Smothering Instinct

I'm extremely forgetful. Perhaps because of my tendency to look below the surface of things and not to stay on top of things? Whatever the reasons, I depend on careful organizational skills and when I find myself under the thumb of the pandemic and not going anywhere there's a tendency to forget about my daily planner which contains (or is supposed to) all my project intentions, chores, appointments and recurring events: everything from teeth-brushing to garbage day to NFL Opening Day.

I sometimes forget to take my meds; both for blood-pressure and the miracle sleep-enabling drug.

Sometimes I forget a couple days in a row and things get sketchy. Recently I went three days in a row without the miracle pill due to a combination of sleep irregularity, lack of organization and terrible service hours/closures of the pharmacy from Friday through Sunday.

The result was the same as the last time I went on a three-day bender. My emotions went right into hyer-drive. While I am always missing a few very dear loved ones and have so since March, a kind of panic sets in in the above circumstance. I feel like something is going to go wrong and I'll never see them again; never hug them; or perhaps that my absence will lead them to forget about me or perhaps to not need me? I don't really understand it. There is no logical interpretation of what I feel; just an extraordinary yearning for certain people.

Certain best friends who I have had in life slipped away from me and lost interest in me despite my continued interest in them. That's probably part of it.

And also being a person who had to fight his way out of the closet in a much earlier day there remains a life-long liability which few straight people could fully comprehend. It lies, normally unwoken, in the pit of every such person who has suffered this adolescent trauma in a less-kind age; as the Eloquent Potter puts it: the fear of being de-grouped. If you know a gay person and you want to utterly kill them just make them feel unwelcome in their established peer group. For us there is nothing crueler.

Now that the internet has given us all a soapbox for preaching our advice any old time at all there's a great tendency to indulge (like yours truly, especially!). But sometimes there's a resentment if we feel that the advice to embrace sacrifice is coming from those who have less to sacrifice. We feel like the call to sacrifice is much stronger when it comes from those who must sacrifice more. This does not reflect on the accuracy or wisdom of the message though!

For instance I am full of parenting advice which I believe in confidently but I rarely ever breathe a word of it because I've never suffered the things which parents must suffer. So my voice is a weaker one. That doesn't mean I'm wrong. It means I'm less trust-worthy.

That's actually a poor example. Here's the point. When my excellent brother and other folks tell me here is the sacrifice we must make in order to ensure our parents health, there is a part of me that knows damn well they are right. But there is another part of me that says "Okay but by the way, go to hell because you have a wife and kids for you to love in your household! I have no one!"

I have a housemate who sleeps two floors above me and a there's her dog too, but these relationships are tricky ones and the love there is not of the sort that seems to keep me alive; not like my family and such dear souls as the Eloquent Potter or Aqualad or Neo for instance.

As much as I adore them, by the way, no one comes close to my Mom. She is number one; our relationship is sacred. But luckily I see her about every five weeks and we either call or skype at least three times a week.  

I found out with certainty after near-thirteen years with Long-Time Companion that the standard relationship model in our society is largely nonsensical to me and that I suck at it either way and since then I cherish close friendships with whom I can share anything (and even the odd one which has edged into sexual behavior though my interest in sex is well into its final hour) and multiple best-friendish companions have in essence replaced the idea of a spouse.

Phone calls and video chats with great friends are great!  But as a person who is starved for physical contact at the best of times these events are simultaneously a reminder of what I am missing.

In my drug-starved despair I hit the facebook status alarm bell, worried or perhaps offended some dear people and an hour later tried to trust my logic and issued a retraction. But the damage was done. Friends of a masculine-problem-solving nature be they men or women; those who rush to fix things as quickly as possible rather than pause to understand them, tried to give me advice; advice I already knew and knew could not satisfy my instinctive perception of my clobbered needs, but bless their kind souls for trying.

Telling a starving man that you have no food, that he'll have to be happy with cigarettes or chewing gum or a harmonica, solves no problems.

I'm a few days back on the pill regular now, and I still miss these people (and some others) quite terribly. But I feel again that this hell-born Covid disaster will surely pass at some point and I will just have to hang on, one way or another, and take my damn pill every day, and pray a vaccine comes to the rescue.

