My name is Ronald McDonald Weaver and I work in a call centre. As far as shit-jobs go, it's alright. I work inside, there's no heavy lifting or meat frying and a lot of my female co-workers are hot and easy. Sure, I was hearing the incoming call tone in my sleep and answering my home phone with an opening script but the work's straightforward enough. And like any job it would be great if it wasn't for the fucking customers.
Beep...beep
“Thank you for calling your Customer Friend Center, my name is Ronald. What would you like to Talk2Me about today?”
“Is this Talk2Me Cellular?” a man’s angry voice asks.
“Yes it is Sir,” I'm wondering whom else this guy expected to talk to after dialling the support line. “How may I help you today?”
“Do you have a thumb up your ass too?” the customer asks without changing tone.
The account information that had populates on my computer screen shows three active units registered to Bob’s Towing. I picture a rough sort of older man in grease stained coveralls on the other end of the connection - the kind of guy wife-beater shirts are made for. “No sir. All digits are present and accounted for.”
“Good, ‘cause I’ve talked to three of you dizzy assholes already and no one seems to understand what I want done here.”
“And how may I help you sir?” I've got the call log associated with his account and there's not reference one to any other calls made today. Which means Mr. Bob’s Towing is full of shit or the so-called dizzy assholes exited the account without noting it. A great first call of the day.
“My bill’s wrong. Fix it.”
I've got last month’s bill in front of me in a jiffy. New charges show $1546.39, a lot for three phones. “I’ll need to know the problem before I can fix anything sir. Who do I have the pleasure of speaking to?”
“You’re speaking to Bob Spitts and the problem is I aint paying you no sixteen hundred for three goddamn phones. Fix it!”
Skimming through the list of charges I can see that each phone has exceeded its allotment of Talk2Me Time which determines how long a customer can use the phone before being butt-raped with overage charges. I communicate this fact to Mr. Spitts.
“Fix it!”
“They’re valid charges sir," I say in my best suck-ass voice. “Each of the users on your account talked for more time than you had contracted with Talk2Me for that month and that’s why your bill is so high.”
“I said fix it!”
“Mr. Spitts, there’s nothing to fix unless you would like to contract with Talk2Me for an increased amount of time per phone. Your bill is correct and I’ve already told you why.”
“And I already told you that I aint paying no sixteen hundred for three phones!”
“And, of course, that’s your choice Mr. Spitts but I am required to remind you that, per your agreement with Talk2Me Cellular, non payment will result in suspension of all services. Past that point we will forward any moneys owed to a collection agency and be shut of you for good.”
“Fuck you and your mother! This is robbery!”
“No sir,” I continue in my best suck-ass voice. “Robbery is using a service without paying for it just because you don’t agree with the charges.”
“Are you calling me a thief, you dizzy asshole?”
“No sir, I was simply clarifying the definition of robbery (you seem to be confused as to its meaning) and to demonstrate that Talk2Me Cellular is not robbing you.”
“Fuck you and all!” Click.
It takes less than a minute for me to leave a log note: All charges valid, see overage, caller hung up before hearing about new rate plan offers. True enough...next.
Beep...beep
“Thank you for calling your Customer Friend Center, my name is Ronald. What would you like to Talk2Me about today?” Nothing. Calls with no one on the other end happen daily in any call center. The deal is you try saying your lines again and hope they’re really not there so you can say your “I’m Dreadfully Sorry Script” and take a breather before the next call. “Thank you for calling your Customer Friend Center...”
“Did you say your name was Ronald?” a woman’s voice asks.
“Yes I did. Just like the burger slinging clown. How may I help you today?”
“I’m not sure that you can.”
“Try me. Nothing's so insurmountable that I can't help."
A moment of silence from her end and then she drops it, “I don’t think I want to live anymore.”
Whoa.
They talk about this kind of thing in training. The chick from HR with the huge cans even came in for an hour to talk about the company's official stance on suicide callers, i.e. pray it never happens. But there's a process involved here too and the first step is keep them talking. “May I ask why Miss?”
“Yes, I guess so. Why do you care?”
“Why did you call?” I ask, stalling for time.
“I wanted to tell somebody,” she says, “and anybody at all would do. Your number was the only one in my Friend File.”
“You’re one of our customers?” Melons McGoo from HR told us in training that some poeple see any kind of service number as a potential sounding-board for marginalized individuals - she menat nutbars. But we were also trained to recognize the company lingo when he heard it. I'm on feet feet signalling wildly for the nearest supervisor to come over.
“I got this phone hoping that I’d be able to have someone call me," she says. "I even left my number on a men’s room wall. You know, for a good time call Fern at 705-476-3161. But no one called. I would have given a dozen blowjobs to anyone who had even called.”
Typing frantically I enter the phone number onto his search field and bingo... Fern French. The supervisor arrives just as I finish writing “I’ve got a suicide call” on a piece of scratch paper. She nods and uses the same paper to capture Fern’s address and contact information before rushing back to her desk to call 911 - all per Talk2Me policy. “Sounds like you’re pretty lonely there Fern?”
“Yeah, alone and lonely. Just me and the whispers.”
“Who’s whispering to you Fern?”
“I don’t know, voices. Sad voices.”
“Sad voices telling you to do bad things Fern?”
“Yes,” she says and then starts crying, great blubbering sobs that fill my ears like poisoned honey that make me forget the company line and actually empathize with this woman. Something that Melons told us was a big no-no.
"Been there," I say.
“Really?”
“Yup. Life can get anybody down, especially if it seems like the universe is singling you out to be ignored and walk the Earth friendless and miserable. Sure I’ve thought about taking the final exit but I was always manage to find a reason not to.”
“Like what?” asks Fern. Her voice is slow and slurry as if she was drunk or stoned and a buzzing static rising and falling over the connection makes me wonder if she might be calling from a basement somewhere. Another point we'd have in common.
“Well first there’s always the great debate on how I’m going to do it.”
“I’ve got a gun,” Fern says and I'm thinking, oh shit, she has a plan. “I read you’re supposed to put it to the roof of your mouth and pull the trigger. At least I can give my gun a blowjob before I die.”
“ I don't know about that. I’ve thought about using a gun myself but then I have to think about the poor bastard who finds me and the mess I’ll leave behind. Personally, I don’t like people having to clean up after me; it’s bad manners, even with suicide.”
“So how do you find the strength not to just pick another way? There are dozens of ways to kill yourself. You can put a bag over your head.”
“Or fill your garage with exhaust and fall asleep in the car."
“There’s hanging,” Fern offers back.
“Or you could do it Roman style and cut your wrists open in a warm bath.”
“You could jump off a bridge.”
“Whoa, I’d have to object to that one. I’ve always considered myself a disciple of the Suicide Protocols and if you plan to jump off a bridge there are factors to consider. Now personally, I wouldn’t want an audience if I was going to jump. People are unpredictable and you never know who might try to stop you in a situation like that. All it would take is one responsible citizen and instead of the Sweet Hereafter you could find yourself under twenty-four hour guard in some drab suicide ward. Or even worse is you get a bunch of yokels urging you on and that can only take away the dignity of your last worldly action. But you don’t want to jump from a deserted bridge either because if suicide’s the last grand gesture it’s kind of pointless if nobody can find your body.”
“You sound like you’ve got it all figured out Ronald,” Fern says through what's left of her tears and with even the hint of a smile in her voice.
“But that’s just it Fern, I don’t. If I had already figured it all out then there’d be nothing left for me to do except off myself. One thing I’ve learned from life is that you never have it figured out, never. And that’s the beauty of it, the beauty of life is that there’s always something new waiting for you around the corner to give you a surprise.”
“Friends?” Fern asks.
“Sure, I’ve been surprised with new friends.” I don't mention that they're a bunch of thrown together misfits suitable only for bad fiction. “Who’s to say that tomorrow won’t have you meeting the certain someone who lives only to make you happy? Just because you’re lonely now doesn’t mean you’ll be lonely forever.”
“I understand what you’re saying but it’s not that easy for me to make friends Ronald. People say I’m repulsive. They call me gross and ugly when I go outside, every time. They make me cry,” and there's a hitch in Fern’s voice now as she tries not too. It doesn’t work. “Oh Ronald!” she wails and there's almost too much pain in those two words for me to bear. “Why does everything have to be so hard?”
I stand up to see what the fuck is taking so long and the supervisor's speaking rapidly to someone through her headset and offers a thumbs up when she sees me looking. Good, real help's on the way. “I know it’s hard now Fern, I do. But remember that life’s always changing, that’s the only thing you can count on really. Well death and taxes too but neither of those is especially appealing to me right at the moment. How about you Fern, do taxes get you down?”
“Sometimes,” she says with a sniffle.
“Same here. Do you cheat on yours too?”
“Sometimes,” she says with a giggle.
“Glad to hear it.” And I take the plunge that flies in the face of everything we learned in training “So does your gun still look as good as it did before you called?”
“I feel a bit better,” Fern says and I believe it. “But what about tomorrow and the next day? I don’t know how to make those better by myself.”
“You can have help for that Fern. Like I said, I’ve been there, you don’t even have to ask.” What the hell. “If you’d like, I could help you Fern. I’ll be friends with you. I don’t have many myself. I guess I could use a friend too.”
“Do you mean it Ronald? Really?”
“Yup. So how about putting the gun down Fern? Put the gun down, okay. This is your friend asking nicely. How about it?”
“It’s heavy,” she said. “I’ve had it in front of my face but its making my hand wobble. Ronald, it’s so big.”
“Well then put it down Fern. You don’t need it anymore.”
What comes next happens so fast that I don't have time to react until it's too late. All at once there's a thud like something heavy hitting a wall (or a door), a muffled shriek and a tremendous bang oer the headset that leaves me deafened.
“Fern!” I'm shouting to hear my own voice. “Fern, what happened?”
Nothing. And then, faintly at first as my ears clear, the sound of strange male voices.
“Shit, we’re too late.”
“Dispatch said there was someone talking her down. I don’t see anybody.”
“Who could see for all these flies in here? Damn, it stinks. Open a window Sanchez, let some air in.”
“Fuck that, check her vitals.”
“Bitch is done, see. Bullet took the side of her face off. Help me shift her.”
“Ugh she weighs a ton. Goddamn! How the hell could she sit in her own shit like this? Look there’s maggots crawling in it. Fuckin’ disgusting.”
Over top of it all I can just make out Fern's voice, "Raw...raw...raw..."
“This is it Sanchez, she’s going.”
“Raw...Raw...Ronald,” and then a rattling gurgle before she stopped forever.
“What’s she on about?”
“Who cares? Maybe she wants one last large order of fries. Look, there’s blood and shit everywhere, open the window. How could anyone live like this?”
“Get down to the rig and grab the saw. We’re gonna’ need to widen the door she’s so fat. And put on a double pair of gloves too. I don’t like the look of those sores on her ass.”
“Which acre? What an ugly bitch.”
Dimly, I'm aware of my surroundings i.e. bustling call centre and oblivious co-workers. But I'm too busy listening to pay any more attention than that.
“For fuck sake!” I scream into my headset. “She’s a human being! She’s my friend! Treat her with some respect you goddamn giddy shitheads! Hit the end button and do your fucking jobs!”
“Oh...what the hell...Here it is, under her thigh. There we...”
Click
Fuck it, I'm done.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
The Cross-stitch Rant
You know whatcha’ gotta’ watch out for though, right?
It's cross-stitch. I’m serious. Cross-stitch is the root of all evil and has the potential to end all life as we know it. Think about it. You’ve probably got one at home, am I right? Hanging on the wall all pretty and framed saying something nice about puppies or Jesus. Or maybe on that throw pillow you’re always spilling stuff on.
Odds are it was a gift from an older relative. Maybe Grandma Millie whipped off a couple for you all alone in the Day Room at the Home with nothing but her arthritis for company. And let me tell you, start from center cross-stitch kits go like smokes in jail at the Home. They fill a need you see. Imagine you’re in the twilight of your life, haven’t had sex since the Trudeau administration, your kids stuck you in the Home and one day someone passes you a plastic packet full of one last chance to make something nice that’ll last after you’re dead. Tell me you wouldn’t tear that bastard open and go right for the needle.
Who wouldn’t? But like I said, it’s evil. Endless hours of doing your rows, no need to talk. Hell, the clock punching hacks they have watching you aren’t going to change your diaper any faster just because you’re doing something more productive than sitting in your own shit. You’re filling the need. But any time you have something that fills a need you’ve got the chance of hitting bad batch. Maybe some factory worker got sidetracked and folded so far off center that poor old Millie - who’s seen more cross stitch than cock - takes her gleaming, antique silver from the old world needle in hand to pick out a fluffy pastoral scene from nothing only to find that the tree tops are straying up too far past the clouds. And then what? Ho-lee sheep shit then what?
I’ll tell you. You get a sweet little old lady who wouldn’t say boo if you pissed in her tea screaming for the number of whatever third world slave labour camp sent her bad cross-stitch. And she’s shrieking fit to strip her throat raw and doesn’t care ‘cause it’s life’s last joke, as far as she’s concerned, waiting for the punch line so the curtain can finally fall on this stage of her life. So watch out, ‘cause maybe it’s your turn to visit the condemned that day and she spots your outsider’s eyes and there's nothing but nothing standing between you and fury with a needle in hand. What’ll you do then, huh?
Well there’s no way you can haul off and lay out a centigenarian without looking like the world’s biggest asshole so you try your best to keep your eyes whole in their sockets while holding her off for the men with the tranquilizers to show up and walk her off for some quiet time in a room with rubber walls. And all the time you’re proper pissed because an old lady has effectively kicked your ass and you‘re wearing scratch marks on your face to prove it. Maybe - gods forbid but it could happen - you’re the leader of the free world and not even your earpiece wearing, gun toting spooks lifted a finger to keep Millie off of you. So you get back to the office and pick up the phone to order an Armageddon special with a side of revenge, hold the hassle, all because of cross-stitch. It could happen.
