, but it's all right now, because you're back with the company! And I can't tell you how happy that makes me! Your sales record is extraordinary for someone your age, and we really *twitch arm shake twitch* look forward to you bringing your skills to our 'hood!

I wish I was joking, but she really said 'hood. In fact, I think if there was a comic dialogue bubble over her head, she might have pronounced skills with a "z". Did I mention this woman was whiter than an albino Stephen Morrissey?

Al: Great. Thanks. When do I get started?

Mary: Well, right now we don't have an opening at this particular location *eye twitch*but let me tell you something dawg - I'm going to have an opening for a third-key position here at the New Money store within about three weeks, so what I'm going to do with you just for now - just for now, mind - is place you over at the Beggar's Market location, 'cause we're really really excited about re-opening our warehouse store, and I want you to be a part of it!!!

Beggar's Market is a pseudonym for a stretch of warehouse outlet stores that runs the length of a four-block street not far from New Money. Most of the major-label companies have locations along there where they basically sell off last season's castaway shit and damaged products at bottom-rung prices, to predominantly white-trash families looking for a deal because they'd rather spend the extra welfare cash on cases of Molson Canadian and cartons of DuMaurier Lights than their children, or to recent immigrant families who either don't have the money to buy clothes off the shelf, or they think they're still in a country where bartering is an accepted form of goods exchange. Most of these places will let their employees get away with a little haggling, particularly when the product in question is a Nike-brand sweater that some careless part-timer sliced damn near in half with a box-opener, meaning they can't sell it on the shelves anyway. Yes, Beggar's Market: where fashion comes to die.

And this is where they wanted to place me: the Horny Creek Warehouse Outlet, located four full city blocks' walk farther than the bus stop for New Money, and conveniently right across the street from our parent company's Head Office. Fuckin' great.

Al: So this is only going to be a temporary placement, right? I'm not going to be stuck selling faulty jeans and misprinted teeshirts to Jethro and Cleetus for the whole year, right?

Mary: Oh, absolutely *shudder shudder* not! Trust me my man, I want you in New Money just as soon as I can clear the *jump jump* paperwork. In the meantime, you start Monday. Go see "Shawna" the manager at 7:30AM sharp! Kick it to the rhythm, Gee!

Apart from that being one of the most thoroughly ridiculous conversations to which I'd ever in my life been privy, I was now faced with the prospect of at least a month's worth of moving smelly returned clothing all over a poorly-ventilated, superheated warehouse for the express purpose of selling it off at five bucks apiece, piece-by-piece, to sweaty, deal-mongering troglodytes and pushy, obnoxious people that don't even speak English. But, with the promise of that magical third-key position (read: more responsibility, same pay) looming just within reach, I manfully accepted my new position and, at the crack of fucking Dawn on Monday morning, set out with my eyes full of hope (or at least sleep-goo) towards my first assignment.

The Horny Creek Chronicles: Dramatis Personae

2008-10-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

(Written sometime in 2006, after the events chronicled in "The Stair Night" story)

It occurred to me while writing down the events of "The Stair Night" that, if I am going to keep writing these pseudo-memoirs, I really ought to provide a little bit of background on a few of the major players that will appear in these stories regularly.

Stories you tell other people are more often than not "only funny if you know ______" or "you really had to be there". In an effort to dispel some of this so people can get as much enjoyment as possible out of this stuff, I've developed a basic dramatis personae of some of the main characters who accompany me on these silly journeys. I've included it as a separate post because "The Stair Night" wound up being really goddamn long, mostly due to footnoted information that didn't really have to be there. It's a learning process folks; bear with me.

At any rate, without further ado, I present my brief introduction and first cast list. Other players will be introduced as they come along, possibly in later incarnations of this post if the need arises.

I've been very fortunate in my life to meet a wide variety of extremely cool people who have taken on the unenviable task of befriending me. Many of them are intelligent, reasonable people with their feet on the ground and their heads on straight; they are friendly and engaging, and have goals, careers, motivation, and all the other positive qualities you would expect to find in up-and-comers of my generation. Needless to say, they make perfect foils for someone like me, who in contrast has no real goals to speak of, is gainfully unemployed, whose motivation extends barely far enough to get up from the laptop to make a coffee, and who is generally considered an all-round egotist cynical prick. As I've said before, I truly don't understand why these people continue associating with me, but I count myself lucky that they do.

There are others that I count as friends, however, who in some way, shape or form, manage to sideline their goals, careers and motivation in order to exist (at least in my mind) in some kind of tandem with my more, shall we say, passive-aggressive worldview. These people have the unique ability to combine the best traits of my other friends with the worst traits in me. They have careers as well as the skills which will allow them to attain a high degree of success; they are friendly, sociable people who make friends easily; they have great game and are found attractive by the opposite sex; all in all, they are outstanding people. They also have the penchant for rampant insanity that I have. The four men I have in mind have been mentioned in some of my previous posts, but have yet to be spotlighted.

The Captain: Former boss. Tall, lanky white boy who kind of looks like the dude that starred in Euro Trip (we noticed this while watching on Saturday; see "The Stair Night"). Laughs often and easily; isn't nearly as cynical as he comes off sometimes. Brilliant environmental engineer (running his own building at 21). Closet Star Trek fan. Devoted friend, boyfriend, son; generous bar buddy. All-round Good Canadian Boy. Drinks like a fish.

E-Dubb: Former employee underling. Shorter, built solid, mixed ethnic background which
includes Polish and something that makes him brown-ish. Haircut we've come to describe as the Signature E-Dubb Hair - think Mexican Kurt Cobain. Computer whiz; works for video game store. Closet techno-geek. Budding musician. Sarcastic bastard with a quick wit and no real moral filter. Very devoted son; lives at home voluntarily to help out his mom. Always up for intoxication. Drinks like a smaller fish.

G: Best friend of almost ten years. Metrosexual and yet masculine (go figure). Respectable
(!). Genius technical theater manager in his last year of school. Thinks far worse things than he ever says. Unbelievably good game. Sense of humour completely on-par with my own. Most dependable man you want to know. Drinks like he means it. And he does.

Brody: Former mall rat (hence the moniker). Completely morally bereft. No social skills to
speak of. Loud, obnoxious, brazenly inappropriate at any given time. Emotionally stagnate after a girl broke his heart. The only one on this list that doesn't embody any of the "good" characteristics. A goddamn train-wreck waiting to happen. Drinks like the bastard son of Winston Churchill and Courtney Love.

Now, in an effort to organize the repertoire of stories I'm trying to write down from memory, I'm starting with the more recent and well-worn of these and moving backwards, so G is not likely to make an appearance for some time. Too bad for him. In the meantime I'm going to focus my next few posts on the events that made working at Horny Creek so very much fun. The Freak Parade continues

The Horny Creek Chronicles, I: Introduction

2008-10-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

(Written sometime in 2006...I don't have the exact dates anymore)

This will be the first in a series of stories I plan to post, tentatively entitled the Horny Creek Chronicles (I said it was tentative). I'm aware that most people of my generation have probably worked in some capacity for that Mecca of mall employment we call retail services. For those of you who have not, I will try to provide some brief background on my own experience working at the "New Money" Shopping Mall in Toronto, Ontario (a large, mid- to upscale shopping center blemishing the north of this fine city, which has been pseudonymed in honour of the jerkoffs who shop there) in order that you might fully appreciate the sheer magnitude of idiocy for which this sort of capitalist edifice serves as a lush breeding ground. With this in mind, I introduce you to life as a "paid" mall rat.

Back when I was around 19, I worked as an assistant manager at a Canadian retail chain called "Horny Creek" (obviously, not the company's real name - but I don't really want to be sued). For those of you unfamiliar with this particular company, Horny Creek ostensibly sells young men's apparel, usually pandering to the same lucrative 13-19 demographic that MuchMusic and MTV and all the rest try to corner.

Now once upon a time, way back in 1995 or so, Horny Creek went about cornering this market by selling to a slightly older crowd; say, the same folks that were actually old enough to have seen Nirvana in concert prior to Kurt Cobain's unfortunate encounter with the business end of a twelve-gauge. Think of this demographic as pseudo-Yuppies; former Seattle Grunge patriots who discovered that many post-secondary institutions required general hygiene and moderate sobriety (at least at the interview) to be mandatory in order to secure acceptance. To these patrons, Horny Creek sold fashionable young men's apparel: you know, sweater-vests, khaki pants, reasonably-priced boot-leg denim jeans...sort of your standard all-American boywear. Okay, so it isn't exactly avant-fashion risqué in that high-school Hot Topic kind of way, but I liked it, at least. Take what you want from that.

At any rate, by the time I began working at the New Money Mall location (for those who care, it's the flagship store for Canada), Horny Creek had been sold to another interest, and as such a new Head Office staff was hired. They immediately shut down all stores nation-wide and began implementing a new "marketing plan" (read: pandering to the lowest common denominator in the interest of securing a sizeable retirement fund for themselves). Thus, when I moved back to Toronto and took the assistant manager position, I was aghast to note that the trendy sweater-vests and khaki pants of old had been replaced with PG knockoffs of T-Shirt Hell outerwear, bargain-basement versions of the likes of FUBU and Sean John jerseys and pants, a whole slew of "wide-leg" jeans whose total fabric volume might well clothe an entire African village, and a host of thoroughly gaudy belts, necklaces, sunglasses and even boxer shorts, all designed to lure in the chronically self-image-deprived young men of the greater Toronto area. The tag line for this new wardrobe abortion might well have been "be a non-conformist, just like all your friends". Needless to say, nothing could be further from my own strong sense of self-direction and common decency, but with bills piling up and an earnest desire to fill my belly with gin and President's Choice macaroni and cheese motivating me, I dutifully set aside what dignity I retained from my high school years and utterly sold out.

Upon taking my position at the helm of this inevitable train-wreck, I met and quickly befriended the manager of the store, a 19-something like myself who I'll henceforth refer to as The Captain (in the interest of avoiding him beating me to death with a tire-iron for posting these potentially libelous stories). The Captain was truly a straight-arrow; after having been booked on an arson charge for burning down a barn full of tires while under the influence of copious ganja (seriously), he resolved to move his life in a better direction and took his responsibilities as skipper of the U.S.S. Horny Creek very seriously. Initially, he and I quite did not get along: he disapproved of my lackadaisical attitude towards all things work-related, and I found it necessary to regularly point out the large stick that seemed to be protruding from his asshole. In time, however, he and I developed a symbiotic relationship; just as the moon governs the tides and the spontaneous bleeding out of human females, so I worked upon The Captain as a mediating force, eventually transferring my total lack of regard for the alleged responsibility of our positions onto him.

Assisting me toward this end was our third-in-command, a twenty-something who I will refer to as E-Dubb, though I seriously doubt he'd have nearly so much concern regarding these stories as The Captain might - E-Dubb and I tended to take notes from the same page with respect to the utter shenanigans that constituted our job descriptions. E-Dubb and I spent the vast majority of our time at Horny Creek generally hanging out with customers instead of endeavouring vainly to sell them clothes that both we and they knew invariably stained, shrank, ripped or simply fell to pieces upon four or five washings. In general, our customers were reasonably intelligent men and women, often the parents of the aforementioned self-esteem challenged. Of course, given The Captain's intense desire to right his past wrongs through masochistic retail ritual, he was obliged to frown on our simple fraternization in lieu of hard budgetary goals.

We were therefore obliged to sell the occasional thousand dollars' worth of clothing, which isn't nearly as hard as it might sound. Granted, at thirty dollars for a pair of jeans, it takes a goodly while to reach that lofty thousand mark, but I'm going to dispel the rumor now: this shit sells itself. No matter what your District Manager has told you about "upselling" (or, as it's better known, convincing people that they really do need a faux-silver Ghetto Chain to go with their K-mart Sean Johns, and while we're on the subject wouldn't a belt be a good idea since you're a 32 waist and you're buying the pants in a 38?) you really don't need to convince anybody of anything - these kids come in knowing exactly what they want, or at least exactly what they want to look like, and they can put it together themselves. One might think that it would be more of a trial to sell to smart parents whom, as I've said before, were well aware of the sweatshop quality we were trying to peddle. One might think so, that is, before discovering that these selfsame, otherwise-intelligent men and women, are all total pushovers. I said before that New Money is a mid- to upscale mall, but really the only "mid" part about it is the existence of a Horny Creek within its confines - most everything else is Harry Rosen and Hugo Boss and so forth, so you can imagine that the clientele that frequent the mall are also ostensibly high-class, or at least have a lot of cash to burn. Couple the Platinum Card with a serious case of divorce-related guilt on the part of Mom and Dad, and suddenly they're charging up not only the Ghetto Chain and the studded belt, but also a very trendy Puffy Jacket (you know what I'm talking about - those Michelin Man-looking things favoured by suburban white boy gangbanger wannabes all across this great land), a sweatshirt that says something derogatory about girlfriends even though half these pint-sized G-unit disciples haven't even figured out how to masturbate yet, an assortment of white cutoff shirts (I understand why they're called wifebeaters but I can't bring myself to call them that) that look like they came out of Eminem's yard sale, and still have room left over in the bag for a pair of yellow boxer shorts with black ant graphics on them. Ants in the pants. Get it? Seriously.

It's a love-hate thing; on the one hand you get some kind of hollow satisfaction out of putting that red checkmark beside your employee number (not your name, your employee number) at the end of the night, signifying that you jumped the hurdle with room to spare. On the other hand, you've just partaken in what amounts to a fashion Holocaust. Your compliance in allowing for an impressionable youth or youths to parade themselves around with "I'm a big target" written on their saggy-pant asses for every real gangbanger to line up in their sights is kind of inexcusable from a moral standpoint. But like I said before: there is no dignity left in me, so I plastered on my best used-car salesman smile and sucked it up.

Here endeth part one, moreso because I have to take a bit of time and structure what I'm going to say next; for the moment this is all memory work, so I think I'm going to call up The Captain and E-Dubb and have them help jog my memory. A litre or so of whiskey might do it.

Localized Irritant, III: A Christmas Story

2008-10-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

(Written 28 November 2007...I took it down originally because it was "too negative" according to some sources, but I think it's funny so I'm putting it back up)

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas. You know the smell. The unmistakable scent of pine wafting through the Home Depot as they load in their crooked overpriced yuletide arboreal shit festival. The delightful vapour of bargain-bin gingerbread cooked within an inch of its structural integrity at your local grocery chain. The nostalgic aroma of gasoline fumes fairly crystallized in the minus-thirty Canadian winter air, fumes that pervade every stitch of your seasonal garments and leave you wafting petrol in your wake like you work at a Sunoco. And then, of course, there’s the spicy, metallic olfactory joy that accompanies this farce of a holiday every year without fail: the invigorating smell of desperation.

There’s a lot of things about Christmas that have never made a great deal of sense to me. I mean, I was raised sort of Christian, and I was definitely raised white-North-American, so I know the religious angle inside and out. Woman gets knocked up, convinces husband she’s carrying the child of benevolent bearded man who lives in the sky. For some reason husband does not stone her to death. The two of them walk halfway across Arabia so she can give birth in a barn. Three fellows on camels chase Halley’s comet halfway across the known world in order to deliver gifts of questionable utility. Child grows up to become spiritual leader, is nailed to a tree by his own people, expires, comes back to life in time for Easter.

Like so many hackneyed comedians before me, the part where I start having trouble is where this charming story translates into a totally different mythology: fat guy, red suit, reindeer, elves, all-night sleigh ride, chimneys, et cetera. As though one fictional omnipresent entity who “knows when you’ve been bad or good” wasn’t enough, Coca-Cola and its affiliates decided to construct a contender: enter Kris Kringle, Jolly Old Saint Nick, The Big Elf Himself, Santa Claus. Now, I get the whole marketing angle, especially the consumerism and the corporate promotional value of an easily-identifiable spokesman for the holiday. Everywhere you look, it’s Santa-themed wrapping paper, tee-shirts, pyjamas, decorations, children’s stories, made-for-TV specials, lunch boxes, jewellery, musical CDs, telephones, wheelchairs, foodstuffs, bedding, silverware and sex toys. I am not even kidding. I even get the moralistic cause-and-effect that the idea of “Santa” teaches kids: do the dishes, take out the garbage, say “please” and “thank you”, don’t put venomous spiders in your sister’s bed, because SANTA IS WATCHING and you won’t get any presents if you’re a little shit all year. (If you have ever been to church, you’ve heard a similar version of this: just replace “Santa” with “God” and “not getting presents” with “going to Hell”) Fine. I guess that’s the link between the manger and the North Pole: maybe Santa’s more palatable than Jesus in this day and age. But to me, either choice feels like parents passing the buck. Fear Santa? I don’t know about you, but when I have kids, the omnipresent entity they’re going to fear and respect is me. Because I’m bigger than Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Great Pumpkin, the Thanksgiving Turkey, the Hanukah Troll, and the Kwanza Leprechaun combined, and most importantly, as far as my kids are concerned, I AM GOD.

