My So Called Off Line Life: In Search Of The Canadian Dream

If you take a leisurely stroll through Bloor West Village during a weekday afternoon, it’s difficult not to take stock of all the people who are just plain out of it. Talking to themselves in a manner that is not endemic to natural ‘talking-to-yourself’ behaviour. I’m talking ’bout crazy folk. I mean, we all talk to ourselves, mutter a ‘Fuck, that’s hot!’ when accidentally touching the stove, or an ‘Oh yeah, gotta deposit the rent cheque’ when it’s overdue. But it seems to me that one in five people in Toronto are incapable of maintaining an inner monologue; they’re mumbling an entire scene from the drama of their insignificant lives for all to hear.

Where do they all come from and where do they all belong? All these people talking to themselves with hang dog jowls and arms slack by their side, shuffling down Bloor St.? Have they found what they’re looking for? Are they deeper into the dream than the guys on Bay St? These are the things that bounce around my bucket when I’m sitting on my toilet, dropping anchor, a cigarette between my fingers. Waste going out, flavour country going in. Where is the Canadian Dream? Our neck’s permanently crooked downwards into phone screens and fingers busy texting. Is the Dream slumbering inside of a device? Most of us are okay with distraction--that’s what we are, a nation of distracted dumb fucks lost in an electronic haze. All I see is people killing time. Just existing until the expiry date rolls around.

Sometimes I think the Canadian Dream, and by proxy happiness, can only be found on an isolated Samoan island. Live isolated in the jungle long enough and the skies open up and the sun beams shine through--no shucksters on the street corner selling a fix, no robberies, no junkie babies, no garbage trucks, no five year plans, no resumes, no taxes--just a tropical life. Yes, it may be hard at times catching food, it may be hard to sleep at night with no AC unit dripping out the window, it may even be scary hearing all those unidentifiable jungle noises at night, but fuck man, doesn’t it feel right? Doesn’t it feel natural? Isn’t this what humans are supposed to do?

There was a documentary about Greece the other day and the host of the film happened upon this old hunched over lady who lives in this ancient bucolic hilltop village. She lives alone for most of the year with the odd visit from her son. For food she forages for wild asparagus; boils it and squeezes a lemon on top and--viola--dinner! God only knows how much her piss smells. But when prodded about her isolation, her loneliness, she replied in a convincing manner that, in fact, she was quite happy. And you could tell by the look on her face that she meant it. She was happy. No internet, no job, no fancy new age electronic gadgets like iPhones or Teleputer’s, just the morning sunrise and the birds, and vomit inducing asparagus pee. She’s got a clutter free mind, that’s where a lot of the contentment comes from, I imagine. There isn’t the ruthless competition of living in close quarters in a metropolis and all the attendant social pressures that go along with it.

Here I am, a world and half away from Greece, sitting at my computer endlessly consuming information. I am a product of the zeitgeist and thus I am an admitted info whore just like most of you by way of reading this. One day I’ll be hauled away to some Arizona Infohab to detox from my digital crack pipe. Paging Dr. Drew.

Have you ever been in a YouTube hole? When you sit at your computer for hours on end watching clips (I‘m unemployed, okay). You can take electronic leaps from Liam Gallagher’s Funniest Interview Moments, to a Cute Kitten Unwittingly Running Into a Strip of Stretch Wrap, to Nardwuar interviews, to Mafia documentaries, to infinity and beyond. YouTube is so prescient in its time draining cruelty. Aside from any number of completely unrelated clips--and now for something completely different--after you watch a clip, YouTube then displays all these other inter-related clips, juicy morsels that are very similar to the one you’ve just viewed, and chances are you need to see it if you needed to see the clip you just watched. Off to the races! The possibilities stretch on forever like a YouTube fractal. Before you know it, you’ve sat through every Oliver Reed interview and every Russian Street Fight KO Compilation, and all the 9/11 and Tsunami footage. It takes all the willpower you can muster up to pull yourself out of the hole and say, “Enough! This is the last clip, and then it’s back to the real world, my offline life, whatever‘s left of it!” What a pathetic generation we are. A bunch of YouTube babies. You must stop reading this immediately, it’s a beautiful day outside and you need the Vitamin D.

Humans are masters of adjustment and self-righteousness. Remember, it was only around ‘87 when smoking was banned on airplanes. For decades smoking on planes was a mild annoyance to the non-smokers (granted there weren’t many non-smokers at the time). Locked in a vessel with no escape at 20,000 feet breathing in all this horrible tobacco smoke. What did you do? You fucking sucked it up like a man, both literally and figuratively. But now, forget smoking inside tight quarters, even outside non smokers get their panties all knotted up. How quickly we are to adjust and feed the fire of our self-righteous indignation.

In the near future I’m betting the U.S. will be the first country to ban smoking in Mexico (under threat of military action) because of the cumulative effect of all those Mexicans’ second hand smoke wafting north across the border. American tobacco companies will put up a big fuss, but the overwhelming sense of entitlement and health of U.S. citizens will be too much. There will be massive protests in California, Arizona, and Texas. Angry citizens clamouring and rioting, smashing storefronts and fighting with police (though they won’t put up much of a fight because of their decreased lung capacities). Even health conscious celebrities affected by the second hand smoke in Los Angeles will film PSA’s, sitting on a reversed chair, telling Mexico’s population that “Butts are for sitting.”

Mexico decides to ban traditional bowling balls because of the Kyoto II: No Tobacco For Mexico Protocol whereby Mexico‘s emissions and waste need to be cut down under threat from the U.S.A., so the Mexican gov‘t resolved, in addition to outlawing tobacco, to illegalize the manufacturing of the plastics and polyurethane directly involved with the bowling ball industry. To counteract the impending bowling ball shortage a few industrious and outside-the-box-thinking gov’t officials propose to use severed heads of the victims of the narco wars. At first, the Mexican population is aghast at such a macabre solution, but eventually give in because, after all, skulls aren’t much use rotting in the ground. Might as well bowl with them. Each ball’s formation utilizes two and a half human skulls and is fashioned into a beautifully round and smooth shape by plaster and reticulated drywall tape. These two and a half skull bowling balls obviously don’t last as long as the P & P type traditional balls, but the skulls were coming in from the morgue and then out to the manufacturing plant to the bowling halls at an almost renewable resource like rate, or so all the bowling hall owners joked, so constant replacement due to dents and nicks that would cause the ball to roll untrue was not really a problem.

Where did our attention span go?
Have you ever wondered just who in the hell all those people are on TMZ? All of those kids in the war room? Me too (again, I’m unemployed). Like an investigative journalist I scoured the internet for information on them for reasons I’m not entirely sure of. Maybe I just wanted to verify that they are, indeed, real people. I have some kind of binge relationship with TMZ. I will go for weeks without watching it and then all of a sudden, I‘ll watch it everyday for a week. It’s the apotheosis of our modern North American entertainment State, the most vapid form of entertainment TV I’ve ever tuned into--and I mean that in a good way, I suppose. I just get lost in every little stupid encounter, every little man-on-the-street interview and the accompanying goofing on the clip by the peanut gallery. Even while I’m watching the show I keep asking myself, ‘why are you watching this trash?’ The mild tingling of excitement at the start of the program is wholly nullified at the end of the thirty minutes by the shame of time wasted. I should be chasing the Dream! I can’t help but thinking that the very next story will be just right, a sexy B level celebrity in the middle of a coke and booze bender. My last wish on Planet Earth before I die is to order up a round of beers and sit down with the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson and watch an episode of TMZ.

“Goddamnit, man! What is this swine?” Hunter says, turning to me with tinted shades, rolling his cigarette holder in his teeth, unable to keep still. “They videotape people doing nothing?”

“Yeah, this is what we watch on TV now, Hunter. It’s kind of like a reality version of Seinfeld but with celebrities,” I explain to him.

“These people should be force fed scrambled napalm eggs. Get my hog! I’m getting the hell out of here!”

Shit, if it was up to me, I’d replace the entire cast of these TMZ hooligans with the likes of Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Manson, Osama Bin Laden, Mel Gibson, Lydia Lunch, John Gotti, Shane Macgowan, and with me hosting, of course, sucking on that silly sippy cup and scribbling out illegible notes with an erasable marker on a fancy transparent board. Now that’s a show! I know some of them are dead but it’s a fantasy so just suspend your disbelief. Maybe I’d get Mel to host when I’m on vacation…

“OKAY--LISTEN UP YOU SCUM FUCKING JEWS. BECAUSE MOST OF YOU ARE, DON’T DENY IT. I CAN SEE IT ALL OVER YOUR FACES. GODDAMN JEW FACES! LIKE 75% OF YOU! AT LEAST!

“NOW LISTEN UP…I DON’T WANT TO SEE ANY CLIPS OF CELEBRITIES COMING OUT OF RESTAURANTS OR CLUBS, I DON’T WANNA HEAR YOUR DUMB FUCKING SOFTBALL QUESTIONS. I WANT YOU CAMERA GUYS, THE FOOT SOLDIERS…” He points around the room and then, dramatically right into the camera as it zooms in close… “I WANT YOU TO GET THE ZIONIST LAWYERS AND HOLLYWOOD EXECUTIVES AND MY EX OKSANA ON FILM AND GET THEM TO ADMIT ONCE AND FOR ALL THAT--his veins practically bursting out of his forehead, “THEY CAN TAKE MY LIFE, BUT THEY CAN’T TAKE MY FREEDOM!”

The largest component to the Dream is a j-o-b. No doot a boot it. That’s what defines the parameters of the Dream itself and, currently, there aren’t too many prospects for this dirty pig in hog town. The Dream is an amoeba like organism constantly morphing and reconstituting itself into indefinable yet ever changing shapes. I checked one ad in the back of Now magazine and it said, “Now accepting applicants for Cock #24 for the adult film, 30 Rock (Hard Cocks). Call 416-819-****.” If it was Cock #3 or #4, well then, maybe, but not #24. So here I sit typing away with overdue bills to pay, trying to figure it all out.