It's cross-stitch. I’m serious. Cross-stitch is the root of all evil and has the potential to end all life as we know it. Think about it. You’ve probably got one at home, am I right? Hanging on the wall all pretty and framed saying something nice about puppies or Jesus. Or maybe on that throw pillow you’re always spilling stuff on.
Odds are it was a gift from an older relative. Maybe Grandma Millie whipped off a couple for you all alone in the Day Room at the Home with nothing but her arthritis for company. And let me tell you, start from center cross-stitch kits go like smokes in jail at the Home. They fill a need you see. Imagine you’re in the twilight of your life, haven’t had sex since the Trudeau administration, your kids stuck you in the Home and one day someone passes you a plastic packet full of one last chance to make something nice that’ll last after you’re dead. Tell me you wouldn’t tear that bastard open and go right for the needle.
Who wouldn’t? But like I said, it’s evil. Endless hours of doing your rows, no need to talk. Hell, the clock punching hacks they have watching you aren’t going to change your diaper any faster just because you’re doing something more productive than sitting in your own shit. You’re filling the need. But any time you have something that fills a need you’ve got the chance of hitting bad batch. Maybe some factory worker got sidetracked and folded so far off center that poor old Millie - who’s seen more cross stitch than cock - takes her gleaming, antique silver from the old world needle in hand to pick out a fluffy pastoral scene from nothing only to find that the tree tops are straying up too far past the clouds. And then what? Ho-lee sheep shit then what?
I’ll tell you. You get a sweet little old lady who wouldn’t say boo if you pissed in her tea screaming for the number of whatever third world slave labour camp sent her bad cross-stitch. And she’s shrieking fit to strip her throat raw and doesn’t care ‘cause it’s life’s last joke, as far as she’s concerned, waiting for the punch line so the curtain can finally fall on this stage of her life. So watch out, ‘cause maybe it’s your turn to visit the condemned that day and she spots your outsider’s eyes and there's nothing but nothing standing between you and fury with a needle in hand. What’ll you do then, huh?
Well there’s no way you can haul off and lay out a centigenarian without looking like the world’s biggest asshole so you try your best to keep your eyes whole in their sockets while holding her off for the men with the tranquilizers to show up and walk her off for some quiet time in a room with rubber walls. And all the time you’re proper pissed because an old lady has effectively kicked your ass and you‘re wearing scratch marks on your face to prove it. Maybe - gods forbid but it could happen - you’re the leader of the free world and not even your earpiece wearing, gun toting spooks lifted a finger to keep Millie off of you. So you get back to the office and pick up the phone to order an Armageddon special with a side of revenge, hold the hassle, all because of cross-stitch. It could happen.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
The Thirteen Steps
There’s a list of rules next to Grover’s door that lays it down for customers sure as Moses laid it down for the children of Israel: "Thou shall not forget thy money, Thou shall not draw heat unto the door of my house, Thou shall not bring anyone unto thy Dealer who is a stranger to Him upon pain of death, Thou shall not refuse a toke should it be offered unto you. Thou shalt always wipe thy feet." The last one's for his mom's benefit and I can feel her eyes on me as I pretend to scan the list. You’re supposed to always read them before descending into the Sepulchre but most of us have the lot memorized. The first time I read them I thought they were a bigger joke than the original commandments and said as much. His mom told me that without rules there is disaster. I've since learned that she believes god acts through her. I just wanna' score but I do wipe my feet before descending into the Sepulchre.
The thirteen steps leading down look like a suicidal carpenter's afterthought and creak like a rusty hinge in the wind. There’s no railing at all, just bare wood leading down to bare cement. No Holy Steps these, just a narrow road down which one misstep leads to concussion or skull splitting death. The first time I took them I slipped on a cat and almost broke my leg. The cat didn't make it and Grover gave me a free gram for my trouble. It was his mom's cat and they never got along.
Grover knows every one of his customers by their foot wear, sees my surplus combat boots and calls out in his mushy voice, "One-Nut descends into the tomb of his Dealer. All praise One-Nut."
I half expect to hear an echoing chorus of worshipers but it's way to early for that yet and it's not nearly smokey enough. Instead I find Grover wedged into his spot in the corner and dressed for receiving in a not too stained bedsheet and a T-Shirt that doesn’t quite cover his nipples with “Welcome to Paradise” scrawled across the front in what looks like black lipstick. The floor's littered with empty beer cans, fast food take-out trays and enough fat roaches to pinch out half a pound of second hand green. "I like what you've done to the place? Very flop-house modern. Your mom must be shitting kittens."
“Fuck her,” he says. “She should have thought of that before she threw me down the stairs.”
About that: Grover's mom - all ninety-six pounds of her - pushed him down the basement stairs when he was fourteen. When I met Grover in Grade Eight he was just topping six feet and weighed over three hundred pounds. He was a bad lad back then and gave her no end of trouble with all of his petty theft and mob enforcement work. She locked the door and left him down there with a cracked skull to die. Not that she ever knew what state she'd put him in - she never bothered checking - she just locked the door and never let on to anyone where he'd gone.
Grover will always say that he pulled through out of shere hate and stubbornness but you have to give the man some credit in the brain department - even if it is the animalistic hind brain. He'll tell about slipping in and out of consciousness for hours (or days) before touching the crack in his head and realizing that his life was leaking through it. He'll tell about fumbling for his belt and looping it around his head to hold the break together. He'll even tell you about eating the vermin that came nosing around the rich meal of blood and matter left by his head wound. My favourite part is listening to him tell about climbing the stairs one agonizing step at a time over the course of interminable hours and finding the door locked. So he knocks on the basement door calling weakly "Ma...Ma.." sounding more like a lamb than a man to find it opened by Mrs. Kackas from next door. She's watching the house while Grover's mom takes advantage of his "unexplained absence" to make a pilgrimage to some shrine in Kilaloe. Mrs. Kackas feeds him lamb and rice enough so he can find his feet and he leaves the house to establish a dope connection and delivery windows. The rest is history.
Looking at him now it’s hard to say if he’s grown any taller since those days but his bulk offers one the impression that it’s pushing against the fabric of reality. He’s not so much sitting as he seems to have fallen and got a settee jammed up his ass. It looks like the basement was built around him. His mom hoped that the basement would be his tomb but he rose again so he calls it the Sepulchre to piss her off. Can't say as anyone would blame him. They've never mentioned the stair pushing incident again but she'll always have his mushy sounding voice and the crease down his skull (which is obvious when you know it's there) to remind her.
I hold up a brown paper bag in my hand. "Brought you tandoori chicken from Indra's."
"Awesome." He reaches a pale crablike hand for the bag and sets it down next to his seat. "You want the usual?"
"Yeah, Man." The only other seat's a broken down lazyboy that Grover grew out of two years after being pushed down the stairs. The seats sagging and broken but it's still a comfortable chair. I take it watching his bulk negotiate the process that is weighing out my bag.
"Remember Spacey Stacy Childers?" he asks while adding fat green nuggets onto his tiny digital scale.
"You mean that chick from the old homeroom, the one with the huge cans?"
"That's her. Georgie Porridge brought her by the other day and she knew me right off. Started talking all sorts of shit like where have I been and did I know that folks still get together on weekends to speculate about me." His hands move through their practised ritual of weighing while he talks without looking at me. "Says she always wondered where I wound up and never expected to see me stuck down my mom's basement."
"She still have a wicked case of chest mumps?" I ask remembering eighth grade erections in homeroom.
"Oh, Man, you'd better believe it. She even hinted at trading favours for smoke."
"Brave girl, " I tell him as he finishes the half-O. "Looking for your Johnson would be like searching for ancient buried treasure."
"Fuck you and gimme a hundred dollars, One-Nut." We trade money for smoke and he settles back into his seat while I stash it down my sock. "Had a kid question my weights and measures the other day."
This perks me up some. Micah "Grover" Groves is the most scrupulously honest dealer I have ever met. His scale is always a top of the line two points after the decimal job and he sells dry weight premium buds. No one questions his authority in the Sepulchre. "What happened?"
Grover shrugs and its like watching the Earth move from orbit. "He was going on about how the last couple bags he got seemed light and wanted to check the read-out on my scale. I told him he could take me at my word or get the fuck out. He took the bag and left."
"Sucks, Dude," I say trying to find an excuse to leave. "Maybe you should bow out for a while?"
"Fuck that," he says while opening his take out tray. "People just gotta' realize that you don't question Grover down here."
"I hear you, Brother. Enjoy the food and I'll see you next week." He mumbles something about bringing him a burger next time and I turn away. Watching Grover eat is like watching a starving crocodile tear an antelope to pieces. Sometimes he'll lose a piece of food in his folds and find it a week later - he calls them tit-bits.
His mom's waiting near the basement door. I know she always listens when it's just him and one other person alone down there. She lives in fear of being ratted out to the cops about what she did those years ago. Grover maintains that her current station in life - co-conspirator in a dope ring and living in fear of the truth - is more punishment that jail could ever be. Dressed in her house-coat and fuzzy slippers she looks like any other late middle aged mom but she pushed her kid down the stairs and left him for dead and it's hard not to see when you know what to look for.
There's guilt and fear crinkling around her eyes 'cause she knows that there are two pushers living under one roof.
The thirteen steps leading down look like a suicidal carpenter's afterthought and creak like a rusty hinge in the wind. There’s no railing at all, just bare wood leading down to bare cement. No Holy Steps these, just a narrow road down which one misstep leads to concussion or skull splitting death. The first time I took them I slipped on a cat and almost broke my leg. The cat didn't make it and Grover gave me a free gram for my trouble. It was his mom's cat and they never got along.
Grover knows every one of his customers by their foot wear, sees my surplus combat boots and calls out in his mushy voice, "One-Nut descends into the tomb of his Dealer. All praise One-Nut."
I half expect to hear an echoing chorus of worshipers but it's way to early for that yet and it's not nearly smokey enough. Instead I find Grover wedged into his spot in the corner and dressed for receiving in a not too stained bedsheet and a T-Shirt that doesn’t quite cover his nipples with “Welcome to Paradise” scrawled across the front in what looks like black lipstick. The floor's littered with empty beer cans, fast food take-out trays and enough fat roaches to pinch out half a pound of second hand green. "I like what you've done to the place? Very flop-house modern. Your mom must be shitting kittens."
“Fuck her,” he says. “She should have thought of that before she threw me down the stairs.”
About that: Grover's mom - all ninety-six pounds of her - pushed him down the basement stairs when he was fourteen. When I met Grover in Grade Eight he was just topping six feet and weighed over three hundred pounds. He was a bad lad back then and gave her no end of trouble with all of his petty theft and mob enforcement work. She locked the door and left him down there with a cracked skull to die. Not that she ever knew what state she'd put him in - she never bothered checking - she just locked the door and never let on to anyone where he'd gone.
Grover will always say that he pulled through out of shere hate and stubbornness but you have to give the man some credit in the brain department - even if it is the animalistic hind brain. He'll tell about slipping in and out of consciousness for hours (or days) before touching the crack in his head and realizing that his life was leaking through it. He'll tell about fumbling for his belt and looping it around his head to hold the break together. He'll even tell you about eating the vermin that came nosing around the rich meal of blood and matter left by his head wound. My favourite part is listening to him tell about climbing the stairs one agonizing step at a time over the course of interminable hours and finding the door locked. So he knocks on the basement door calling weakly "Ma...Ma.." sounding more like a lamb than a man to find it opened by Mrs. Kackas from next door. She's watching the house while Grover's mom takes advantage of his "unexplained absence" to make a pilgrimage to some shrine in Kilaloe. Mrs. Kackas feeds him lamb and rice enough so he can find his feet and he leaves the house to establish a dope connection and delivery windows. The rest is history.
Looking at him now it’s hard to say if he’s grown any taller since those days but his bulk offers one the impression that it’s pushing against the fabric of reality. He’s not so much sitting as he seems to have fallen and got a settee jammed up his ass. It looks like the basement was built around him. His mom hoped that the basement would be his tomb but he rose again so he calls it the Sepulchre to piss her off. Can't say as anyone would blame him. They've never mentioned the stair pushing incident again but she'll always have his mushy sounding voice and the crease down his skull (which is obvious when you know it's there) to remind her.
I hold up a brown paper bag in my hand. "Brought you tandoori chicken from Indra's."
"Awesome." He reaches a pale crablike hand for the bag and sets it down next to his seat. "You want the usual?"
"Yeah, Man." The only other seat's a broken down lazyboy that Grover grew out of two years after being pushed down the stairs. The seats sagging and broken but it's still a comfortable chair. I take it watching his bulk negotiate the process that is weighing out my bag.
"Remember Spacey Stacy Childers?" he asks while adding fat green nuggets onto his tiny digital scale.
"You mean that chick from the old homeroom, the one with the huge cans?"
"That's her. Georgie Porridge brought her by the other day and she knew me right off. Started talking all sorts of shit like where have I been and did I know that folks still get together on weekends to speculate about me." His hands move through their practised ritual of weighing while he talks without looking at me. "Says she always wondered where I wound up and never expected to see me stuck down my mom's basement."
"She still have a wicked case of chest mumps?" I ask remembering eighth grade erections in homeroom.
"Oh, Man, you'd better believe it. She even hinted at trading favours for smoke."
"Brave girl, " I tell him as he finishes the half-O. "Looking for your Johnson would be like searching for ancient buried treasure."