Anyway, I digress. I’m currently sitting at my job as a front-desk guy for a car dealership. It’s November 24^th. The last of the Halloween candy has just gone the way of the dinosaur. Two days ago the weather decided to take a sharp right-turn out of pleasantly Warm Fall (formerly known as Indian Summer before the INAC finally got around to politically-correcting that blemish) and into Freezing Bitch Cold Canadian Winter. Two weeks ago my neighbours were swimming in their pool, and now I’m getting ninety-five calls a day from frantic idiots who ignored last week’s warnings about an impending snow storm, and waited until two feet of freezing white shit fell from the sky to book an appointment to get their snow tires put on. Canadians have memories like goldfish. Every year around the same time in this country, we start experiencing the same weather: snow, freezing rain, hail, and other assorted cold unpleasant conditions, and EVERY YEAR people wake up on the first morning and go “OH SHIT! WHERE THE HELL DID THIS COME FROM?! I’M TOTALLY FUCKING SHOCKED! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET TO WORK WHEN THERE’S A QUARTER INCH OF WET SNOW ON THE GROUND?!” Never mind the fact that you’ve probably been living in this country most, if not all, of your life. Never mind the fact that it’s the same goddamn thing every year. No, instead of being prepared for the inevitable return of cold weather and bad driving conditions, they assume since the snowstorm didn’t hit exactly when it was supposed to that it’s NEVER GOING TO SNOW AGAIN. And, predictably, when it does, everyone loses their shit, forgets how to drive, gets in horrendous accidents causing hundreds of deaths each winter, and yet the population of people who are this stupid never seems to diminish. Good, now I have another reason to hate this season.

So I’m sitting at my desk, on November 24^th (it’s a work story, remember?) and I’m listening to the radio they have playing in the show room. Generally it’s a mid-range mix of soft-rock, easy-rock, easy-listening, easy-soft-rock-listening, and elevator music. This is okay with me. Unlike my last job where the speaker was located two and a half feet over my head and blasted at a hundred and seventy decibels right down on top of me, the speakers here are a good twenty feet above me and the volume is set to a more tolerable background level (read: easily ignored). I’m really not a big fan of the Beegees, but if I can tune out their whiny caterwauling then I’m hardly going to have a fit about it.

But there’s one kind of music I can’t tune out, and slowly but surely it’s working its insidious little way into the regular rotation. You all know what’s coming. Now, it’s beginning to sound a lot like Christmas too.

A couple of things about Christmas music. First, I understand there are people out there who actually enjoy and look forward to this time of year, and in fact enjoy and look forward to hearing a different version of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” in every different store they enter during their week-long cash haemorrhage consumerist orgy. But the fact of the matter is that I am not one of those people, and further, I can state with reasonable surety that no one who has ever had to work a retail or customer service position over the Christmas season falls into the above category either. More on this later. For you, the valued customer, a sampling of Christmas music is a pleasant reminder of the joy and nostalgia and fuzzy cuddly warmth of the holiday season. You walk into one store and hear “Jingle Bells” as performed by that irritating bitch with the big nose (you know the one – where the tempo is accelerated to the point where it sounds like it’s being performed by a speed-addled Tourette’s patient), and that’s nice. Walk into the next store and you’re treated to Louis Armstrong doing his best Cookie-Monster impression to the tune of “Winter Wonderland”. And that’s nice too. Another store might even be playing a song with religious undertones – go figure – but they’ll be sure to play the version recorded by Jewel or Celine “The Aural Holocaust” Dion so as to maintain the illusion that they’re merely playing “pop” recordings and not actual hymns (even though it’s allegedly a Christian holiday…apparently Santa is a liberal). And that’s even nicer. Surely you, the valued customer, appreciates listening to a snaggle-toothed one-hit wonder from Alaska reaching for the high notes in “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” and not quite making it. Or, contrarily, stepping over the shattered glass that resulted from the nuclear force of the highest C note known to man, as it expelled itself out of the gaping sing-hole of a psychotic French mannequin from Charlemagne. Nothing says Holiday Cheer quite like permanent inner ear damage. But whatever trims your tree, I guess.

Anyway, the point is that Christmas music, to paraphrase Karl Marx, is supposed to be the opiate of the mall-going masses. I’m told the intent of piping this Holly Jolly nonsense all over major consumer outlets, is to remind people that the whole point of Christmas is to be with the ones you love and spend quality time with them, not to murder other parents in a desperate bid to claim the last Molest-Me-Elmo, or whatever the hot item is this year. I know, this philosophy is somewhat at odds with all the corporate hyping that goes on around this time: LAST MINUTE SALE, CHRISTMAS EVE BLOWOUT, FORGOT-YOUR-WIFE’S-GIFT SPECIAL, et cetera. The whole point of that side of the equation seems to be to whip the masses into a bloodthirsty, stress-generated buying frenzy, and let the winner take all. On some level I’m surprised they don’t hand out small-calibre firearms or bladed weapons at the door, a la “Battle Royale”, and just let these last-minute morons and Ho-Ho-Homicidal Maniacs have at it, because really: is that too far from what already happens?

For example, I once saw two customers (both women) get into a fist fight over a bottle of Jean-Paul Gautier cologne because it was the last one the fragrance department had in stock. These women were both impeccably dressed in designer brands and they both had wedding rings set with diamonds the size of the goddamn Rock of Gibraltar, so not only could they obviously afford to buy pretty much whatever they wanted from the counter, they were probably already using their husbands’ platinum card to buy him his own gift anyway. Yet, they were kicking the shit out of each other over a fifty-dollar bottle of cologne shaped like a naked man’s torso, complete with tastefully blended Ken Doll jockstrap genitals. I’m sure any man would be thrilled to grab a hold of that little treasure in his stocking Christmas morning. It wasn’t even a nice scent, unless their husbands really wanted to walk around smelling like they fell in a big bin of potpourri. Eventually, somebody called security and the boys managed to break these two out of the death-grips they had on one another’s throats.

What does this have to do with Christmas music? The consensus in upper management seems to be that Christmas music promotes higher sales (check) because it puts people in a generous, gift-giving mood (check), because it adds to the “festive atmosphere” of the store (all right, fine) and finally because it promotes a general sense of holiday cheer and joviality between customers during a stressful time of year (wait). Seriously, that’s as close to a direct quote that I can give you – a floor manager at the department store I worked at last year actually said this during a floor meeting. Holiday cheer and joviality, huh? Tell that to Steve in Loss Prevention who caught a Gibraltar diamond above his left eye while subduing the Gautier harpies and needed three stitches. Peace on earth my Aunt Fanny.

So it’s fairly safe to say that Christmas music as it is defined by upper management does not, in fact, have the calming effect on you, the valued customer, for which it is intended. It’s also fairly safe to say that the average employee, if lambasted for eight hours a day with every conceivable version of “Santa’s Coming to Town”, will likely become sick of it (if by “sick” I mean “violently ill and/or certifiably psychotic”). I’d be willing to accept it as one of the many, many necessary evils of this stupid holiday, except for one thing: if all of what I’ve said so far is true, and many of you will agree, then why, why, why must we start this process earlier and earlier every year?

I’ve been tracking this disturbing trend for the last ten years or so. Look, I know that “holiday”-themed sales, with the exception of some token Thanksgiving crap, go through sort of a slump between November 1^st when the Halloween thing is all over with (and when did people start treating Halloween as a legitimate holiday, complete with full-house decorations and light show? More on that another time) and the onset of the Christmas thing, which is still realistically five or six weeks away. I’m sorry that for those five or six weeks, you might actually have to try and sell something worthwhile and/or useful to your customer base, rather than stuffing all this throwaway holiday pabulum down their throats. I know it’s not entirely your fault, because you work on supply and demand. and generally speaking your customer base is downright stupid. “Gee, I really should invest in something intelligent like a microwave that doesn’t make a horrifyingly loud buzzing noise so it sounds as though you’re cooking a beehive every time you set the power level above 3, but HOLY SHIT, LOOK! FOR THE SAME PRICE I COULD GET THIS ENORMOUS CERAMIC TURKEY THAT LOOKS LIKE IT WAS STOLEN FROM THE SET OF ‘THREE’S COMPANY’! I know it’ll take up half my dining table since it’s larger than the actual turkey my measly wage down at the Stop and Go can provide my family for Christmas dinner, but DAMN it’ll look classy when I pair it with my ‘vintage’ (read: bargain basement) circa-1977 ceramic Santa-and-Elf salt and pepper shakers!”

It’s hard not to take advantage, I’m sure. But still, you could show a little restraint for the sake of the rest of us who actually need to go get that microwave, and don’t really want to be inundated with all this “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” horseshit.

About that: who gave you the authority to arbitrarily decide when the Christmas season starts and stops – particularly when it starts? Why is it that I walk down the street, still having to step over smashed pumpkin bits left over from Devil’s Night, and I’m already seeing tinsel and holly and pictures of elves everywhere? Isn’t this season, with the snow and ice and cancelled transit and family theatrics and gift-related guilt and alcohol abuse and rampant consumerism and depression and suicide, bad enough with out extending it by another whole month and a half? Last time I checked the song talks about the twelve days of Christmas, not the twelve WEEKS.

Look, everybody who was going to do their Christmas shopping early this year is already done by November, okay? You know why? So they don’t have to go to the mall and deal with people like the Gautier twins or the savage parents. And all the rest, the people that constitute 95% of your customer base, are going to do the same goddamn thing they do every year. They’re going to wait until a week before the day and then flip out, jump in their car, repeatedly hammer the horn and smash into other cars in order to get to the mall before everything is picked over, and once they get there they’re going to battering-ram their way through all the other toe-headed morons that wonder why hot-ticket items are no longer in stock by December 23^rd in the hopes of finding something, anything that will appease their kids and/or their significant others or ailing parents or bitchy coworkers or greedy friends or whatever. They will spend inordinate amounts of money on a credit card they cannot really afford, which will take them until next Christmas to pay off, and then they will get in their cars and smash their way out of the nightmare back to their suburban shit holes, just in time to catch Tim Allen starring in “The Santa Clause” on TBS for the ninetieth time this week.

So if that’s true (which it is), what’s the point in subjecting the intelligent consumers – not to mention your employees – to a month and a half of totally unnecessary holiday cheer? I know, I know. You will now quote facts and figures to me that prove Christmas decorations and a Christmas soundtrack are guaranteed to increase sales in November and early December. You will point out that if I don’t like the music that is being played in my store, I can happily go find another job where music and indeed contact with the outside world is not required. You will smugly suggest that if I like getting paid, since it’s not terribly feasible for someone to find a job this late in the Christmas game (thanks to your arbitrary dating system), I will shut up and do my job and like it. You will tell me these things and you will be right, and I will not care. I will hate you anyway. Fuck Christmas and fuck you too.

…Wow. Sorry about that. Much of the preceding off-kilter rant, I can only assume, was the result of post-traumatic retail stress disorder. In fact I like my current job very much, and in fact I’m doing my damndest to keep an open mind about the holiday season this year. I’m not complaining about the weather since it’s possible this might be the last Canadian Christmas I see for a while, and I’m not complaining about the customers since I get to pass the buck to the service department and they can deal with the snow-tire morons. In fact, I’m keeping everything pretty simple this time around. My Christmas wish list for this year: to see my friends when they’re in town, to make it through the day without any of my family members being incarcerated for mischief, public drunkenness, assault or murder, and maybe, if I’m really lucky, to be able to see my girlfriend soon after the whole thing is done with. That’s all I really want, so please, Santa, please make this boy’s wish come true. Make it a Christmas miracle, for me?

Wait…what’s that smell? It’s metallic and vaguely spicy and…oh, right.

It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas, folks.

And it smells like shit.

Localized Irritant, II: (Since When Do We Not) Support Our Troops

2008-10-02T08:51:00.001-07:00

(Written 19 September 2007. Obviously it's a little dated now, given the way things are going in the Middle East, but I figured I'd put it up just for posterity.)

I just got a Myspace friend request from Canada. That's right, Canada wants to be my friend. I was unaware that Canada and I had had a falling out. We've been on relatively good terms for the last twenty-three or so years. Maybe Canada was pissed that I've been spending so much of my free time in transit to, thinking about, and generally working on moving to Texas. Could Canada be jealous? Naw, it's too pleasant a country to succumb to jealousy. Anyway, I accepted Canada's invitation, and we are now friends (again?).

But it seems Canada has had a change of heart since we last spoke. You see, I went to Canada's Myspace page, and all I could find was various maple leaf paraphernalia, a few references to the Tragically Hip, and a lot of "Support Our Troops" notices.

Okay, now I've been down in Texas for a few weeks now, and I've seen my share of Support Our Troops ribbons stuck to the back of large SUVs and just about every other conceivable surface. I can't remember which colour signifies "Support Our Troops" because it seems that every cause and charity now has a ribbon attached to it. Pink for Breast Cancer, yellow for Other Indiscriminate Cancer, white for Male Violence (which is so non-discriminatory), blue for human rights, red for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the cute little rainbow ones for gay rights, and even a black ribbon for - get this - the fight against ego. But the "Support Our Troops" one still seems to be most prevalent. I saw a Hummer the other day with six different ribbon stickers on the bumper, four of which were Support Our Troop ribbons done stylistically in the Red, White and Blue colours generally associated with the American flag. This driver also had a bumper sticker that read "Git 'Er Done" on his rear window and a few non-specific military logos, and my favourite: Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) peeing on something with a nasty look on his face. Bumper stickers make you cool, no doubt about it. The one that wins for me is still the lady driving around with the "Kerry For President" sticker still hanging onto the back of her beat-up Subaru. I guess she needed a new one to replace the "Bring Down the Berlin Wall" sticker she had on there up until May of 2003.

Anyway, the Support the Troops thing. So I'm loathe to enter into a political debate about a country whose political leaders have been somewhat lacking in my eyes, especially because I'm trying to move here and the DHS is listening. I'll say this much: insofar as "Support the Troops" goes, I'm all for bringing men and women back to their homes in one piece as quickly and efficiently as possible, because I'm tired of turning on the news and seeing more dead people. The concept of supporting one's troops isn't what bugs me about Canada's Myspace page (this is a Canada story, remember?)

What bugs me is that it's just another symptom of my country blithely following along the beaten path laid out by our neighbours to the south and adopting yet another element of their culture into ours. Canadians have always been proud of our military men and women, and we've always done our best to be respectful and honour those who have served in war - to the point that a certain War Museum is considering revising a plaque it has posted detailing the Allied attacks on Axis civilian populations during the Second World War (in which Canada took part) because it paints us as the "bad guys". Yep, we're willing to rewrite our history for the sake of our veterans. So I think it's safe to say that we are supportive and respectful in our own way already. I just don't get why we think we have to remind one another to "support our troops". Canada's involvement in the Middle Eastern conflicts of the last several years has continued to be a peacekeeping, humanitarian role (largely). We're there to help folks out who've been disadvantaged by the ongoing hostilities, and I really don't think you'll find a Canadian anywhere who is going to disagree with our political standpoint on the whole thing (Canadians feel free to disagree with me). Canada joined most of the rest of the Western world in giving the big thumbs-down to Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Coalition of the Willing and everything else, instead opting to do the same thing we always do - go in and help clean up the mess. We're doing our bit as international peacekeepers, and we're largely staying out of the cluster-fuck that is the main conflict out there right now.

So, we've determined that we do, in fact, support our troops in many ways and that we don't really need to be convinced that supporting our troops is a good idea (the way that a lot of Americans seem to require convincing that being in Iraq and sending their young people to get blown up is a good idea). So why does Canada's Myspace page suggest that we need to be bringing more attention to this idea? Why does Canada's Myspace page say that we should go to "rallies" to Support Our Troops? I'm well aware that this page is probably not sanctioned by any member of the Canadian government, but still: there are enough people in the world who are totally ignorant of the country I love that they might actually believe that Canadians on a whole are this stupid. We aren't a military culture and we never have been: granted, we'll fight like crazy people if we figure we're in the right, but we'd rather find diplomatic solutions to our problems. Hell, we've been putting up with the Quebecois for over a hundred years and have yet to start an armed conflict...that has to say something.

I guess it just bugs me when I see an expression of my culture that doesn't really accurately reflect what we're like (to my mind). Granted, we too have our share of psychotic rednecks who live by the mantra "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out", but they truly are a minority - by and large, Canadians really do live up to the stereotype of being friendly, non-aggressive people.