And when this is over I'm coming for you with a giant hug so brace yourself, and just like the childless female penguin who competes so desperately for an available orphan, I'll try not to crush you to death.

The Promise

Tax the Canadian super-rich.

Building the Map Room

Egotistical?

I was thinking about empathy and was suddenly surprised I had not considered something before: That the development of this capacity to generate feelings spawned by another person's experience and not our own - should hardly be surprising; that this capacity and the capacity to appreciate our own experience may in fact be nearly - or else exactly - the same thing.

Identity is a strange thing and largely warped from illusion. I must wonder if feeling something for our own self is (at least for empaths) in fact just empathy - because a human being is not a solitary party. The conscious and extinctive minds are not the same thing and are (I'm inclined to say "in fact") so obviously separate that they must communicate (or more likely eavesdrop) in dreams. 

We do know for fact that the brain is a collection of agencies which lack a stable hierarchy. They have to send communications back and forth.

I know that when I feel strong emotions (good, bad or neither precisely) in regards to my own experience it feels very much like an empathetic experience because I rarely feel much liability if any. It's merely the context which moves me.

I mentioned this to the Eloquent Potter - that I wondered if empathy and attached feelings were in essence the same thing and he seemed to agree. He claimed that empathy was in fact egotistical in nature. I see the point. Common empaths are not psychics. We don't actually feel another's feelings. We feel our own but which are stimulated by the ponderance of another's experience as we interpret it, no matter how close or far we are from the mark.

"Egotistical" sounds like a harsh criticism when I think of some empaths. One dear friend who identifies as such seems never to look down on those she empathizes with but in fact seems to suffer for her gift often more than the actual sufferer does. In fact there are infrequent occasions where I will withhold from her my own unfortunate experience because I feel certain she will hurt for it much more than I am! I'm talking about Dog Whisperer and I freely name her because credit is due. I know she is sincere in her empathetic offerings. She regularly handles her own suffering as well as that of others with generous grace and aplomb. There's a good soul in that woman and I hope she knows it.

Ganges Delta Blues

Tell Biden we don't need another pipeline at an extraordinary expense to the biosphere

Vitality… painted over

Hey so back over to the A-to-Z we’re finally unveiling the previously postponed V-Day. The assignment was too good not to treat right. It came from the valiant, vibrant, venerable, infrequently verbose and too-frequently valedictory; my very valuable friend, life coach and visionary, the venturesome Vietnam Vagabond; the Eloquent Potter. And it is:

Varnish

Varnish is the shit…

…that is everywhere.

Let me look back at just the last, oh, thirty-six hours.

I watched a video about quantizing and auto-tune. Exactly how this shit is done. The anatomy of this phenomena that has made the overly-safe, overly-simplified, corporate-dictated pablum we call main-stream music so grotesque to my ears; so obscenely, vulgarly, morbidly anti-human. Why modern mainstream music reeks of death. It is not real. It is varnish. The musicians who are tricked into selling out have suffocated within this varnish. Of course the saving grace is that there are heaps of amazing music being made every day. You just have to hurl your fucking radio into the fires of Mordor and go looking elsewhere. Bandcamp for instance. Soundcloud.

I stopped for gas and saw that my drink was on sale: three for seven bucks. Varnish, it turned out. I went inside, picked my three and was charged not $7 but $13.

“Huh?” I says.

“Oh the special isn’t working,” says the corporate slave.

The special isn’t working.

When I was young no one ever uttered the words the special isn’t working. No context existed where such a phrase could bear any meaning. If I had said to my English teacher for any reason “the special isn’t working” I would certainly expect to be told I would be repeating the grade.

Oh we had computers when I was young. But computers were still tools at the time; tools which served the user; the human being who operated the computer tool; the human being who still maintained sentience. Today a gas station cashier is literally a tool of the computer.

Of course the pumps themselves are varnish, aren’t they? This is not where oil comes from. It’s ripped out of the ground in manners which compromise the biosphere, it is taken from a place where it served the biosphere as a filter and then it magically makes our car go zoom zoom zoom (a little TV varnish) and what we don’t see through that particular varnish is the cloud of toxins formerly filtered from the ground now being burned and fed to the sky where it will fuck us over real good.