"Fuck you and gimme a hundred dollars, One-Nut." We trade money for smoke and he settles back into his seat while I stash it down my sock. "Had a kid question my weights and measures the other day."
This perks me up some. Micah "Grover" Groves is the most scrupulously honest dealer I have ever met. His scale is always a top of the line two points after the decimal job and he sells dry weight premium buds. No one questions his authority in the Sepulchre. "What happened?"
Grover shrugs and its like watching the Earth move from orbit. "He was going on about how the last couple bags he got seemed light and wanted to check the read-out on my scale. I told him he could take me at my word or get the fuck out. He took the bag and left."
"Sucks, Dude," I say trying to find an excuse to leave. "Maybe you should bow out for a while?"
"Fuck that," he says while opening his take out tray. "People just gotta' realize that you don't question Grover down here."
"I hear you, Brother. Enjoy the food and I'll see you next week." He mumbles something about bringing him a burger next time and I turn away. Watching Grover eat is like watching a starving crocodile tear an antelope to pieces. Sometimes he'll lose a piece of food in his folds and find it a week later - he calls them tit-bits.
His mom's waiting near the basement door. I know she always listens when it's just him and one other person alone down there. She lives in fear of being ratted out to the cops about what she did those years ago. Grover maintains that her current station in life - co-conspirator in a dope ring and living in fear of the truth - is more punishment that jail could ever be. Dressed in her house-coat and fuzzy slippers she looks like any other late middle aged mom but she pushed her kid down the stairs and left him for dead and it's hard not to see when you know what to look for.
There's guilt and fear crinkling around her eyes 'cause she knows that there are two pushers living under one roof.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
The Great K-Mart (Attempted) Robbery
Knowing the difference between right and wrong was an important precept in my early spiritual education. Basically, if anything you did broke any of the Ten Commandments or disappointed your parents then you were fucked in the eyes of God and your recording angel had tape on the whole thing. Doing right was always supposed to be accompanied by a warm rising in your chest which meant that the Holy Ghost approved of whatever thought, action or deed heralded the warm rise. We even had a song to sing in Sunday school to encourage us in our journey along the straight and narrow. The refrain follows:
"Choose the right, choose the right,
Let wisdom mark the way before.
In its light, choose the right
And God will bless you ever more."
And being the good little Mormon boy that I was supposed to be meant a lot of wrestling with the concept of right and wrong. Do I take the pop my mom's been saving in the fridge to slake a reader's thirst or drink tap water instead? Do I tell the recess monitor that Rich Bully is playing house with a second grader or let him piss in her hair some more? Do I forgive my sister for pouring new model paints over my mattress or offer some percussive discipline about her head and neck? If I ever "chose the right" it was by accident.
Being bad was and is the shit. I could do things that no sane parent would condone, take what I wanted from whomever I pleased and diddle the afternoons away despite a religiously applied proscription against touching oneself. The best thing was that I was taking my badness cues from the one place where no one suspected - the Bible. If Jacob's brothers could put him in a pit and sell him into slavery then I could tie my sister to a tree and rent her out for the afternoon. If the Prodigal Son could take and squander his inheritance on wine women and song I could snatch the change off my dad's dresser to buy a Jumbo Mr Freeze at the store. And Onan...wow...what do you say about a guy who has the best sin of all named after him - I'd tip my hat if I had a hand free or wore a hat.
It got to the point where I was around thirteen that my badness always had a turtle head poking out. Not only was I unstoppable but largely unsuspected as well - no one ever blames the quiet one. I collected a fair army of Battle Beasts (squat mostly immobile anthropomorphic action figures with interchangeable weapons used to play a wood, water, fire game much akin to paper, rock scissors..."Battle Beasts, they grow into an army, Battle beasts") with the five finger discount method and increased my comic book collection too. Cash could always be obtained from the Bank of Mom (her purse) for sundry needs and I never went without the little things that make every kid's life bearable (ships, pop and chocolate bars). My downfall was that I was too greedy.
INT - K-Mart - Pembroke, Ontario - DAY
A rotund 13 year old boy in dripping muk-luks and a grey plastic parka surveys the rack of audio cassettes. Five dollars pilfered from his mother's purse is burning a hole in his pocket and there are some cassettes on sale for $3.99. He spins the carousel display past such offerings as Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" (got it) and the marked down Devil's Music (i.e. AC/DC and Iron Maiden) to stop when he sees the Holy Grail of Church approved listening, "The California Raisins Sing the Hits" for $11.99 A quick glance at the case shows him several choice songs being covered by the four wrinkled fruits. A quick glance around him shows no one looking and the tape slides easily down into the parka's lining through a strategically cut hole through the inside pocket (it's the first coat he's owned that has an inside pocket owing to the fact that a man's medium coat was necessary to cover his man sized gut).
His father waits at the front of the store since depositing the rest of the brood in the car. The father has an inherent hate of shopping that his son will inherit in later years and just wants the fuck out. It's snowing outside and he wants to make it home before the ploughs come out. They've almost made it out through the automatic doors but a strange voice stops them both:
"I need to see what's in your coat?" The speaker is a stocky man in work boots and Kubota tractor hat. He's accompanied by a tall cadaverous blond woman in a long mangy black fur coat who wears glasses studded with rhinestones. The father thinks that the man is talking to him and starts to protest but the woman clarifies.
"We were talking to the Boy."
"The Boy" tries to make himself as insignificant as possible which is a tough order considering that he is the biggest person there (around the middle at least). He slaps half-heartedly at his pockets and opens his coat hoping that their search won't be too thorough but the cadaver woman has eyes like his mother's. They spot the bulge in the lining down by the hem and she asks if the Boy would kindly remove the cassette. The Boy knows he's busted and it takes a minute to free the cassette from the sticky confines of the coat's lining.
"Did you buy that?" the father asks hopefully.
The Boy takes advantage of this unsuspecting ally and nods an emphatic yes.
"Do you have a receipt?" asks the corpse woman. The father turns his face down to his son's waiting for his first born to produce the scrap of paper.
The Boy hangs his head, "No."
"You'll have to come with us," the man says, all business. He leads the way down the stores main aisle followed by the Boy and his father in single file with the blond cadaver bringing up the rear. It's a Saturday afternoon and the store is crowded enough that the boy's shaming is noted by half a hundred people.
The tiny room that they are lead to smells of cigarette smoke the ammonia reek of old urine. He is sat down next to his father and questioned at length with the cassette tape sitting on the desk between him and the inquisitors. It feels like hours that they're sitting in that room. The Boy is told that since he's over twelve years of age that this incident will be attached to his Juvenile record. He will never be able to get a government job, come in to a K-Mart for one year (he will never return to a K-Mart again, ever) and probably become a bed wetter for stealing. The Boy sits silently, speaking only to answer a direct question while his father refuses to even look at him. Because there is something much more serious on the father's mind; more serious than being able to shop at K-Mart or work for the government. The thirteen year old boy has shamed his father by dishonouring his newly ordained priesthood. And the Boy will never be forgiven.
End Scene
Do I still do wrong? Meh...I suppose an outsider would say so but I stopped caring about other people's opinions after that trip to the smelly room in the back of K-Mart. Quitting the Church helped too and so did the discovery that ethyl alcohol plus a certain type of girl equals dirty bad fun. I haven't stolen anything since (and been caught) but that piss smelling room will always remind me that there dark places in this world waiting for people like me to take that one toke over the line into damnation. Whatever...I've since lived in worse smelling places than that back room and counted myself among the fortunate. I've made and spent a few fortunes of ill-gotten wealth with nothing more to show from them but an abused liver and a spank bank full of mammaries.
The important thing is that I have the presence of mind not to give a shit anymore.
"Choose the right, choose the right,
Let wisdom mark the way before.
In its light, choose the right
And God will bless you ever more."
And being the good little Mormon boy that I was supposed to be meant a lot of wrestling with the concept of right and wrong. Do I take the pop my mom's been saving in the fridge to slake a reader's thirst or drink tap water instead? Do I tell the recess monitor that Rich Bully is playing house with a second grader or let him piss in her hair some more? Do I forgive my sister for pouring new model paints over my mattress or offer some percussive discipline about her head and neck? If I ever "chose the right" it was by accident.
Being bad was and is the shit. I could do things that no sane parent would condone, take what I wanted from whomever I pleased and diddle the afternoons away despite a religiously applied proscription against touching oneself. The best thing was that I was taking my badness cues from the one place where no one suspected - the Bible. If Jacob's brothers could put him in a pit and sell him into slavery then I could tie my sister to a tree and rent her out for the afternoon. If the Prodigal Son could take and squander his inheritance on wine women and song I could snatch the change off my dad's dresser to buy a Jumbo Mr Freeze at the store. And Onan...wow...what do you say about a guy who has the best sin of all named after him - I'd tip my hat if I had a hand free or wore a hat.
It got to the point where I was around thirteen that my badness always had a turtle head poking out. Not only was I unstoppable but largely unsuspected as well - no one ever blames the quiet one. I collected a fair army of Battle Beasts (squat mostly immobile anthropomorphic action figures with interchangeable weapons used to play a wood, water, fire game much akin to paper, rock scissors..."Battle Beasts, they grow into an army, Battle beasts") with the five finger discount method and increased my comic book collection too. Cash could always be obtained from the Bank of Mom (her purse) for sundry needs and I never went without the little things that make every kid's life bearable (ships, pop and chocolate bars). My downfall was that I was too greedy.
INT - K-Mart - Pembroke, Ontario - DAY
A rotund 13 year old boy in dripping muk-luks and a grey plastic parka surveys the rack of audio cassettes. Five dollars pilfered from his mother's purse is burning a hole in his pocket and there are some cassettes on sale for $3.99. He spins the carousel display past such offerings as Bon Jovi's "Slippery When Wet" (got it) and the marked down Devil's Music (i.e. AC/DC and Iron Maiden) to stop when he sees the Holy Grail of Church approved listening, "The California Raisins Sing the Hits" for $11.99 A quick glance at the case shows him several choice songs being covered by the four wrinkled fruits. A quick glance around him shows no one looking and the tape slides easily down into the parka's lining through a strategically cut hole through the inside pocket (it's the first coat he's owned that has an inside pocket owing to the fact that a man's medium coat was necessary to cover his man sized gut).
His father waits at the front of the store since depositing the rest of the brood in the car. The father has an inherent hate of shopping that his son will inherit in later years and just wants the fuck out. It's snowing outside and he wants to make it home before the ploughs come out. They've almost made it out through the automatic doors but a strange voice stops them both:
"I need to see what's in your coat?" The speaker is a stocky man in work boots and Kubota tractor hat. He's accompanied by a tall cadaverous blond woman in a long mangy black fur coat who wears glasses studded with rhinestones. The father thinks that the man is talking to him and starts to protest but the woman clarifies.
"We were talking to the Boy."
"The Boy" tries to make himself as insignificant as possible which is a tough order considering that he is the biggest person there (around the middle at least). He slaps half-heartedly at his pockets and opens his coat hoping that their search won't be too thorough but the cadaver woman has eyes like his mother's. They spot the bulge in the lining down by the hem and she asks if the Boy would kindly remove the cassette. The Boy knows he's busted and it takes a minute to free the cassette from the sticky confines of the coat's lining.
"Did you buy that?" the father asks hopefully.
The Boy takes advantage of this unsuspecting ally and nods an emphatic yes.
"Do you have a receipt?" asks the corpse woman. The father turns his face down to his son's waiting for his first born to produce the scrap of paper.
The Boy hangs his head, "No."
"You'll have to come with us," the man says, all business. He leads the way down the stores main aisle followed by the Boy and his father in single file with the blond cadaver bringing up the rear. It's a Saturday afternoon and the store is crowded enough that the boy's shaming is noted by half a hundred people.
The tiny room that they are lead to smells of cigarette smoke the ammonia reek of old urine. He is sat down next to his father and questioned at length with the cassette tape sitting on the desk between him and the inquisitors. It feels like hours that they're sitting in that room. The Boy is told that since he's over twelve years of age that this incident will be attached to his Juvenile record. He will never be able to get a government job, come in to a K-Mart for one year (he will never return to a K-Mart again, ever) and probably become a bed wetter for stealing. The Boy sits silently, speaking only to answer a direct question while his father refuses to even look at him. Because there is something much more serious on the father's mind; more serious than being able to shop at K-Mart or work for the government. The thirteen year old boy has shamed his father by dishonouring his newly ordained priesthood. And the Boy will never be forgiven.
End Scene
Do I still do wrong? Meh...I suppose an outsider would say so but I stopped caring about other people's opinions after that trip to the smelly room in the back of K-Mart. Quitting the Church helped too and so did the discovery that ethyl alcohol plus a certain type of girl equals dirty bad fun. I haven't stolen anything since (and been caught) but that piss smelling room will always remind me that there dark places in this world waiting for people like me to take that one toke over the line into damnation. Whatever...I've since lived in worse smelling places than that back room and counted myself among the fortunate. I've made and spent a few fortunes of ill-gotten wealth with nothing more to show from them but an abused liver and a spank bank full of mammaries.
The important thing is that I have the presence of mind not to give a shit anymore.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
By Hook or by Crook
What’s it gonna’ take for people to start helping each other out? I mean really help and not just pose with limbless kids for photo-ops to abolish land mines on another continent or stage sing-alongs to stay the inevitable advance of genetically altered foods. This is the sort of factory charity for show that’s usually run off by celebrities on behalf of internationally publicized agencies - filler on an entertainment news show. All that anyone’s looking for is press good enough to draw attention away from an ugly truth. And forget about the many ribbon campaigns that help the ideologically challenged decide what cause to support based on their favourite colour. In the end you wind up with a bunch of people wearing ribbons around months after the awareness week is over and their good intentions no more than absent minded evidence of maybe once giving a shit. Best of all, you can always indulge your sense of right-doing and leave your spare change in one of those clear plastic coin boxes that sit in front of the register at your local fast food franchise and think you‘re making a magnanimous contribution to any thing from cystic-fibrosis to the local humane society. What a load of shit.