That said, I did "friend" the Canada page, just so my American friends can go have another good laugh at my expense. I'm sorry if this post was disjointed...there's more I want to say about this, but I'm not yet sure how to phrase it. I might come back to this issue later; I really just am trying to get the juices flowing again. More rage another time.

Localized Irritant I: Suicide & You

2008-10-02T08:47:00.000-07:00

(Written 13 September 2007...but it still rings as true now as it did then, at least in my head)

I'm currently sitting in Fort Worth Texas, working on research for my graduate school writing sample. Okay, not really – I'm reading news on the BBC's website, because I have a penchant for procrastination.

The BBC is a pretty reputable news source - inasmuch as any government-sanctioned, industry-run news source can be in this day and age - but I'm telling you, the demographic they sell to are some seriously fucked up people. First off, the British paparazzi is one of the most ruthless organizations in the world: they can and will dig up dirt on anyone, anywhere, and at any cost. Give those guys two weeks in the Middle East, and not only will they be able to tell you where Osama is, who he's been schmoozing with and who he's fucking, but they'll already have concocted a sensational story in which he's actually Anna Nicole's baby-daddy. But the British public are even worse for feeding into this: they're a nation of very twisted voyeurs who get off even more than most Americans I've met on stories of human suffering and the debasement of their fellow man. As a result, I've been slowly eating my way through stuff run by the BBC, and they're constantly the same kinds of stories: death, murder, rape, suicide, death, celebrity titty, death, suffering, celebrity mental breakdown, death, death, death. It's a little much for me.

But this actually isn't a story about the BBC or its questionable journalistic ethical integrity, I just tend to get on a roll with this sort of stuff sometimes. This morning, I read the latest in the "suicide" category of news items. The story is a bit dated (March 23rd of this year) but the context is still relevant. For those who question my integrity, this story can be found at www.bbc.co.uk by looking in their archives under "chat room", as well as at a variety of other sites, including www.thisislondon.co.uk, which is the site I will be referencing particularly.

Apparently a fellow in the UK by the name of Kevin Whitrick became Britain's first case of "cyber-suicide" after logging into a chat room, turning on his webcam and proceeding to hang himself with electrical wire for a live audience. Sad bits: he was 42, had two 12-year-old daughters, and had been struggling with depression after being involved in a serious car accident last year, as well as coping with the death of his father as well as his own divorce proceedings. As per usual, the folks around him didn't notice a thing, though the lady who worked the convenience store across the street from his flat said he was very nice when he came in every night to buy eight cans of Boddington's. When Whitrick took the plunge, shocked chatters contacted police, and he was pronounced dead at the scene, during which time the site moderators closed off the camera feed.

Important things to note: the website in question, called "Paltalk" hosts a wide variety of chat rooms ranging from the starkly religious to the conventionally political, from the sicko celebrity to the sultry and steamy. One of the rooms hosted by Paltalk was ostensibly an "Insult Room" in which, according to the London Evening Standard, participants are encouraged to "have a go" at one another (that's British for making fun). I took a look at Paltalk a few minutes ago and wasn't able to locate any such chat room which means one of two things: a) I didn't look hard enough because there are several thousand chat rooms hosted there and I don't have that kind of patience, or b) the room was shut down, which is pretty likely considering. Either way, I've heard of these sorts of chat rooms before, and I'm sure you have too.

Okay. So this brings me to the good bit.

I think we can all agree that suicide is bad. It's horrible that anybody feels like they have to cut their mortal coil off at the bud, because there aren't too many people who deserve to feel that way. But the other thing is, in my personal opinion, it's pretty selfish to wax yourself, because you don't have to take responsibility for the kind of havoc you wreak on the people around you (believe it or not, there are people who give a shit). It's the ultimate guilt trip, right? Especially those fuckers that leave a note saying "It's not your fault"...that's the cosmic, mortal version of the "It's not you, it's me" speech that people in relationships give one another when they're trying to say "It's not me, it's you", but they want to soften the blow. And that just covers people who go quietly into their rooms, down a bottle of sleeping pills and a handle of Jim Beam, and leave the world as unobtrusively as possible. As for everybody else - the skyscraper leapers, the "I'm taking you down with me" psychotics, the subway jumpers, and in fact the webcam performers - it gets elevated to new levels. At that point you're actively involving other people - people who don't even know you - in your little drama play. Think how the subway operator feels when she wipes out some idiot at seventy-five kilometers an hour because he leapt off the platform, or the guy who nearly gets flattened by somebody swan-diving off a fifteenth-story balcony. Think about what it must be like to see some guy hang himself - live and in living colour - and because you're sitting behind a computer screen there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Worse, you thought the cat was kidding because he brought up suicide in an INSULT CHAT ROOM, so you goaded him on, thinking you were participating in some bizarre "Punk'd" facsimile. How would you feel?

Pretty fuckin' bad, I'd imagine.

Apparently, the people who commented on the article at ThisIsLondon agreed with me. The difference, of course, is that the commenters were all ready to line up and crucify everybody who was in that chat room that night - some comments even called for legal action against the other chat members.

Okay, I want to address this first, and then we'll look at some gems from the comment list.

Here you have a 42 year old man - an electrician by trade, so you assume he's got some brains. He's got two 12 year old daughters whom he professes to adore (according to his family and friends). Okay, his father died - that sucks. And his wife left him right afterwards - that was a pretty bitchy thing to do (which is thoroughly overreaching, I know, but I'm giving this guy the benefit of the doubt). And he was in a car accident (I couldn't turn up anything reliable about the accident itself or what happened to him - but if he didn't lose his dick in the wreck, and if he still had enough ambulatory agency to be able to break his ceiling and hang himself with electrical wire, his injuries couldn't have been that extensive). Plus, the guy is probably a functional alcoholic (eight cans of beer every night?), which is no good in and of itself. So the cat is pretty unhappy, which nobody is going to hold against him because he's had a rough year.

So what does he do?

He goes on the internet. To a chat room, where he can talk to people he doesn't know. A chat room which, I gather, was clearly demarcated as one in which "fighting" or "flaming" or whatever is allowed, and in fact is encouraged. He then proceeds to tell everyone in said chat room that he's going to off himself. This is akin to cutting yourself shaving and then taking a swim in the Great Barrier Reef: a feeding frenzy will quite obviously ensue.

I can say for myself that if I was in that chat room, I would have serious doubts as to whether this guy really meant it. I mean, what kind of person who is struggling with depression and having suicidal thoughts goes deliberately into a jackal's den like that? What would somebody like that hope to gain?

The answer, my friends, is justification.

If you've already decided more-or-less beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're going to make the Big Move, you usually don't tell everybody about it. Generally speaking, people who tell other people that they want to die are looking for some kind of support - they call it a "cry for help" I think. They want to hear that their life is worth something: they want to be validated externally because they can't find internal validation for whatever reason. Kevin Whitrick was obviously kind of like that - so why did he go to the one place where we was absolutely guaranteed to get the opposite kind of attention? It strikes me that the only reason somebody would deliberately go somewhere to get mocked and belittled before killing themselves is that they needed one last push in the "right" direction, one last justification for their decision, one last shred of proof that the world is, indeed, a cold and lonely place where no one understands their pain and other people exist only to stomp out the last vestiges of hope that have been sputtering within their breasts and holding off the inevitable blackness of existence. It goes back to what I said about suicide being a pity-party: woe is me, the world hates me, I'm justified in ending it all.

So where do we put the blame for this? I'd tend to put it on Kevin Whitrick, myself, because it's his life and his decision to end it, regardless of the other factors at work. If he had nothing else to live for, he had his daughters, and that should have been reason enough to find other ways - any other ways - of dealing with his problems. But here in North America, and obviously in Westernized cultures the world over, it seems to me that we have this amazing capacity to turn everyone into a victim. Have you ever noticed this? The rising prevalence of "victim criminals"? They don't call it that, but when the rapist is just a rapist because his father raped him, and his father raped him and so on back through the annals of time, and when the serial killer is a serial killer because mommy didn't love him like she should have because mommy was a crack whore because she was underprivileged and "fell through the cracks", and the kid who goes to school with a shotgun is a victim of the faceless media that told him to listen to Marilyn Manson and watch The Matrix and that's why he was violent, where do we put the blame? Who gets to take responsibility? See – everybody's a victim and nobody's at fault.

So instead of looking at this situation for what it is: a guy who was terminally fucked up and offed himself on camera after placing himself in a situation in which he was almost guaranteed to not be taken seriously, instead of looking at why Kevin Whitrick and so many other people like him are driven to suicide when suicide as it exists today was a relatively non-existent phenomenon prior to maybe a thousand years ago, instead we back into a corner screaming "Not me, it's not my fault, I'm not part of the problem, I'm not partaking in a sick, wrongheaded culture that spawns depressive suicide, it's not my fault that the Kevin Whitricks of the world feel so isolated and fucked up that they have to hang themselves, nope, not me...it's THOSE GUYS OVER THERE."

And who, in this case, are those guys over there?

"For all those people who watched this tragedy I hope you are proud." - Paul Rust, UK

"Those people egging him on are disgusting - I hope they feel ashamed." - Mia, England

"My thoughts the room should be closed and the people who had @ on need banning..." Lesley, Saint Paul USA

"The fact that those people goaded him into killing himself is unbelievable. Regardless of whether or not they 'thought' he was acting even joking in that way about suicide is not acceptable. Those people that encouraged him to go ahead and kill himself should be held just as responsible for his death as if they were there and assisted him with it! Those people have something seriously wrong with them in the first place...they need more help than a 'support facility' can offer." - Jenn, USA

"I can only hope that the rest of their lives they will feel responsible for the death of this poor man and find it hard to live with themselves." - Linda, Lynn, MA

I could go on and on because there are lots more comments just like this, but I think you get the idea. Basically, the prevalent opinion seems to be that it was not, in fact, Mr. Whitrick who was responsible for his own death, but instead a bunch of people located all over the world who were speaking with him via a specially-designed insult chatroom when he turned on his webcam and killed himself (I'd like to make special mention of the term "KILLED HIMSELF" here). Certainly, had Mr. Whitrick entered the insult room and found the kind of caring and supportive environment one would obviously look for in an insult room, his terrible decision might have been averted. Certainly, in mocking Mr. Whitrick's assertion towards suicide, the denizens of the insult chatroom were behaving completely out-of-character and in a manner for which Mr. Whitrick must have been totally unprepared. And yes, Jenn USA, they should be held totally accountable as though they were there assisting him, because without their "goading" Mr. Whitrick would doubtless have returned to his life and found the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel - perhaps even accepting Jesus and foregoing his alcohol addiction in favour of the children he professed to love. We can only hope that the hardened murderers of the Paltalk network will take this opportunity to reevaluate their life decisions and even, as Lynn MA suggested, "have a hard time living with themselves". If we're really lucky, they might even become so depressed over their "responsibility" for Mr. Whitrick's death that they might take a page from his book and off themselves too. They could start a whole chatroom on that very topic, in fact: "I killed Kevin Whitrick and now I want to die". Might want to disable webcam availability in that room, though.

Get your shit straight people. Take some responsibility for your actions, and hold other people responsible for theirs. I wasn't in that chatroom that night, so I can't say for sure what went down. But the scenario seems pretty goddamn fishy to me, and the minute we decide to start shutting down websites and handing out judgment to people for behaving in a way entirely accordant to the standards of the situation, well, what does that make us? I'm sorry Kevin Whitrick is dead, but I'm more sorry his two daughters will now grow up without a father. And as far as the people on the insult board at Paltalk go, I'd be willing to bet that they're already heaping enough largely-undeserved guilt on themselves as it is, without you fucking moral puritans advocating their crucifixion.

It all comes back to addressing the disease rather than the symptom. Instead of blaming all the worlds' problems on cosmetic issues, we need to get to the root of the issue: next time something like this happens, because it will, let's look at how we can prevent more fathers from hanging themselves with electrical wire rather than who we can blame for his personal decision.

And that's how I spent my morning. There will be more of this to come. I'll try to make the next one a little more light-hearted. Thanks for reading friends...I don't know about you, but I feel a hell of a lot better.

Localized Irritant - Prologue

2008-10-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

(written 13 September 2007. This was the beginning of a series, which I'll probably revisit here at the new site.)

All right, so I'm going to try and make this a more regular thing. I've been trying to figure out what I can sit down and write about in a weblog forum that's going to fulfill a couple of requirements: a) it's something I actually want to say, b) it's marginally creative, c) it amuses me, and d) it amuses others. So I did some thinking, and I realized that the answer was right in front of me the whole time.

I'm not the most content guy in the world; a lot of stuff that I see around me every day, both in the news and personally, infuriates the shit out of me. The context doesn't really matter; I see things worthy of my intense hostility everywhere in the public sphere, and certainly in my day-to-day life. But the problem I have is that people, by and large, don't want to be exposed to the kind of "negative energy" I seem to radiate when I try and talk about the things that are bugging me about the world. There are a select few people that enjoy my half-lecture, half-rant pseudo-polysci diatribes, but for the most part people seem to view me as a pretty intense and easily-wired kind of guy, and honestly I get the sense that the majority of people just don't like to think too much on the subjects that preoccupy me, because in fairness it is kind of depressing and it's hard to think when there are so many ways to just forget about stuff and let it all slide.

Unfortunately, I can't bring myself to do that - partly because I feel like we should be talking about everything that goes on around us, like it's our duty to do so, and partly because it's just so overriding in my head that I have to get it out somewhere or risk giving myself brain cancer or something. So in the interest of maintaining what semblance I have of a social life and structure of friendships (and sanity), I've decided to start expelling the kind of bile I stockpile every time I turn on the television or read the news or leave the house, by doing what the rest of Middle America seems to do with the minutiae of their mediocre lives that nobody really cares about: post it in a weblog. Every time I post on one of these potentially spiteful and vindictive subjects, it will be titled under the name "Localized Irritant", more as a gesture of forewarning to the five people that actually follow my seldom-updated weblog than because of any intentions to make up a clever or marketable name.

I can't make any guarantees that all of these posts will be particularly funny - the one that will follow this post likely won't make anybody's comedy routine anytime soon - so if you're looking for a laugh-a-minute "Big Al" story, you run the risk of being disappointed. But if you're looking, as a hero of mine says, to "prolong your life by keeping your blood thin with rage", then I'll do what I can to dole out some serious white-hot hate on all the things that make us want to ram tuning forks through our ears. Join the fun, won't you?

inklings of a short story

2008-10-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

(Written 17 june, 2007, 6:00pm. I've always wanted to revisit this character. I like him; maybe you will too.)

What frustrated Ember Ross most about public transit - buses, subways, airplanes - was the lack of ambulatory agency. Certainly one could walk the length of the cabin (or car or bus as the case might be) provided there was space and that no warnings to remain seated were issued, but this agency extended only so far as the confines of the transportation vessel.

Macrocosmically, he mused as the obese car salesman to his left shifted his briefcase painfully into Ross' outer thigh; macrocosmically there was nothing, short of declaring
or manufacturing some manner of emergency, that one could do to affect the course or duration of the journey. Declaring an emergency if none existed would be inadvisable, nearly as much so as manufacturing one, given the powers that govern transit and law enforcement had had what sense of humour they could claim severely curtailed by the threat of explosives in the underground and airplanes consciously directed into large buildings. And anyway such a course of action would be at best inexpedient, as emergencies were most often cause for further delay rather than a faster and more efficient trip.

Sweat coalesced uncomfortably in the narrow expanse of skin between Ross' shoulder blades. He was itchy and sore from standing more erect than usual for seven stops at last count. The subway car, it appeared, was sweating along with him. Condensation formed on the windows from the foul exhalations of far too many commuters. Ross had no inkling as to the capacity of a single train car, but he was willing to bet that maximum input was exceeded significantly on a regular basis. And this particular afternoon was proof positive of this claim.

Awkwardly, and with great care borne of a desire to avoid as much physical contact as possible with his unwelcome neighbours, Ross shifted his shoulder-slung carryall left and right, trying without much success to redistribute the unstable weight of the bottle of cheap English gin contained in the bag. The gin, it seemed, maintained its own right to ambulatory agency within the confines of its glass prison: the bag shifted left and the liquid went right, indignantly throwing its owner off-balance and preempting every attempt to compensate; prophesizing in erratic motion, perhaps, the inevitably unsteady gait Ross would perform upon its consumption.

The train had slowed, as Ross feared, to a crawl, inching through the blacked-out tunnel like some great sightless worm cautiously burrowing through the earth. More sweat shone on his upper lip, tracing its way in rivulets through the forest of a two-day beard to collect in the corners of his tight lips. The car salesman to his left had joined forces with the four-foot myopic octogenarian to his right: as the train continued its slow perpendicular shuffle, Ross was alternately assailed by the sharp corner of the salesman's briefcase digging slowly into his thigh, and the methodical bumping of a veiny, withered but altogether right-angled elbow into the line of his ribcage, left necessarily exposed as his right hand grasped the undoubtedly unhygienic upper handrail.