Yesterday morning the alarmingly nervous, high-strung, OCD basket case of a day shift guard came in to relieve me and spotted my coat hanging from the back of a chair. She sputtered and agonized trying to find words for the occasion, finally pointing: “That doesn’t look good!” Coats over chairs is not proper varnish. The reality is that we all use coats. They are not hurting anyone (in the office I mean). If you could actually follow the trail of your coat’s creation you will find harm somewhere. I guarantee it. If not a furry animal or sheep or a sweatshop third world in-effect-slave there are still more avenues of suffering in the trail of a textile factory. Suffering we do not see through the layers of varnish.

I saw the faces of Ford, Trudeau and Trump because you cannot access the internet without their weaselly little faces weaselling onto your screen one creepy way or another. Their entire existence is varnish. They are the curtain between we and those who have our money and control us. They are talking idiot-boxes. They are court jesters, juggling their balls and pretending that they are the real show while they are not.

Maybe we don’t mind living this way. Maybe the varnish is nicer than the reality. And here’s where I get stuck. I know very well that the rewards for embracing reality are so much finer. But to fully explain why will make me sound like religion, when I am not. And so people will turn away. Oh well. Fuck em.

The Venturesome Vietnam Vagabond is an angel to me at times. He is not fooled by anything - anything external anyway. I think he knows that reality is better than varnish.

“Do you have a coaster for me?” I asked.

He laughs and gestures at the grand wooden table with its myriad of markings. It is a mural; a family history. And tonight we will eat well and drink copiously and add another stroke or two to this wooden canvas; this time capsule. And we’ll say not a word about sports, weather or headlines. We’ll unearth more reality and lay ourselves bare. Thank heavens there is still a place to do this.

I could go on and on. Anywhere you look you are seeing varnish. Give it a thought and you'll start to realize the illegitimacy of anything you happen to witness.

Varnish is the shit that is everywhere. It is what we have built our society out of, instead of celebrating life. 

Going East

“I think of it as going east,” said Cat Man. “when I choose which direction to step in any moment; which frame to enter next, knowing that as I turn the world the world turns me.”

“Nice.”

“Because for me East represents the source of my… guiding forces… according to my culture. You would give it a label that suits your own views.”

“No I like that. I’m more directly attuned to Buddhism and Hinduism then the other… philosophies. So yeah. And also the most inspiring thing that’s going on right now is following my friend, the Eloquent Potter on his journey in Cambodia and Vietnam. It’s actually one of the few motivators for me right now. I want to lose enough weight that I could travel there. I want to spend some time away from here… with people who don’t speak my language. I want to communicate primitively and not be shown a person’s menu of insanities so easily. So yeah. Going east.” 

Q is for Quest

From my late teens until the current decade I was strongly motivated by instinctive desires. Overlapping that in the new millennium I was strongly motivated by very noble desires.

And now, for the first time, basically, in memory, there are no strong motivations in me. And I strongly feel that vacancy. How do I take less compelling goals and make them feel urgent enough to motivate me?

One such goal is to become travel-ready. That means weight loss. The Eloquent Potter is off now to Cambodia and Vietnam on his own five-month quest. We both need to find ourselves in various manners of speaking. I fully expect he will move there permanently before long. I will want to visit him there. The idea of a more natural environment and a language gap are so very appealing these days. And I will want to visit India. I may require a long break from this society as a last-ditch effort to maybe learn to love it again. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I have a lot of contempt to get over.

Roller coasters and merry-go-rounds

Ooh, I wouldn’t do that, I thought. No, I wouldn’t do that either... Mmm… I wouldn’t say that... This is too linear and yet unclear….

She had sent me the draft, looking for an honest opinion. Would an honest opinion be possible? The 6-minute oral memoir performance was scheduled for this evening! If there are too many problems with the draft there wouldn’t be time to fix them all. In that case, better to down-play concerns? No sense worrying someone about that which cannot be fixed.

When it comes to storytelling, whether I am on the telling or receiving end, I am firmly in the subtlety camp. Not necessarily on the blog, mind you. When people send me tell-not-show writing, wanting my feedback, I am at a loss. I barely remember my tell-reading days. I can no longer really identify what works and what doesn’t. I eventually tell tellers, "Look: You have to find someone else to beta read for you; someone who gets your style. I’m not in that camp!" So my feedback did not seem to me very useful at all.