I’m not cynical enough to deny that there are some organized charities that do good work - so I won’t bother. Sure, a movie star might raise awareness of refugees from war torn Somewhere-in-Africa I’ve never heard of and make pity contributions pay to have a well drilled but they don’t stick around to see it appropriated by the same heavily armed men who displaced the refugees to begin with. And granted, national fundraising campaigns do raise millions of dollars for medical research but I know a guy who owes his lavish lifestyle (including an 11,000 square foot lake-front home, boats, stables, servants and winters in Bora-bora) to the chunk he allocates himself every year from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. And yes my dear sainted mother gave a nice young girl at the market two dollars for a "tear" stained bit of green ribbon that would show the world she supported…something about the environment or legalized marijuana - the girl wasn't too coherent. And I worked out of a Wendy's where the coin boxes might as well have said “Managers' Laundry Money” instead of claiming to support adoption. But what the Hell, nobody`s perfect. Right?
Funny thing is that I take what I cherish most about charity came out the mouth of the only guys more than twelve people ever thought was perfect. He gave a famous sermon on a hill in the Middle East to a lot of people who were probably just as miserable and run down as a lot of people today. He laid down some crazy cool stuff about loving your neighbours as you love yourself and that doing good works to one another was the best way to follow the example he was trying to set. These were Great Ideas in their purest sense but I do believe the Man overestimated his audience’s attention span. I can imagine walking away from that meeting with every good intention under the Son - maybe even helping an old Pharisee to cross a Roman highway - only to get home and yell at the wife for not having my goat and rice ready and kick the dog for failing to honour his master. I can imagine that because that’s the same day to day shit that people pull nowadays. It doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the message, I just think the meaning’s been getting lost in translation over time.
Know what else I think? I think the message is a lot easier to swallow without the divinity starching it up. "Be good to each other and get into Heaven." Yeah, that never led to any despicable double standard. How many people do you know who only do good works towards people who give them stuff or have the power to have stuff given? Bah! There are people on my street whose kids where jean jackets in the dead of winter and can't give their families enough to eat. Forget land mines in Africa, forget Farm-Aid and ribbons for children done away with by the fear and hate towards homosexuals - make a difference in your own backyard.
I can hear people asking, "What's this all got to do with the stupid fucking title of this post?" Well, I'm sure that everyone's heard the phrase before even if they don't know what it means (or, more specifically, my meaning). A hook and a crook are pretty much the same thing except that a hook's got a pointy end. Shepherds in the Bible stories I used to like were always carrying crooks to lift lost lambs out of holes or to prod the flocks into what passes for order with sheep. Hooks are most commonly seen on the ends of fishing line to pierce and pull a fish into a boat or onto shore. My point is that charity work usually takes the gentler crook approach and that, if something doesn't change in our attitudes, people needing the help might go for the hook and take what they want because they don't have what they need.
There...satisfied, now go out and do some good already.
I’m not cynical enough to deny that there are some organized charities that do good work - so I won’t bother. Sure, a movie star might raise awareness of refugees from war torn Somewhere-in-Africa I’ve never heard of and make pity contributions pay to have a well drilled but they don’t stick around to see it appropriated by the same heavily armed men who displaced the refugees to begin with. And granted, national fundraising campaigns do raise millions of dollars for medical research but I know a guy who owes his lavish lifestyle (including an 11,000 square foot lake-front home, boats, stables, servants and winters in Bora-bora) to the chunk he allocates himself every year from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. And yes my dear sainted mother gave a nice young girl at the market two dollars for a "tear" stained bit of green ribbon that would show the world she supported…something about the environment or legalized marijuana - the girl wasn't too coherent. And I worked out of a Wendy's where the coin boxes might as well have said “Managers' Laundry Money” instead of claiming to support adoption. But what the Hell, nobody`s perfect. Right?
Funny thing is that I take what I cherish most about charity came out the mouth of the only guys more than twelve people ever thought was perfect. He gave a famous sermon on a hill in the Middle East to a lot of people who were probably just as miserable and run down as a lot of people today. He laid down some crazy cool stuff about loving your neighbours as you love yourself and that doing good works to one another was the best way to follow the example he was trying to set. These were Great Ideas in their purest sense but I do believe the Man overestimated his audience’s attention span. I can imagine walking away from that meeting with every good intention under the Son - maybe even helping an old Pharisee to cross a Roman highway - only to get home and yell at the wife for not having my goat and rice ready and kick the dog for failing to honour his master. I can imagine that because that’s the same day to day shit that people pull nowadays. It doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the message, I just think the meaning’s been getting lost in translation over time.
Know what else I think? I think the message is a lot easier to swallow without the divinity starching it up. "Be good to each other and get into Heaven." Yeah, that never led to any despicable double standard. How many people do you know who only do good works towards people who give them stuff or have the power to have stuff given? Bah! There are people on my street whose kids where jean jackets in the dead of winter and can't give their families enough to eat. Forget land mines in Africa, forget Farm-Aid and ribbons for children done away with by the fear and hate towards homosexuals - make a difference in your own backyard.
I can hear people asking, "What's this all got to do with the stupid fucking title of this post?" Well, I'm sure that everyone's heard the phrase before even if they don't know what it means (or, more specifically, my meaning). A hook and a crook are pretty much the same thing except that a hook's got a pointy end. Shepherds in the Bible stories I used to like were always carrying crooks to lift lost lambs out of holes or to prod the flocks into what passes for order with sheep. Hooks are most commonly seen on the ends of fishing line to pierce and pull a fish into a boat or onto shore. My point is that charity work usually takes the gentler crook approach and that, if something doesn't change in our attitudes, people needing the help might go for the hook and take what they want because they don't have what they need.
There...satisfied, now go out and do some good already.
Boobies Rock Hard!
Boobs are nature’s greatest invention - a bold statement, I know. I can hear people thinking that the human brain deserves top honours while others must feel that life as we know would stop without a heart. I can appreciate these points of view since I do think about boobs an awful lot and fallen in love with a pair or two. Without boobs I’d be hard pressed finding anything worth thinking about and be left feeling nothing below my waist but knees and toes. Without boobs…no, I don't even want to consider it. My love is too deep.
I started forming my conclusions at a young age. At about three or four I was still small and cute enough to get women with racks. With the right mix of ennui and guile I could usually get a two base hit. Unfortunately, my exposure to women outside of the immediate family was restricted to church and the welfare ladies who shared the yard in geared-to-income housing. The church ladies usually looked and smelled better than the yard ladies but the holy-hangers were a lot harder to access than backyard breasts (mostly because yard ladies would trade feels for cigarettes and church ladies didn't smoke). I was a brave explorer charting islands in the stream and logging the results - wee as the log was at the time.
Grade one was an eye opening experience. Some of the girls in grade six were starting to develop and that got me bugging `cause I shared a yard with them and there`s all sorts of stuff a twelve year old will trade for a touch or a peek. I learned a few more important lessons; boobs grew off of girls, girls don`t like you staring and arithmetic is just plain old math in fancy dress. Eventually I even learned to read but it took so long because the TA who taught remedial reading drove a Trans Am, smoked in her car during recess was stacked out to yowza. I spent more time looking at her bumpers than the books she brought me (and there were some good books too including Where the Wild Things Are). When pressed I could manage a few sentences before finding a long word to stumble over and stumble I would. She would lean over and point to the word and help me sound it out while my eyes feasted on the breast meat revealed. I remember the day after she saw through my ruse like greasy underwear - the day a woman finally put me in my place.
It was starting on to summer and she wore a tight T-shirt with something printed right across the front. In my mind it was carte blanche to stare and after a few moments she asked if I was having trouble with the word. She said it out loud and I could see how the sounds came from the letters on here shirt - especially the J circling her left nipple. And then she gave me a twenty minute lecture on the meaning of the world.
The word was OBJECTIFICATION. For the effect it had the word might as well have been CASTRATION. I was devastated and ran home weeping uncontrollably. When my mother asked me what was wrong I couldn't tell her - make that would`t tell her - what had happened at school. I was too ashamed of my behaviour to tell her and I knew that she`d be mad enough to offer a little of the old percussive maintenance. The less I talked the more she started worrying and jumping to conclusions. Mom’s are funny like that. “Did you have reading today?” she asked. “Yes,” was my barely audible reply. “Did something happen with Miss Grace?” “Yes.” “I need to know what happened?” “no.” I started crying again. In the end, my mom went to school with me the next day and we talked with the principal. I read him my copy of "Where the Wild Things Are" (long since memorized) and he said that I didn’t need remedial reading anymore. Then he and mom talked when I went back to class. Half an hour later the whole school hears Miss Grace peeling out of the faculty parking lot. At recess the grade fours told us she was giving the finger too and the burnt rubber hung heavy in the air - and in my heart. The best boobs in school were history.
In a perfect world I would have stopped there and been better for the lesson learned but it was only a matter of time before my boob love reared it ugly head again and again. Successful completion of grade school led to junior high where hormones hit over-drive and girls became women - women with boobs. I grew an extra two inches every day, starting on the bus ride. But Miss Grace’s lesson was never far from my mind and I had learned to keep my glimpsing furtive and non-descript. Still, it didn’t stop me from learning a few more important lessons; girls always know when you’re looking and most of them want you to - there are exceptions to every rule. I did, however, limit my worship to glimpses of the divine peaks. I never got to second base or even kissed a girl until I was just shy of leaving high school and all the way towards quitting on God.
And I won’t say any more about that.
My boob love continues unabated through the years and, nerd that I am, I have learned my lessons well. Short of teaching myself enough about genetics and cloning to grow the perfect pair I can content myself with the boobs at my disposal (i.e. Internet porn and not suggesting that women are trashy or garbage). A little self control and imagination goes a long way towards lifetime fulfillment of my desires but I don’t base my opening statement on fetish alone. Don’t misunderstand, I can’t deny that my statement has a lot to do with a deep seated boob appreciation and lifelong fascination - but nature‘s greatest invention? Yes. After all, for the first seven-odd months of our lives, our favourite food is made by boobs.
Mmmm…breast milk.
I started forming my conclusions at a young age. At about three or four I was still small and cute enough to get women with racks. With the right mix of ennui and guile I could usually get a two base hit. Unfortunately, my exposure to women outside of the immediate family was restricted to church and the welfare ladies who shared the yard in geared-to-income housing. The church ladies usually looked and smelled better than the yard ladies but the holy-hangers were a lot harder to access than backyard breasts (mostly because yard ladies would trade feels for cigarettes and church ladies didn't smoke). I was a brave explorer charting islands in the stream and logging the results - wee as the log was at the time.
Grade one was an eye opening experience. Some of the girls in grade six were starting to develop and that got me bugging `cause I shared a yard with them and there`s all sorts of stuff a twelve year old will trade for a touch or a peek. I learned a few more important lessons; boobs grew off of girls, girls don`t like you staring and arithmetic is just plain old math in fancy dress. Eventually I even learned to read but it took so long because the TA who taught remedial reading drove a Trans Am, smoked in her car during recess was stacked out to yowza. I spent more time looking at her bumpers than the books she brought me (and there were some good books too including Where the Wild Things Are). When pressed I could manage a few sentences before finding a long word to stumble over and stumble I would. She would lean over and point to the word and help me sound it out while my eyes feasted on the breast meat revealed. I remember the day after she saw through my ruse like greasy underwear - the day a woman finally put me in my place.
It was starting on to summer and she wore a tight T-shirt with something printed right across the front. In my mind it was carte blanche to stare and after a few moments she asked if I was having trouble with the word. She said it out loud and I could see how the sounds came from the letters on here shirt - especially the J circling her left nipple. And then she gave me a twenty minute lecture on the meaning of the world.
The word was OBJECTIFICATION. For the effect it had the word might as well have been CASTRATION. I was devastated and ran home weeping uncontrollably. When my mother asked me what was wrong I couldn't tell her - make that would`t tell her - what had happened at school. I was too ashamed of my behaviour to tell her and I knew that she`d be mad enough to offer a little of the old percussive maintenance. The less I talked the more she started worrying and jumping to conclusions. Mom’s are funny like that. “Did you have reading today?” she asked. “Yes,” was my barely audible reply. “Did something happen with Miss Grace?” “Yes.” “I need to know what happened?” “no.” I started crying again. In the end, my mom went to school with me the next day and we talked with the principal. I read him my copy of "Where the Wild Things Are" (long since memorized) and he said that I didn’t need remedial reading anymore. Then he and mom talked when I went back to class. Half an hour later the whole school hears Miss Grace peeling out of the faculty parking lot. At recess the grade fours told us she was giving the finger too and the burnt rubber hung heavy in the air - and in my heart. The best boobs in school were history.
In a perfect world I would have stopped there and been better for the lesson learned but it was only a matter of time before my boob love reared it ugly head again and again. Successful completion of grade school led to junior high where hormones hit over-drive and girls became women - women with boobs. I grew an extra two inches every day, starting on the bus ride. But Miss Grace’s lesson was never far from my mind and I had learned to keep my glimpsing furtive and non-descript. Still, it didn’t stop me from learning a few more important lessons; girls always know when you’re looking and most of them want you to - there are exceptions to every rule. I did, however, limit my worship to glimpses of the divine peaks. I never got to second base or even kissed a girl until I was just shy of leaving high school and all the way towards quitting on God.
And I won’t say any more about that.