The air was already thick and sour, heavy and warm like a stale soiled blanket carelessly draped over the captive commuters, and it seemed to Ross that the unwashed, sticky atmosphere closed in even further until it lay like cellophane over every square inch of his exposed skin, as with a disconcerting grinding tone the train lurched to a dead stop in the nameless limbo between stations.
Outside the windows, oppressively close and blank, could only be seen dull, water-stained concrete and thick black power lines that ran like meticulous surgical incisions parallel to the tracks below. A slow panic dripped acid into Ross' stomach.

Walled in, a voice said, like the fool who sought Amontillado. A fate, Ross responded silently, I might endure if only I had the cool solitude afforded Fortunato. But to be trapped, crushed in to suffocate amongst strangers? To watch them empty and waste, to hear them moan for lovers and mothers, and even at last for a breath of air that came not from their own lungs and the lungs of each greedy prisoner who gave it only grudgingly? To watch them, feel them, finally slump exhausted and defeated against him? To never be free of their flesh and their stench and their stupid, docile despair?

Like it always did the acid took hold and turned his veins into electrical conductors, his breath to napalm, every muscle to uncontrollable spasmodic retaliation against real and imagined stimuli his brain refused to process and summarily dumped, whole and raw and radioactive, into his tattered nervous system. His eyelids slid shut, sandpaper despite the wet heat, and he saw purple and black explosions opening, expanding like superclusters, alive with white veins like lightning. Ember Ross stood before a great hungry mouth that shrieked like a thousand subway rails, grinding metal on metal, and the mouth smiled and spoke and only Ember Ross heard its words.

With a jerk and a slow groan the train resumed its meandering, sluggish progress towards the next station. Ember Ross blinked as sunlight washed over the car, the horrid slate of the tunnel walls giving way to green grass and street traffic as the subway surfaced like a Nautilus from the hollow stone depths.

With trembling hands Ember Ross snatched headphones from his pocket and fastened them to his ears. His left hand rose unsteadily to his face as he pressed the hot, clean flesh of his wrist to his nose, determined to focus on the subtleties of soap and mild cologne gathered there. His right hand sought the volume control, pressed and held it until the hiss of dead tape sounded in his ears, until the smooth arcing of a classical guitar filled everything he could see and hear with calm white light.

And as it always did, the fire in his belly subsided to a slow, barely perceptible burn; the explosions in his eyes faded to leave only a purple corona on the edges of his vision, the tremors that ran along his skin and through bone and blood vibrated slower, slower, and were replaced by the calming vibrato of plucked nylon strings ringing through every filament of his singed consciousness.

The train glided slowly into the station; the Nautilus submerged once more. When the doors rattled open it was as though the great worm released its own rancid, long-held exhalation, and Ember Ross was jolted into halting half-steps that expelled him and the other passengers like so much placenta from a steel womb. As he walked his feet and legs slowly regained their confidence and mobility. And his breath came easier with each step. His clothes clung damply to his skin, but the sweat was drying, dissipating into the dry recycled air of the station.

And as always, Ember Ross uttered a silent prayer that this would be the last time, that he had conquered the shaking nightmare and the acid in his veins. It was a fervent prayer and it was hollow, and it was lost to the girdered ceiling and the slow rush of fans, and it was silenced by the crush of stupid, docile despair that sounded like silent thunder through the station and through him. The slosh of gin at his side was more comfort than hindrance, now; perhaps its consumption would earn him peace, or at least silence in wide open places and in solitude.

With the prayer fled Ember Ross walked on. And in that, at least, he took a measure of control. In that, he took a measure of joy.

ostranenie, IV

2008-10-02T08:27:00.000-07:00

(written january 13, 2006, 9:20am, sid smith hall)

I am cleaning house. Losing addictions left, right, and - yes, even center. In five days I've had a total of one beer and only a half-pack of smokes. No coffee. No hot sauce. I've started swimming daily, hoping to fix whatever seems to be wrong with me. Swimming and drinking water. I feel as though my life has become a BodyBreak(TM) commercial. I'm half-expecting Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod to leap out of my closet, circa-1987, complete with Hal's (now) missing mustache and Joanne's awesome neon-nylon workout suit, and tell me that I'm keeping fit and having fun.

Well let me tell you something Hal; this is not fun for me, no matter how much fun you might be having at my expense. I feel worse now than I've probably felt in years. Drinking water makes me sicker than a mild hangover, and I end my day feeling like I'm somehow missing something. I really, really don't like being this clear-headed. Tea, tea, tea, tea, tea. It's just not waking me up the way coffee does. But as has been brought to my attention by several sources, coffee beans are (and I quote the scientific prognosis) bad. That's Latin for "Al likes it, but it doesn't like Al". Now, tea is different. Tea is supposed to be good (from the Latin: listen to your mother). I think it's called a "diuretic" and it contains something called "anti-oxidants".It's supposed to flush my fucked-up system by making me piss like a goddamn infant all the time.

Apart from spending half my time leaking like a sieve, I'm beginning to fear that whatever it is this tea is flushing, I probably need - or at least am used to. I've noticed that one of the more important elements being "flushed" is my patience. I mean all of it. I offer an example: I am currently sitting in a modern Canadian poetry class (insert your own joke here) listening to the regular crop of Trinity assholes wax philosophic on the poetics of Native writer Fred Wah, and I want to get on the phone and call up ol' Fred, go pick up a couple of twelve-gauges and correct their perceptions. These people are absolutely certain that they know everything about everything, and though I'll grant them they probably have a lot more going on regarding Modern Canadian Poetry (because that matters a fiddler's damn) than I have, there is this utterly arrogant, aristocratic, elitist intellectual undertone to everything that is said to the point where it's stinking up the room. And it makes me want to get up, Half-Baked style, and walk the fuck out.

Usually I'm quite happy to tune out and let it all wash, but given the state I'm currently in I think that particular circuit has been fused and I either have to shut down entirely or else overload. Now I'm not trying to give the impression that no one here has anything worthwhile to say; in fact, there are a few of them I could listen to all damn day over cigarettes and beer, because they're quite introspective and prescient, but those few are overshadowed by the sheer volume of ego in this little tiny claustrophobic room. They're actually palpable - I can feel them push up against my forehead when I try to lean down and write, and I hear them rub against one another - they sound like helium balloons squeaking high-pitched rubber on rubber that sets my teeth on edge.

And the damndest part about the whole thing is that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I were to give these jerkoffs something I had written myself (and god knows I don't write poetry) and put, I don't know, Margaret Atwood's name on it...well, maybe Atwood is a bad example because I really don't hate men the way she does, and it just wouldn't sound caustic enough. Okay, maybe Cohen or something. Anyway, if I were to put a big name on it and then hand it off to these jackals, we'd probably spend a whole class deconstructing and reading into every damn line and they would absolutely love every second. Were it my name on the page, not only would it be totally dismissed for utter garbage (which it likely is; see my above statement about not writing poetry), but even worse it might just be deconstructed again - not with the precision of a literary scalpel but with all the finesse of an ego-fuelled M80. I've seen it happen to better amateurs than me; there are entire funny-farm wards filled with writers who were given the intellectual beat-down by these fucking academic usurpers and completely lost their shit when their life's work was dissolved down into nothing before their very eyes. Tell me; who learns from this sort of treatment? Who pays for this sort of treatment?

Unfortunately, I do.

Tea, I've decided, really isn't the drink for me.

ostranenie, III

2008-10-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

(written october 7, 2005, trinity college quad)

I used to drink my coffee with no less than two sugars and two creams, and likely two shots of Irish whiskey. Then, for a long while, I took it black, though I rarely omitted the Bailey's. Now it's back to cream and sugar, though this time round I limit it to one of each, and that whiskey is still present more often than not.

I find the older I get the more things truly hate my stomach. I have to wonder exactly the nature and extent of the damage I did to myself years ago. It's frustrating to look back on those times, through a lens that either fortunately or unfortunately has become clearer and more distinct over time. I'd never go back, of course, because if I am to be totally honest I never actually did anything to be proud of.

On the same token, and still striving for that honesty, I get tired of downplaying whatever constitutes the life experience I gleaned from those days, simply because the actions that precipitated that experience were admittedly foolhardy and immature and dangerous. I talk to people all the time who ind it easy to point down from their moral high horses with a Clint Eastwood glare and Supreme Court finger, and lay judgement on people like me, confident in their superiority on the matter because they've never smoked, snorted, eaten or shot anything - ever. Now, on the one hand I can't truly blame these people for their choices; if truth be told - again - they've probably made the right decisions as opposed to the wrong ones I seemed to fall in line with regularly.

But still, at times I truly wish these vanguards of the healthy lifestyle could perceptually experience those years of my own life, if only so they oculd understand that (while there were those who definitely fell into this category) I was not motivated in my decision-making process by the Degrassi High tenets of peer pressure or a desire to cultivate a particular image, not was I precisely motivated by the much-touted Teenaged Angst (patented Dr. Phil solution) or even by alleged "clinical" depression. Of course, I knew even then that the use or overuse of drugs and other questionable activites did nothing to make one introspective or deep or important in any way whatever; like I said before, this is nothing to wear as a medal.

But yet, irrevocably, there was some nameless motivation that drew me to vice; pushed me to pursue a quest toward complete numbness as quickly and completely as possible. I can't tell you what to call it; to this day I still don't quite know how to explain the functions of my head in those days. I wish I could, because of course - and everyone saw this coming - every so often those old desires slide precariously through whatever semblance of normality I've managed to construct in the years following: tickle on inside of stomach wall, burning along forearm skin, great big hole opening in my head into which all my insides migrate, and suddenly there isn't anything to see past the headlights anymore. I have this distinct feeling that poison - and I mean real poison, like nightshade - would feel like this. Sitting in my spinal cord somewhere, waiting to be woken up like a five-year acid flashback.

And the absolute worst part of the whole damn thing is that I will never be able to share that part of me with anyone who might be able to figure it out, and even with those who wouldn't. It's watertight and unaccessible; a younger me might have called it Pandora's Box, but now it's just an unwanted inheritance from a tighter time. And I've managed to convince myself that it's just nerveless scar tissue anyway; at least I guess so. Upon writing this, I can't even tell you where it came from.

ostranenie, II

2008-10-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

(written november 14th, 2005, sid smith hall.)

I no longer have any doubt that I am stretched more thinly than usual. My skin is fairly vibrating; no sleep, too much booze and coffee. I smoke cigarettes like breathing. Lights are too bright, and frustrating. Now matter how much tape I use, the Bristol board on my window continues to fall down, like the wind that hasn't died down in days is trying desperately and resolutely to get in, to break the window and chase me around. My apartment is too small and too full and there is absolutely nowhere to hide. I am quickly becoming afraid that the wind might find me. My body is betraying me, slowing me down no matter how much I exercise a will to starve myself into clarity. I'm drunk on whiskey and wind, or else my perspective shifts too fast to follow. I live with shades and I am pantomiming a useful existence. You don't know it to look at me, because at the end of the day I look so damn good. I can't tell; I can't tell. I am stability. Without being singularly important, I am yet something. And I hope to hell that this will improve me, this unavoidable penance and the exercise of a paradoxical control. I had better be a genius or else I'm one more burnout. Good thing I'm poor or I'd likely be dead. There are subways rumbling through the tracks in my brain, and god help me one of these days I'm likely going to jump.

ostranenie, I

2008-10-02T08:19:00.000-07:00

(written september 26, 2005, queen's park east.)

The fog is thick, really thick, and it reminds me of London (though the weather was beautiful when I was there, warm for September and not at all what I'd come to expect from all the Dickens novels and Sherlock Holmes serials I'd read). The displaced fog is laced with what I assume is acid rain, and it floats by the base and the summit of the C.N. Tower like spent gunsmoke from a John Wayne western: all dry ice and blank caps. It leaves only the revolving restaurant ball visible halfway up the
structure, like a bead halfway down an abacus.

I imagine there isn't much to see looking down from there today, though I can't say with certainty,
because in the twenty-odd years I've lived on and off in this city I've never been up what the
brochures call the tallest free-standing building in the world. Now, most of my information (and
maybe theirs as well) comes from half-remembered public school lessons; like Neptune being farthest from the sun, the height ratio is probably out of date. The thing that's tallest is only
tallest until something else gets taller. And that seems to be a big deal with people: tallest,
longest, fastest, smartest, strongest - it's all relative and it's all transitory.

The longer I spend downtown the better I get to know the area: south-east around Queen's Park
from Museum Station, right on Hoskin and past Trinity College (which is under construction -
workers' lattices climbing the sides of a characteristically classical building like matchstick
constructs). I look at the aloe-green towers (not nearly as tall or free-standing as the Canadian
National) through the gridwork of ugly and impressively fragile-looking rusted steel lattices, and I presume the green-and-brown combination that is mirrored on the Parliament buildings farther down the way must
be some kind of British thing, though I don't remember seeing much of that in London despite the
good weather.

My feet move me farther down the sidewalk and past the old wrought-iron fences and distinctly
churchy university buildings. There's this underlying but extremely prominent religious feel to
the entire layout of this area; a feeling of the sanctity of education, the richness of history and the hand of god on young minds that you don't get at newer
schools like York or Laurier. This school pays mostly lip service to the superstructures of glass
and plastic and electronics and concrete that you find in the new universities; save for a few
modern structures like Sid Smith Hall, the majority of classes are nestled within buildings made
of old wood and thick uninsulated glass and heavy iron knockers. It's like the school itself is vying
against the passage of time, like it prefers candlelight to the illumination of a PC screen, like it's
desperately holding onto a time when its vitality was still measured in feet instead of meters and
pounds as opposed to a composite-alloy dollar. It's vying against the natural order of things;
clinging to the trappings and importances of an earlier age while still trying to stay tallest, longest,
fastest, smartest, strongest.

I know that time renders everything obsolete and that relates directly to the transience of
superiority, but if something outstanding remains frozen in time; if something devalues the
importance of the passage of time in favour of its own superiority within the framework of that
time, if this school at the borders of its grand old constructs maintains the form and shape of that time in this place; do I enter that structure and immerse in that superiority while I stand here? Or is it all of
this, here in this time, in this place, just an old memory that refuses to die; a planet that will not return to its original orbit,
the gold medalist who refuses to observe his broken record? But in all of what I see: the fog and
the religious streets and a tower that I still believe is tallest, all of what I might be, standing here
and breathing in acid rain and dry ice and old time, I suppose that I and everything must be relative
and transitory.

Pornopalooza

2008-09-30T11:52:00.000-07:00

(Originally posted April 2006, the events depicted here took place late that month, after the events of A Night At The Reverb. As usual, names have been changed to protect the innocent -- and the sluttily detestable, because everyone deserves a second chance.)

So the Captain called me up back in the summer, on a Saturday when I coincidentally had nothing to do (being gainfully unemployed and generally too lazy to do anything worthwhile, like post new stories). Turns out "Leetha" (from A Night At The Reverb) was hosting a party at a friend's house, and she'd specifically invited both of us to attend. Evidently, despite her assertions that I was "angry" and "scary" and what all else, she enjoyed my company and wanted me to partake in this soiree. I was puzzled, but not entirely displeased with this development; despite what I might say, I really do hate it when people don't immediately love and/or worship me on sight.

Upon asking the Captain what the vibe for the evening was to be, the following conversation ensued.

Cap: They're calling it "Pornopalooza".

Al: (pause) They're calling it what?

Cap: Yeah, I know.

Al: What is entailed in a "Pornopalooza"?

Cap: Basically it's an excuse for Leetha and her slutty friends to get together, dress like porn stars, and get raving drunk. And I have front-row tickets to this drama of decadent debauchery, dude. What the hell would you do without me?

At this point, Caligulic images of drunken, scantily-clad co-eds cavorting in time to Earth Wind and Fire jams and licking various edibles off one another, with Ron Jeremy's daunting manhood and Jenna Jameson's ample bosoms dominating the television screens, were dancing in my head.

Ladies and gentlemen, thanks to the Captain once again, we have the makings of a winning night.

Cap: Oh, and another thing - Leetha's been talking up the fact that you're a musician ... the girl running

the party is a huge Big and Rich fan. They want you to come wearing nothing but your guitar.