I also have no experience at six-minute memoirs (though I was approached by the event organizer last night about my possible future involvement, which indeed interests me as I have always been a natural with public speaking, even when I was a shy, awkward, teenage introvert. Which is rather mysterious I know. I was always instinctively more comfortable talking to an audience than to an individual. Weird is all I can say.

So my friend gets up and reads her piece. And I am completely hooked. The words have not been changed dramatically that I detect. And yes, I would have done it differently, but what she has done, now that it comes from her own mouth, with her own precise tones and inflections, well damn… it’s perfect!

She speaks of her roller coaster love life past, and the merry-go-round that is her stable new relationship. Like a pro, she carries the metaphor through to the inspiring end. I was hugely moved. I was in tears for six minutes. So much panic she had seemed to endure and why? She had it nailed! But what deep courage she needed in order to go through with it, both for obvious reasons and also for “political” ones. Meanwhile I continue to put off the stand-up comedy workshop even though I have several routines prepared because… well, what if I’m not funny?

I write this at the Espresso bar in Little Italy, a block from the Eloquent Potter’s home and looking forward to a major dinner-and-drink binge before he departs for Vietnam for another three month tour. This will be the last before he relocates permanently. I am armed with beer, wine, bread, cheese and a bouquet of flowers. The florists all hugged me; yes hugged me! - when I told them my friend would be leaving permanently! “Oh you must be broken-hearted!” they said. This is riotously funny. I guess when a man buys another man flowers they assume they can only be a gay couple!. It is such a warm moment for them that I just smile and tell them I will be fine! I do nothing to correct them nor to mislead them further.

The potter has made great strides learning a ridiculously difficult language and planning a new business and new life abroad, in a beautiful ancient culture.

I was once extraordinarily courageous. Then I became largely a chicken-shit again; just a wiser one. Today I am in awe of the courage of my sweet friends.

I can smell the leaves

I left the house this cool grey wet afternoon and was promptly aroused by the seeming freshness of the air. I breathed deep, buoyed by it, and by the lingering afterglow of another (almost bi-weekly) fine dinner at the home of the Eloquent Potter. We ate well of course, and drank the passable wines I scrounged, and explored his very exciting 12-book series which tackles deep existential questions, and more importantly we bared ourselves; our most pertinent personal issues and were then of great comfort to one another, and through no perfunctory sympathy but through genuine sensitivity and honest logical insight. He was thrilled with the fresh flowers and I’m happy that he was, and happy for the inspiration he reliably imparts on me.

I breathed deep and wondered at this freshness as I trod over mats of wet tattered leaves; wondered at all this decay and the seeming incongruence between decay and freshness. But all impressions are relative I suppose, and I suppose that if decay were indeed a notable component of this invigorating aroma, that perhaps it is because it masks things of a worse nature... Whimsical thoughts these, but as I head out to the the write-in; a pre-NaNoWriMo prep-in to be more precise, I am okay with that.

Hello Blog. I’m sorry to have been such a stranger. I have better intentions but promises would be foolish. 

Dinner with the Potter

No others were available for our gaming group night but we two gathered anyway. I suppose I looked forward to it even more so than the previous occasion when we five played Tokaido. For I would have the potter to myself and surely gain some insight into the living experience of this significant poet; this capable witness to the universe.

The home-made bread was joyfully sustaining; the pulled pork superbly spiced. The competent Californian red was overly chilled and delayed while we divvied a magnum of white.

Dear Doctor Lock; his brother and my excellent old pal, had generously prepared us, each with praise for the other, and so we fell quickly into comfortable openness.

I garnered a valuable pointer or three with regards to the craft of writing both poetic and prosaic. There were books, films and at least one album demanding purposeful reflection. We bared ourselves much; confessed unashamedly. We had to speak of parents passed on, of course, and I shed brief tears for the departed father person of mine, for the first time since the event, when I abandoned him to pass away in no presence of love from me; one of my great sins for which I still owe the universe (what price I don’t yet know).