It’s rumoured that the Nike co-founder, Dan Wieden, modelled the phrase, “Just Do It” after Gary Gilmore’s last words, right before he was executed, which were, “Let’s Do It”. A monosyllabic tweak and--presto!--advertising gold. Those shoes on your feet are made by slave children, and the phrase associated with the impulse you had to buy the shoes in the first place comes from a man who was executed for killing two people: a gas station employee and a motel manager, of all people. Well, there is a cock-shitting fuck load of time to do nothing and sit and think in a Texas prison, so at least two thirds of a golden ad slogan can easily bubble up to the surface in the mind of an inmate. Now let’s see you skip on down the street.

There is an underground terrorist group, maybe you’ve heard of it, but probably not, since not many have, and I may have just made it up. The leader is a broad shouldered man-woman with facial electrolysis, water balloon titties filled with milk (it’s a fetish thing), a bad blond wig parted in the middle, and big veiny man hands that can palm a basketball. She eats nothing but sandwiches which she has dubbed, ’LGBLT’S’ (Leeks, Guacamole, Bacon, Lettuce, Tomatoes). They are gearing up to wage war on straight North Americans. With Bombs. Smoke bombs. In places like subway trains, Bay St. elevators, and select Tim Horton’s. This leader of the cell, who shall remain nameless, she always and without fail leaves her self-published manifesto which rants on and on about the vacuity and banality of straight culture on the floor in the middle of all the confusion right before she makes a hasty retreat.

President Obama has voiced his opinion in support of gay marriage and hey, it’s the right one, no matter what recondite political strategy it comes from, but why not nationalize gay marriage, strong arm it into the constitution (last time I checked, Nezbit, that right was ALREADY THERE, DUMBASS), you do, after all, have the power. And if that’s what you truly believe, then be a real man and do what is right, what you feel in your heart of hearts, listen to the throbbing cockles of your heart, play your heart strings, in fact, strum them like a mandolin and play God Bless America.

My first visual sighting of an actual player in action, two people getting hot and heavy, was a biracial affair involving a rakish guy who had neatly cropped facial hair and hailed from Trinidad & Tobago and a busty brunette white girl. He just laid pipe--I’m assuming--into tons of chicks. I was, after all, only twelve, with slim to no knowledge of actual carnal relations with females. He was one of those guys who just lives to get some pussy; the kind of guy who has like four ho’s on the go at any one time and juggles them around without any one of the ho‘s finding out about the other three ho‘s. He was my babysitter’s older brother, Mika, aged eighteen.

For the past two years my parents employed a neighbourhood boy, Mika’s brother in fact, who lived six houses down, to baby sit me in the summer months at the economic-collapse-proof-rate of twenty dollars tax free cash per day. Someone had to watch me while my parents were working and school was out, and that someone was Marty. Our neighbourhood culture was one of warmth and plenty of communal interaction between kids and parents alike regardless of race and religious persuasion. There were summer barbeques and baseball games on the street. Our street was a cul de sac that formed a unique type of ball park, like a 2D beaker laid down flat. Legitimate jog-around-the-bases homerun’s constituted hitting the tennis ball onto one of the adjacent house’s roof’s. A homerun was considered an upper-decker if it plopped onto the top roof and just a regular, non-flashy homerun if it hit the lower roof. Our urban street ball had other unique aspects too: Incorporated into the game were all manner of obstacles that a fielder must be prepared for…bounces off cars, garages, curbs, just to name a few. If the tennis ball went under a car the runner was practically guaranteed an extra base and a half as the hapless outfielder was splayed on the street searching for the elusive ball.

Marty is from Trinidad & Tobago (what were my parents thinking, I know!), as is the rest of his family for that matter. He’s a sixteen year old kid with a good responsible head on his shoulders living with the aforementioned lady killer, Mika, with his two parents, who, whenever I visited were extremely quiet and reserved, especially the mother, but very polite nonetheless. Their house was alien to a white kid like myself. It was always so quiet which made any silences and natural body adjustments magnified and more uncomfortable. The first thing that almost illegally assaulted my olfactory senses upon entering Marty’s house was the thick stench of curry. I didn’t really like or dislike curry at eleven, though there was some apprehension to deeply inhale. It was more a massive whiff of whoa, that’s a little different, I wonder what Marty smells when he walks in to my house? Nothing? Because my house smells like nothing when I walk in.

Marty and I both looked forward to the summer months because he wasn’t so much a babysitter as a friend who cooked KD for lunch and played ball with all the kids and came down into my basement when my friends and I were building forts out of cushions out of both rectangular and right angle type cushions and pretend to be a monster and attack us. I mean, it’s almost scary to think back to how much fun and excitement fort cushions was. Why couldn’t I be eleven forever? And then the next day it would be baseball.

About twice a week we’d play inter-neighbourhood games at a local school’s ballpark that was closer to our opponents neck of the woods but generally conceded two summer‘s ago that it was the best ballpark in the general area, so we braved the longer trek. There were only two teams in our league. Outside of our own intra-neighbourhood games, more like pseudo-competitive practice for the inter-neighbourhood games, we only competed against one other neighbourhood team: The Indians (not Cleveland). These were the big games, the games where I felt a little anxious knot in my prepubescent stomach if I stepped up to the plate late in a tie game. Knowing what to do and waiting, waiting, waiting all this time for Marty to lob a floater into my wheelhouse so I can just plaster the baseball into outer space, so high and long that maybe the ball will be sucked into the gravitational pull of an asteroid belt and will revolve around Earth for a thousand years, and then it will touch down in some godforsaken place like Namibia. All I have to do is execute, like Gary Gilmore. Swing my pre-man body around with my favourite Easton aluminum bat and crank that ball into the stars.

Todays game: The White Kids With The One Illegally Older West Indian Guy vs. The East Indians.

My side of town against yours. The Indians lost almost every time but us White kids didn’t rub it in too much because of the illegal W.I. guy who was on our team hitting gargantuan homers every time he stepped up to bat like Frank Thomas playing on a triple AAA team. Sometimes he would crank it so far the hard ball ran out of grass and rolled onto the school’s paved recess play area, and if it was hit just right, it could scoot all the way down a narrow walkway about three feet wide and keep rolling into the front recess area which is, like, farther than any of Big Papi’s dingers. The Indians conceded Marty’s presence to the whole game because he was my babysitter and because he was the pitcher for both teams. There was just no escaping his participation. He organized and coordinated all the games and kept track of both teams’ batting averages.

Being a lefty, I would typically, if I made solid contact, smack it into right field (but I could go both ways wink wink), and that was conveniently where the Indians stuck Jindy (who I called Jindy 500 mainly because he was hitting about .500 [.497 to be exact]). Most of the Indians didn’t have turbans, but Jindy did; one of those starter turbans for prepubescent boys that is a tennis ball sized bubble of hair neatly wrapped in a colourful fabric placed directly on top of the head. Turb Bubbles is what some of the kids called them. But that’s not why I intentionally hit the ball to his portion of the outfield--it was because he was an immensely fat kid on little legs. His nubby weiner dog legs couldn’t chase down any substantial hit into the gap within a reasonable amount of time, so a triple was always in play, even though it would typically be a single or at best a risky play for a double. Jindy had a decent arm, too. He’d launch the ball from deep right field all the way to the plate with one bounce, right into the catcher’s mitt. But like I said, all this was pretty much negated by his foot speed. The point is if you’re white you have unfair advantages in this world.

And then one day I woke up shortly after Marty arrived, which was S.O.P., and walked downstairs bleary eyed yet excited at the prospect of another day swimming, or playing ball, or doing whateve’s, sizzling in the summer sun. It’s all good baby baahby. Marty was watching t.v. and I grunted ‘hi’, or ‘hey’, or some other kind of salutary grunt denoting acknowledgement. The mornings always started off a little slow and I lazily sauntered into the kitchen to get a glass of milk. To my amazement I could hear, emanating from below, what sounded like cutesy girlish giggles, and I thought, hmmm, that’s strange. Strange cutesy girlish giggles don’t, like, ever happen around here. I chugalugged my milk, kahhhhh, and went downstairs to investigate. I kept the lights off and traversed the first few steps that led to a small square landing before the stairs changed direction at a right angle and continued downward. I stood on the landing and let my eyes adjust to the darkness until the semi-formed biracial octopus morphed into two intertwined people, a West Indian guy on top of a busty White brunette. He was, to my virgin eyes’ stunned amazement, smothering her with kisses and grinding against her with his six foot frame. It was a heavy petting zoo, that’s for sure. I recoiled and turned to go back upstairs and maybe heard the two teenaged lovers even giggle at my quick retreat up the landing and back into the kitchen to process what I had just seen. I thought to myself, “Girls actually kiss guys with all that hair on their face? Grrooosss.”

I could tell that Marty was a little miffed that Mika was using the Nezbit household, of which he was responsible for during the weekday hours of 8:30 to 5, for his sexual gratification. Now he was even more livid because he could tell by my puzzled prepubescent face that I had gone downstairs and witnessed god knows what. Mika bullied his brother as siblings are oft to do, and he was understandably hesitant to go downstairs and tell Mika to take his kissing booth somewhere else for fear of later reprisals. But his duty to purify the sanctimonious Nezbit household was paramount and he trudged downstairs and told Mika to hit the road.

As they were leaving, this brunette, she smiled apologetically at me and Mika playfully adopted a boxers’ stance and hit me softly with a combination as I turned my body and crumpled inwards with my skinny little arms. Then out of nowhere, with Mika and his girl walking out the front door, a whole procession of people came strolling in and the walls of my childhood home collapsed as if on a Hollywood set to reveal a sizeable studio audience and a whole apparatus of lights and cameramen and producers running around with headsets.

There was Mel Gibson, Charles Bukowski, the LGBLT shemale, Dan Weiden, three Mexican gov’t officials (with bowling balls), Nardwuar, Hunter S. Thompson, Gary Gilmore, the old Greek lady, President Obama, and the entire cast of TMZ, interlocking arms and starting to do the can-can dance, just like the showgirls in Vegas.

Dat dat dat de-dat, dat dat dat de-dat…

The studio audience went wild! Marty and myself stood stupefied in the middle of all this with our mouth’s hanging open unable to process the scene.

I quite enjoy curry now, for the record.

Attack of the Killer Bookstores!