My boob love continues unabated through the years and, nerd that I am, I have learned my lessons well. Short of teaching myself enough about genetics and cloning to grow the perfect pair I can content myself with the boobs at my disposal (i.e. Internet porn and not suggesting that women are trashy or garbage). A little self control and imagination goes a long way towards lifetime fulfillment of my desires but I don’t base my opening statement on fetish alone. Don’t misunderstand, I can’t deny that my statement has a lot to do with a deep seated boob appreciation and lifelong fascination - but nature‘s greatest invention? Yes. After all, for the first seven-odd months of our lives, our favourite food is made by boobs.
Mmmm…breast milk.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The Entertainment News Dream Biopsy
Through no fault of my own, I watch a little too much entertainment television before bed. I once saw George Clooney propositioned by an Italian journalist and later learned that it was all a hoax (apparently the Venice Film Festival will never be the same again). Lately it was revealed that Joaquin Phoenix’s paradigm shift from hare-lipped actor to hare-lipped rapper was a hoax as well (in related news he’s set to play Leonardo DiCaprio’s lover in a film adaptation of FBI founder J Edgar Hoover’s life). And who can forget how the death of GUESS cover model Anna Nicole Smith resulted in a custody battle which proved once and for all that washed up celebrities sleep around on their shyster husbands with photographers (and the lazy eyed little girl is doing well by all reports). Oh, and Michael Douglas has some sort of throat cancer that his younger wife is very pissed off about (she made a point of saying early on the doctors didn’t find it fast enough).
Ever dream about the last thing you see before falling asleep? Well, I must have drifted off to an update about the Micheal Douglas tragedy one night because there was a very strong Gordon Gecko theme to the last dream I remember having. I was at some hoity-toity but at the same time too risqué social do in an opulent penthouse looking over a night time city-scape lit up like a crack addict’s Christmas tree. Maybe I was playing the main role but there was this tickle in my throat that had me coughing bubbles into my two-hundred year old Scotch. Excusing myself from the discreet cocaine and nubile young bodies enjoying it one off another I went to lie down in a perfect copy of my own bedroom set on a raised platform in the centre of the party. I laid my self down fully clothed and tried not to cough but the tickle kept getting worse and I was disturbing my guests. With a complete disregard for my dream walking gag reflex, I reached an index finger down my throat to scratch the tickle. That’s when it started getting weird.
The cancer tickle had turned into a hand holding a feather to the back of my throat. Sensing the intruding digit the cancer-hand abandoned it’s throat itching and grabbed my finger. I must have made some loud if muffled exclamation because there were party guests surrounding me in an instant. They started taking off my clothes and rubbing me sensually like spectators in a group sex scene. I locked eyes with a pretty red-head bearing a striking resemblance to Mary Hart and saw myself fisting my own moth reflected in her eyes. She turned to tell the elderly woman next to her what she was thinking and the old bitty started seizing while John Tesh licked her nipples. Soon everyone around the bed was engaged in symptomatic sex of some kind while the cancer-hand swallowed itself so that I could taste my arm up to the elbow. Lubricated with my own blood, the throat rape began. So appalled was my dream self, so bound and determined to prevent the spectacle I had become, that he pulled back against the cancer hand with a might that tore a baby shaped mass out…
That’s when I woke up paralyzed. (This sometimes happen when I’ve dreamed something so fundamentally disturbing that my waking mind just can’t deal with the horror. I’ll lie completely still, barely daring to breathe, for anywhere from five minutes to half the night, hoping that the nightmare hasn’t carried me somewhere too far from which to return.) I didn’t so much regain my senses as I recouped their loss and found my throat drier than twice baked bread. Luckily I remembered the way to the bathroom,slurped three hand-cups of water out of the toilet before seeing my reflection in the bowl and the new vagina shape to my mouth with traces of a fresh...
Then I woke up for real. Or have I? Life’s been feeling entertainment newsworthy of late and I keep finding myself embroiled in petty scandals and intrigues. People are getting all up in my business and I don't go out anymore. I'm thinking about shaving my head, adopting a third-world baby and driving around drunk with my shaved head out the window, baby in my teeth, looking for a transgendered prostitute selling drugs. And I would if I couldn't see it all every weekday night from 7 to 8 on one of the only two channels I get on my analog television.
Maybe I should just fall asleep to porn. That'll fix me right up.
Ever dream about the last thing you see before falling asleep? Well, I must have drifted off to an update about the Micheal Douglas tragedy one night because there was a very strong Gordon Gecko theme to the last dream I remember having. I was at some hoity-toity but at the same time too risqué social do in an opulent penthouse looking over a night time city-scape lit up like a crack addict’s Christmas tree. Maybe I was playing the main role but there was this tickle in my throat that had me coughing bubbles into my two-hundred year old Scotch. Excusing myself from the discreet cocaine and nubile young bodies enjoying it one off another I went to lie down in a perfect copy of my own bedroom set on a raised platform in the centre of the party. I laid my self down fully clothed and tried not to cough but the tickle kept getting worse and I was disturbing my guests. With a complete disregard for my dream walking gag reflex, I reached an index finger down my throat to scratch the tickle. That’s when it started getting weird.
The cancer tickle had turned into a hand holding a feather to the back of my throat. Sensing the intruding digit the cancer-hand abandoned it’s throat itching and grabbed my finger. I must have made some loud if muffled exclamation because there were party guests surrounding me in an instant. They started taking off my clothes and rubbing me sensually like spectators in a group sex scene. I locked eyes with a pretty red-head bearing a striking resemblance to Mary Hart and saw myself fisting my own moth reflected in her eyes. She turned to tell the elderly woman next to her what she was thinking and the old bitty started seizing while John Tesh licked her nipples. Soon everyone around the bed was engaged in symptomatic sex of some kind while the cancer-hand swallowed itself so that I could taste my arm up to the elbow. Lubricated with my own blood, the throat rape began. So appalled was my dream self, so bound and determined to prevent the spectacle I had become, that he pulled back against the cancer hand with a might that tore a baby shaped mass out…
That’s when I woke up paralyzed. (This sometimes happen when I’ve dreamed something so fundamentally disturbing that my waking mind just can’t deal with the horror. I’ll lie completely still, barely daring to breathe, for anywhere from five minutes to half the night, hoping that the nightmare hasn’t carried me somewhere too far from which to return.) I didn’t so much regain my senses as I recouped their loss and found my throat drier than twice baked bread. Luckily I remembered the way to the bathroom,slurped three hand-cups of water out of the toilet before seeing my reflection in the bowl and the new vagina shape to my mouth with traces of a fresh...
Then I woke up for real. Or have I? Life’s been feeling entertainment newsworthy of late and I keep finding myself embroiled in petty scandals and intrigues. People are getting all up in my business and I don't go out anymore. I'm thinking about shaving my head, adopting a third-world baby and driving around drunk with my shaved head out the window, baby in my teeth, looking for a transgendered prostitute selling drugs. And I would if I couldn't see it all every weekday night from 7 to 8 on one of the only two channels I get on my analog television.
Maybe I should just fall asleep to porn. That'll fix me right up.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
The Dope
I recently scored a quarter pound and got a good price. Fuck that, the best price I’ve ever had on a QP. I’m sitting here trying to understand how I ever managed this on ten hours notice and all I can figure is that I must have had it coming. Who knows why? I could speculate on a number of reasons but most of them favour a reality in which wrath is rewarded with the choicest fruit and choices have no consequences. Oh sure, it’s an outdoor grow and the bottom of the bag was a lot of shakey-bake but the nipple tip buds are furrier than vintage gash. The fly little hottie who delivered it to my door even brought me a coffee and if she’s sporting any bush south of the equator it’s been pared down to a landing strip. She smelled good too - almost as good as the Dope.
Weighing it out into ounces by the quarter brought back a lot of old memories. No one ever took a short count off me - I sold fat baggies. Small bills and big profits. And yes, Friday nights would always see a motley queue of hooligans out my basement cell door - Fresh Fish Fridays. Some would take little nibbles and others took bigger bites while I weighed the scales. Weights, measures, justice and universal balance in the palm of my hand. Good times and good smoke. I had lots of cash and lived in relatively high style for a stoner monk. Busty house bunnies brought me take-out trays of prime rib and potatoes. As the Great God of Plenty I was the happiest camper in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Wake-n-bakes, plenty of sleep-overs and booze with every meal. Until the rats chased my fish away and started sapping at the foundation of my tidy little enterprise. In recall I can say that the Barbarians were encamped without the gates of my Rome - blocking the Apian Way of the basement stairs. Truth to tell, I was lucky to have gotten out with my skin.
Do I really want to start another back-pocket empire and deal with all of the shit that entails? Oh, the extra money would be nice and we could get the Cable in maybe if there was anything good on TV. Free smoke and cigarette money’s nothing to complain about but nosey pig calling neighbours I can do without (and a certain pus-arsed cock-jawed example of same remains to be squared away). There’s nothing wrong with getting ahead but a jump from wage slave to dirt merchant can land you in a lot more than a new tax bracket. You move from anonymity to wearing a sandwich board which reads along the lines of, I’m better off than you are…feel free to pick at my still twitching carcass. And I never lacked for the envious scavengers in those bygone days - carpet-crawling flunkies and dogs begging at table who turned to bite the hand providing. I guess it all depends on putting the word out and come what may.
Thing is that I also ran into an old customer last weekend who was visiting from being away at college. He greeted me warmly, asked if I was still burning the herb and if I could help him out. But the cupboards were bare at home and I was waiting on emergency relief like a starving Ethiopian for UNICEF pennies. Thing was that he also said the cupboards were bare back at the college and folks were getting hungry. That got me to thinking as I finished my grocery shopping - I sure would like to be the hand providing again. So maybe I made the decision last weekend and this auspicious quarter-pound is the seed for my future prosperity. Maybe I'm following a would-be bean counter's fateful suggestion down the wide and winding way to my own private hell.
Or maybe it`s all just the Dope talking.
Weighing it out into ounces by the quarter brought back a lot of old memories. No one ever took a short count off me - I sold fat baggies. Small bills and big profits. And yes, Friday nights would always see a motley queue of hooligans out my basement cell door - Fresh Fish Fridays. Some would take little nibbles and others took bigger bites while I weighed the scales. Weights, measures, justice and universal balance in the palm of my hand. Good times and good smoke. I had lots of cash and lived in relatively high style for a stoner monk. Busty house bunnies brought me take-out trays of prime rib and potatoes. As the Great God of Plenty I was the happiest camper in the Garden of Earthly Delights. Wake-n-bakes, plenty of sleep-overs and booze with every meal. Until the rats chased my fish away and started sapping at the foundation of my tidy little enterprise. In recall I can say that the Barbarians were encamped without the gates of my Rome - blocking the Apian Way of the basement stairs. Truth to tell, I was lucky to have gotten out with my skin.
Do I really want to start another back-pocket empire and deal with all of the shit that entails? Oh, the extra money would be nice and we could get the Cable in maybe if there was anything good on TV. Free smoke and cigarette money’s nothing to complain about but nosey pig calling neighbours I can do without (and a certain pus-arsed cock-jawed example of same remains to be squared away). There’s nothing wrong with getting ahead but a jump from wage slave to dirt merchant can land you in a lot more than a new tax bracket. You move from anonymity to wearing a sandwich board which reads along the lines of, I’m better off than you are…feel free to pick at my still twitching carcass. And I never lacked for the envious scavengers in those bygone days - carpet-crawling flunkies and dogs begging at table who turned to bite the hand providing. I guess it all depends on putting the word out and come what may.
Thing is that I also ran into an old customer last weekend who was visiting from being away at college. He greeted me warmly, asked if I was still burning the herb and if I could help him out. But the cupboards were bare at home and I was waiting on emergency relief like a starving Ethiopian for UNICEF pennies. Thing was that he also said the cupboards were bare back at the college and folks were getting hungry. That got me to thinking as I finished my grocery shopping - I sure would like to be the hand providing again. So maybe I made the decision last weekend and this auspicious quarter-pound is the seed for my future prosperity. Maybe I'm following a would-be bean counter's fateful suggestion down the wide and winding way to my own private hell.
Or maybe it`s all just the Dope talking.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Won't you be my neighbour?
So, I'm in my underwear in front of this idiot machine and watching a few choice episodes of "The Big Bang Theory" when the phone rings. Caller--ID says unknown name, private number. Well, I'm more than willing to answer the phone when I'm expecting a call and I'll answer if I know who's calling and I want to talk to you but this privacy shit is for the birds. Blocking your data means that you're either a telemarketer or a bill collector or you're too pussy-assed to let your name and number show on my display. Fine...I get it, privacy's important but if you value your privacy more than a conversation with me then I don't wanna' know ya and we sure as hell aint gonna' talk on the phone.
Low and behold, there's a message waiting. Hmmm...okay, I'll play the message game...that's cool...you listened to mine so I'll listen to yours. So I punch in the codes that keep my messages private and listen. "Hello, this is Constable X calling for [the author's wife]. Can you please call me back at XXX-XXXX. Thank you..." My only thought at this moment is "why the fuck do the cops wanna' talk to my wife?" Really, she's the most law-abiding, kind and nonthreatening person I've ever met...I mean, she brakes for chipmunks crossing in front of the car, she pets every dog that walks by her and married me of all people.
And as it's Sunday and barely a quarter after ten in the morning, she's not up. (I wouldn't have been except that I was running snot out my nose like a steady drip of...well, snot.) But I want to know what the hell's going on so I take her the phone.
"Hey, babe," I say with the phone a half inch from her nose. "The cops called you, there's a message."
"Cops?" she asks. I can imagine her using the same voice if I suddenly grew a third testicle.
"Yup. Call them, will you?"