Once again, my modest musical expertise has its intended effect: to make that which is otherwise mediocre inestimably more attractive. Though no-one, anywhere, ever needs to see me wearing nothing but a guitar, I agree to bring it with me in the hopes that its siren song will net me one or more of the aforementioned Big and Rich co-eds. Save a horse, ride a cowboy indeed. (I just had to say it)

The Captain and I swiftly made arrangements to meet up at my place for some pre-drinking (I never learn) before the party, and shortly thereafter I received a phone call from an old and dear high school friend, “Marsha”. Back in the day, Marsha and I hung out together in many of the same wrong crowds, so to speak, and to this day I’ve met few women who can match my biting wit and burning cynicism pound-for-pound. It also helps that Marsha is very attractive, in that classic, thumb-through-your-dad’s-Playboys kind of way. When she asked if I wanted to hang out, I promptly invited her to Pornopalooza.

Mar: They’re calling it what?

Al: Yeah, I know. But it sounds like it might be a good time.

Mar: I don’t know…sounds a little creepy at best, and conceivably lame at the worst…

Al: The Captain’s bringing free booze.

Mar: I’m in.

There are reasons Marsha and I get along.

Al: So you know the dress code, right?

Mar: I’m guessing Slut Couture is the order of the evening.

Al: You got it. Think you can find something appropriate?

Mar: To whom the fuck do you think you are speaking? You know me better than that. I’ll see you in

two hours.

True to form, the Captain and Marsha showed up simultaneously shortly thereafter. The Captain came bearing his traditional gifts in the form of Olympian bottles of rum and gin, and Marsha came bearing her traditional gifts of good looks and poor attitude.

Marsha had decked herself out in what can be best described as Dominatrix Marilyn Monroe, with an amusingly ironic accessory: a large, somewhat gaudy silver crucifix hanging around her neck. When I asked about it, she merely replied “I figured Jesus would offset all this leather”. Beautiful.

The Captain, too, had taken the leather route, donning a thin strap of a tie over a teeshirt that read “I might be wrong, but I doubt it”, and leather pants so tight I was surprised he wasn’t speaking in a falsetto. He certainly looked the porn-star part; being that he’s the Captain I was reasonably sure he could pick up and take home at his leisure. The only problem I foresaw for him was the almost insurmountable obstacle of the pants: it would take the Jaws of Life to scrape him out of those things, particularly while drunk. The things we do for fashion.

I quickly realized upon seeing my friends in all their whorish resplendence that I had precisely nothing to wear to an event of this nature. In the end I settled on a 70’s era dress shirt, jeans and a fur shawl thing lent to me by Marsha for the occasion. Topped with a pair of those ridiculous gigantic sunglasses that cover half your face (the ones favoured by the Hollywood elite when they try to walk around sub rosa in public), and I was transformed into a reasonable facsimile of - if not a porn star - at least a porn aficionado.

When we arrived at the designated address, the first red flag went up: this was definitely not what I’d call ‘student living’. Situated in a reasonably middle-class suburban neighbourhood, the house looked like your run-of-the-mill Cleaver home, complete with little picket fence and a station wagon in the driveway. This didn’t at all resemble the sort of seamy college dive I was expecting for an event called “Pornopalooza”. I decided something was amiss, and turned to the Captain for clarification, but his face remained impassive and he refused to make eye contact.

We walked in, unannounced, through the side door and entered a well-appointed and entirely-too-clean kitchen, where we were greeted by a jubilant Leetha. She was wearing what amounted to suspenders attached to a glorified belt, both of which barely covered her naughty bits, coupled with stiletto heels that thrust her midgety form precariously into the air where she was currently swaying and skittering to and fro while endeavouring to run towards us. She enveloped the Captain and I in a sloppy, breast-popping hug which nearly bowled us both over as we tried to steady The Amazing Stilt Girl before she nailed her pug-face on the counter.

Lee: I’m THHOOO happy you guyth could make it! Thith ith going to be THHOOO much fun!

Bear in mind this girl is next to impossible to understand under sober circumstances: throw in a goodly amount of whatever she’d been drinking, and it was like trying to comprehend a drunk Newfie with a mouth full of marbles. Stilt Girl tap-danced her way back across the kitchen to rejoin her friends, which was the first time I actually noticed that anyone else was present.

There were a total of six girls sitting at the kitchen table, with what appeared to be a small mini-bar (read: tiny bottles of girly liquor) set forth in front of them. My eyes swept casually over the “slutty friends” the Captain had mentioned, but I was distracted from my appraisal when my ears caught a sound I hadn’t heard since middle school, and had fervently hoped I’d never hear again: the sound of mocking girlish laughter.

Anyone who’s ever walked the hallways of a high school with toilet paper stuck to their shoe, or an unbeknownst “Kick Me” sign plastered to their back, will be acutely familiar with this fiendish noise. It is the bane of nerds, geeks, dweebs, dorks, and other social misfits everywhere. It begins as a titter; a Bacchian giggle barely noticeable to the untrained ear, and quickly escalates into a full-scale Harpy cackle, usually accompanied by finger pointing, conspiratorial whispering and faces contorted in exaggerated disgust.

Now, given I was a bona-fide theater geek in high school, my ears are more than attuned to catch even the slightest inkling of this esteem-murdering pubescent barrage. What I couldn’t figure out for the life of me was why six grown women would, alcohol notwithstanding, revert to junior-high gum-cracking cheerleader mob mentality. So I reappraised the Sinister Six in the hopes of coming to some conclusion.

Which is when I realized that not a girl at the table was a day over 18.

The red alert klaxons immediately started going off in my head. My first coherent feeling was the intense fear of jail that two seasons of “OZ” has instilled in my heart, as I realized that when the police were inevitably called to break up the underage booze-fest, I’d likely be arrested on-sight just for being here and looking significantly older than I am. Leaving aside the fact that I definitely would not be picking up this night (I have some morals), there was therefore a very real danger of imprisonment on suspicion of pedophilia, and I know what they do to dirty old men in the lockup. I ain’t going out like that, I decided, and so turned to leave.

The Captain grabbed my arm, having seen the look of dawning terror and the desire to flee in my eyes, and was very nearly in stitches as he pulled me aside. One look at his face told me all I needed to know: he had known the whole time that this party was a veritable Lolita-fest. The whole time, and yet he’d still subjected me to what might conceivably my last night as an anal virgin, if things went south and the five-oh showed up. There arose in my breast at that moment an intense desire to kill, maim or otherwise severely damage my good friend, who was still wiping the last tears of laughter from his eyes.

Al: You - you - you - YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

Cap: Dude, just calm down.

Al: Man, the cops are gonna come, and they’re gonna think I’m a goddamn pederast, and they’re

gonna throw me in a cell with some dude named Bubba, who’s gonna -

Cap: RELAX, asshole. These girls are all eighteen or older; they just look young. The most that would

happen if the cops showed - and they won’t - would be they’d bust up the party for underage drinking, and

that means they’d be asking everybody for ID. We aren’t that much older than these girls, so they wouldn’t

think you were some creep trolling for the just-come-of-agers. On top of which, the term ‘pederast’ refers

to somebody who likes to sleep with little boys.

Al: (awkward silence) …How did you know that?

Cap: (awkward silence)

Al: Man, regardless - what the hell is this about, anyway? You know I’m not going to take any of

these - these cheerleaders home, and you sure as shit know I’m going to have piss-all in common with any

of them…why am I here? Why am I wasting my life on this?

The Captain didn’t respond. He merely produced the bottle of gin he’d brought and poured me an

extremely large drink, which he handed to me with a wink and a grin. I snatched the booze out of his hands

with fire in my eyes, and proceeded to pour myself the largest gin and tonic known to humanity.

By the time I turned around, the Captain was already mingling (read: shamelessly flirting) with most of the women-in-training and he’d drawn a sizeable crowd of impressionable tweeny-boppers to his side (several more had shown up in the interim), so I decided to watch the show while desperately trying to calm myself down (read: drink as much as possible in a very short time span) and keep from walking right out the door. As I watched, I saw pretty much what I expected to see: the Captain doing his thing and doing it well. What I couldn’t understand was why he was employing the full force of the Captain Game on girls that needed no more cajoling into sexual escapades than a Mike’s Hard Lemonade and a half-assed promise to be their boyfriend later.

It took me a minute to pick up on the fact that what I was viewing was not, in fact, the full force of the Captain Game, but rather a bizarre approximation tailored to netting high-school girls. Where the Captain is normally suave and debonair, the vibe I was currently picking up from him more resembled Robert Romanus’ character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High (the one who knocks up Jennifer Jason Leigh). If we were at some club downtown and the Captain tried to pull off some of the lines he was using right now, he’d be going home very much alone - mostly because not even I would be seen with him after that - but since we were currently hanging out with the Babysitter’s Club, every bit of his bullshit was being eagerly sucked up by his crowd of adoring fans. Seriously, it was like he walked into a chemo ward with a dick that could cure cancer.

Of course, it helped that the sum total IQ present in the room, excepting the Captain, Marsha and myself, probably hovered somewhere just above the double digit mark. Here are some gems:

Slut #1: So, like, what do you, like, you know, do?

Cap: I’m an environmental engineer.

Slut #1: Oh, that’s SO great! I, like, totally respect people who try to build new rainforests and, like, help

the little animals and stuff.

Cap: (to a girl wearing “Bootylicious^TM” hot pants, a lace bra and six-inch stilettos) Hey, I really like

your outfit, it looks great.

Slut #2: Oh, thanks! I borrowed it from my sister!

Cap: Must be nice to have an older sister to share clothes with, huh?

Slut #2: Oh no, she’s my younger sister. She’s fifteen.

Seriously. This had nothing to do with having game: this was like Free Sample Day at Costco. I was, in a word, horrified. This was a bona-fide All You Can Eat Buffet, except the table had been picked over by - I’m assuming - everything with two legs and a dick in the Greater Toronto Area. The combination of stupid and STD I could almost tangibly feel in the air was too much for me. I expressed this to the Captain by shaking my head very fast back and forth and pointing to my crotch, mouthing “Your cock will fall off if you throw it in anyone here”.

Either the Captain didn’t hear me, had no concern for the well-being of his genitals, or had no interest in associating himself with the shady half-drunk dude frantically pointing at his own junk. The “women” around him paid absolutely no attention to me (which I’m used to) and continued fawning and ejecting stupid-air from their mouths. I decided I had had about as much as I could take, and so I took a powder, barely acknowledging the Sinister Six as I fled to the deck for a cigarette. To this day I’m sure I could hear their emasculating giggles following me out the door.

As I lit my cigarette and began aggressively sucking back my second Jumbo Gin And Tonic, Marsha joined me on an opposing deck chair. She too had been amused by my miniature freak-out in the kitchen (which Leetha and the Fembots seemed to have missed entirely – go figure) and had come to impart some cynical wisdom to her former drug-buddy.

Mar: Dude, I think you’re missing out on a prime opportunity here.

Al: To do what? Babysit a bunch of drunken pre-sorority whores while what’s left of my self-respect

curls up in a bottle of gin to die?

Mar: No…but I have been reading your blog recently, and it seems as though the best way for us to turn

your frown upside down and start making something worthwhile out of this truly bizarre night - thanks for inviting me, by the way - would be to start feeding you as much booze as possible, and then we’ll spend the night totally fucking with these people. What do you say?

In spite of myself, I felt my lips begin to curl upward at the prospect of taking some measure of verbal revenge on the sort of people who made the sober portions of my high-school career singularly unbearable. That, and I’m kind of a functional asshole anyway, so any excuse to mock and belittle those most deserving is an excuse I’ll jump at.

Mar: (catching my grin) Come on, you know you want to…

Al: I just can’t stay mad when there’s debauchery afoot. And revenge is a dish best served drunk.

Finishing my Big Gulp Gin and butting my smoke, I walked back inside to refresh my drink. It seemed in

my brief absence that the “party” had begun to fill up: there were at least five or six more Slutty Spice

disciples crowding the kitchen, most of whom were drinking coolers or light beer, with the exception of a

few self-styled bad asses that had hit the “hard” stuff - in this case referring mostly to Amaretto or peach

schnapps. I also noticed, to my amusement, that the gender divide was starting to close: several young men

were now populating the miniscule spaces left between the bony hips of the whores-in-training, and if it

was possible they looked even more ridiculous than their female counterparts. Everywhere I looked I saw nothing but skinny white-boy breastbone peeking out from absolutely ridiculous faux-tuxedo tops over top of jeans tight enough to qualify as skin grafts. Toothy grins stuck in the middle of faces not yet mature enough to grow anything more than patchy facial hair, were topped by absurd EMO-boy mop haircuts. I felt like I’d been transported into somebody’s idea of a bad joke.

Now, for those of you that read my stories (you know, all three of you) you must know that what lay before me was akin to a blank canvas, upon which I could paint a veritable masterpiece of mockery. It is my favourite medium, after all. Unfortunately I have to admit that, thanks to the Captain pulling this whole preschool surprise on my unsuspecting ass, I was still more than a little off my game. Fortunately for me, while I was aggressively lubricating my palette of rage with Beefeater-brand hate juice, Marsha was prepping the easel with a brilliant masterstroke of her own.

From the time we came in, Marsha had been attracting all kinds of attention, and not just of the pubescent puppy-boy variety. Seems the Sinister Six has put their thimble-heads together, pooled all three ounces of their combined grey matter, and decided that Marsha was the coolest thing since the Bratz cartoon hit syndication on YTV. The Tweenie Tribe had chosen their queen, and they approached their unsuspecting monarch with all the deference of amateur KISS groupies coming to pay homage at the Altar of Gene.

Now, I’m not trying to belittle Marsha’s character at all because I think she’s great, but if I’m going to be realistic I have to say that young, impressionable girls could probably find a better role model by visiting your average rehab clinic or unemployment office (it’s not as harsh as it sounds - I mean, really, does anybody see me winning any Youth Counselor awards anytime soon? Or ever?). Let me illustrate my point.

After several awkward moments of starstruck ogling, a pop tart wearing what I estimated to be seventeen percent of a Catholic schoolgirl uniform finally approached the elected brood mother.

Tart #1: Uh, uh, Marsha? Can we ask you a question?

Mar: Sure.

A titter of fangirl glee rippled through the hormonal harlots and they eagerly gathered around my friend, the newly-appointed High Priestess of Poon.

Tart #1: So, we were wondering…where, like, did you, like, get your costume? It’s, like, totally the

shiznit!

I often wonder whether white teenage female hip hop fans have ever actually listened to Snoop’s lyrics, or whether they mindlessly repeat these marketing-tool phrases completely out of context. Oh. Wait.

Mar: What costume? I dress like this all the time.

Tarts: Really? Like, where do you work??

Mar: Oh, I’m a stripper.

A palpable silence fell on the room. The only sounds I could make out were the simultaneous flaking-off of cheap caked-on makeup as the collective eyes of every slut-in-training present widened to the size of dinner plates, and the creaking of tight denim as erection after erection sprang to life in the pants of every eager skinny white boy within range. Personally I was on the edge of my seat, waiting to see where this was going to go. I mean, did I mention Marsha is a computer tech analyst? Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised at the response.

Tarts: THAT IS SO COOL!!!

I have to give Marsha credit - in the ensuing cacophony of awe and excitement, she never lost her poker face. I, on the other hand, shot gin out my nose. That burns, by the way, but I was laughing so hard I didn’t notice at the time. But Marsha didn’t stop there.

Mar: Oh yeah, it’s a great job. The money’s good, lots of men pay attention to me and tell me they’re

in love with me and stuff, and I hardly ever have to give blowjobs to customers. Plus, it makes me feel really attractive, and that’s, like, the best thing ever!

Tart #1: Oh yeah, you’re totally right.

Tart #2: I wish guys would pay that kind of attention to me!

Tart #3: That sounds soooo romantic!

Tart #4: So is your club, like, hiring?

Evil, thy name is Marsha. I can’t hold a candle to that kind of shit. But I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to try.

So Marsha and I, joined by the Captain, once again retired to the deck for a smoke, promising her newfound litter of aspiring exotic dancers that we’d only be a minute. The Captain was suitably impressed with Marsha’s performance and through tears of laughter we congratulated her on tainting an entire roomful of somebody’s daughters. At that moment Marsha fixed me with a pointed stare, lips twisting smugly.

Mar: Okay Al, I just set the bar. Think you can top it?

Cap: I don’t think anybody is going to be able to top that one, Marsha.

Obviously they were in league in the “Call Out Al” camp. Not to be outdone, I slammed back the remainder of my Giant Gin (must have been my fourth or fifth by that time; our main bottle was draining fast) and got unsteadily to my feet.

Al: To whom the fuck do you think you’re speaking? Stick to the whoring, woman, and leave the

abuse to the experts!

Cap: It’s about time - lock and load, here we go.

I walked back into the house, nearly taking the screen door off its track in the process, and began searching alternately for more booze and my first target. All around me, a bizarre comedy was unfolding – it was like an episode of Degrassi Junior High with less clothing. The more rampant sluttiness and awkward advances I witnessed, the more incensed I became. Unable to locate my gin, I wandered back to the kitchen table to see what I could scavenge from the Sinister Six’s mini bar.