The empty business space at 2964 Bloor Street W is awaiting its next occupant, whoever that that may be, there’s no sign as of yet, both literally and figuratively speaking, only row after row of dingy, yellowed pages of old newspapers taped up on the insides of the windows to block any sight into the unit. Old news covering up an empty present. Taped in front of the newspapers are a few single sheet’s with a goodbye message written in large font and multiple exclamation points. Something like, “Thanks for the memories!!!” A brief goodbye to all and no one in particular.

Once this limbo period is over and a new tenant sets up shop, my scorn will be directed to a tangible enemy, my anger focused, because you and me both know it will be a nail salon or a Tim Horton’s, or a Second Cup, or a Starbuck’s. Surely nothing of much substance…a wicker basket store, or a mattress emporium; or a novelty store like Hell Toupee, or Bong Voyage. Fuck me sideways.

The place I’m referring to is, of course, The Book Mark; Toronto’s oldest independent bookstore. In the black since 1965 and now an empty unit. Already old news, too, but what else would you expect? There’s record breaking temperatures and daily instalments of trial porn to take up ink and web space, (in the GTA, it was the Shafia trial, currently it is the Tori Stafford trial, to give you a frame of reference).

Give us beans! Give us cell-phones! Give us the ability to summarize our current thoughts in 140 characters or less and electronically transfer them, in pixelated codes onto screens, accessible to the masses at the touch of a button. Yes! Nothing but Yeses! We’re making a connection here. I can feel it!

According to an article I read in The Star, the Book Mark ultimately had to shut their doors because of a crushing rent increase--around 25% for the bean counters out there. I also spoke with who I presumed was the owner shortly before they closed for good and she confirmed as much. Now it’s gone. Thanks for the memories. The rent increases are a common theme. Aside from The Book Mark, the other independent store up the street in the Bloor West Village, Book City, is now in the process of closing. A rent increase is also cited. The For Lease sign is up as well as signs offering 40% off most books. The out of business sale has been going on for over a month now and there’s not much left except receding shelves with bargain bin 1980’s hardcover books about 16^th century Italian castles. In Italian. Obviously, the book business has been in a precarious state for many years and it appears as though the rent increases proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. That damn camel couldn’t take all the extra $20 bills stacked upon his hump.

There’s something sad about a store that you’ve frequented for years closing down. Any future memories knocked off the table by the careless swipe of a God’s hand. No one’s ever happy about it, and we all collectively sigh, accord the tragedy a moment of thoughtful remorse, and resolve to get on with things. “Such a shame, really,”… or…”I wish I bought more books,”…they say. It’s true. I heard two strangers conversing as I walked by. But what can you do, really? One person is so powerless to obstruct powerful business forces, we just get swept up with the wave and our attention is buoyed by another distraction. Life goes on, as it always seems to do.

When an ethereal magical place like a bookstore closes down, a little piece of your soul dies along with it. All of these wonderful stories and facts that self-reflect the human experience back at us. We gaze into the mirror of our collective selves dumbfounded with astonishment. Is this what we’re really like? A frame of reference develops from which we can form sound judgements. I’m not in Afghanistan or Iraq but I can be taken there and learn more about the conflict by reading an embedded journalists account than I would by reading the scroll at the bottom of CNN. A bookstore radiates and glows, a pulsating plasma orb, breathing life and illuminating the dank crevices burrowed deep within each of us. A good book informs us, gives us a chance to glean an understanding out of the madness and fury of the noise of modern existence. It’s the closest thing we have to magic, to time travel. Hell, it is time travel. And now time travel is going out of business? Now it has to diversify to stay in the game?

Chapters now gives over a sizeable chunk of it’s floor space to knick-knacky type stuff, an array of auxiliary crap like coffee, and decorative picture frames. I don’t blame the Chapters brass, they gotta do what they gotta do to survive. If staying in business means selling canned soup, then so be it. But still, it’s strange to go to the pet store and buy a case of beer; it’s a desperate move.

If it’s done properly, the written word can be the most electrifying and important cultural artifact we have. All those TV shows, those movies you love, from blockbuster Hollywood schlock like The Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, The Notebook, Harry Potter, down to scantly viewed indie gems, originate in book form. That’s where it all fucking comes from, man. Oh, you like the movie American Psycho--Book! Oh, you like Brokeback Mountain--Book! Oh, you like The Shining--Book! Oh, you like Trainspotting--Book!

Books are the endless well from which we draw inspiration as a culture. The human imagination will always be the most valuable, truly renewable resource and it‘s being taken for granted. Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth!?

A common complaint in the death of independent stores is that all the leftover business and local culture is funnelled into the evil corporations and they’re able to further monopolize the business and mould it into devious shapes. But how can you hate Chapters with a burning passion? The book business is so fragile that one imagines Chapters could be next in line to shackle up their doors. It’s just a BIG independent store. It’s not like I can’t get any book I’ve wanted to, no matter what the subject matter (and as you can imagine, my literary interests do not lean towards Danielle Steele). In fact, I’ve had to go to Chapters to order certain books because the independent stores can’t even order them from their suppliers, never mind actually having them in stock. I used to take that hit like a champ. For example: the book I really want is in stock at Chapters but I’ll still order it from the independent store and wait 1-2 weeks to, in my own little way, support the team. In the last year, I’ve simply started going over to Chapters to order my books because it is, and I hate to say it…more fun…in a sad way…a sad humans-are-useless-in-a-high-tech-world kind of way. The people at Book City and The Book Mark had antiquated computers and it took them forever to find the book I was looking for. If there was, by chance, a nice looking woman behind the counter then I would go back, but the retail book world is full of Hayden Planetarium’s for the most part.

Chapters has multiple docking stations with computers so that you can type up the book you want to buy and see if any copies are in the store. If the book isn’t in stock you can order it by following the few easy steps until finally a green slip is printed out which you take to the cash register and prepay or pay at the kiosk with a credit card. 1-2 weeks later you get your option of a call or an email notifying the book’s safe arrival. Humans are erased from the equation. But, one thing that annoys the ever-living shit out of me at Chapters is how prevalent the staff is. It’s like vacationing in Mexico. They’re always wandering around without seemingly much to do except engage customers in queries. “Did you find what you were looking for?” Clearly, I’m walking towards one of the computers to find what I’m looking for. I don’t need you! As soon as I get ten feet into enemy territory and dart off in the direction of the first available computer, without fail a peppy employee approaches and asks if I need help. The question is just plain weirdly ambiguous. I can’t help but think they’re asking me something deeply philosophical, or at the very least, medically inquisitive… “Do you need help with something?” Lady, do you have a few hours?

It would seem obvious that if I’m plopping down my bag at the docking station to search for a book, then I don’t need to be asked if I need help. Miss, the computer is going to help me. Why do businesses insist on approaching the customer (especially when there are computers to do helping?) Let us come to you. I’ll ask you when I need help. It’s very condescending when you get down to it. We, the customers, are so forlorn and incompetent, like that as soon as we enter a store we must immediately be offered professional help.

It will be interesting to see how the profits are divided when they figure out the eside of things. This is a crucial time in the fledgling ebook industry, the pieces are falling but it’s tough to make out just what kind of puzzle it will be. The book world, for the most part, has always had an all access code for unlimited downloading: the library card. The maelstrom of the book world must adapt like any other business. Business evolution is such a relentlessly turbulent beast, but it’s always moving forward, incapable of pithy human considerations, onward to conquer all that is feasible, gobble it all up, even as the troops come out of the trenches and are mowed down. Human life is the collateral damage of progress. It’s a capitalist clusterfuck. If you want to play around the pool you’re going to get wet. So instead of trying to save the independent bookstores, why don’t they adapt? Small bookstores should think creatively to stay afloat: hold readings, art events--switch it up. Here’s an idea for the struggling independent bookstores: One night a week hire attractive young women to work cash and stock shelves--and here’s the kicker--they must dress like librarians…in a porno. Miniskirt, glasses, cleavage--turning sin into sales!

These shops should participate more in the community. I mean, why do people even go to independent stores in the first place? In past generations people would flock to the independent stores because of the refined selection they offered that was unavailable at the mass market locations. But there has been no book I’ve ordered in the last five years that Book City had that Chapters didn’t. The populace will not support independent stores just for the sake of supporting independent stores. They have to offer up something different, some other angle. At this point, most are just small scale Chapter’s--of course they’re destined to the wastelands. When small companies clone the big boys it doesn’t usually work. It’s a dog shit eat dog shit world. If you’re not offering up something the bigger guys aren’t than prepare to be squashed like a bug in the ground. A little shop can’t compete with multiple docking hubs!

One day, in the not so distant future, our parents will upload all of the necessary written information to be a successful adult from Amazon.com into their newborns’ fragile egg-shell brains, like synching an ipod (technologists still have to conduct further research because they don‘t quite know where the usb cables will connect to in humans, but one can narrow it down to a few ports).

Parents won’t have to even bother reading to their children at night (raising kids is sooo boring, I know) or even encouraging them to read on their own. Consider the benefits of the free time: More laundry can get done. More status updates to be posted while the infant sleeps peacefully in it’s crib, dreaming baby babble dreams of nanotechnology and dematerialization and iHELMETS and iFAMILIES.

Our individual lives are passing comets in the night sky; spotlights faintly illuminating a vacuous spaceland for a handful of awestruck spectators to bear witness to all of it’s ragged glory, but the cold hard destiny is that life passes as soon as it is created. Your life is a lighter without any juice. A useless spark and then hello darkness. It’s Chapter’s Eleven. So why are you reading this?

What A Sorry State

About a year ago there was a terrible catastrophe on the east coast of Japan. No, it wasn’t Godzilla, but a massive tsunami caused by an underwater earthquake; a disaster of epic proportions. Surely I, like many others, watched the raw POV footage over and over as coastal towns were engulfed by a wave of death. I can still hear the sound of twisting metal that was never intended to twist that way, locals fleeing to higher ground, some not running fast enough and casually absorbed by the invading blob. Though I don’t speak Japanese fluently, screams of horror are a universal language. In times of tragedy one knows exactly what foreign people are saying from behind the camera. It’s the same thing we’d all say if we witnessed someone washed up by a tsunami: Holy Shit! . . . Fuck, this is crazy! . . . Oh my God! . . .  Run! . . . Led Zeppelin Rules! . . .