She does and I wait to see what's happening. She's switched around a few times and ends up leaving a message for Constable X. By this time I'm figuring that it can't be too bad. If she's done something really wrong we wouldn't be getting a phone call. Shit, if she'd done something really wrong and we did get a phone call I sure as fuck wouldn't be getting her to call them back. In any case, she goes back to sleep and I get back to the antics of Doctors Sheldon Lee Cooper and Leonard Leaky Hoffstaeder.
At noon someone rings the doorbell. No one rings my doorbell unexpectedly...I just don't have anyone who ever wants to come over. Glancing out the window I see a North Bay City police cruiser. Irrationally, my first thought is, "They're never gonna' take me alive!" But then I reach back through the haze of three morning screwdrivers to remember the phone call. Shit! They're here for my baby-girl and she's the nicest, kindest person in the world and they'll never take us alive.
So, I let the wife know that the cops are here and cover my shame with a robe before answering the door. The cop's cute enough that I think, "Strippergram?" but I know that's the vodka talking. She asks if my Mom's home and I'm all, "Huh? She's in Utah." And then the cop asks for my wife by name. "Yeah," I said, "she knows you're here?" And the cop asks if she can come in. Seeing as I moved the meth lab and the white-slave ring accounting department across town last week I step aside and admit her.
The wife's bleary eyed and tired looking when she comes to the door. The cop confirms her identity and says something about a car accident. We're both like, what the hell are you talking about? The wife's so discombobulated from being woken up by someone else that I suggest maybe she'd like to go out with the officer and see what's up. The officer agrees and they're gone.
Here's what happened...at some point last week my wife's left front bumper brushed against the car parked in the space next to ours hard enough that some paint transferred. My neighbour, who's a member of our nation's armed forces, decides that he doesn't want to deal with me directly (for whatever reason...I am a scruffy, shiftless ne'er-do-well apparently) and calls the cops. Constable Strippergram is the end result of that phone call. In the bad old days I would have gone ballistic in this kind of a situation but my wife has mellowed me considerably. Instead of calling this fucking dough-boy a fucking dough-boy I listen to the officer explaining that she won't be charging my wife under the Criminal Code (like that could have happened because there was never any intent to damage pus-balls's shitty little rice burning hatchback in the first place) and that both parties need to bring their vehicles to the collision reporting centre on Princess Street. Then the officer says that we should hash these things out on the spot and come to resolution.
Listen, my wife's no Chatty Cathy and doesn't do well speaking to people she's never met. I tell the pus-arsed mincing fairy shit-lipped cry-baby across the hall (who has supply-tech written all over his weak chinned ferret face), in my best customer service voice (with extra syrup) that we have no trouble paying for any damage to his car. "But," I say, "why didn't you just leave a note on the car or maybe cross the hall and knock on the door if you had a beef with us? Why call the laws on us?" He mumbles something about not knowing how to pursue the issue and some shit about covering his bases and I'm thinking, If this guy's any indication of what Canada's military has become then I'm gonna' start learning Mandarin and Farsi tomorrow.
In the end it was an amicable deal but there's a part of me that knows this isn't over yet. I am so pissed off that I can't see straight! He called the cops about a scratch I could have made with my fingernail! We live right across the hall from each other and he never once asked about this. I swear to Christ by all that's good and holy that Mr. Fred Rogers himself would bitchslap this pseudo-soldier and feed him to the Kingdom of Makebelieve! Yeah, yeah...I can here the more reasonable among you saying, "Leave it go, Air. What's done is done." or "It could have been worse." And all I'm thinking is, Yeah, it could have been worse. Constable Strippergram might have had a soldier fetish and sent my wife to the bucket for something that didn't even register at the time. I've had any number of sweet revenge schemes go through my head in the five hours since that I'm starved for action. Deep down (and for legal purposes) I know that nothing's ever gonna' come from any of them (yet) but what's a simple man to do in the face of such a shitty neighbour?
Peace...for the time being.
Low and behold, there's a message waiting. Hmmm...okay, I'll play the message game...that's cool...you listened to mine so I'll listen to yours. So I punch in the codes that keep my messages private and listen. "Hello, this is Constable X calling for [the author's wife]. Can you please call me back at XXX-XXXX. Thank you..." My only thought at this moment is "why the fuck do the cops wanna' talk to my wife?" Really, she's the most law-abiding, kind and nonthreatening person I've ever met...I mean, she brakes for chipmunks crossing in front of the car, she pets every dog that walks by her and married me of all people.
And as it's Sunday and barely a quarter after ten in the morning, she's not up. (I wouldn't have been except that I was running snot out my nose like a steady drip of...well, snot.) But I want to know what the hell's going on so I take her the phone.
"Hey, babe," I say with the phone a half inch from her nose. "The cops called you, there's a message."
"Cops?" she asks. I can imagine her using the same voice if I suddenly grew a third testicle.
"Yup. Call them, will you?"
She does and I wait to see what's happening. She's switched around a few times and ends up leaving a message for Constable X. By this time I'm figuring that it can't be too bad. If she's done something really wrong we wouldn't be getting a phone call. Shit, if she'd done something really wrong and we did get a phone call I sure as fuck wouldn't be getting her to call them back. In any case, she goes back to sleep and I get back to the antics of Doctors Sheldon Lee Cooper and Leonard Leaky Hoffstaeder.
At noon someone rings the doorbell. No one rings my doorbell unexpectedly...I just don't have anyone who ever wants to come over. Glancing out the window I see a North Bay City police cruiser. Irrationally, my first thought is, "They're never gonna' take me alive!" But then I reach back through the haze of three morning screwdrivers to remember the phone call. Shit! They're here for my baby-girl and she's the nicest, kindest person in the world and they'll never take us alive.
So, I let the wife know that the cops are here and cover my shame with a robe before answering the door. The cop's cute enough that I think, "Strippergram?" but I know that's the vodka talking. She asks if my Mom's home and I'm all, "Huh? She's in Utah." And then the cop asks for my wife by name. "Yeah," I said, "she knows you're here?" And the cop asks if she can come in. Seeing as I moved the meth lab and the white-slave ring accounting department across town last week I step aside and admit her.
The wife's bleary eyed and tired looking when she comes to the door. The cop confirms her identity and says something about a car accident. We're both like, what the hell are you talking about? The wife's so discombobulated from being woken up by someone else that I suggest maybe she'd like to go out with the officer and see what's up. The officer agrees and they're gone.
Here's what happened...at some point last week my wife's left front bumper brushed against the car parked in the space next to ours hard enough that some paint transferred. My neighbour, who's a member of our nation's armed forces, decides that he doesn't want to deal with me directly (for whatever reason...I am a scruffy, shiftless ne'er-do-well apparently) and calls the cops. Constable Strippergram is the end result of that phone call. In the bad old days I would have gone ballistic in this kind of a situation but my wife has mellowed me considerably. Instead of calling this fucking dough-boy a fucking dough-boy I listen to the officer explaining that she won't be charging my wife under the Criminal Code (like that could have happened because there was never any intent to damage pus-balls's shitty little rice burning hatchback in the first place) and that both parties need to bring their vehicles to the collision reporting centre on Princess Street. Then the officer says that we should hash these things out on the spot and come to resolution.
Listen, my wife's no Chatty Cathy and doesn't do well speaking to people she's never met. I tell the pus-arsed mincing fairy shit-lipped cry-baby across the hall (who has supply-tech written all over his weak chinned ferret face), in my best customer service voice (with extra syrup) that we have no trouble paying for any damage to his car. "But," I say, "why didn't you just leave a note on the car or maybe cross the hall and knock on the door if you had a beef with us? Why call the laws on us?" He mumbles something about not knowing how to pursue the issue and some shit about covering his bases and I'm thinking, If this guy's any indication of what Canada's military has become then I'm gonna' start learning Mandarin and Farsi tomorrow.
In the end it was an amicable deal but there's a part of me that knows this isn't over yet. I am so pissed off that I can't see straight! He called the cops about a scratch I could have made with my fingernail! We live right across the hall from each other and he never once asked about this. I swear to Christ by all that's good and holy that Mr. Fred Rogers himself would bitchslap this pseudo-soldier and feed him to the Kingdom of Makebelieve! Yeah, yeah...I can here the more reasonable among you saying, "Leave it go, Air. What's done is done." or "It could have been worse." And all I'm thinking is, Yeah, it could have been worse. Constable Strippergram might have had a soldier fetish and sent my wife to the bucket for something that didn't even register at the time. I've had any number of sweet revenge schemes go through my head in the five hours since that I'm starved for action. Deep down (and for legal purposes) I know that nothing's ever gonna' come from any of them (yet) but what's a simple man to do in the face of such a shitty neighbour?
Peace...for the time being.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Sinspiration
I've been reading about psychic poison lately in science fiction. It's an interesting concept whereby a trained assassin plants a mental suggestion in the subject that breaches the victim's internal fortifications to seek out and destroy any willingness to resist a nasty end (check out Frank Herbert's "Dune Messiah" for the discussion in Chapter One). The funny thing about all of this was that I realized it had happened to me already... and it started when I was four.
Listen, Sunday School teachers once had me believing that the Holy Ghost talks through people by filling us with warmth and upliftment when we do what is right or hear what is true. I thought that this was the most amazing thing I had ever heard, having felt the warmth and upliftment on many occasions at church during hymn singing. So, if the Holy Ghost was talking through me and acting as God's intermediary then the feeling I got inside was actually God talking to me. Right on, proof that God exists, I thought...that's bitchin'. It got so that I could talk to the Holy Ghost pretty much whenever I wanted while doing different things. '
Warmth and upliftment used to fill me until tear ducts spilled the excess whenever Dad told me a good story. The Holy Ghost used to come around for a chat every time I put my hand down my pants. I told my mom about that one and she spanked me so I learned to keep those conversations to myself. But I was just a kid and didn't understand the difference between fact and metaphor...I actually thought the feeling I was getting was the Holy Ghost speaking inside of me. I actually thought that I was doing right and hearing truth all over the place.
I started having my doubts at around seven. The first time I ever saw a naked woman, I told the friend who showed me that the Holy Ghost was saying this gash was right and true by filling my dingle with warmth and upliftment. Buddy pissed himself laughing. Honest, his mom sent me home so that she could change him. And it started me wondering why my Sunday School teachers never picked me to offer an example of the Spirit speaking to me after the time I told them that God loved Theoden, King of Rohan.
Why else, I advocated, would the speech he made to the Rohirrim before charging on Peleanor Field affect me so if not for the Holy Ghost communicating God's approval? They told me I was wrong. See, without knowing it, I had already realized that any number of unholy things could make me feel the same way as the "Holy Ghost" speaking to me. I was a sinner. What a fucking nightmare for the son of a father who stood true to the faith despite constant testing and daily trials. I'd also fallen for the line that I would die and come before God whose recording angels would have offered up an account of my life entire. All of my sins would be presented to the Lord of Hosts via Betamax and all of my dead relatives would be watching. The Holy Ghost began whispering God's shame and guilt every time He caught me tucked away with Tolkien and a meat sandwich. Masturbation was actually the Devil using my idle hands despite the warmth and upliftment. It was all too much for a kid to deal with. No wonder I left the straight and narrow way to cavort on the wide road down to Hell.
That was years ago - too many to admit and I stopped believing in Hell before I started getting laid. Nowadays I sit around wondering how I could have ever fed in to that whole line of shit and think about psychic poison. I've since built my life on a foundation of understanding that people can be inspired to do pretty much anything they damn well want and make others believe it's right and true. Look at Hitler and the Heaven's Gate - see how many people have tasted poison for one man's being inspired with warmth and upliftment. I doubt that it was the Holy Ghost goading Hitler and his psyched out minions to attempted genocide and I don't think God would have wanted Marshall Applewhite and his crew of martian loving misfits in Heaven with Him anyway. And the boy I was in Sunday School would hardly recognize the man I am today for all of the psychic poison he'd been fed about voices in his belly and the warmth and upliftment brought by God.
I wish that I could meet that kid I was...really and truly. Maybe then I could get to him before he realized the lies he was being fed would hurt him bad in the long run. I could tell him that the warmth and upliftment he feels when something rings true is body chemistry and nothing to do with a Father in Heaven. I could tell him to jerk it as much as he wants and that no one will get hurt so long as he does it in private. I could tell him that being inspired by what Dad calls sins is okay and that people will appreciate him for it some day (hint hint). I'd tell him to talk to someone about the despair he experienced every time something "bad" made him feel good and that contemplating suicide was nothing an eight year old should ever have to think about.
But I probably wouldn't have believed myself, that's just the kind of kid I was. Maybe it's better that I discovered the truth behind sinspiration all by myself. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to sit here and tell you all about it. But then maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing either. Meh...I'll always have Tolkein, meat sandwiches and masturbation.
Listen, Sunday School teachers once had me believing that the Holy Ghost talks through people by filling us with warmth and upliftment when we do what is right or hear what is true. I thought that this was the most amazing thing I had ever heard, having felt the warmth and upliftment on many occasions at church during hymn singing. So, if the Holy Ghost was talking through me and acting as God's intermediary then the feeling I got inside was actually God talking to me. Right on, proof that God exists, I thought...that's bitchin'. It got so that I could talk to the Holy Ghost pretty much whenever I wanted while doing different things. '
Warmth and upliftment used to fill me until tear ducts spilled the excess whenever Dad told me a good story. The Holy Ghost used to come around for a chat every time I put my hand down my pants. I told my mom about that one and she spanked me so I learned to keep those conversations to myself. But I was just a kid and didn't understand the difference between fact and metaphor...I actually thought the feeling I was getting was the Holy Ghost speaking inside of me. I actually thought that I was doing right and hearing truth all over the place.