He praised me too much and he trusted me very much - as one is always safe to do. As such, I offer no particulars here, for this blog evolved before I did, beginning not quite as anonymously as I should have preferred.

But he allowed me to an inner place where the building blocks of his life took shape but with holes of course; one in particular which he can not abide. I understand his wish; his plight. There are commonalities in the way we fiercely love. He is looking far away at the possibility of harmony. I looked that way too once, for reasons less informed or pertinent, but it is one of many parallels.

We hugged warmly and parted with the promise to reconnect and where I vowed to properly share my own great struggle. I know that his counsel will be wise and so I am already comforted!

We had crossed paths before of course; twice at his own lofty abode. And so the next day his message, as with any proper poet, was precise: It was great to meet you, man.

Avitable Scramble Aroma edition

Thirteen thoughts in thirteen minutes:

1, I’m at the Aroma cafe at Euclid and College in Toronto because I’m way too special to be subjected to Q.E.W. rush hour traffic and so I make this apparently-now-regular trip from 2 to 3 PM and then hang out at the cafe-du-jour until the 6:30 dinner appointment at the Eloquent Potter’s tower.

2. I’m trying not to think about Neo these days. He’s back to mostly ignoring me. I wonder sometimes if he came back into my life specifically to torture me. I wonder if he knows how his behaviour is perceived when he continuously ignores me between offers of “Hey, let’s get together… when are you free?” followed by an immediate blackout period until the threat of getting together has passed. I keep trying to remind myself that this must be the product of some form of suffering and that I should not take it personally but it's very difficult.

3. I’m thinking of a very thoughtful and touching amateur documentary that was put together by a father and which mostly concerned his son, then teen-aged. At one point he narrates something  

like this: “I’m sure that teenage boys do not realize that their own fathers would literally murder them if not for the memory of the loving child they used to be.” I’m confident he was sane and sincere about that. I’ll get back to you with the title when it comes to me..

4. I paid twenty dollars for a fairly decent shredded steak and egg sandwich and a nice coffee in a bignormous wide cup which spills into the voluminous saucer every time this hysterically warped-legged table rocks back and forth as if it’s the Titanic’s final moments. I wedged enough napkins to supply the nation of Malta for a decade under one of the offending table feet to very little improvement.

5. Every time the saucer fills up with coffee I lift the cup and pour the saucered-coffee back into the cup. It’s a satisfactory system.    

6. Once you love a kid like your own son there is no going back, Ever. It’s just not possible. It’s a fucking life sentence. I mean - let’s face it: consciously I know that’s not really supposed to be true. Just like the spectre of rape, war or any traumatic event, it is fully possible to dismiss the past and experience no harm from it ever again. I know this with solid uncompromising clarity, The past does not exist. We subconsciously choose to hang on and we call this hanging on “scars.” But it takes oh god such a spectacular escape from the bullshit of our dedicated bullshit-only society to be so enlightened as to understand and conquer your own illusionary ego. No cell phone, no TV, no pal, parent, priest, politician or ubiquitous fucking corporation will ever let you get away with it if they can possibly help it. There is no sanity without firm and dedicated solitude. Except for - you know - hanging out with me!

7. I can’t imagine living in Toronto with a vehicle. Finding parking arrangements that are at all functional is like winning the lottery. Which is fine I guess. I used to park in my special little-known free parking place near the Islington station and take the subway in from there but I can’t do that any more because I am literally so decrepit I can’t carry my own briefcase more than a block and frankly I’m a little too attached to my laptop. It’s perhaps my own version of the dreaded cell phone at times.

8. This Aroma place must be a chain. It is exceptionally well-branded. Aroma notebooks $6.95. I don’t think you can get anything for less than $6.95. My sandwich is listed on the menu board for $6.95. but SURPRISE!! That’s actually the price for half the sandwich! If you want the whole sandwich you find out too late that it’s actually $13 and change. Hahahahahahahaha! Buyer beware! It’s utterly fucking amazing what a pathetic docile flock of dumbass sheep we are and what we let all our masters get away with. I’m sure we must be the most obedient morons on the Earth.

9. I think thirteen minutes expired a long time ago. I don’t care. It’s my blog. I make and/or ignore the rules on a whim. If corporations can do it so can I. Yay!!.