But this isn’t what I want to focus on here. I want to focus on the real issue in the grand scheme of things--the bigger (in a fascistic oppression of the population through language to manipulate thought kind of way) disaster: The firing of the Aflac Duck voice, narrated by the inimitable comic Gilbert Gottfried. Gottfried was sacked for his cringe inducing one-liners posted on Twitter mere hours after the tragedy. Well, comedy is all about timing. Gilbert wasn’t fired for his jokes, though. Or the timing of them. If he adroitly dropped lurid lines of scatological humour in a comedy club in North Dakota, or between friends (if Gilbert has any, that is), or even at a private boardroom meeting between Aflac marketing executives, there would be no problem. The reason for his firing wasn’t the cruel sentiment of the jokes in the (ahem) wake of a national tragedy, but the dissemination of the jokes instantaneously to a huge audience. And Twitter is the king of that kingdom. If enough people have access to a message, a small handful is going to get pissed off and make a lot of noise about it, no matter what the message is. Comedy is low-hanging fruit in the professional outrage game.

Maybe it was the quick turnaround, or the severity of the jokes, or a combination thereof that caused Aflac brass to give in to the pressure and drop the hammer on the man who’s voice has simultaneously entertained and annoyed us for decades.

For a short time the issue reached a fever pitch in the media. At its apex, it reached bizarre postmodern proportions: Gottfried’s insensitive tweets about the tragedy of the tsunami had become bigger news than the tragedy of the tsunami itself. It’s like photographing people who are photographing the most photographed barn in the world. Now, some of the jokes weren’t very good at all—mere throwaway’s. As long as we’re alive and events are happening, whether on a personal or global scale, there will be an endless well of comedy to draw from. That is both a comedy fact and a scientific fact. 

A few jokes stirred a chuckle out of me, which you can read out loud or in your head in your best Gilbert Gottfried voice . . .

“I fucked a girl in Japan. She screamed, ‘I feel the earth move and I’m getting wet.’”

 “My book Rubber Balls and Liquor was released in Japan. It’s making quite a splash.”

Okay . . . finally . . .

“Japan called me. They said ‘Maybe those jokes are a hit in the US, but over here they’re all sinking.’”

What puzzles and troubles me about the upper echelons of Aflac, and by extension, the people at the top of corporate culture in general, is that Gilbert has been known for the last thirty years as a comic who is by far one of the most abrasive out there on the national and international comedy scene. Anyone who has a passing interest in comedy knows this. Gilbert’s always the first to go there. He’s a too soon guy. Nothing is out of bounds. I’ve busted many guts watching him perform at roasts. Gilbert blurts things out like a crazy old Jew with Asperger’s.

What did a multi-national insurance company like Aflac expect out of Gilbert Gottfried when he was hired back in 2000? That by lending his voice as a shill, gussied up as a goofy duck, all of sudden his past material is, (ahem, again) washed away? I certainly would not buy insurance from Aflac--clearly, they don’t do diligent research on their animated mascots. The left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. The only thing these Aflac Asshats heard was Gilbert’s unique, yet recognizable voice--a nasal, gravely whine, though grating, is definitely unforgettable. Did they know that Gilbert is a dirty comic and figure that no one will care? He’s the parrot in Alladin for Christ’s sake! Surely before making a comic your mascot there is a vetting process to check out a funny man’s entire catalogue to see if he’s suitable to represent your company, or at the very least, what his angle of attack is. A cornerstone of GG’s schtick is to say outrageous, shocking jokes at all times, especially right after a tragedy when the snake’s venom is at most potent. Umm . . . hello? That’s Gilbert Gottfried in a nutshell. Three weeks after 9/11 at the Friar’s Club in New York, he was the first notable comic to very publicly say a 9/11 joke. Something about trying to catch a plane, but it had to make a stop at the Empire State Building first. Whatever. It’s Gilbert, not the president, it’s what he does. He didn’t get swept up in a shit storm like the Japanese tsunami, the 9/11 fallout was more like a shit sprinkle. No matter what you say, 9/11 is old news and you can joke about it and get away with it, too. Time heals physical and psychic wounds. The tsunami in Japan is now old news, too, but it most definitely was not just days after the tsunami. The wound is still raw. There is a week or so period where jokes or any making light of are totally off limits in the media, a window where outrage grows, and then blossoms once some comedian jokes about the tragedy.

A mitigating factor that is difficult to ignore is that Aflac is the largest life insurer of Japanese citizens. You can’t deny the jokes landed too close to home, like two nuclear bombs. The usage of words in and out themselves, is meaningless. Intent and context are king. It’s like playing violent video games doesn’t actually lead to real life violence. That’s the easy way out. It’s the Blame Game and a lot of people sit down at the table.    

is compromised when there’s a personal affront involved. If it’s about someone else, well fuck ’em, it’s right there, immortalized in the Charter of Rights & Freedoms goddamnit! Maybe I have no soul but I found it even funnier in a twisted way when I learned that Aflac does most of it’s business in Japan. It adds so many levels of intrigue to the jokes and to Gilbert himself. Did Gilbert know most of the business was centred in Japan? Did he just not care? Did he think it would roll of their shoulders?

On firing Gilbert as the Aflac Duck, the chief marketing officer stated, “Gilbert’s recent comments about the crisis in Japan were lacking in humor and certainly don’t reflect the thoughts and feelings of anyone at Aflac.”

I can’t begin to tell you how many things are wrong and misguided about this statement. First of all, there was about ten jokes that Gilbert tweeted and the three that I have reprinted are actually pretty funny, so the marketing guy is wrong on the lacking in humour part. Secondly, doesn’t it go without saying that the comments don’t reflect the thoughts and feelings of anyone at Aflac? Does the public assume Aflac employees are so morally bankrupt at their cores? Do we need to be reminded they don’t seriously endorse jokes about people dying horrible deaths, crushed by debris, drowning in fetid slew water, their cities and possessions wiped away by an angry planet?  

What comes next is a phenomenon, that although is not new, is more prevalent now than ever before in the media. The forced apology. And so Gilbert breaks gives in. Let the healing begin! I don’t even have to reprint the apology because you know exactly how it goes. I’m sorry if my remarks offended…blah blah blah, doot-doota-doot-doo . . . DOO-DOO. Even after his empty apology, Aflac still fired him. Never mind how disingenuous an apology originating from outside the speaker is in the first place, but coming from Gilbert, it’s even more uproarious. An apology for some Twitter jokes coming from Gilbert has about as much sincerity and warmth as Terry Schiavo.        

These forced apologies light up the media landscape like fireflies, and it’s been pretty bright out there lately. Today, as I write this, it’s Mike Milbury, a hockey analyst/commentator apologizing for his ‘Punk’ rant on Sidney Crosby. Breaking news: Crosby’s camp has rejected the apology from Mr. Mulbury. Somebody call a Wahhhmbulance.

How will we ever go on in the face of such injustice!?

What is insidious about these forced-from-the-outside apologies is that they undermine the very foundation that genuine apologies are based on. It’s the crying wolf effect. Genuine apologies are supposed to come from within; a growing and learning process whereby wrongs are righted and sins are atoned for.  

True apologies don’t penetrate, they defecate.

An apology is supposed to be an expression of remorse for a perceived wrong. It’s also supposed to originate organically from the speaker if it is to retain any integrity. These principles have been usurped by a minority of interweb humanoids that want to build a brand, a public narrative to garner attention and credibility. The FA is now used in the media as a weapon, the lash of a whip made out of the tongues of the infidels, to inflict the sting of the public at large, whoever that is. The pressure from this small minority out there in the ether make the heads  force apologies out of their investments. And so we hear Rush Limbaugh, or Don Imus, or Dean Blundell light up the ‘On Air’ sign, and in a sombre tone, profess their sincerest of condolences; that they regret their momentary lapse of reason. Well hoo-fucking-rah.

Consider if you will Rush Limbaugh’s ‘Nappy headed ho’s’ comment, and the subsequent FA. When it really comes down to brass taxes, the comment is pretty benign. Not even that insulting even if you’re part of the group being insulted. Find any black female college basketball player and she’ll tell you she’s had far worse verbosity slung at her than, ‘Nappy headed ho.’ I’ll leave it up to you to come up with a few examples.

You can be outraged and annoyed at Rush Limbaugh for his comments. You have your right to be offended. But if you don’t like what Rush says than just do what I’ve been doing the whole time during the FA debacles: Don’t listen. Just turn the dial. Rush is only on my radar because of all the coverage, the incessant media clips by all the local affiliates that are regurgitating his offensive comments and apologies. Warning . . . this may be offensive to some viewers . . . but here you go folks, we’ll play it for you anyways, over and over, and vicariously re-offend you.

It’s the mark of a truly selfish and hubristic person to take offence to something and then endlessly whine about it, and more importantly, demand consequences. I’m occasionally offended by pundits/entertainers and their nutty ideas (mainly because the hordes who lap it up can’t distinguish the performance from the actual human being playing the character). But I would never want them silenced or taken off the air. For example, I don’t like Ann Coulter. I think she’s smart as well as an opportunistic, contrarian shill that doesn’t believe the things she says and writes, but does it because of her agenda and to get a rise out of liberals and to keep her brand relevant. She wants power and capital. She wants a voice. I can’t blame her. But here’s how a reasonable, intelligent human deals with this particular offense: Either (a) ignore her completely, or (b) postulate using reason and logic why you don’t agree with them and leave it at that. Hope other humans can relate. Hence unprofessional think pieces like this. I don’t want Ann Coulter fired or silenced. I’m not that narcissistic and selfish to try and impose my will on you plebeians! I realize lots of people are entertained by her, and agree with the gist of her politics. I have respect, which is something that is sorely lacking in our internet culture.  