I started having my doubts at around seven. The first time I ever saw a naked woman, I told the friend who showed me that the Holy Ghost was saying this gash was right and true by filling my dingle with warmth and upliftment. Buddy pissed himself laughing. Honest, his mom sent me home so that she could change him. And it started me wondering why my Sunday School teachers never picked me to offer an example of the Spirit speaking to me after the time I told them that God loved Theoden, King of Rohan.
Why else, I advocated, would the speech he made to the Rohirrim before charging on Peleanor Field affect me so if not for the Holy Ghost communicating God's approval? They told me I was wrong. See, without knowing it, I had already realized that any number of unholy things could make me feel the same way as the "Holy Ghost" speaking to me. I was a sinner. What a fucking nightmare for the son of a father who stood true to the faith despite constant testing and daily trials. I'd also fallen for the line that I would die and come before God whose recording angels would have offered up an account of my life entire. All of my sins would be presented to the Lord of Hosts via Betamax and all of my dead relatives would be watching. The Holy Ghost began whispering God's shame and guilt every time He caught me tucked away with Tolkien and a meat sandwich. Masturbation was actually the Devil using my idle hands despite the warmth and upliftment. It was all too much for a kid to deal with. No wonder I left the straight and narrow way to cavort on the wide road down to Hell.
That was years ago - too many to admit and I stopped believing in Hell before I started getting laid. Nowadays I sit around wondering how I could have ever fed in to that whole line of shit and think about psychic poison. I've since built my life on a foundation of understanding that people can be inspired to do pretty much anything they damn well want and make others believe it's right and true. Look at Hitler and the Heaven's Gate - see how many people have tasted poison for one man's being inspired with warmth and upliftment. I doubt that it was the Holy Ghost goading Hitler and his psyched out minions to attempted genocide and I don't think God would have wanted Marshall Applewhite and his crew of martian loving misfits in Heaven with Him anyway. And the boy I was in Sunday School would hardly recognize the man I am today for all of the psychic poison he'd been fed about voices in his belly and the warmth and upliftment brought by God.
I wish that I could meet that kid I was...really and truly. Maybe then I could get to him before he realized the lies he was being fed would hurt him bad in the long run. I could tell him that the warmth and upliftment he feels when something rings true is body chemistry and nothing to do with a Father in Heaven. I could tell him to jerk it as much as he wants and that no one will get hurt so long as he does it in private. I could tell him that being inspired by what Dad calls sins is okay and that people will appreciate him for it some day (hint hint). I'd tell him to talk to someone about the despair he experienced every time something "bad" made him feel good and that contemplating suicide was nothing an eight year old should ever have to think about.
But I probably wouldn't have believed myself, that's just the kind of kid I was. Maybe it's better that I discovered the truth behind sinspiration all by myself. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to sit here and tell you all about it. But then maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing either. Meh...I'll always have Tolkein, meat sandwiches and masturbation.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Parents Strongly Cautioned
The only reason I took the plunge into French Immersion was for the trip to Quebec City in Grade Eight. Every year like clockwork Monsieur Arsenault would pack his students into a bus and pilot them eastward Joseph Conrad style - right into the heart of darkness. The stories from years past were the stuff of legends with plenty of deflowering by nubile Quebec girls and illicit drinking binges. Yes, for that kind of opportunity I would suffer to learn French.
I never got to go because we couldn't afford it. Instead I spent the week at my elementary Alma-matre helping Mamselle "Flat Chest" Farrell mercilessly beating her nose pickers at Zut! and other classic French class blackboard games. Reports filtered back from up the river that everyone was doing fine and enjoying the local culture - blatant propaganda as ever there was. The truth was much more sinister.
Sure, I can remember a few of them (mostly prissy girls who spent too much time holding on to Teacher's dick) coming back to civilization with airy tales of Old Quebec's cobblestoned streets and loading muskets on The Plains of Abraham. They made sure to rub that one in harder than a masochistic Thai masseuse when they saw me listening but my interest was only peripheral. See, the boys brought back something far more valuable, far more exotic than pretty spoken tales of a far-off land. The boys brought back music we'd never heard before, songs that could only be purchased in multi-cultural cities with links to vast trading partners around the world. And who knows, the music might have been decent but we were only interested in the tape case which held a notice that read: "EXPLICIT LYRICS: parents strongly cautioned."
Say what? Explicit lyrics? Whassat? Crack 'em open and let's have a listen. Oh, NWA's "Fuck the Police"...yeah that's explicit. Ice-T and Too Live Crew...pussies and drugs and me so horny...yup my parents should be cautioned about this. Hell, my mom would stroke out if she heard "Fuck Martinez" played at full volume. Where had these been all my life? Gimme more bad words and driving beats. Gimme the chance to live a little before a lifetime of religious service. Hell yeah...gimme explicit lyrics and caution my parents to stay out of my way, 'cause this boy's found his muse and it ain't got nuthin' to do glory, lauds and honour so much as surrender, slander and shame. more...More...MORE!!!
Now that I'm older and a tad wiser (no comments from the peanut gallery, please) I can safely say that I scraped through those years rather well. I never got anything pregnant, I never had any trouble with the cops (with one exception) and I did eventually beat my teen age alcoholism. I've also learned what not to do if I ever have children of my own...never let them out of my sight or else chaperon trips away from home. A little freedom goes a long way and can sometimes take a child all the way to the heart of darkness. Heck, I never even left the province and I still got into trouble...just ask Mamselle Farrell.
Tell her that her "petit chou" sent you...she'll remember.
I never got to go because we couldn't afford it. Instead I spent the week at my elementary Alma-matre helping Mamselle "Flat Chest" Farrell mercilessly beating her nose pickers at Zut! and other classic French class blackboard games. Reports filtered back from up the river that everyone was doing fine and enjoying the local culture - blatant propaganda as ever there was. The truth was much more sinister.
Sure, I can remember a few of them (mostly prissy girls who spent too much time holding on to Teacher's dick) coming back to civilization with airy tales of Old Quebec's cobblestoned streets and loading muskets on The Plains of Abraham. They made sure to rub that one in harder than a masochistic Thai masseuse when they saw me listening but my interest was only peripheral. See, the boys brought back something far more valuable, far more exotic than pretty spoken tales of a far-off land. The boys brought back music we'd never heard before, songs that could only be purchased in multi-cultural cities with links to vast trading partners around the world. And who knows, the music might have been decent but we were only interested in the tape case which held a notice that read: "EXPLICIT LYRICS: parents strongly cautioned."
Say what? Explicit lyrics? Whassat? Crack 'em open and let's have a listen. Oh, NWA's "Fuck the Police"...yeah that's explicit. Ice-T and Too Live Crew...pussies and drugs and me so horny...yup my parents should be cautioned about this. Hell, my mom would stroke out if she heard "Fuck Martinez" played at full volume. Where had these been all my life? Gimme more bad words and driving beats. Gimme the chance to live a little before a lifetime of religious service. Hell yeah...gimme explicit lyrics and caution my parents to stay out of my way, 'cause this boy's found his muse and it ain't got nuthin' to do glory, lauds and honour so much as surrender, slander and shame. more...More...MORE!!!
Now that I'm older and a tad wiser (no comments from the peanut gallery, please) I can safely say that I scraped through those years rather well. I never got anything pregnant, I never had any trouble with the cops (with one exception) and I did eventually beat my teen age alcoholism. I've also learned what not to do if I ever have children of my own...never let them out of my sight or else chaperon trips away from home. A little freedom goes a long way and can sometimes take a child all the way to the heart of darkness. Heck, I never even left the province and I still got into trouble...just ask Mamselle Farrell.
Tell her that her "petit chou" sent you...she'll remember.
The Khan of Khans
Good Arghun, tarry yet awhile.
I’ve plucked you from the rank and file
To take a place in history.
(Your songs of battle make me smile.)
The council’s done, our course is set,
That now, good Arghun, hearken yet,
It’s time to carve my legacy
In flesh with bloody ecstasy.
Before the west was pacified
I fought against a mighty tide
Of faithless fools and jealousy
That forced my hand to fratricide.
And since those days of living rough,
I’ve taken pains to take enough.
My sole regret was having none
To sing the work my blade had done.
When acts of vengeance made my name,
The seed for all my present fame,
I wanted men to bear its fruit
So flew my flag and many came.
They, daily, dwell in muck and mud
And sing my skill for shedding blood.
I’ve bled them too, they love me still,
By right their mouths are mine to fill.
Ambitions make me more than man.
I loot and burn because I can.
No mortared stone or timber wall
Has yet protected foes who ran.
Gone soft in shelter, safe and warm,
They shake before the coming storm
And soon the world will call me Lord
Or fall beneath my motley horde.
The afterglow of rout is sweet
As honeyed wine. Each tribe we greet
With steel is offered certain death
Or pledge my flag with no deceit.
With deep salaams and prayers of thanks
Mohammedans have swelled our ranks.
Betrayals meet with swift dispatch,
A smartly severed head to catch.
As nature bids me stand erect
The captured women genuflect
For all my earthly gifts are great.
They bare themselves to show respect.
But needs demand our next contempt
Of humankind for so I’ve dreamt.
We’ll turn towards the rising day
And boldly conquer gold Cathay.
I see the doubt behind your eyes
But fear no more, your Khan is wise,
We strike because the time is ripe.
Let yellow scholars criticize
We fighting men enduring pain
While non-combatants cast disdain.
But take some consolation thus:
Their livelihoods depend on us.
So long as men are ruled by kings
They’ll bend to breed distasteful things
Pretending everything is fine
And knowing why the caged bird sings.
My acts will likely touch a nerve.
It’s better far to rule than serve
Unless the folk you’re shitting on
Have sense enough to see the con.
I’ve plucked you from the rank and file
To take a place in history.
(Your songs of battle make me smile.)
The council’s done, our course is set,
That now, good Arghun, hearken yet,
It’s time to carve my legacy
In flesh with bloody ecstasy.
Before the west was pacified
I fought against a mighty tide
Of faithless fools and jealousy
That forced my hand to fratricide.
And since those days of living rough,
I’ve taken pains to take enough.
My sole regret was having none
To sing the work my blade had done.
When acts of vengeance made my name,
The seed for all my present fame,
I wanted men to bear its fruit
So flew my flag and many came.
They, daily, dwell in muck and mud
And sing my skill for shedding blood.
I’ve bled them too, they love me still,
By right their mouths are mine to fill.
Ambitions make me more than man.
I loot and burn because I can.
No mortared stone or timber wall
Has yet protected foes who ran.
Gone soft in shelter, safe and warm,
They shake before the coming storm
And soon the world will call me Lord
Or fall beneath my motley horde.
The afterglow of rout is sweet
As honeyed wine. Each tribe we greet
With steel is offered certain death
Or pledge my flag with no deceit.
With deep salaams and prayers of thanks
Mohammedans have swelled our ranks.
Betrayals meet with swift dispatch,
A smartly severed head to catch.
As nature bids me stand erect
The captured women genuflect
For all my earthly gifts are great.
They bare themselves to show respect.
But needs demand our next contempt
Of humankind for so I’ve dreamt.
We’ll turn towards the rising day
And boldly conquer gold Cathay.
I see the doubt behind your eyes
But fear no more, your Khan is wise,
We strike because the time is ripe.
Let yellow scholars criticize
We fighting men enduring pain
While non-combatants cast disdain.
But take some consolation thus:
Their livelihoods depend on us.
So long as men are ruled by kings
They’ll bend to breed distasteful things
Pretending everything is fine
And knowing why the caged bird sings.
My acts will likely touch a nerve.
It’s better far to rule than serve
Unless the folk you’re shitting on
Have sense enough to see the con.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
"Gloria"
The title's in quotes to let you know that "Gloria" is a song title and does not name anyone from my past (although in this case I really wish I could name names). And to be clear, I'll be referring to Laura Branigan version as it's the only one I ever heard. In fact, if you don't know it then you might want to take a moment to find it and take a listen. You can hear it free online (via google) or if you've got a copy of "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories" it plays on FLASH FM regularly - just don't start mowing down hookers willy-nilly while you do. I'll wait...
Good...not a bad song eh? It was recorded in 1982 so I would have been seven years old but I didn't hear it for the first time until I was ten. See, Mom had traded me and my brother to a fat guy in Eganville in exchange for a week of peace and quiet. Ostensibly, we were there to keep his three young niece's company but I think back and remember some strain around Dad's eyes and maybe there was some deeper current moving underneath. Regardless, the fat guy managed an holistic retreat in the wilds around Eganville and the girls were going stir crazy so he came with his brother-in-law to pick us up and take us in to meet them.
There were three of them...I don't remember their names but the oldest and youngest were sisters and the middle one was a cousin. I don't think they thought too much of us at first. My brother and I were devout Mormon boys and these girls were straight out of Babylon - we had no idea what to expect from each other. Anyway...we were left completely unsupervised for long periods of time in the main lodge with a big screen satellite TV and stereo system. The girls had a tape of 80's hits and "Gloria" was the first track on the A side. I'll tell you that what happened next changed my life forever.
See, they wanted to dance for us and said so with many giggles and sideways glances. (Apparently, this is something that girls do when they're together and feeling wicked...they dance.) They kept asking us if we liked dancing and if we'd ever seen girls dance for just us. For shit's sake, these were the first girls we had ever met outside of school and the prim confines of Church besides our sisters...we were ten and nine. I was totally in the fucking dark. But when I tried to ask my brother if it was OK he didn't even look at me...he kept his eyes on the oldest and nodded - completely stunned.