I noticed that Slut #2 had gotten herself separated from the rest of the harem, and she was currently lording it over the mini bar, drinking heavily from a glass filled with viscous brown liquid. I realized that I would have to get past her to score any of the remaining liquor, so I decided to be the bigger man and play it sweet.

Al: So, what are you drinking?

It turns out that Slut #2’s copious binge-drinking had let loose all the animosity she held against her daddy for not buying her that pony when she turned seven, and it so happened that yours truly was standing directly in the event horizon of Hurricane Bitch when it struck without warning.

Slut #2: I’m drinking AMARETTO you fucking asshole, what’s it to you? Seriously, why are you even at

this party? It’s called Pornopalooza, and you’re not even dressed like a porn star, not like anybody would want to see you naked, ‘cause you’re so hairy and fat and everything. Like, oh my God, why did Leetha ever invite you? Your friend is pretty cute which makes you look even worse standing next to him! Go find your own fucking booze you LAME-O!

Al: …Wow. I always wondered what it would be like to be verbally owned by a fifteen year-old.

Before she could reply, I walked away from her, swiping a mini bottle of gin on my way, and headed back out to the patio. Somehow the Captain had beaten me inside, found my discarded glass and refilled it yet again, so when I sat down with a bemused expression on my face, he had something to hand me.

Cap: What was that all about?

Al: (taking a deep drink) I don’t know man, but that girl is now my target. Before night’s end, with God as my witness, I vow I’m going to make her cry.

Cap: Dude, God has so little to do with what’s about to happen.

And true to my word, I went to work on this girl. She couldn’t find solace anywhere. I rode her the whole night and didn’t let up for a minute, but here are some exchanges I remember.

When she went to get another drink I was waiting at the bar:

Al: You know, you and alcohol are like Popeye and spinach. Except Popeye gets strong: you just become an even bigger whore.

When she went to the bathroom I happened to be next in line when she came out:

Al: Don’t forget to take your birth control. And apply your herpes cream. (to the guys in line) What? I just did you a favour. It’s like G.I. Joe says – Knowing Is Half The Battle!

I caught her shamelessly flirting with some under-age EMO boy near the front door:

Al: Damn girl, you don’t take long to recover, do you? (to the guy) By the way, if you kiss her and

taste something salty, you might want to ignore it. Just puttin’ it out there brother.

The best part about this constant barrage was that it had a curiously double-edged effect: predictably, all the girls at the party steadily began to hate me more and more as the night wore on, but the guys in attendance thought I was absolutely hilarious. Actually I was being more of a drunken prick than a comedian, but I guess it doesn’t take much to amuse inebriated teenagers.

The piece de resistance came later in the evening. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Marsha had departed due to an early work day the following morning, and as a result I was outside smoking with a bunch of the aforementioned guys that had attached themselves to me. I was regaling them with stories (one of them had asked me how I got the scars on my forehead, so I had to recount the Stair Night) and they were loving it, when Slut #2 came outside and sat down on the bench opposite me across the table and started taking over the conversation. I shut up almost immediately, mostly because I am acutely aware of the inherent value of keeping my mouth shut until I’ve got the right thing to say. Sure enough, the opportunity presented itself rather quickly. Slut #2 was talking to a few of the boys about her outfit, the one she told the Captain she borrowed from her younger sister.

Slut #2: But, like, you have to realize that me and my sister are, like, nothing alike. My mom says we are

but we so totally are not, you know? Like, we’re totally different people! UH!

Load all weapons.

Al: But didn’t you borrow that very classy outfit of yours from said sister?

Slut #2: Duh, she gets her fashion sense from me!

Target in range and locked.

Al: I weep for the future if that’s the case. But then obviously you must be at least a little alike, right?

I mean, if you both want to look like low-rent Spice Girls?

Slut #2: NO! I’m telling you, we are, like, TOTALLY OPPOSITE!

Fire at will.

Al: Then I must conclude that your sister must be attractive, intelligent, chaste, thin, and both of her

eyes must be pointing in the same direction.

Let me explain briefly: this young woman was not at all unattractive (she had too much paint on her face, but that’s a personal preference on my part), nor was she anything resembling heavy-set. She was stupid, yes, and a wanton strumpet, and she did have a barely perceptible lazy eye, but I was much harsher than I needed to be. And for what it’s worth, I did feel kind of bad for bringing so much force to bear on such a small target: I mean, over the course of the night, my treatment of her was akin to using napalm to kill an ant colony. But after years of suffering mental and emotional abuse and anguish at the hands of girls just like her, I felt at least initially justified in totally cutting her down in front of all her friends.

I’ll give her this much, she didn’t cry. What she did do, however, was slam her drink down with enough force to fracture the pint glass it was in, scream at me to fuck off and die, and storm off the deck. For my money, that was just as good. I turned to the guys remaining at the table, who were staring at me as though trying to figure out whether or not to laugh.

Al: What? She called me a lame-o. So the bible says what I did was okay: you know, an eye for an

eye and all that. And if God says it’s okay, then it’s okay by me.

There was a moment more of confused contemplation, and the lot of them collectively lost their shit. The one guy was in tears, telling me how awesome that was. Apparently, this girl comes to a lot of their parties, and while all these young fellows would like to take her to bed, they can’t stand her company either before or after. Evidently my Vapid-Whore-Dar was working perfectly that night, and for once the right person got it.

By this time I was starting to get antsy; this party was doing nothing for my love life aside from attracting a horde of little Tucker Max wannabes who followed me around wanting to hear me say funny stuff. The Captain joined me in the kitchen with yet another drink, which I damn near passed up due to the amount I’d consumed already that night (but I’ll never admit to that now).

Cap: Having fun?

Al: Man, I’m telling you, never do this to me again. When the only fun I get out of a night is verbally

trouncing a teenage girl I just don’t go home feeling fulfilled, you know? I mean, it’s kind of like stealing Halloween candy from small children: entertaining for a while, but it gets too easy really fast.

Cap: Well, you have to admit it hasn’t been that bad. Scenery was good, you got to be a bastard, everyone goes home happy. You might still even pick up if you tried.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the Captain was baiting me again.

Al: Pick up? PICK UP? YOU ASSHOLE. It’s not enough that every girl in here looks like a

stretched out slutty piece of shit. It’s not enough that they’re all going to spend their lives

alternating between an honest night’s work on their backs with their feet in the air, and heading to the clinic for pap smears and free condom stockups. Pick up?? I mean, come on: EVERY GIRL IN HERE LOOKS LIKE SHE ALREADY SUCKS DICK FOR A LIVING!!!

I should mention that when I’m drunk I have difficulty gauging the volume of my voice. At the end of this exchange, I had the full attention of every single person at that party. For the second time that night an utter silence fell on the room. You could hear hair growing in there. Ever the good wingman, the Captain threw out the defining line of the night:

Cap: Well, when you’re right, you’re right.

When the Captain and I left shortly thereafter, it was not precisely by choice. That is to say, the girls at the party had collectively gone to him while I was in the can and asked that he please remove his asshole friend from the premises because I was ruining their good time. The only two that didn’t seem to have a problem with me staying were Leetha and “Brooke”, the girl that owned the house. They both wanted us to stay, as did my new-found fan club, but I was headed swiftly out of Amusingly Assholish Al towards Pass Out Randomly Al, so we opted to head out. Though I never got to play, Brooke expressly told me that I should be showing up to her next party, so I guess I didn’t manage to alienate every single woman there.

On our way out I asked the Captain about his conversation with the Sinister Six and their cronies.

Cap: Seriously man, the final tally excluding Leetha and Brooke was a unanimous decision that you are

like the anti-Dr. Phil. You went out of your way to ruin those people, especially that one girl, with the lazy eye or whatever.

Al: Whatever, she probably just went home to write angsty poetry on a forty-five degree angle in her

diary. Besides, this whole fucking thing is your fault. You knew damn well what was going to

happen if you invited me to this thing without my foreknowledge of what it was going to be about.

Cap: Yep. Same thing as what happens when you invite Genghis Khan over for tea. Or Hitler to a Bar

Mitzfah.

Al: Come on, I’m not that bad.

Cap: All I can say is God help the woman that winds up settling for you. She’ll be a better man than I.

Al: (awkward silence)

Cap: (awkward silence)

Fin.

A Night at the Reverb

2008-09-30T11:43:00.000-07:00

(Originally posted April 2006, the events depicted here occurred in early April, a few weeks after the events of the Stair Night. Did I mention I used to drink a lot? This was originally written as an email to a friend of mine, which is why it doesn't have the same narrative rhythm as the Stair Night story.)

Friday night wound up being something of a cluster fuck (two Fridays ago, when I was supposed to jam with Crazy Sean and Guitar Dan). See, Guitar Dan's plans changed and he neglected to inform me (he's a bit of a prick) so I sat around my apartment until about 8pm trying to get in touch with him or Sean. No such luck, so I called the Captain, who had invited me out earlier in the week to see his cousin's band play down at the Reverb (semi-major club venue downtown). Now, I wasn't terribly interested in seeing this band play: they sort of do that EMO-scrEAMO thing which I have only a little bit of patience for, and I knew that since it was a Battle of the Bands that genre would dominate my night of audial pleasure. Then the Captain said the two magic things he needed to: 1) the boys in the band were bringing a lot of women who were mostly stupid and easily led with few standards, and 2) there was promise of free booze. Off I went, since I follow my alcohol habit (and portions of my anatomy) around like a divining rod.

So we got down to the Reverb and after a couple of pints at a nearby bar we went in. I had to laugh because I figured there would be a lot more people there to see this so-called Battle of the Bands than there actually were. Mainly it seemed to consist of the bands, their girlfriends (or boyfriends or whatever) and a couple of hangers-on. Even worse, the guy from Rogers who was MCing the night kept trying to pump up the crowd. Unfortunately, when you turn your mic up really high in a small club with almost no one in it, the sounds that come out of the speakers don't really resemble human language so much as a scene from The Exorcist. So that was lame.

The first band we caught onstage was some GRRL POWER outfit called "Boring Mediocre Girl Band" (not their real name, but on the off chance they eat enough dick to garner a record contract, I don't want to get sued later). They sucked. A lot. They completely ruined my favourite Misfits song when they tried to cover it and then proceeded to play their instruments poorly in time to the drummer (the only male member of the band) who appeared to be on some kind of hallucinogen. However, their guitar player was hot so I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. When they finished raping my ears they got offstage and I realized that "hot" guitar player was not nearly as hot as I originally thought. Let's just say she was a big fan of rancid, and I'm not talking about the band.

The next band that went on, well, I never caught their name, but it really didn't matter. From the moment they took the stage I couldn't stop laughing. Now, to be fair, for what they were doing they were a tight group, but the singer...it was like Eddie Vedder fucked Raine Maida and they had a boy. All his guitar lines and most of his singing in the verses had that growling, mewling "Yeeeeeaaaah" vibe that Lane Staley perfected (and that later got ruined by Nickelback and Creed and the rest of them), and then when he hit the chorus he went into this whiny, nasally "Superman's Dead" caterwauling that threatened to blow out monitors all across the stage. And he looked like a low-rent Chris Caberra, complete with EMO(TM) registered trademark hairdo and full-sleeve tattoos.

Needless to say, during these performances I felt a little of me dying minute by minute, so I did what I always do when I get depressed: I drank. Unfortunately, the bar was FUCKING expensive: $5.50 for a bottle of domestic beer? Get the fuck out of here. So I took it pretty easy, considering.

Throughout this time, me and the Captain are hanging out with this ex-girlfriend of his; a marginally cute broad called Lisa. From what the Captain told me, she's just another slut (like most of the women he's dated) so I figured I could ply her with alcohol to lower her standards enough to go home with me. That is, until she opened her mouth:

"Hi guyth. My name'th Leetha. What'th yourth?"

Sufferin' sucatash! The girl sounded like a post-op tranny Sylvester the Cat. I decided to forget plying her with booze and keep it for myself...I won't go into detail here, but just imagine what "bedroom speak" would have sounded like coming out of this woman. I would need to be shit-housed just to keep from laughing in her face.

So Phase I went into operation right then and there: I turned on the Charming Al bit and went to work on my impedimented hookup, made her laugh and whatnot. That's when Ken and the boys from Scarsville went on stage.

I kind of had to laugh again because there were roughly seven or eight of them on stage, all with instruments, all tuning up, all looking like extras from a Taking Back Tuesday video or whatever. Eight guys to play thrash? What are you, Supertramp? But they were okay, I guess. At least, for what they did they didn't completely suck. But by this time I was dying for a cigarette and really wanted to fuckin' leave, because you can't smoke in clubs in the city anymore.

So right after they got off stage, the Captain and Leetha and myself went with a few other people across the way to the Velvet Underground, which used to be a really happenin' club back when they did Machine Mondays (sort of an industrial/goth vibe in there, which I used to dig). They've turned it into a much more chill place since then: pool tables, two bars and a modest dancefloor, seating and big screen TVs showing music videos or the game or whatever. I was impressed.

At this point the Captain's younger brother Steve showed up with a couple of his friends: Steve was the one whose birthday I went out for a few weeks prior because he turned legal. Anyway, I like Steve as he's a good kid, and usually I don't mind his friends, but the two he brought out with him this particular night were utter fuckups. They weren't the usual MTV-ites that Steve generally chills with; these guys looked like they spent their free time playing Dungeons and Dragons in their underwear in their Mom's basement and jerking off to Kingdom Hearts standies. I referred to them as the Moron Twins the whole night, which I think kind of pissed them off. Whatever, like I'm going to start caring now.

Anyway, these two idiots decided they wanted to show me up playing pool. It so happens that I'm not a bad pool player on most nights, and on some nights I'm really good. It so happens that night was one of those nights. So Steve and I teamed against the Moron Twins for a game of pool. Predictably I botched my first shot, receiving much catcalling and horseshit from the Moron Twins, to which I replied that I was simply lulling them into a false sense of security. The next time the cue came back around to me I sank six balls, followed by a seventh which was completely awesome because I shot too hard - while I did sink what I was aiming for, the cueball jumped the table and racked Moron Twin #2 right in the nuts. I couldn't even bring myself to apologize because I was laughing too hard, as were Steve, the Captain, Leetha, and half the bar, because the kid was bent over cradling his junk and weakly calling for ice. Then he picked up the pool cue and I was reasonably sure he was going to try and hit me with it, but he was so drunk at this point that I don't think the fight would have lasted for more than ten seconds or so. It didn't matter; the bartender came over and brought him an ice pack.

After we cleaned their clocks at pool twice more, I was getting a healthy buzz on because the Captain kept feeding me double gin and tonics, which were very tasty. So I decided to talk to Leetha for a while. The conversation went something like this:

Lee: Tho, do you have a girlfriend?

Al: No (insert short ex-girlfriend sob story here)

Lee: That'th too bad. Tho are you looking for new prothpectth?

Al: No (insert prepared but impersonal desirous-of-one-night-stand-speech here)

Lee: Well, let me give you thome advithe, Alekth. I think you're very attractive and very funny, but on the thame token you thcare me.

Al: What? What do you mean I scare you? I'm not scary, I'm very nice.

Lee: Yeah, you're nithe and all, but there'th thith thread of violent anger that runth jutht beneath the thurfathe and I think a lot of girlth will thee that and be thcared off by it.

Al: I really don't understand what the fuck you're talking about. I've been called cynical, caustic, negative, a general asshole, but never "angry". Give me an example.

Lee: Well, maybe cauthtic would be a better word for it, but come on - people call you "Al"...that'th an old curmudgeonly name. You thould call yourthelf "Zander". You know, like the character from "Buffy". That would be hot.

Oh fucking kay. I'm not even going to list the reasons why I'm not naming myself after a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I like the show well enough, but since when do people nickname themselves? You nickname yourself, you might as well scream "I have no friends" and "I am a big loser who names myself after obscure television characters from the late 1990s". Now granted, people used to call me Zander once upon a time, but not in years, and furthermore, that's a really good way to get my ass kicked - who in this age group calls themselves Zander anyway? Tell you what bitch, in the spirit of 90s nicknames, I'll call myself Zander when you let me call you "Blossom" and piss all over your face. Wouldn't that be "hot" too? Huh? Goddamn it, I'm losing patience with this woman. And my buzz. I order another drink.

Al: I'll bear that in mind, thank you.