10. Speaking of some of the most evil and demonic maggots in the world… Monsanto believes they have the right to subpoena my personal information and communications along wiith thousands of other half-decent citizens for the world as part of a lawsuit against the entire Avaaz community for fucking with them and ruining many of their sickeningly corrupt cancerous schemes in which people and other innocent creatures die or are monstrously extorted for their immense profit. Personally I think that every Avaaz member should relinquish to this move but only after each and every one of us communicating conflicting plans around operations in which all Monsanto executives are to be kidnapped and have their leathery parasitic throats slit. Let them try to figure out which plan is the real one.

11. People often think I’m joking when I’m serious; and serious when I’m joking. Sometimes I appreciate the amusement in this.

12. The eloquent potter is a very interesting dude. He’s a very compelling writer and poet; a regular visitor to India and perhaps a seeker of enlightenment to some degree. His home is filled with his pottery and other art, bookshelves galore and… ready for this? A swarm of inflatable monstrosities. A giant inflatable donut. An inflatable Dalek. I don’t even know where he gets this shit. On my last visit the centrepiece on his dinner table was a slightly larger-than-life inflatable cooked turkey.

13. Tonight it’s just the two of us for the first time. I am very much looking forward to learning more about him.

Return of the Avitable Scramble

Forgive me father for I have sinned. My last avitable scramble was back in September 2012.

1. I’m at a Portuguese restaurant for the first time ever. On College Street in The Big Smoke. It’s lovely. The waiter dressed all in black with shiny slick black hair is also lovely. He informs me that he has excellent skin because of the healthy Portuguese diet.

2. I ordered a meat sampler dish and found something on it rather distinctive and almost beef-like but with a decidedly avian bone structure. Weird.

3. I am here because the Ponderer suggested I travel early in order to miss the tres horrible rush hour mess that will decimate the Q.E.W. highway at the strike of three. Indeed my trip was a breeze and now I’m in town three hours early.

4. I’m invited to Doc Lock’s brother’s place - wait! Doc Lock’s brother has his own alias. He has appeared in this blog before. The Potter? The something-Potter? The Eloquent Potter? Damned if I remember. I will have to look it up.

5. It’s a game night tonight. We’re to play Takaido. I have done my homework by watching a Takaido-featured episode of Table Top - hosted by Wil Wheaton who once played…. Gordie?? Maybe?? in the Stand By Me film which is based solidly on the Stephen King novella The Body.

6. I have to finish the last couple chapters of The Dark Tower by Stephen King which is the final book of the wildly distinct and compelling series of the same name. I keep putting it off, not wanting the series to end. It will probably mark the end of my Stephen King experience. But I must move on if I am to get on to Soul of the Orcs which is a sequel to Lord of the Rings written by none other than my host tonight: the something-Potter. Or Sculptor. Not Potter? The something-Sculptor? And there I have gone full circle. Did you see that! Did you see what I did there?

7. My butt hurts from sitting here for nearly three hours.

8. I am assembling my first ever video compilation in order to support an upcoming blog piece. A very similar compilation almost certainly exists somewhere on youtube already but - I don’t know. I want to do my own. Maybe because it indulgently qualifies as a creative project which I can work on even when tired. Which is far too often.

9. I have no idea if Doc Lock will even be here tonight.

10. According to the excellent-skinned waiter I have eaten quail for the first time! Mystery solved. Damn. My only familiarity with quails up to now have been with cute live ones. [insert sad emoji]

11. My eyes have been continually drawn to the TV here which is blessedly silent but full of images and text of the CNN variety. I can’t describe how dog-vomiting stomach-turning this silent lunacy appears to me. HOW in the flying fuck do CNN watchers not go running screaming into traffic after ten minutes of this vacuous quasi-political horse shit? By god the human creature is a wonder.

12. That didn’t sound judgemental did it? Just a little bit?

13. How many items are in an Avitable Scramble? Thirteen? Wouldn’t twelve make more sense? After all, twelve is so preferable a number to thirteen that the ancient Babylonians assassinated an entire constellation just to bring the zodiac into groovy twelvacious compliance. Which is not precisely the reason that me and most of my “Capricorn” companions are actually mislabelled denizens of Sagittarius. That has more to do with the twenty-five thousand year wobble period in the Earth’s rotation. Regardless, there is just no way for the doubly-screwed astrology community to explain their way out of their mess.