So they put the tape in and "Gloria" starts pouring out the speakers. Immediately the girls start light stomping to the beat and moving their hips. They must have danced to this song together before because they had a routine down. In fact, if you google videos for this song you'll find a Much More Music's Retro Video Dance party version of the song. Look it up and watch the lovely Miss Laura Branigan dance...that's what the girls were doing. They lip synced the song as well...at least the oldest did and whenever she sang along to the "and you really don't remember...was it something that he said...or the voices in your head calling Gloria" lines she'd do a little shirt lift and rub at her hair which (for some unknown reason) had me feeling pretty fine in my pants. Of course the supposedly stoic Mormon boys pretended not to like it but I, at least, refused to get up off the couch for a while after they had stopped. And when I finally managed (at the insistence of the oldest) it was only to accompany her out to the spring house for some exploring (wink wink, nudge nudge, how's your father).
I write this not as a brag but as a plea for help. See, I've always wondered what happened to those girls from that summer 25 years ago and I'm sort of ashamed that I can't remember their names. There's a hope burning in me somewhere near my pants that one of them will read this some day and remember the boys they met that week at Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty-Anne's place. Maybe then I could apologize to the middle one for going out to the spring house with her cousin and tell her that the quiet game of trivial pursuit we played under the pool table remains one of the strongest sense impressions of my life. Maybe all I'll ever have to remember of them is "Gloria."
But I hope not.
Good...not a bad song eh? It was recorded in 1982 so I would have been seven years old but I didn't hear it for the first time until I was ten. See, Mom had traded me and my brother to a fat guy in Eganville in exchange for a week of peace and quiet. Ostensibly, we were there to keep his three young niece's company but I think back and remember some strain around Dad's eyes and maybe there was some deeper current moving underneath. Regardless, the fat guy managed an holistic retreat in the wilds around Eganville and the girls were going stir crazy so he came with his brother-in-law to pick us up and take us in to meet them.
There were three of them...I don't remember their names but the oldest and youngest were sisters and the middle one was a cousin. I don't think they thought too much of us at first. My brother and I were devout Mormon boys and these girls were straight out of Babylon - we had no idea what to expect from each other. Anyway...we were left completely unsupervised for long periods of time in the main lodge with a big screen satellite TV and stereo system. The girls had a tape of 80's hits and "Gloria" was the first track on the A side. I'll tell you that what happened next changed my life forever.
See, they wanted to dance for us and said so with many giggles and sideways glances. (Apparently, this is something that girls do when they're together and feeling wicked...they dance.) They kept asking us if we liked dancing and if we'd ever seen girls dance for just us. For shit's sake, these were the first girls we had ever met outside of school and the prim confines of Church besides our sisters...we were ten and nine. I was totally in the fucking dark. But when I tried to ask my brother if it was OK he didn't even look at me...he kept his eyes on the oldest and nodded - completely stunned.
So they put the tape in and "Gloria" starts pouring out the speakers. Immediately the girls start light stomping to the beat and moving their hips. They must have danced to this song together before because they had a routine down. In fact, if you google videos for this song you'll find a Much More Music's Retro Video Dance party version of the song. Look it up and watch the lovely Miss Laura Branigan dance...that's what the girls were doing. They lip synced the song as well...at least the oldest did and whenever she sang along to the "and you really don't remember...was it something that he said...or the voices in your head calling Gloria" lines she'd do a little shirt lift and rub at her hair which (for some unknown reason) had me feeling pretty fine in my pants. Of course the supposedly stoic Mormon boys pretended not to like it but I, at least, refused to get up off the couch for a while after they had stopped. And when I finally managed (at the insistence of the oldest) it was only to accompany her out to the spring house for some exploring (wink wink, nudge nudge, how's your father).
I write this not as a brag but as a plea for help. See, I've always wondered what happened to those girls from that summer 25 years ago and I'm sort of ashamed that I can't remember their names. There's a hope burning in me somewhere near my pants that one of them will read this some day and remember the boys they met that week at Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty-Anne's place. Maybe then I could apologize to the middle one for going out to the spring house with her cousin and tell her that the quiet game of trivial pursuit we played under the pool table remains one of the strongest sense impressions of my life. Maybe all I'll ever have to remember of them is "Gloria."
But I hope not.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Dungeon Master
He was the fat kid whose clothes never fit and whose skin never tanned. He had long greasy hair and a bumper crop of acne in the furrows on his forehead. No one but his younger brother would sit next to him on the school bus and a year of that was enough. There was one girl - a pretty little gamine with green eyes - who thought he was mute until the first day he was left to sit alone. But by then his backpack had become so stuffed with rule books, notes and miscellaneous magic that he needed the seat next to him. She asked what was in the bag and he told her in a way that had her bemused from Pet to the Broke and then asked why he wouldn't look at her. He said that mortals were forbidden to look upon perfection and she turned her countenance away - typical goddess behaviour.
There were always two or three guys to meet him when he got to school - sometimes as many as six. Times had been they'd be waiting to prey on him sure as wolves shit sheep only now he was their king and the keeper of secrets. He was their Dungeon Master. This fat loser would mediate disputes, settle accounts, offer advice gleaned from too much science fiction and too much time alone, basking in their attention where before he was shunned. Their tributes had filled his pack to bursting and they all carried a complete set of dice in either draw string leatherette bags or carved wooden boxes. They were ten in all with names like Merit Goodgrass, Slim Picker, Dirk Blackmoor and Siriadin Urktenuct and they saved his life with their adoration so he served as their God.
He worked harder at creating their afternoon adventures than at most of his subjects and would never advance past 11th grade math but he could add sums in his head as fast as he could roll the bones. There were hand drawn maps and painted figurines that earned him praise from his group and the art teacher. Adventure stories that earned him a trip to the Principal's office made for grim fun behind the Island of Pines by lunchtime. Weekends would see them all gathered at an ambivalent parent's house, huddled in the basement with pizza and soft drinks while they overthrew dragon ruled empires and spelunked into dank monster lousy dungeons. Buckets of blood and barrels of booty awaited the boys brave enough to endure the Dungeon Master's Company...
Until they discovered women and booze mixed together in a more compelling manner. And that was the end of the grand adventure. The Dungeon Master crawled into a bottle for lack of anything better to do. The Unwritten Laws of Primitive Teenage Society contained articles on fallen idols and lost glory. It didn't matter if you were jock or a nerd, a bad ass or a boy scout; the fall from grace is complete and absolute. You're lucky if you don't get beat up every day and ranked out by teachers. The best you can hope for is a quiet corner to eat lunch in and a nod in the hallway.
This was me.
And now they want me back. Not those same guys from school, no, they've all grown up and got jobs or kids - sometimes a bit of both. No, this is a new group still shifting and sliding to find their fit in the foundations of a new Company. They're single or still engaged with no kids but furry quadrupeds and one of them is a woman - an actual woman with breasts and everything. Yes, I wouldn't mind introducing them to Razkale Blackgob and Porcine Thunder or the Fey Knights of Thinwhistle Moore but I have also developed some self-respect over the years. My clothes fit better and I wash my hair daily, most of the acne's gone. I've brought women to bed and been taken...the game's gotten better. All that I have to do is forget all I've learned in the years since high school and I could be a Dungeon Master again.
We'll see...
There were always two or three guys to meet him when he got to school - sometimes as many as six. Times had been they'd be waiting to prey on him sure as wolves shit sheep only now he was their king and the keeper of secrets. He was their Dungeon Master. This fat loser would mediate disputes, settle accounts, offer advice gleaned from too much science fiction and too much time alone, basking in their attention where before he was shunned. Their tributes had filled his pack to bursting and they all carried a complete set of dice in either draw string leatherette bags or carved wooden boxes. They were ten in all with names like Merit Goodgrass, Slim Picker, Dirk Blackmoor and Siriadin Urktenuct and they saved his life with their adoration so he served as their God.
He worked harder at creating their afternoon adventures than at most of his subjects and would never advance past 11th grade math but he could add sums in his head as fast as he could roll the bones. There were hand drawn maps and painted figurines that earned him praise from his group and the art teacher. Adventure stories that earned him a trip to the Principal's office made for grim fun behind the Island of Pines by lunchtime. Weekends would see them all gathered at an ambivalent parent's house, huddled in the basement with pizza and soft drinks while they overthrew dragon ruled empires and spelunked into dank monster lousy dungeons. Buckets of blood and barrels of booty awaited the boys brave enough to endure the Dungeon Master's Company...
Until they discovered women and booze mixed together in a more compelling manner. And that was the end of the grand adventure. The Dungeon Master crawled into a bottle for lack of anything better to do. The Unwritten Laws of Primitive Teenage Society contained articles on fallen idols and lost glory. It didn't matter if you were jock or a nerd, a bad ass or a boy scout; the fall from grace is complete and absolute. You're lucky if you don't get beat up every day and ranked out by teachers. The best you can hope for is a quiet corner to eat lunch in and a nod in the hallway.
This was me.
And now they want me back. Not those same guys from school, no, they've all grown up and got jobs or kids - sometimes a bit of both. No, this is a new group still shifting and sliding to find their fit in the foundations of a new Company. They're single or still engaged with no kids but furry quadrupeds and one of them is a woman - an actual woman with breasts and everything. Yes, I wouldn't mind introducing them to Razkale Blackgob and Porcine Thunder or the Fey Knights of Thinwhistle Moore but I have also developed some self-respect over the years. My clothes fit better and I wash my hair daily, most of the acne's gone. I've brought women to bed and been taken...the game's gotten better. All that I have to do is forget all I've learned in the years since high school and I could be a Dungeon Master again.
We'll see...
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Where There's Smoke...
There's a picture of me playing with fire when I was a year old. I know because it was taken at my first birthday party - the single candle told me so. In it I'm in a high chair, wide eyed and fascinated with a single pointing pink digit straining to touch the flame lit to celebrate successful completion of my first year of life. I say straining because the picture also shows a piece of my father holding me from being burned by a taut handful of my overalls. Whenever it's shown to my immediate family the inevitable "I told you so" looks and "We should have knowns" get passed around like joints at a Hip concert- freely and without consideration of offending. Or so I'm told after the fact. I'm always too captured by the glimpse back at true and perfect open wonder to notice.
So, I can be completely confident in my assertion that I have always been fascinated by fire. I can remember the first book of matches I found under the slide in the park behind the house before my sister was born and being caught with burned fingertips. Then there was a Sunday School class about Samson tying several pairs of foxes to a torch each and sending them pell mell through Philistine cornfields - I had a taste of what heaven's savour is rumored to be like that morning. (In fact, your Bible's chock full of bonerific burning imagery and it's a wonder that there aren't more devout Christian firebugs.) No sooner were we home from Church that day then I was out the back gate with a pilfered bic to spend the afternoon raining brimstone on sinning ants. Again, I was betrayed by burnt fingers and the blue plastic lighter was confiscated. Keeping fire away from me only fuelled my desire for more and I learned from my mistakes.
Lighting fires became a secret thing to be shared only with close confidences who would be in as much trouble as me if caught - mostly my brother. It was his idea to keep the fires small and us out of trouble and I complied in his presence. But I would argue that only containment was key to not being discovered and one day he relented. We filled a garbage can full of birch bark, set a match to it and didn't account for the wind. The rest of that day stays locked away in a sealed juvenile record. Two years later we were both in cubscouts where the same man who held me back from my first birthday candle and tanned my ass after court initiated me into the Art of the One-Match Fire. Soon I was performing in front of crowds and providing a service at the same time - like masturbating for a sterile posterity or nose picking to feed the homeless.
See, I've got a fire to look forward to. It's been raining for the past two days which means that there can be one out at the cottage this weekend. I can lay it, light it, feed it and kill it at my leisure - for my pleasure. I'll play the dutiful scout and be safe about it but the wide eyed, apple cheeked one-year old in me is always reaching for more. Only now there's no one to hold me back by my overalls and I'll be drinking enough to maybe let myself loose as well. Maybe I'll smoke a joint too many and imagine that fires get the munchies too. Let's just hope that I don't feed it the world.
So, I can be completely confident in my assertion that I have always been fascinated by fire. I can remember the first book of matches I found under the slide in the park behind the house before my sister was born and being caught with burned fingertips. Then there was a Sunday School class about Samson tying several pairs of foxes to a torch each and sending them pell mell through Philistine cornfields - I had a taste of what heaven's savour is rumored to be like that morning. (In fact, your Bible's chock full of bonerific burning imagery and it's a wonder that there aren't more devout Christian firebugs.) No sooner were we home from Church that day then I was out the back gate with a pilfered bic to spend the afternoon raining brimstone on sinning ants. Again, I was betrayed by burnt fingers and the blue plastic lighter was confiscated. Keeping fire away from me only fuelled my desire for more and I learned from my mistakes.
Lighting fires became a secret thing to be shared only with close confidences who would be in as much trouble as me if caught - mostly my brother. It was his idea to keep the fires small and us out of trouble and I complied in his presence. But I would argue that only containment was key to not being discovered and one day he relented. We filled a garbage can full of birch bark, set a match to it and didn't account for the wind. The rest of that day stays locked away in a sealed juvenile record. Two years later we were both in cubscouts where the same man who held me back from my first birthday candle and tanned my ass after court initiated me into the Art of the One-Match Fire. Soon I was performing in front of crowds and providing a service at the same time - like masturbating for a sterile posterity or nose picking to feed the homeless.
See, I've got a fire to look forward to. It's been raining for the past two days which means that there can be one out at the cottage this weekend. I can lay it, light it, feed it and kill it at my leisure - for my pleasure. I'll play the dutiful scout and be safe about it but the wide eyed, apple cheeked one-year old in me is always reaching for more. Only now there's no one to hold me back by my overalls and I'll be drinking enough to maybe let myself loose as well. Maybe I'll smoke a joint too many and imagine that fires get the munchies too. Let's just hope that I don't feed it the world.
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