Ironically, all these people who are outraged by the comments that give birth to the FA’s don’t even listen to the entertainers they’re outraged by. But they know damn well that YOU shouldn’t be subjected to the aural filth, either. They have a worldview they want to impose on you. The folks who are outraged only hear about the outrageous comments because they hear it re-filtered through the news that they do listen to. They don’t even listen to Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern in the first place, but once they’re exposed to the tip, gigantic, imaginary icebergs naturally form underneath the surface. It’s a big bad world out there and rather than being constantly critical and questioning the foundations of our worldy outlooks, we paint ourselves into a corner and then defend that corner as the right way, the just way. Just turn the dial.

Why would you, if you were so mortally offended by a rape joke, or Don Imus insinuating a woman is a slut because she wants the state to pay for her birth control, be satisfied with a simple, short, forced apology? Apparently, this “I’m sorry, I apologize,” fire extinguisher is usually sufficient to put out the raging inferno of outrage. That’s all you wanted!? An ‘I’m sorry?’ That is the only demand from the kidnapper’s!? Come on Imus, all you have to do is give a sweet little remorseful show of humility, just get on your knees for a minute or two and then get back up, wipe off your mouth with the back of your hand, and carry on entertaining. If I’m truly offended by a comment/joke/person/group/etc., I sure as hell wouldn’t be assuaged by a simple apology, even if it did originate from the offender and not their bosses. The healing process would take time. The relationship may never be the same.

Speaking of Don Imus’s recent FA for calling Sarah Fluke a slut for wanting the state to cover her birth control, why is the abortion issue flaring up again in the States like a bad case of genital warts?

Look at the new law in Texas that forces doctors to perform an invasive, humiliating, intra-vaginal exam on women, accompanied by a patronizing lecture before they can have an abortion. Under the new state policy, a woman seeking an abortion must first be subjected to an ultrasound probe inserted into her vagina. Then comes the weird part . . . “She is then forced to look at the ultrasound image of the unborn fetus and listen to its heartbeat while the doctor points out the parts of the body.” Then the woman signs a document, and is sent home to wait twenty four hours before the abortion is performed.  Wha? Come again? This is legal humiliation and state sanctioned abuse. Does the state of Texas think women who get abortions are she-devils with spinning heads, frothing at the mouth, salivating in hungry anticipation of the unformed morsel being sucked out of their vagina? Can I take it home and eat it, doc? Clearly, women want to kill, kill, kill! They enjoy killing the babies inside them.

I don’t even have a pussy and it makes me throw up a little in my mouth. Hey law man, how exactly does forcing a doctor to waste his time pointing out body parts prevent abortions? I’d like to apply to be the speechwriter for the scripted rant that the doctors go through . . . “These are the hands that will one day pull triggers . . . and these are the lips that will one day suck on crack pipes…”

I’m no law expert or politician, but one sure fire way to not prevent abortions is cutting state funding to Planned Parenthood by some 66%, which Texas did in 2011. This law is ultimately benefiting only a select few perverted doctors who are consumed by unnecessary-pre-abortion-intra-vaginal-probing fetishes. Who cares? A fetus isn’t cute at one month anyways, just a gooey mass of nascent semi-formed life matter. Maybe you can make out a toe or two. Big shit. It isn’t going to pay the hydro bill. 

If you want to know how sexist any law on abortion is, imagine if the situation was reversed: After nine months of gestating, babies come out of a man’s grossly oversized and bloated penis, cock veins painfully extended to backyard hose proportions, the pregnant penis resembling a snake with a freshly eaten mouse.

Checking in for dinner at the in-law’s place you give in to the ceaseless prodding from the glowing grandparents-to-be, and whip out your pregnant cock so the whole extended clan, little Patrick too, can marvel at the bulging life inside it. Mom-in-law puts an ear to your shaft and exclaims proudly to no one in particular, “I think I felt a kick!”

The next morning, on a stroll through the park, other parents with their kids in tow notice the sizeable bulge in your Levi’s 501 Preggers©, and a gaggle of moms giggle to each other, hands over mouth’s, afraid to actually ask, only whispering cupped conspiratorial messages into each other’s ears, “Is he pregnant or just big?”

Can you imagine a government passing laws forcing all pregnant men to go through invasive procedures prior to the abortions of their unwanted cock-babies? Not in this lifetime, pal. 

The Blue & White Rose of Toronto

The Toronto Maple Leafs' 2012 regular season campaign is winding down, and the reality of missing the playoffs for the eighth straight year can now can be deduced to nothing more than a simple mathematical law of inevitability. That’s why it is so soul destroying when you see it in the Toronto papers, usually around mid-March, the sports columnists all start wheel-barrowing out the math stats. In particular, the grotesque, all encompassing, dream crushing, boil-a-season-down-to-a-sentence summation, “There are X amount of games left, and the TML’s have to win X amount to make it into the 8^th place.”

This is always the beginning of the end…

It isn’t as if we’re informed of this statistical gem at the twenty eighth game mark because, well, it isn’t cogent; there would be no perspective from which to make a sound judgement, too many variables at play. But when the Leaf’s are almost surely destined to miss out on the dance, when there is nary a niggling shadow of fear of cancelling mid-April tee times, the ride takes the next exit off Faith Freeway and onto Reality Road.

Such a shame, really, considering that only a little more than a month ago the TML’s were right there, reaching as high as sixth in the Eastern Conference, before inexplicably spiralling into oblivion. It’s not like the team was wiped out by a plane crash, yet they have crashed and burned nonetheless.

How cruel and unusual the punishment is to a faltering team in the realm of professional sports when there is no hope of post season drama, but a significant smattering of regular season games still left on the schedule. Essentially, there are two options: (1) Collectively tank so as to end up at the bottom of the standings and draft a potentially very good player, or (2) Keep on truckin’ and playing like it’s all on the line because, after all, isn’t that what’s owed to the sponsors and the fans? To play your best at all times? The goal of the GM or coach, always, and without fail, is to espouse the latter while subtlety implementing the former. You can’t just go ahead and take out the starting goalie and put in a rookie like Joe Shakeyknees now can you?

What makes this season all the more woeful is that this was not a rebuilding season. Burke and Co. have ostensibly iced a team that was supposed to make the playoffs. Note the lack of action taken during the recent trade deadline. On top of this failure, the Leaf’s have a nasty habit of foregoing rules number 1 & 2 altogether and winning like it’s going out of style when it can only do them harm because by finishing 9^th and 10^th the team will not acquire high draft picks. It’s an ironic quirk to the competitive rules of hockey where winning is not really winning, it’s, in fact, losing. It’s like Charlie Sheen circa 2011.

My gosh! To be a fly on the wall as the travel worn and sleep deprived Tim Connolly arrives at the Tampa airport and he gathers up his suitcase from the carousel and is whisked away in the team bus with his fellow sad sack team-mates to the local Hilton, before the utterly meaningless April 5^th tilt against the Lightning, where he will get paid what you make in four months to almost surely score 0.0 goals and end up minus 2. The Horror…The Horror…

Of course I’ll be there to watch that game just like most of the others, if only to see if the Leaf’s can play the spoiler role and ruin some other teams chance at the playoffs. Misery loves company.

This futile end to the regular season calls to mind the analogy of match play in golf. One full point is awarded to the winner of a hole, and half a point if they tie. The end of the match is merciful…If Player A is winning by more holes than there are holes left to play for Player B to catch Player A, then the match is over, and Players A & B shake hands and go their separate ways. If only it were that simple in the NHL--the Leaf’s could be golfing already! In hockey all the hand shaking comes at the end of a best-of-seven playoff series, bearded and bloodied warriors lining up at centre ice and squelching series’ long beefs that have festered for the last six games. The only hand shaking the Leaf’s will be doing this spring are when they’re introduced to the girlfriend’s parents.

Mathematics renders a team’s quest for glory so starkly as if it was written in our favourite players’ blood on the wall in front of us. It is a requiem for a dream. Sports like hockey are the longest running reality shows that t.v. has to offer. What is served up to fans is the hope, the illusion, no matter how improbable, that their team can achieve greatness in any given season, any given game.

As I write this, the TML’s are at a this crucial threshold where they have to gobble up all the remaining points, like a blue whale feasting on plankton, to make it into the last available playoff spot. The tipping point where meaning becomes nonsense. Win every game and nothing less. Such is their insurmountable task. It’s somewhat odd that 8^th place is deified as the holy grail in Toronto. Or rather, it’s quite telling about how low our expectations have become of the team over recent years. It’s Psych 101: Don’t get our hopes up too much because the disappointment and damage to our self-worth will be too severe when the hammer falls. If we keep reasonable goals we have a better chance of meeting them and therefore be satisfied with our lot. In this regard, 8^th place is the goal, our lot. And Lord knows I would stick a Molotov cocktail inside a cop car’s gas tank if the Leaf’s made 8^th. Yonge and Bloor would look like downtown Syria. And the Lord also knows that as I sat in a jail cell awaiting my face time with a judge because some jerk off with a smart phone posted my picture on Facebook, I’d read in the jail copy of the Sun that Boston beat the ever-living shit out of them. Swept. Four and done. Tee it high and let it fly, boys.

As a die hard Leaf fan who bleeds blue and white (oh how I bleed!) my only recourse is to smile fondly on the ghosts of past glories. My televisual memories of Wendel Clark and Dougie Gilmour are too remote to recall at will with any clarity, I was too young, and didn’t watch many games. I was more interested in playing rather than watching, so my warm and fuzzy Leaf memories reside mainly in the Sundin years when I really started to develop a serious interest in the fortune‘s of the team. Plus I could legally drink in bars.

Sundin doesn’t get enough credit in Toronto for his achievements. I will always be able to warm my hands in the glow of Sundin’s Swedish smile. Can you recall any man in recent NHL history that seemed more genuinely happy than Mats Sundin when he put the puck in the back of the net and raised his arms to the rafters where his banner now hangs? It was like he won Lotto 649 every time he potted a goal. The man didn’t have much to work with during his tenure, in terms of fire-power to play off of, so it makes it all the more poignant that he holds the most points, goals, etc., of any Leaf. Ever. If he was from Dundalk he would almost certainly be the most revered Leaf of all time; Don Cherry would surely agree with that. Or perhaps it was Mats’ demeanour that prevents him from being remembered as the best. He wasn’t really suited for the fishbowl that is pro hockey in Toronto. He was a simple guy, not in an unintelligent sense but a man who wasn’t prone to hyperbolic rants. Sundin was a classy, polite to a fault, not a great sound-bite, offering the most standard of sports clichés in interviews, but you could kind of tell that he was an honest and good man who preferred to leave his statements on the ice. You wouldn’t catch Sundin at an L.A. nightclub after playing the Kings, at some Hollywood hot spot, dancing provocatively with some unidentified blonde then allegedly punching her in the face.