I’m not sure that was a proper scramble. It seemed to be more of a narrative, didn’t it? I will try to be more random next time.

Fact check: Wheaton's character was indeed named Gordie Lachance. The potter has not received a consistent nickname but shall forthwith be favoured with the moniker: the Eloquent Potter! 

$526 for a limp rocket

Went to see the IMAX film Roving Mars. Me and five friends. Spent the night prior at Peter Pan's house.

"Don't stay up too late," I said. "We have to leave by 11:30 tomorrow."

"Don't worry about me," he said.

I went to bed knowing it would take a miracle to get us away on time. Pan's late for everything. Always.

At 11:00 AM, still in pyjamas, he asks, "What time do we have to leave?"

I cut him some slack and tell him the truth. "11:45." Now, this is not in accordance with standard Pan handling procedures. You're supposed to pad the departure time by an hour until the day of the event and then by a half-hour the day of. I`m giving him way too much credit.

At 11:30 he asks how much time he's got. I tell him, fifteen minutes, and he takes Zee, Prince of Canine Chaos, for a short walk.

He returns at 12:00. I remain calm. Life is circumstance and choices. My choices enabled this circumstance to arise. I know how he is.

We get a little bad weather on the way, and a little traffic, and arrive late in Little Italy where we are picking up the Worldly Sculptor, who's greatest phobia in life, it turns out, is the fear of being late.

As the organizer of this outing, I wish not to screw things up for the others who are meeting us at the Ontario Science Centre where I must be present to receive the tickets that I ordered on everyone`s behalf. But I'm perfectly calm. It's pointless to stress over it. Circumstances and choices. One choice at my disposal, is to take my lumps if we're late and to avoid such circumstance in the future by declining Pan`s participation in similar - time sensitive - outings.

"We're meeting the boys at 1:45," I say calmly and pleasantly. "You`ll get us there on time, Pan, or else you`ll be thrown into a pit of starving wolves."

We arrive roughly 1:58 and scramble into the theatre during the trailers. Being late, we`re seated at the perimeter.

Now - I`d never seen an IMAX film before. Or should I say - CMAX. Because the screen is dome shaped, looming over and around you, and when you`re seated at the perimeter, the perspective is altogether wonky. Things that should be straight up and down - like a rocket, or the letter 'I' for instance, are shaped instead, like the letter 'C'. The whole film was warped to shit. Didn`t enjoy that one bit. Luckily it was no great loss for me. Turns out I`d seen this film previously on my home screen sans CMAX effect.

Everyone else seemed to get a kick out of it though, and took the flaccid rockets in stride.

The Facing Mars exhibit also failed to impress. It was more for kids or for adults who don`t normally take a big interest in planetary science. Given my passion for the subject, it was silly perhaps to have expected to see something new here.

Although I did get a kick out of the martian meteorite sample and the video clips of various experts talking on the subject of sending people to Mars. I listened to a Planetary Scientist, an Aerospace Engineer and a Bioethicist. The last offering was from a Globe and Mail Writer. I walked away at that point.

The bill was $26 each for the total Mars experience - but wait - there`s more. Dinner at the Biermarket cost Pan another hundred. He insisted on it being a birthday present.

And then, on the way back to Hamilton, despite my assurance that the wolf threat had expired, he took the highway too swiftly given the snowy weather, and lost control; went into a spin. Oddly, I felt no panic at all. We bounced off a snowbank and came to rest, backwards on the shoulder.

The bumper was dented and cracked. A pricey affair but Pan is a champion at getting deals and swears it`ll only cost him $400.

Epilogue:

Back in Steeltown, on the heels of five beers, I trudged eight or ten blocks through heavy snowfall to see the I.S. A mickey of scotch seemed to evaporate and then the wine came out. I never noticed how drunk I was. The I.S. did though, upon driving me back to Pan`s at five in the morning and putting up with me when I cried like a baby and wouldn`t let go the embrace.