This sort of treatment from Tranny Sylvester kept up most of the night: seriously, this woman wrecked my shit all over the board, culminating when the Captain and I went home to chill out at her place. First off we had to tiptoe all over the shit festival that was her apartment and talk really quietly because her roommate was asleep (on a Friday night when she didn't have to work in the morning). Then when the Captain and I asked for the booze, the promise of which lured us back to her place, she pulled out - and I'm not kidding - a quarter bottle of Malibu rum. Between three people. Then she poured the baby booze equally into three PINT GLASSES and filled the rest with fruit juice. Great, do I get a cookie too?

We hung out there, painfully, for several hours, during which time it became plainly apparent to me that Leetha was not over the Captain. Quite the opposite: she was barely containing her love (or at least her burning desire to insert something in her genitals). I became aware of this and decided it was time for me to go the fuck home after a wasted night out. I suggested this to the Captain, and he agreed.

I left the room to hit the head before we departed into the early morning dawn. When I got back the Captain was looking decidedly uncomfortable and so we left. I was cordially invited to a shindig Leetha was throwing the next night which I promised to attend (sure).

Once we got outside, I asked the Captain what his problem was.

Cap: Dude, I think you’re right. I think she still digs me.

Al: Bravo. Nothing gets past you, does it? What changed your mind Sherlock?

Cap: When you left the room she started trying to grab my dick.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present proof positive that women are whores. (ed. Note: I know not all women are whores, but it’s hard to maintain a balanced perspective when so many of them are trying to grab the Captain’s dick).

A short cab ride later I collapsed for two hours on the Captain’s couch, only to get up and go for lunch with my ex-girlfriend. My life is silly sometimes.

The Stair Night

2008-09-30T11:30:00.000-07:00

(Originally posted March 2006, the events of this story took place in early March of that year. This was the post that started it all. Enjoy.)

***

So for the last few weeks I've been finding myself tied up in some love-life drama (which I won't be writing funny stories about, you invasive bitches), and so I've been partaking in the same self-healing exercises I always do when depressed about women, school, changing climate, foreign policy or the utter futility of astrology: I drink myself into a fine mist.

That said, I've been gainfully unemployed since August (which is another potentially libelous story that I'll have to spend some time carefully crafting before posting) and as a result, my savings from six long years of self-deprivation have been completely drained out of the necessity of having a roof over my head and something to eat (even if it's only rice and beef broth for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a goddamn year).

So I really haven't got the money I need to be able to maintain the level of nicotine and gin in my bloodstream, at which I find myself most comfortable. This displeases me on some base instinctual level, and forces me to scrounge for other acceptable forms of debasing substances: Red Bull, double-strong Tim Horton's coffee, Tylenol 3, Star Trek marathons on the Spike channel, whatever gets me through the day. Of course, when it comes to my favourite men (read: Jim, Johnny, Jack, Morgan and Gordon), just like Diet Coke, you can't beat the real thing. Baby.

So what's a poor struggling student to do?

Enter The Captain.

Since I've known him, which is I suppose about three years now (give or take), The Captain and I have had a mutual understanding when it comes to the imbibement of happy juice. That is to say, we both come from a long genetic line of cultures with which alcohol is inextricably linked.

My father's family is German; my mother's is Irish - apart from the Scots, go find another nationality that can compete with the sort of enhanced constitution this mixed bloodline affords me. Of course, it also affords me a nasty temper and a judgmental streak (insert your own racially-charged jokes here; I'm proud of my hardcore heritage). While tempered by my inherent lack of muscle mass and streetfighting skills, these traits are supplemented by a university-level vocabulary and Socratic argumentation training garnered from my father, as well as a severe case of egotism that, when fueled by alcohol, utterly convinces me that I'm by far the smartest person in the room (read: everyone else is stupid and should be called out and shown up as such). All of this tends to land me in unpleasant verbal altercations which necessarily require my larger and more physically-fit friends to come and intervene on my behalf in order to avoid frequent trips to the hospital and/or a police station. Honestly, I don't even know why these people hang around with me.

The Captain comes from a line that is half-Spanish and half mainland European; while the Spanish aren't - to my knowledge - known for being serious drinkers, Ernest Hemingway did live on their beaches for several years, so one might assume they know a thing or two about taking care of drunks (a trait The Captain comes by honestly). Couple this with The Captain's inherent Spanish sense of charm and the Antonio Banderas-level game he brings to the clubs with him (though he is the whitest white boy ever to walk the planet), as well as a credit limit which is exponentially larger than mine has ever been (he's a top-level environmental engineer that runs a chic mall in Toronto's famous Yorkville neighbourhood), you've got the blueprints for a hard-drinking hookup machine. And that's what happens to The Captain each and every time he goes out. Though he's currently not single, and his keen moral compass is a finely-tuned machine which prevents him from misstepping into the realm of pseudo-adultery, he has the potential kinetic groove to bring home with him at least three willing ladies from any given club, on any given night, at any given level of intoxication you'd like to name.

Unless, of course, he goes out with me.

I have to make this admission if I'm going to try and live the so-called examined life: I am a piss-poor wingman.

Given my aforementioned drunken qualities garnered from my checkered cultural forefathers, I have the unique ability to cock-block anyone I happen to be hanging out with, standing with or to whom I am in close proximity. I become slurred, angry and abusive to everyone around me, which makes it extremely difficult for my long-suffering friends to keep the cloud of young attractive women they tend to retain, from dissipating utterly. As I said before, I also have no game, drunk or sober. After four-plus years in a committed relationship, any ability or confidence I had regarding picking up or even flirting with women at bars, clubs, social gatherings, grocery-store queue lines, late-night cigarette runs to the Rabba, classes, funerals, campus coffee houses, bookstores, bar mitzvahs, red-light districts, or chatting on the internet, is completely shot. Even worse than this is the fact that I'm bitter about it. Not because I particularly want to get laid or find a girlfriend or replace the one I ostensibly have now; it's got nothing to do with any of those things.

It's a principle, my friends.

There once was a time that I could walk into a room and people (I don't know the ratio of men to women, but for some reason it's often skewed one way or the other) would look my way. I could talk my way into a young lady's heart and, by association, anything else I wanted to talk my way into, within a half-hour or so, depending on the intoxication factor and other variables (boyfriends, jealous catty bitches in the room that I'd slept with prior, availability of reasonable privacy or transportation to a private location, et. al.).

Nowadays, only if I've had enough liquid courage in the moments leading up can I initiate a conversation with a woman, without the use of a trademark pick-up line or some other such desperation tactic. However, immediately following this landmark, one of several things will necessarily occur:

a) The woman will turn to face the speaker who's just addressed her, see that I more closely resemble her older sibling's creepy frat brother (the one who spends his time drinking beer, playing Half-Life and jerking off to nude pictures of Seven of Nine) than one of the emaciated, ecstasy-driven, EMO metrosexual Chris Carrabba wannabes she usually hooks up with, and she'll take a powder. This is Honest Girl - no bullshit, just a real clear message that even I can dig.

b) She will turn to face the speaker who's just addressed her, and it won't be me: in fact, she'll specifically turn and speak to whoever happens to be on the opposite barstool, and more, she'll do her damndest to turn that into the most engaging conversation she's had all night. Doesn't matter if the guy looks like John Turturro's character from The Big Lebowski; she'll be interested for as long as it takes me to go away. This is Dishonest Girl - apparently she thinks I'm stupid enough to believe that she actually wants to talk to Jesus the pedophile.

c) She will turn to face me, and an expression of abject pity will appear in her eyes. She'll of course quickly banish the look, for fear of offending me (even though she doesn't realize that my own eyes have been trained by years of this treatment to detect even a hint of the "you poor bastard" look). She will then proceed to take a predetermined amount of time (usually around 5-15 minutes depending on exactly how World Vision this girl wants to be) to talk to me engagingly, ask me questions about myself and my plans for the evening, the weather, a local sports team, and other vapid nonsense in an attempt to make me feel as though I'm not a complete social pariah and sexual outcast. Eventually she will beg off the conversation because her friends are leaving or whatever, thank me for a nice conversation, and vanish like the angel of mercy she is into the whirling chaos of the club. This is Really Nice Girl - of course, the road to my own personal hell is paved with the good intentions of these Mother Teresas of the club district.

d) She will talk to me as long as I continue to buy the Long Island Iced Teas she's been sucking down as fast as the bartender can bring them. When the money runs out, she goes to the bathroom and never comes back. This is Profiteering Drunken Whore. No explanation is really required.

After a few of these encounters, which invariably fall into the categories I've listed above, I tend to get really bitter and depressed. It's important to note here that I really don't like clubs to begin with.

Really. Don't. Like. Clubs.

I'd hazard to say that if I could get away with it I'd set fire to the entire Yonge-Richmond-Queen area and torch the whole mess of half-assed DJs playing absolutely shit music, overpriced drinks, pissy bartenders and vapid club-crawling ginos and punkers. I'd much sooner go and enjoy my drinking experience at a small pub with live music of some description (preferably acoustic or trip-hop acid jazz), a nice vibe and generally cool people who are there for the same reasons I am. Or better yet, stay home: buy a few bottles, invite over some of my more musically-inclined friends, get a pizza and jam for the night. Yeah, now that I could dig. So, apparently, could the Captain. Here's the story.

On the night in question (for those keeping track this would be the Saturday that just passed), The Captain called me up around 2 in the afternoon, asking whether I'd be inclined to spend the late evening downtown getting thoroughly shit-housed with some friends of his from Richtown, Scarborough (an offshoot of Toronto which is largely comprised of Ontario Housing projects with the exception of a few gated communities: The Captain's friends hail from one of these WASP strongholds). Having just consumed a bottle of Captain Morgan rum with a friend the night before and having garnered almost no sleep whatsoever, I was more than a little leery about going back downtown to do it all over again. Also, there was the aforementioned problem with funding, which The Captain assured me would be a non-issue as he was recently paid (I honestly don't know if this is generosity on his part, or else a strong desire to not recognize his own alcohol dependency by avoiding the "drinking alone" symptom). At any rate, I told him to call me later on (they weren't leaving till around 11 or so) and I would decide then. True to form, he called back around 5.

It seems that many of The Captain's compatriots had abandoned his great plan (which was to attend a club downtown called Lee's Palace; a venue I quite like for small live shows, but whose "Dance Cave" dance club upstairs I'd not ever attended) in favour of "pussing out" and staying at home for the evening. I therefore suggested that we chill out at my place and have a few (har har) drinks here, which is my aforementioned preference anyway. He concurred and set about heading over.

This is where the principle of overcompensation comes into play. The Captain would usually procure a bottle of some intoxicating substance on his way to my place, but my inference of having a few drinks led him to believe that I had somehow come upon a treasure trove of booze akin to the rum-running scene from Pirates of the Caribbean. Of course I hadn't, so we set off to the local LCBO to procure our stash for the night. Though I'm not usually a fan of sweet drinks (hence my preference for G&T) I've had a real taste for Captain Morgan dark rum recently, and so because The Captain isn't a fan of The Captain we compromised and bought a forty of Bacardi Amber. Just as we were approaching the cash, The Captain dashed back across the store and returned promptly with an additional 26er, pronouncing "Just in case" with a wink and a nod.

Upon returning to my apartment, it became known that The Captain had never watched the admittedly guilty pleasure of a film entitled "Euro Trip". I stress that this truly isn't my kind of movie for the most part - I wasn't a fan of the American Pie series, nor did I enjoy Scary Movie or any of the other lowest-common-denominator bawdy humour shit festivals in that category. But for whatever reason, I felt some sort of kinship with the characters in this particular film and was quite enamored of the title track "Scotty Doesn't Know", so once again I forced my opinion on a friend and made him watch the film. Whether it was the movie's innate comedic quality or the rum (which we finished over the course of the 90 minutes or so), The Captain laughed his metaphorical ass off the whole time, and by the time the end credits ran, we were really amped about the idea of going out to a club like we saw in the film. It's kind of the same feeling smokers get while watching a movie like The Boondock Saints or Casablanca, where every other scene makes you want to light up. With this in mind, we decided it would be a truly hype idea to go downtown to Lee's Palace anyway and the hell with the boys from Richtown.

I'd like to take a moment here and reflect on the sheer idiocy and lack of foresight which leads people to believe that decisions they arrive at while drunk are solid, positive plans of action. The last time we had a drunken idea that seemed to be really cool, I very nearly wound up with Star Trek command pips tattooed on my collarbone. Seriously. And yet, we've apparently not learned our lessons, so we're doomed to repeat mistakes again and again, ad nauseum, forever and ever, amen.

After a quick shower, we were off and running for the TTC. For my international readers, this stands for the Toronto Transit Commission, and it's widely regarded as one of the better transit systems in North America when it actually goddamn works. I happen to live about ten seconds from the nearest subway station, which facilitates my ability to implement these really poorly thought-out plans with little time to change my mind. While riding down towards the club, The Captain and I ran into one of his myriad attractive female friends, a young black lady whose name escapes me, but was a very cool traditional African name (at least as far as my White-North-American-wired brain can tell). Anyway, we shot the shit with her all the way down until we arrived at the club.

Now, once again, I should explicate to those who don't know Toronto (though I assume this is probably a rule the world over): bouncers and door-people aren't really supposed to let folks in who already appear intoxicated. It's a liability for them both in the legal sense and the I-might-puke-all-over-your-dance-floor sense, and really, given it was early in the night they had nothing to lose by turning us away. However, The Captain and I have mastered the ability which I like to call the "cool-calm". It's the kind of vibe you slip into when you have to deal with cops, irate bouncers, drunk assholes that want to fight you, raging boyfriends of girls you've hooked up with, and raging fathers of the same. It's the "I'm totally cool, I'm not ruffled and I'm definitely not drunk" vibe. It's the vibe that makes them suspect that you could easily walk the straight line while touching your nose and reciting the alphabet backwards, even if you absolutely could not if your life depended on it. It's the poker-face of drunk. And we've got it. All it takes is a certain amount of decorum and a great deal of restraint: when walking past the bouncers toward the lady that will take your money, you stay straight-faced, walk with purpose and give them the masculine "hey, what up" nod. Above all, keep your mouth closed because if you don't you smell like a brewery or a homeless person who can afford better than Lysol, and those bouncers are like goddamn bloodhounds when it comes to that. When you approach the ticket-lady, you smile warmly (still keeping those lips sealed), give her your money and allow your hand to be stamped. You nod to her as well, except with the smile it becomes a nod of gratitude and pleasant acknowledgement (as opposed to the manly politeness of the aforementioned bouncer-nod) and you make goddamn sure you don't trip on the steps up the stairs. Once you're within the bounds of the club, you're usually in the clear.

With this level of grace and confidence, The Captain and I passed the gauntlet at the front and immediately positioned ourselves in front of the bar. There was almost no one in the club at this point; truth be told we'd arrived early (about 10pm) and the place wouldn't really start jumping for another two hours or so. This gave us plenty of time to do what we'd come to do - drink our goddamn faces off.

The Captain ordered up four shots of Liquid Cocaine, a detestable and yet thoroughly delicious substance that combines equal parts Jagermeister and Goldschlager in 2 oz. shot glasses. We downed these in rapid succession, at which point he brought four domestics to the table and we began double-fisting shitty Canadian beer like men possessed. Given my ambient level of depression which had been overriding for several weeks at this point, I was hell-bent and determined to quench my rising ire and caustic impulses with copious alcohol (which, as many people are aware, is very akin to putting out a grease fire with PAM cooking spray). As more and more people began to arrive, The Captain turned on the Banderas-game and went to work.

It turned out that some of the Richtown crew had decided to come out anyway, as there's little to do in the barbed-wire compound they call a community. I was reunited with The Captain's old friends The Twins, an identical pair of EMO youth that had the same haircut as that ludicrous wannabe from The Ataris (you know, the one that makes you look like a prematurely balding white man with bleached-blonde hair); haircuts and total lack of fashion sense notwithstanding, they're okay guys. I was also reintroduced to a woman we call The Screamer (figure it out) whom I'd verbally owned at a previous party in Richtown; needless to say, she was less than pleased to see me again. The only one I'd not met initially was a man I called Cowboy, due to the headgear he was wearing that looked like it had been purchased at Billy Ray Cyrus' yardsale. Don't get me wrong; I've got nothing against cowboys, but there was something about this guy's vibe that screamed "schtick". I convinced him to come up to the DJ booth with me and request some Big and Rich; needless to say, the DJ looked at me like I'd just requested Total Eclipse of the Heart and ignored me completely. Oh well, she looked like quite the k.d. lang fan with her shaved head and unshaved upper lip, and if she can't dig a righteous vibe like John and Kenny, fuck her anyway.