You want an important stat: Most overtime goals: Mats is tied with Sergei Fedorov, Patrick Elias, and another childhood hero of mine, Jaromir Jagr, at fifteen. When the pressure of success is at a fever pitch, these men deliver, like winning a crucial immunity challenge on Survivor. There’s just no denying that Mats is a true sports hero in the purest sense.

Aside from his deft hockey skills, I greatly admire him because he’s bald. As a man with a growing forehead myself, it always bolsters my spirit a notch or two when a bald man is extremely successful. Makes the rest of us look good. It’s a pleasant reminder that bald men are not athletically inferior to fully haired ones. Agassi, anyone (post hairpiece, of course)? One only has to look at perhaps Sundin’s most heroic accomplishment as a Leaf to be convinced of his superior prowess: Those playoff series against Ottawa in the early aught’s, when it really counted, and without fail, Sundin carried the vastly inferior Leaf’s to victory. I mean, during the regular season the Sens would beat up on them like they were the Marlies. The kinds of games where you turn it off half way through because the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The death of a hockey game. But come playoff time it was like the captain was out to lunch and the sailors had taken over the ship. Under the direction of Sundin the script was rewritten. Those were some glorious series and they’ll have to serve as the zenith of my Leafdom memories.

After the Leaf’s beat the Sens in game seven of the ’02 playoffs there was an impromptu parade down Main St. in Brampton. I walked out of the bar, fully loaded, with a carload of friends into the clear warm night. I was consumed by the energy of the crowd the way one is when alcohol and adrenalin are doing a dry cycle inside the gut. The hum of incessant honking and chanting--Go Leaf’s Go! Go Leaf’s Go!--was all around us. People stopped speaking a language…communication was reduced to an easy, repetitive rhythm. Policemen were directing traffic. It was a peaceful gathering, no matter how rowdy, but the police didn’t seem prepared for it, didn’t expect the eruption of passione that swelled like a tsunami wave from Toronto and crashed into the suburbs. If the situation got just a little more out of hand, if storefronts were smashed, the police would have been ill-equipped to deal with the madness. In a dream it would have been a mini G20 debacle…with one small difference: The Leaf’s, all sweaty and heroic, would arrive on Main St. riding white horses, the clompity-clomp of the beasts shaking the ashphalt below us. The galloping Leaf's, led by Sundin, still wearing their game jerseys, would lance all the cops with the butt end of their hockey sticks and join in on the looting. And the crowd goes wild!

But it was a celebration that was content in and of itself, and somehow all the booze and energy didn’t spill over into violence. All it takes is a spark and this could have become post 7^th game Vancouver. But I suppose that would be too embarrassing for us, for Brampton as a city to riot that exuberantly, after all, it was only the quarter-finals. And this was only Brampton, the City of Flowers.

I was quite drunk, with a mind for adventure, and as we crawled along in a jam on Main St. I decided to exit out of the passenger door and run down the white line, in between the two stalled lanes of southbound traffic, and high five all willing participants, like I was the Ultimate Warrior running up the ramp towards the ring, arms outstretched to slap the palms of fans on both sides of the partition. I was impenetrable. Immortal. This is what the Gods must feel like when their team wins the Eastern Conference Quarter Finals. Brampton was unified. Most cops joined in with a pumping fist when a gaggle of people walked by mid-chant. Differences of class and race were briefly cast aside. White, Black, and Indian people were all White and Blue on this night. After at least one hundred high fives I doubled back and re-entered the car, which had barely moved since I did my whole price-is-right-contestant routine. Madeleine, the driver had a look of dismay that was wholly contemptuous of the male species. Mouth agape in horror, witnessing behaviour she thought previously impossible. She must have went home and reorganized her whole outlook on the capabilities of men. I could already see the textbook behind her eyes beginning to hastily incorporate new facts for a revised edition.

Now I don’t want to get caught up sentimentalizing the past, but the future hasn’t offered up much. Hey, I enjoy watching Phil Kessel race down the wing, using his other-worldly speed and snap a wrister in off the post--ding!--top cheese, as much as the next fan, but the heart is slow to catch up. Maybe it’s just an overall lack of grit, or truculence as Burke would put it, that the current team lacks. It’s like they don’t want it badly enough, and it’s puzzling. Dougie Gilmour could have been stranded on a desert island in the Pacific for a week after a plane crash, eating washed up first class dog food to survive, and then after being rescued he would definitely suit up for Hockey Night in Canada. He would shit out the dog food and get a steak and potatoes meal, a fresh shave, and tie up his skates. I can’t see Kessel doing that…maybe Schenn would, but he has to. I know he’s not paid to score goals but, man, it’s like he’s allergic to putting the puck into the net. Schenn even gets this annoying, goofy look on his face after he scores, like “Huh-huh, that wasn’t ‘pposed to happen.” Not a good look, kid.

Never mind that the once tall and mighty TML’s haven’t won a Stanley Cup in the average lifespan of a Haitian grandfather. Since the lockout in 2004 the leafs, along with the high-flying Florida Panthers have been the only two teams to be locked out of the playoffs. By the way, there’s only three people in Florida who even know that. Can you imagine if that was the Yankees? Or the Dodgers? Or the Bruins? Or Tiger Woods (okay, he has an excuse for losing because he power-tooled a bunch of whores, and the fallout has been distracting for him) or the Red Wings? There would be bloody mayhem in the streets. Hordes of miscreants with balaclavas wrapped around their faces shattering storefronts and tipping cars. Has the current roster of the Leaf’s forgotten that this is war? The lack of urgency on the ice and the smugness of the players off of it is abhorrent. They should be embarrassed to show their faces on the streets, but since none of them are from Ontario their faces will surely be on other, faraway streets come this off season. They’re safe at last!

It is an abusive marriage, my fandom for the Leaf’s, and I’m stuck with them for better or worse, until death do us part. As a fan I cannot simply transfer allegiance to another team. Perhaps in social situations, on the most visible of surfaces, I could feign a love for another team, to stop an unwanted conversation before it starts, but it‘s not true romance. In my heart I would know. One longs for the safety of the arms of the familiar lover even though they pimp slap you repeatedly for over-cooking the roast. And the TML’s have beaten me silly over and over after promising to never do it again. But I won’t press charges. I’ll tell the cops that I ran into a door.

You’re not reading the notes of some fair-weather fan here. I stand up for my man. Come October I’ll be right there, ass firmly planted in my seat for the first game of the 2013-14 campaign, waiting with bated breath for the first puck drop of a gleaming new season, fresh with unlimited possibilities, and I’ll say, please, please, please, let me get what I want, Lord knows it would be the first time.

The blood of my rose will forever be blue and white. The team is rooted so deep into my subconscious that there is no untangling the knot. There is nothing to satiate the undying love I have for the team and I’ll continue to haphazardly cling to the hope for a brighter tomorrow until the day my life is extinguished, and my soul dissipates into the ether, and I become a translucent shadow of my former self, doing shots at the 4^th Period Bar & Grill with Bill Barilko and Punch Imlach. Until that day I will keep company with these ghosts who are always babbling at the edge of our future dreams of glory. The bar, I’m told, doesn’t have Leafs TV.

Man Boobs, Me & TLC

I have man boobs.

There I said it. Phew. What a load off my chest--or...erm, on it. If you perchance are one of the chosen few to catch a glimpse of my naked upper torso it would appear as though I'm stuck in the body of a normally developing twelve-year old girl. If you were a blind man, your hand would recoil in jailbait horror. I'm scared that any day now my Mom will sit me down and give me the big girl talk. It's just another thing to get hung about. If it's not man boobs it's something else. Worry, worry, worry. So many things to do. There's the money, the womenfolk, the status, the laundry, the car, the friend's wedding, the health, oh the health, don't smoke so much, don't drink too much, for God's sake don't drink that. The whole scam of life can drive a sane man to unleash a hellbroth of destruction unto the whole damn thing. Blow this popsicle stand! What's a guy got to do to have it easy? To have it made in the shade? I want to lay back and enjoy the ride, open a can of beer, thwack, drink my gloriously golden pint with my pinkie up, two Persian sex slaves with lobotomized eyes in tow, alternately fanning me with Macaw feathers, then sucking on my boobs with infantile abandon. Ah! If only my boobs produced milk,--I could make a quick score and cruise on Easy Street. You'd see me on Sunday afternoons in my black BMW convertible winding through back country roads, my golden retriever's tongue flapping in the wind like a worm with a fork in it. Sometimes, Christ, it's like I don't have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot.   

These cursed man lumps are all the more strange looking on thin frame like mine. Usually you see big ol' droopy, hairy man boobs with flapjack nipples on the chests of heavier men--tits in proportion to their overall largeness. Through some genetic quirk, a simple twist of fate, I've got them. You can suck in a gut but try sucking in your tits--it's not easy. 

I play tennis, jog, watch my food portions, and do some light bench-pressing once a week, but no matter what I do I can't get rid of this cursed boobage. Billy Blanks help me! When I'm alone and topless, lifting steel in my bedroom, after a ripping a good set, I'll invariably look at my reflection in the full length mirror and flex my pectorals without moving any other muscle. First the left, uhhh, than the right, uhhh, then both at the same time in rapid succession, uhhh, uhhh, uhhh, etc.  Sadly, vision far superior to 20/20 is needed to detect any movement.