Late afternoon, my head still splitting, I`m awakened by the phone call. I apologize for my poor behavior and am told there is nothing to apologize for. I`m told we`re all allowed our moments. We all have to have them now and then, and that, hey, with my move to Hamilton soon, we`ll see plenty of each other. So cheer up.

I guess I'm spoiled. Every now and then I want too much. I have to remember how very thankful I am for what I've got.

Length matters

I prefer them long. Don’t you? Weekends, that is?

Saturday night – had a great chat with Doctor Lock concerning life after full-time corporate enslavement. Not that he’s retired, mind you. He just never went out for that whole full-time career thing to begin with. He had some great advice. On that note I must also credit Porn King and Matman for their kind ears and recent council on these matters and helping to keep me grounded.

The evening began at Doc Lock’s mom’s place where birthday celebrations took place amidst rather unique surroundings. The exterior of her home bears an ornate, almost spooky aura while inside it’s just plain eccentric. We have poems written on doors and running up the stairwell. We have a commercial size map of the entire New York City subway system in the hallway. The walls all bear the artwork of their owner, her late husband, and of the three sons who grew up within them. We have loaded bookshelves in every room (nothing wrong with that, I hope). A collection of handmade crowns – each fit for a king – though built of non-precious metals and stones. We have Christmas lights, a chandelier made entirely of artificial flowers (non-luminous) and a television set that has never been watched since the screen was painted over with a crude yet perfectly recognizable image of the Cleaver family – Wally, Beaver, June and Ward.

A stained-glass artwork bears one diamond-shaped tile that is perfectly the size of a soda cracker. This is obvious as this one sector contains no glass but rather – a soda cracker. This particular biscuit has occupied the spot about ten years and still looks good as new!

Oh – almost forgot. The sculpture titled Baby Jesus Bomb Factory. What does it look like? Exactly like a Baby Jesus Bomb Factory, of course. Next visit I must snap a picture of this and send it to Flumadiddle.

The birthdays in question belonged to Doc Lock and his brother, the sculptor. I made two ridiculous errors. One. I didn’t wrap Doc Lock’s gift in a railway or subway transit map, as everyone else did. Apparently I’m the last of his associates to underestimate the depth of his love of the tracks. Two – I got confused and thought it was Mamma Lock’s birthday instead of the sculptor’s. I gave her a cute little book clip. Her birth date is in November so this gift comes six months early. Or late. Take your pick. I told the sculptor he could choose any item belonging to Mom and take it home. Then we’d all be square.

Now – if you think these folks sound a bit like freaks, let me say, yes, they sort of make their own rules in life. But trust me - they’re qualified to do so.

Consider this batch of freaks I encountered later that night – like – 2:00 AM or so. I was attacked by a terminal case of the yumblies on the way home and got caught in the tractor-beam of the Death Star – I mean – the Golden Arches. MacDonald’s. Not the Death Star. Two spots away from the pick-up window all hell broke loose. Hooligans tried to extort extra product out of the management by refusing to move their car. I was imprisoned within a long line of cars for twenty-five minutes until Ronald’s boys finally called the police. Luckily I always keep a book in the truck so I was kept entertained by Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the robot on their journey to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Sunday. I hosted Skeeter Willis and his Port Credit Cardinals for the Strat-o-matic 2008 Benko Cup finals. I lost in the seventh game. This is the third time in four years I’ve gone to the finals the favored team and lost. I’ve decided to stop trying to win. I’m changing my name from the Ybor City Tabaqueros to the Ybor City Bridesmaids and going for the world record for championship losses. Wish me luck.

Monday. My folks invited Peter Pan up to the farm for dinner and I felt obliged to participate. Zee the Lanky Doberman also came along and had a marvelous time running all over hell’s forty-nine acres and playing tag with Pan’s gas-powered remote control truck.

During dinner, Zee, not allowed in the house, would alternate which dining room window she would stand upright and glare at us through. Finally she gave that up. Then the doorbell rang. And rang and rang and rang. We found Zee standing upright at the front door with one paw firmly on the doorbell. I kid you not.

Other than that barrel of laughs we spent all day either watching TV or talking about the dog. I survived the boredom and lived to tell about it.

So there.