So there I was, sitting in a booth off to the side of the dance floor, watching Hurricane Hormone wreak its vengeance on the denizens of this little Gommorah, and the first reasonably clear thought I had since the whole night had started was "what the fuck am I doing here?". As I said before, I loathe clubs. As I looked around I remembered precisely why: everywhere the eye could travel I saw poser after poser dancing with impressionable female after impressionable female, and I couldn't help but think that, if this was a house party and I had a bottle of gin and a guitar, these girls would be on my vibe like flies to shit. It was frustrating to acknowledge that I wasn't going to attract women just by being there, but as my roommate / close friend Ariel has told me on more than one occasion, "Unless you've got a valid credit card, women are not going to come knocking at your door looking for romantic liaisons". So I figured I'd just drink until I felt ready to try my luck at dancing.

A note on dancing: I am the epitome of white-boy dancers. After a lifetime of being a musician, I have absolutely no desire to partake in that outdated ritualistic mating process; I'd much rather be elevated on a stage, making the music so others could pursue random copulation. That, and I couldn't do the goddamn Macarena convincingly. The closest to dancing I ever got was when I was younger and used to attend raves, but really I don't know how much of my ostensible ability to rave came from a legitimate grasp of the music and the style with which ravers move themselves, and how much came from really excessive drug use. Either way, no one at those functions cared. Clubs are different.

I don't get where the genetic imperative comes from. Both my mother and sister have admittedly excellent rhythm and they're quite good dancers (keep your Oedipal jokes to yourselves you fucks), but both my father and I have no interest and thus, no rhythmic ability to move our bodies in tandem with music. I think this is a fairly common line between the sexes: women like to dance and such are good at it (with notable exceptions) and men don't like to dance and as such they suck (with notable exceptions - my gay friends kick ass on the dance floor). So my response to dancing is the same as my response to everything: if I drink more, I'll either get good at it, or just be intoxicated not to give a fuck that I look like a lame duck with a six-inch dildo buried in its rectal cavity.

So I sat in that corner booth, double-fisting Labatt Blue or some other rotten hops beverage (I absolutely refuse to drink Molson Canadian even though it's my country's "signature" beer; I'd rather be force-fed horse urine Terri Schiavo-style) and trying not to think about the fact that I'd have to go back to my place alone, even though The Captain (who was currently dancing in the center of a circle of more-than-marginally attractive women), were he to take advantage of his potential, could be bringing home a full harem of willing bar broads to do his every bidding. The more I drank, the more convinced I became that were I just to get up and try already, I might be able to get back some of that magic that I once owned and wielded prettier than a 10^th level Elven cleric.

Then I asked myself whether that analogy could really be considered advantageous thinking at this point in the night. Fuck all of you, D&D kicked ass back in the day.

While these and other dark thoughts permeated my skull, I continued to sit and pound back the beers that The Captain had so charitably provided. Suddenly and without any warning whatsoever, I felt myself lifted from my seat by a meaty paw on the scruff of my black dress-shirt. I turned to curse at whoever was obviously trying to pick a fight with me, and I came face-to-face with a veritable ocean of black-shirted pec with the white-fonted words "SECURITY" emblazoned across the barrel-like chest. I looked up at my assailant and was greeted by the stone face of the absolutely enormous black bouncer I'd passed with the "what up" nod on the way in. Seriously, this guy made Michael Clarke Duncan look like Christian Bale after a three-week cocaine binge. I might as well have tried punching my way through one of those steel green electrical boxes you find near public schools nation-wide. I decided at that moment, even through my drunken haze, that resistance in this case was completely futile and that I better not make any sudden moves, or Golgotha here might just decide to eject me through one of the club walls and down two stories to the unforgiving concrete of Bloor Street. That, or he'd want to make me his "little puppy". Either eventuality was not terribly attractive to me.

"You gotta leave, man." Jesus H. jumped-up Christ in a sidecar, the guy sounded like James Earl Jones with a tracheotomy tube. I still had no idea what I'd done, but before I could even voice my objection, Big Brotha had hoisted me clear of the booth and was directing me much like a snowplow blade through the crowd of eager patrons. More than one Smirnoff Ice bottle bounced off my cheekbones and forehead before we cleared the crowd and headed for the stairs, which didn't improve my mood, though there was little I could do about it at the time. In the midst of this forced march I tried desperately to plead my case with Big Brotha, asking what I had done to warrant being kicked out and please, sir, couldn't I have just a little more beer before I went? No such luck.

However, the luck did kick in when The Captain noticed my imposed extraction and removed himself from his fan club to follow myself and Big Brotha to the entrance. I told him that for some unknown reason I was being kicked out of the club and also said that he was welcome to stay, given the sort of attention he was being afforded on the dance floor. He declined like the hardcore gentleman that he is and escorted me past the cute door lady and onto the street. Once outside, I promptly lit a cigarette (which are no longer allowed inside clubs in the Toronto district due to provincial legislation) and took stock of the situation. We both agreed that there was no reason for my expulsion and we should definitely scream Fuck You at the doors and sealed windows of Lee's Palace and never return again. With that, we progressed off into the night.

One of the most common symptoms of drunkenness is an irrational desire to find and consume the most vile and objectionable foodstuffs available. Under normal circumstances my preferences are Taco Bell (yes, I can't help but love that Grade F cat-meat) and Burger King, where I am encouraged to Have It [My] Way. Unfortunately, in the area we were walking neither option presented itself; in fact, the only option that we came upon was purchasing a piece of cardboard with fake cheese and plastic toppings from the Pizza Pizza chain. I seriously doubt this travesty of a pizza conglomerate is limited only to Canada, but for the sake of the rest of the world, I sincerely hope it is. These people are famous for providing pizza to elementary school Pizza Lunches across the nation, which suggests to the average consumer that they are indeed the Lowest Common Denominator of pizza restaurants, as they're willing to give away their product to a bunch of pimply-faced pre-teens who will eat really anything, no matter the nutritional or flavour value. At any rate, this was our only option on this fateful night, so we each purchased a slice of mediocrity and promptly doused them in an entire bottle of hot sauce in order to kill the taste of boredom that we otherwise would have had to choke down along with the pedestrian "hot" Italian sausage and "extreme" three-cheese blend. The only thing "extreme" about this pizza, to reference Maddox, is the "extreme" shit you have to take later on - but this sort of logic really doesn't apply when you've had a grand total of 20 oz. of rum, 5 oz. of cinnamon liqueur and 10 bottles of domestic beer a piece. After our less-than-satisfying trip to the Pizza Place That Fun Forgot, we headed for the subway station.

At that point we were both certifiably intoxicated: read, we likely could not walk the aforementioned straight line while reciting the alphabet backwards, so we were somewhat confused when we arrived at Spadina Station, also known as the "other" northbound station (also, three stops too early). So we got off.

This was a fundamentally bad plan.

Spadina Station is divided into two floors: the top floor contains the East-West line on which we had originally been traveling, and the lower floor contains the North-South line on which we had decided we were going to travel. The upper and lower floors are connected by a series of stairs, or for those of us with laziness problems, there are also escalators.

Now, several things at this point must be understood.

First, when Al gets drunk, the first thing to go is his gross motor skills - for the uninitiated, this means the ability to run, jump, or even walk with any degree of precision or accuracy. I can sit and play guitar all night with forty ounces of booze in my stomach, but ask me to get up and walk somewhere, and I'll likely decline out of a combination of laziness and sheer inability.

Second, Al wears contact lenses when going out. Contact lenses are a wonderful invention, allowing people who were heretofore unable to see past the end of their noses without the use of glasses, new freedom - the ability to play sports (har har), swim and see at the same time, and also look a great deal cooler than they do wearing glasses, when the glasses they bought four years ago have since been co-opted by the EMO movement and as a result have been taken under the same stereotypes which affect that particular subculture. I'd like it understood that I'm not an EMO kid - I really don't dig on Taking Back Tuesday or whatever, and I really really think that someone should fucking crucify the fucking Cure guy so at least he has something to complain about. Unfortunately I liked the idea of black, square-frame glasses several years in advance of their ruination, and because I haven't the cash to purchase new glasses simply to avoid being associated with a bunch of asshats, I've no choice but to continue looking like a poor Rivers Cuomo imitation. Anyway, contacts.

For those of you who wear contact lenses, you know that the more tired (or more drunk) you get, the more difficult it is to see out of the selfsame lenses. The reason for this is because fatigue and moisture lost due to alcohol consumption tends to dry out the eyes first, and without the natural tear-moisture provided by blinking, the porous plastic of the contact lenses starts to dry out, turning the world into a series of blurry light sources and (if you're drunk) disembodied voices telling you to beer-bong more tequila. This bizarre limbo is where I found myself while traversing the two floors of Spadina Station.

The TTC subways stop operating after a certain point in the evening; usually this is in and around 1:30AM, and given I never wear a watch I was unsure as to the time when we arrived at the crossroads. I remember being extremely concerned that we would miss the train, notwithstanding the fact that The Captain still had enough cash left to get us home via a taxi were the necessity to arise. As a result I was in an extreme hurry to get to the lower platform in order that we would not miss the northbound train.

I spied, through my drunk and dehydration-fogged contact lenses, an escalator that appeared to lead to the lower platform, and so I ran for it with all the grace of a crippled ostrich with a seven inch dildo buried in its rectum. I would be extremely happy to say I noticed too late that the escalator was one which actually ascended from the lower level to the upper, but the truth is that I did not. I ran headlong into an escalator which was coming the wrong way and yet I had it in my mind to try and get down anyway.

I succeeded, rather spectacularly.

When I regained consciousness, it was to The Captain and some random drunken frat-boy he'd conscripted to help me up, yanking on my arms with considerable force until I balanced under my own power on my own two feet. I vaguely remember the statements "Are you okay?" and "Does he need an ambulance" thrown about, to which I replied in what The Captain informed me later was a completely rational and composed voice, "No, ma'am, I'm perfectly fine to get home on my own without the assistance of an ambulance; but thank you very much for your concern." This The Captain found unerringly hysterical upon reflection, because of what had just occurred and the following state in which I found myself.

As it happens, I had attempted with some success to walk down a set of moving stairs that had been in fact coming towards me the entire time. This made my movements vaguely resemble some absurdist BodyBreak Stairmaster commercial for approximately five seconds before I inevitably lost my footing. According to The Captain, he saw me keel forward like a domino that had been nudged in the direction of its fellow slabs, only to disappear out of his sight. What followed would have been the most frightening and nauseating experience of my life, could I remember it.

Evidently, my entire body flew forward like Keanu Reeves going off the building in the Matrix, but this time there sure as shit was a fucking spoon. The front of my head collided with the divots in the escalator's metal stairs, and it didn't stop there. In essence, I went headlong down the escalator like some demented luge racer, using my forehead as a brake the entire way. I finally came to rest at the bottom of the escalator, whose emergency stop button The Captain had yet to press, and so in some bizarre twist of fate, the escalator performed its duty and brought my prostrate body back up to the top of the stairwell.

Imagine my confusion when, drunk and punch-addled from my race to the bottom, I found myself back at the apex of my colossal fall, wondering with the innocence found only in drunkards and accident victims: what the hell just happened?

At this point, The Captain hit the emergency stop and the escalator ceased its desperate attempt to eat my pants as I brought myself to a shaky kneeling position at the top of the decline. In his own admission, The Captain had feared the worst: he figured I'd goddamn killed myself falling down a flight of metal serrated stairs with that sort of speed, but upon seeing me in a semi-kneeling position, his hope to avoid police involvement was reignited. Unfortunately, I bore an uncanny resemblance to a drunk and fat version of Our Lord, dressed all in black and bleeding profusely from wounds in my forehead and like a running tap from my nose. Yes sir, I was indeed the K-Mart Jesus.

Unable to right myself under my own power, either due to alcohol or the severity of the blow to my head, The Captain recruited the aforementioned drunk frat-boy to help lift me up into a standing position, which is when the terrified TTC janitor came running at full tilt to see if we required an ambulance. In our still-intoxicated state we insisted that all we required was some paper towel and directions to the subway platform. At this point I had smeared my life's blood all over no less than three of the escalator stairs as well as on the wall beside and part of the handrail. More's the pity; according to The Captain, the poor janitor had just finished cleaning the selfsame escalator prior to my stupendous leap of faith.

In an act of unadulterated brilliance, we elected to return to The Captain's apartment, which resided on the northernmost-west side of the giant "U" which makes up the Yonge-University subway line (again, look at the map if you really care), instead of returning to my apartment where I live with my EMERGENCY ROOM TRAUMA NURSE ROOMMATE who might have looked at my injuries in greater detail. Nope, no such luck for us. Instead, we returned to The Captain's place where he called his brother no less than three times, requesting that any and all First Aid supplies they had in the house be ready and waiting when we arrived. The entire subway ride back, The Captain was more than a little amused to note that every time I took the paper-towel away from my head, I exclaimed with renewed surprise:

Al: Am I bleeding?!

Cap: Yes, you stupid bastard, you're bleeding like a damn sieve. Keep the fuckin' paper towel on your fool head.

Al: Wow. What happened?

Cap: *sigh*. You fell down a goddamned escalator. Don't you

remember?

Al: No man...(removing paper towel again)...wow, am I bleeding?

Needless to say, this got a bit repetitive for the old Captain, so he eventually ignored me, much to the chagrin of the other five people on the subway car with us, who were unadulteratedly staring at me with an expression of amusement mixed with abject horror. I must have looked like I just walked out of an MXC competition with my face all cut up and blood seeping through my clothes in random places. Evidently I was quite lucid; I was reassuring everyone on the train that I was "perfectly fuckin' fine" and that I was extremely desirous of Burger King (which I knew was right around the corner from The Captain's place) the moment we exited the train. The Captain's response was to tell me that yes, we would indeed get Burger King, but first he would take me home and treat my wounds, and then he would venture out to bring me an Uber Whopper or whatever it was I wanted. Like hell he would.

We finally returned to The Captain's abode where he slathered me with Polysporin and haphazardly slapped bandages on my face before we both mutually collapsed under the excesses to which we'd subjected ourselves over the course of the night. Amazingly enough, it was the best sleep I'd gotten for almost three weeks.

The following morning was a bizarre experience; The Captain was still prostrate in his bed when the unbearable thirst I felt in my throat and cotton-mouth drove me to rise from the couch and to the sink, where I consumed probably four gallons of shitty Toronto tap water before I could even stop myself. I was unsure as to whether I had dreamed the events of the night before or whether they'd actually happened; a trip to the bathroom and a look in the mirror solidified the horrifying and yet endlessly amusing reality of the situation. My face looked as though I'd been struck repeatedly with the ass-end of a hammer, as did my chest and legs. My left kneecap was swollen out to the point that it looked as though that joint was about to give birth. I'd also done significant damage to my thumb; my initial prognosis was that I'd broken it or at least fractured it in my swan dive, but more recent improvements have suggested merely a sprain. All in all and combined with the significant amount of liquor I consumed, I bore a striking resemblance to some kind of white-trash Bruce Campbell clone a la Army of Darkness. Every movement I made was like dipping my limbs in acid, and I spent two consecutive days walking like Hopalong Cassidy. And yet, I had survived. All told, I got off light: the following evening I went to sleep early, and was plagued with nightmares of what might have been: a blow to the neck might have rendered me Christopher Reeve the second, or a slight miscalculation in the impact point might have turned me into the Toothless Wonder. All manner of ill might have befallen me had I not fallen in just the right way to avoid permanent damage: my roommate told me that the fact I was drunk probably aided in this as I was loose and bendy when I struck the cold, hard steel. Of course, it's the great Catch-22 of drunken escapades - had I not been drunk to begin with I likely would not have attempted to body-surf my way down the wrong escalator. Brilliance, thy name is Al.

The sound of water falling into the sink evidently awoke The Captain from his slumber, and he came out to join me in the living room. We both sat quietly for several minutes, before The Captain finally broke the silence with the words:

Cap: I can't believe that fuckin' happened.

Al: Neither can I, Captain. Neither can I.

Cap: Are we getting old, or are we just really excessive?

Al: At this point, I'd say we've crossed a line from borderline alcoholism into true debauchery. Let us never speak of this night again.

Cap: Are you goddamn kidding? I'm going to tell everyone I know about this! Fuck, man, it's not even Spring yet, and we've already got completely ridiculous wild-ass drunken stories! Isn't this great?

At the time, I couldn't have disagreed with him less. But I'll be damned if I tell anybody that. More to come...welcome to the Freak Parade.

A Brief Introduction

2008-09-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

This blog had its genesis on Myspace.com, but I don't really want to use my account there any more. It's overrun by creepy youths and sub-par bands: sort of like the rest of the internet, but I digress.

The first few posts you'll find here will be transferred from my other blog and summarily deleted from Myspace forever. In the interest of chronology, I'll label the original publishing date in the title of these retroactive posts, and eventually I'll start writing up-to-date posts for you people to enjoy.

My name is Alex; this is what I do.