There was a time when I did go to an actual gym with other human beings--a YMCA in dowtown Brampton. It has fake rubber rocks jutting out of the wall for climbing, squash courts, and a wonderful 2nd level gym complete with all manner of modern muscle sculpting machines, spin classes, and about a 200 metre track around the whole thing. Ahh, the track. That was my favourite part. I was a skinny lad and didn't look out of place jogging around, I belonged on the track. Plus, I could look out over downtown Brampton (lucky me!). Turned out I was in pretty good shape, not because I was twenty years old, but because I would run around and around for far too long in an effort to delay the weight lifting portion of my workout. All those intimidating, alien machines that I didn't know how to use silently mocking me, daring me to give it a go; they looked rather like diorama oil hammers. I laid in wait, until I passed by on lap 12 on the track and saw some gym rat with a firm, taut body grinding it out on one of them to figure out how they were actually used before I'd even put forth an attempt. Nothing is more embarassing than using one of these machines in the wrong way and some hard body housewife in spandex walks by looking at you like there's a dick growing out of your ear. 

I remember one of the first times I went to this Y. It was like a first day in a new class--and nobody was showing me the ropes. A stranger in a new land. I could just leave, toweling my forehead, feigning a good workout. But I would only be fooling myself, and that's who I have to live with in the end.  

I finally acquiesce to the call of the weights, of my forlorn dreams of bulging buffness, of walking into a room (most likely sideways) with arms uncomfortably hanging out from my side with nowhere for their impossible girth to go. Like two twin elephants in the room. With these images in my head, I saddled over to the the mock bench-press thing-y, where you sit upright at a ninety degree angle and push outward instead of upward like you would bench-pressing with free weights. It' not for serious lifters, it's for women and dentists and the like. Adjacent to me, there was a gaggle of thick, self-assured, black guys monopolizing the free weights anyways, and in my wildest dreams I wouldn't dare to venture into that dimension of the gym. The five or six of them were dressed alike, like they were on the same football team. There was no one else around--just a noodle armed honky and a group of veiny coloured fellas. I'm white, and over all it's great, don't get me wrong, it would be imprudent to pretend otherwise, like my life isn't ahead a notch or two by default because of the colour of my skin, but when you're pumping tethered iron in close proximity to big tattooed black guys, you don't quite trust the paint job.

I take the pin out of the 150lbs slot and put it into the 70lbs slot. I grip the handlebars, and for a moment it looks like I could be riding a Harley 74 down the PCH, like a righteous Hell's Angel. I start furiously pumping away and simultaneously sneaking glances of how much weight the big black guys are lifting. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice one of them playfully taps his buddies shoulder, motioning him to look at me. Then they both laugh, looking in my direction and I pretend not to notice, praying they're looking at someone else, but there's no one else in the general vicinity. Oh, shit, here we go. At first I'm angry that they just couldn't be more discreet about mocking me, it's not like I inherently care too much about what people think, just please keep it to yourself. But then one of 'em said something along the lines of, "Hey bro, you need a spot?" and they all erupted in laughter. I laughed, too, because the whole thing was kind of funny, even if I was the brunt. Whoever says you should ignore bullies should be ignored. I have to say or do something if I'm being engaged in conversation, no matter how insulting if only to diffuse the situation. A real man doesn't just turn his back. Similarly, I have to acknowledge homeless people when they ask, "...spare a quarter, sir?" I will certainly and without fail try to use another citizen as a human shield and hide behind them while walking by the homeless to avoid the exchange, however brief, but I cannot simply walk on as if a ghost is talking to me in another dimension. The homeless may not always get any change, but they'll always get a half-hearted, 'sorry brother', or a at the very least a sympathetic shake of the head, as if to say, "I see you and the other-worldly suffering you endure, cold and alone on the streets, and it's a shame, I really truly believe it, yet I choose to walk on because somebody else is going to help you, of that I'm sure."

Okay...let's get down to the real issue here: body dysmorphia. Don't we all suffer from this affliction to some degree?  Whether it's bitch-tits, no tits, no hair, too much hair, one leg, acne scars, Chinese people, big guts, jiggly arms, gunjy pussies, crater-asses, hook noses, muffin tops, spare tires, lazy eyes, blotchy skin, bald spots, liver spots, big belly buttons--there's always something wrong that we're dying to fix; doubts about our attractiveness that niggle at us while we lie in bed at night. Not many of us come out genetically perfect. I'm sorry, it must be tough for you. 

The t.v. flicks to life and a booming voice says what the screen reads...

Next on TLC...the premiere of Skinny People, Bitch-Tits.  

Really--what has happened to that channel in the last ten years? They switched from programming firmly rooted in their namesake, with at least a modicum of educational value, to a modern day P.T. Barnum act. I've sat and watched Toddlers and Tiaras on visits to my parents, my mom and I sipping on red wine and laughing at what passes for entertainment in today's culture. Don't get me wrong, it's not like it's not entertaining, it is down right fascinating, in a car wreck rubber neck way, on so many levels: A--How N.A. culture sexualizes women at younger and younger ages; B--Red neck families are funny in and of themselves; C--The incredibly sad beauty competitions and the even sadder attendees; D--The castrated husbands at the mercy of their diva daughters. But these network t.v. reality shows seem to hit a collective nadir on a semi-annual basis. Personally, when watching Toddlers and Tiaras (BEEP-BEEP-BEEP[flashing red lights]--Incoming Pedo Disclaimer: I've only watched it with my Mom, and only twice in total, so get over yourself) I like to scan the meager audience for potential creepoids (I told you, it's entertaining on multiple levels), I look beyond the families introduced at the start of the show for that one creepy guy in sunglasses, alone, sitting in the back of the banquet hall, seemingly well composed, but on the inside of his head I bet there are seven different kinds of illegality going on during the crowning of the winner for the five year old bracket. I can't wait for the Muslim themed knockoff: Toddlers and Hijabs.    

Can it be any funnier that the channel is still called The Learning Channel? It's like buying the New York Times and it turns out to be some porno mag called Laying Pipe. If it were up to me, I'd enlist that Super-Size Me guy, Morgan Spurlock, and get him to make a documentary wherein he subjects himself for an entire month, not to a Mcdonald's diet, but an immersion of a different sort, a televisual diet only consisting of TLC shows. 24/7. No commercials, either. Totally DVR'd. Line 'em up and knock 'em down Morgan. He must watch specials and regular programming alike. Season upon season of Little People, Big World and 28 Kids and Counting, all manner of hour long documentary type shows of morbidly obese human beings being carted out of their homes on forklifts. I've got a better idea: Instead of wasting the tax payers' hard earned money on the forklift and the forklift driver, the doctors, the entire fucking system, man, why not just make free soap for the homeless out of these gargantuans? Welfare soap. Problem solved.

Then at the end of the movie Morgan goes to the doctor to see how unhealthy he's become from this TLC mega-marathon. The doctor places the stethoscope on Morgans chest and has him take deep, measured breaths, then asks him to say ahhh as he peers down his throat, then looks at the dilation in his eyes with a pen light, then grabs his bean bag and makes him cough, and then, finally, places a reassuring, fatherly hand on Morgan's shoulder as he gives him the news...

"I'm sorry Morgan...but you've got CancerAids."

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Possibly Do Again

You ever been in one of these?  

It's 5am and you're wired on E, spooning in bed with a petite brunette, after raving at a club all night, and you have a raging hard-on rubbing up suggestively against her backside (with her panties on, of course), and she seems to be responding positively, grinding back, moaning softly, and you take this to be a sign to go further, and so you start to get frisky with your free hand, first fondling a breast, and then moving down to her smooth stomach enroute to her sinful hole, her apex of desire, and then, (then?) she jerks awake, (awhat?) and groggily says, "Hey! What are you doing!?"

My hard-on disappeared faster than a gram of crack in Whitney Houston's glass pipe. Too soon? 

It's amazing how quickly a girl can come out of a booze and drug laden sleep when she's being semi-molested. Or maybe it's not amazing, it's just what you would expect. But, I too, felt like I was being violated and molested in some way. I didn't act maliciously. Perhaps it's amazing what the body will do while unconscious. How it seems awake at first until you catch onto the ruse; like the cold dead eyes of a sleepwalker looking through rather than at you. My heart was in the right place, as it usually is I'd like to think, even with a fog of illicit chemicals coursing through me. Terrible thoughts of a long prison term a in rural Southern Ontario facility hit me, shitting in front of my cellmate, whose name is most likely Slippery Pete or something, and listening to him jerkoff in the bunk above me. I'll probably have to get a tattoo or two, too. I immediately went into damage control mode: "Shit, sorry, sorry. I'm sooo sorry. Oh my god! I thought you were awake."

And I did. Really.

Earlier in the evening, I was on a double date of sorts, but kind of not. My date, Alicia, was for all intents and purposes a platonic friend; I was definitely thinking that if I played my cards right there could be some action to be had but there are no guarantees. We made out once in my kitchen during a party but that was some time ago. Wedding bells were not ringing. It was a kiss devoid of passion. She did it as a display of her party girl ethos. Look how dangerous I can be. Not too say it wasn't nice on a purely physical level--our tongues were pleasantly slithering and flickering in each others' mouth's but we were both quite sure nothing was going to come of it when our embrace came to an end. I didn't pursue her that night and she sure as fuck didn't pursue me. She ended the kiss and I didn't want to be that guy, the one who creepily persists in ogling and groping when it's clearly over. I'm not inclined to put much effort into romantic endeavors. I don't know--I'm just kind of resigned to let the pieces fall where they will. I'm a proponent of subtle romance--a certain look or comment rather than an elaborate, fiscally intensive charade. Who wants to shovel pitch fork loads of their hard earned cash into the bank accounts of Tiffany's executives. I'd love to be the type of guy, like John Cusack in Say Anything, who shows up late one night under my one true love's bedroom window with a ghetto-blaster held high above my head blasting our song.  But I can't. Just like Stephen Hawkings can't do a cartwheel. Or how the GOP nominees can't convince me they're not half-retarded. Take that Republicans! 

Alicia is a great kisser though, and that's hugely important. No one likes a robo tongue or some weirdo who gives you the death stare the whole time. Thankfully, she let me assume the best possible position there is for a man when french kissing a woman: The double handful of ass. I was squeezing those cheeks like they were full of orange juice. Up and down, spreading them from side to side, then one cheek up and one cheek down. She let me do it all.

On this particular night, Alicia and myself were contrasted by the other two in our double date who had been together for years--Long-termers. Because the male half, my friend Marius, loves techno/jungle/drum n'bass/shit we found ourselves at some club full of jacked up kids dancing in a seemingly arbitrary manner, swinging their arms and twirling about in a way that I'm supposed to believe is hip and modern. I hope that if I have kids they don't turn out like these people is my first thought as we're enveloped by the darkness of the club. Glow sticks, like flying radioactive snakes, are whirling around in a blur. Unlike regular citizens on the street, these denizens have all put an inordinately large amount of time into their get-ups, even the males. Haircuts are gelled into asymmetrical shapes and gelled to perfection, beards are shorn down into pencil thin lines along jawlines. If anyone of the guys at this club were somehow plopped down in the middle of Thunder Bay, I have no doubt they'd be labelled either queer, faggot, or homo--maybe all three. The beauty of diversity, I suppose.

Sometimes, a small cluster in the crowd-at-large will part and form a circle around a particularly coordinated dancer, and he'll shred some tile like nobody's business as us lesser humans marvel at the display of dexterity. Being high on Ecstacy heightens the furious activity around me and adds another element of tension to the semi-confusion and fear of being in an unfamiliar environment. In this case a house club, or dub step club,  or drum n' bass club, or whatever the fuck kind of club it is. I'm not fucking Deadmau5 over here. 

I don't even really like the drug Ecstacy, I wouldn't touch the stuff nowadays, but this was years ago; and besides, if you're going to the rodeo shouldn't you wear a cowboy hat? With Ecstacy I'm a light weight. There are ravers out there who can gobble it all night long. Not me--after swallowing one pill I'm fully loaded, a total dancing queen. It's like being fried on speed and lsd at the same time. Not really my cup of tea anymore. It didn't stop me from enjoying myself though. If you are going to do Ecstacy it's definitely best to do it at a club rather than sitting in a house because your body needs to indulge in action of some kind. It distracts from the dread and paranoia. 

I dragged Alicia out into the throng of sweaty young bodies and we danced for hours and hours, with brief interludes of gulping water (her) and beer (me). I ended up swirling two--yes two!--glow sticks, gyrating my hips like a mental patient, and puckering my lips like Jagger for all the other dancers to gaze at in astonishment. I was dancing as if I was on the fastest setting on an elliptical machine designed by Andy Kaufman. I would oscillate between totally selflessly lost in the moment and totally consumed by the wrath of one thousand eyeballs. I had to get innovative and mimic some of the better dancers' moves, and, failing at that, feebily attempted to blend in. When I did lose myself, I was tapping into some larger communal energy, something inter-galactic. It's amazing what the power of drugs music can do.

Alicia seemed more interested in the better looking club kids but I didn't care--I could dance the night away. "Wait until this next guy comes on," Marius yelled into my ear, "you'll go nuts!" I could give a squirt of piss about who was coming on next because I was on another plane. All the DJ's seemed to have the same move--slowly increase the speed of the rhythm, a burgeoning crescendo that lasts forever until, mercifully, the guy with the mike on stage screams in a jibber jabber non-language (I don't think I would give him enough credit to be called a 'singer') and the beat drops explodes into a dancing frenzy. It's like a wave building up, getting bigger and bigger, just about to break, a perfect curl forming, and then it just fucking CRASHES and you ride that fucker as long as possible. Like your parents, I think it all sounds the same and it's no big deal. I've tried, I really have, to find some redeeming qualities, and I like everything from Refused to Bob Dylan so it's not like I'm narrow minded, musically speaking, but the appeal of dance music is lost on me.

We're back at Marius's apartment. Marius and his girlfriend have retired to the master bedroom and with only one smaller bedroom remaining there wasn't really a decision to be made. I could be a gentleman and offer Alicia the bed on her own and I could lay down on the loveseat with my gangly pasty legs hanging over the edge.

I went to the bathroom for a quick pee and when I entered the bedroom Alicia was already tucked under the covers, laying on her side. I mechanically disrobed down to my boxers and climbed into the bed with her. For a brief moment, a deathly silence befell us as we adjusted to the alien situation. I couldn't tell if she was awake or not, so I mustered up the cajones to inch closer to her body in the darkness. Every little movement was a victory, an advancement further into enemy territory, until I could finally inhale the glory of her dried sweaty essence. I cautiously draped my arm in a bracelet over her t-shirt clad waist, and she emitted a soft moan of delight. How delightful: She's awake and is giving me permission to proceed. I pressed my body up snugly to her backside. My cock was a throbbing jackhammer digging up the Ass Crack Expressway. Her body language was screaming at me to keep going, her ass climbing all over my apparatus. We were essentially dry humping our brains out in the spooning position. And speaking of dry humping, I have this nasty habit of doing that to women, especially if it is the first (and of course, most awkward) encounter, where it's improper to take off your clothes right away. Typically, I don't engage in dry humping because there is no need: I end up dry humping her pussy with my cock, the way God intended. After a few minutes of kissing on some couch or bed, I'm known to start humping at the poor girl like a monkey unable to stop from publicly masturbating. I can't control it, it's simply an evolutionary compulsion.  

Not too long ago I had this one HPOA splayed out vertically on her basement couch and our limbs were entwined, my knee digging into her crotch. I uncontrollably, almost imperceptibly at first, started thrusting whilst on top of this lovely specimen. My primal urges took over and there was no getting them back in their cage. I was going slowly at first but the thrusting generated into a furious ground and pound. 

"Are you dry-humping me?" She asked with a hint of mortification.

I was stunned to a halt, mid-thrust. "Oh, uhh, no. I guess I'll stop. If you want."

She kind of laughed and I blushed and rolled off of her, trying to brace for the oncoming psychic slaughter of a shameful self-pitying depression. Memories!

Anyways, Alicia was cooing, throaty uhhh's and hmmm's radiating from deep within her. I was fairly sure at this point that we were going to copulate and it dawned on me that I didn't have any condoms-- this thought, it's worth noting, rarely dawning on me because I don't usually need condoms when I go out. True story: About a year ago, I actually had a pack of condoms that expired. For a couple years the pack sat in my bathroom cabinet, these neatly coiled up rubber donuts, three quarters full (twelve pack). Every morning when I went for the toothpaste, this box of condoms stood there in stoic judgement, relentlessly mocking my manhood. It's not like a carton of milk going bad. There's a lot more shame to it than that. When the expiry date finally came around, June 2011, I had to begrudgingly toss them out. The last thing I would want to do to a women is put a rotten cock in her cunt. Most condoms out by the dumpster are used, but not mine! But I'm a hopeless optimist--my spirit sings to me, things will turn around.  

Anyways (I know, again) my left hand is moving all over Alicia's stomach and breasts, giving the nipples sensuous tweaks and they harden purposefully into nubs like the eraser on top of a No.2 pencil. I press my body ever closer to her and we are like one being under pressure, giving and taking; my hand glides down the length of her fit thigh and grabs a chunk. I want to just eat her at this point, bite into her haunches and rip off a hunk of chuck. Inevitably, as human behaviour is want to do, since time immemorial, from Apes to Neandrethals, to Insects, and a few North Koreans, my hand moves down to the golden chalice of lust hiding between her legs. The moist pink gates thrust themselves open and rays of light beamed out her oval hole and illuminated our under cover bodies, and I think a fawn went strolling by too. I was in heaven. The glory of vagina!

(I really shouldn't even put this in here, it's a total crowbar job, but it's the only mention of the word 'vagina' in the whole piece and there isn't going to be another one, and also because of my recent un-employment, I have decided to include this...I'm thinking of fresh new ways to generate an income, among them managing a hip new all-girl, all-Chinese pop band, called The VaChina Dollz. Just saying).

My left index finger was fondling her clitoris, and it too, became the eraser on a No.2 pencil. No doubt, that's the sweet spot. Alicia's moans became more guttural, more possessed. Busting a nut in my boxers was fast becoming a distinct possibility so I had to lay it all out there. This is the moment--now is the time--carpie diem--just stick it in her hot wet mess. Somebody's gonna get pregnant, Tracy Morgan bellowed through my head (still high, I guess). I whipped it out, and went to say, "Take your panties off," in as sensous a manner as was possible at 5am after screaming all night, when my bed-mate promptly stiffened up, ice in her veins, and bolted upright, and my left hand jolted back like it was on a hot plate. WHA IN THE FAH?

She then uttered the penultimate phrase, a phrase that no man should have to hear while in bed with a knockout, especially with such emphatic concern. It wasn't a "Hey! What are you doing?" like "I'm saying 'no' but I mean 'yes' keep going." It was "Hey! What are you doing!?" as in "Hey, there's a rapist in my house!" 

I apologized profusely, stunned and disappointed at the same time. Stunned because I thought she was awake and disappointed because there was not going to be any sex. But I was relieved that she wasn't  
infuriated with me.

"It's okay, just let me go to sleep," Alicia said wearily and promptly slipped back into still motion unconsciousness. I rolled over on my back and exhaled, staring at the ceiling. What a life. I tried sleeping, maybe dozed off for an hour or two. 

At about 8am, I was summoned into the stark morning light that's decidedly fetal-position inducing with an Ecstacy and booze hangover. Alicia appeared to be sleeping peacefully on her side of the bed, her body heaving softly, almost imperceptibly.

At some point during the night, I became convinced that I had to apologize to Alicia in the morning for last nights debacle, when our heads were straight. I couldn't just leave without saying anything-- hat would be worse Since I just wanted to go home and lay down in my own bed, I had no choice but to wake her up (again). I jostled her shoulder, "Alicia, wake up. I gotta tell you something."

I began to give her one of those apologies that are prefaced with a sigh and a "Listen..."

She was so dismissive about the whole thing and laughed it right off. Probably shouldn't have even woke her up. I put on last nights sweaty clothes, caught a faint whiff of stale tobacco, and walked out into the hallway of the apartment building. 

I walked like a zombie to the elevators. It was silent and I could hear the gentle hum of life in the building, families waking up to another day. I pressed the domed "L" button and it lit up. I looked back and forth a couple times. Empty. There was no one in sight but I could hear life going on around me. Clanking of plates, children using outdoor voices. A guy laughing, ack-ack-ack at his own joke. The elevator opened and I was swallowed whole. "L" again. I stared forward blankly, thousand yard style. Muzak played from an anonymous radio and I slowly descended until I was no longer there.