about-face /əˌboutˈfās/

I was perhaps seven or eight years old; Eddie significantly older. He was our leader. The two of us left the stairwell on an arbitrary floor and immediately the posse appeared ahead of us coming around the corner at the end of the long hallway: the dark-skinned girl and her sister and her mother who held a page in her hands. It was Eddie’s note with the F-word scrawled in extra big letters. I didn’t know what all the small writing said. We spun 180 degrees and fled back to the stairwell to try another floor.

But the rouse was in vain. I had to go home and face the music. We had earlier spied our pursuers at my apartment door, speaking with my parents.

At my bedside, my parents had a talk with me. “No,” I said. “It wasn’t my writing. Eddie wrote it. I don’t know what it said.”

The next day I apologized to the Indian girl and her family. She remained fond of me, and I never played with Eddie again.

abound /əˈbound/

Cars and cows and cars and cows and cars and cows and cars and cows and cars and cows and cars and cows and cars and cows and cars and cows and cars and cows and cars and cows. Say it ten times quickly.

abort /əˈbôrt/

It’s largely accepted that the young people who concocted my creation were foolish enough to attempt marriage for the solitary reason that was me.

I have never asked what the runner-up option was. I’m not sure I want to know.

aboriginal /ˌabəˈrijənl/

Long long ago in a galaxy way too close for comfort, one of the douchiest douchebags in human history – I think his name was Christopher Columbus – paid a visit to the Americas, bringing its indigenous peoples the gifts of smallpox, patriarchal greed, the grooviest ever gender-ambiguous Spanish fashions and, last but not least, a new name: Indians.

Indians, he called them because he didn’t realize what hemisphere he was in. Nice try Chris.

More than 560 years later I still cannot say the word Indians without knowing if I've been understood. Have we still not figured out the difference between First Nations peoples (or Native Americans if you’re south of the 49^th parallel) and people from the nation of India? Do we need to sit down and get this sorted out once and for all?

I've got a job, I explore
I follow every little whiff
And I want my life to smell like this:
To find a place, an ancient race
The kind you'd like to gamble with
Where they'd stamp on burning bags of shit

-The Tragically Hip (song: Looking For a Place to Happen)

abominable /əˈbäm(ə)nəb(ə)l/

I fail to see what is supposedly so ghastly about an extra-tall snowman. Far more loathsome, I suggest, is the miniature snowman who looks up at him and says, “Oh! You must play basketball!”

Kudos, I say, to the former pro basketball player who confessed to losing his patience with a little old lady who asked this same question, based only on her observation of his loftiness. “No!” he lied, looking down on her. “Do you play mini-golf?”

image property of Pop Art Decoration

A-bomb /ā′bŏm′/

Here’s a fun little murder by numbers exercise. I think you’ll like it:

#10: Yang Xinhai of China was credited with 67 murders by axe, meat cleaver, shovel etc. before being executed in 2004.

#9: India’s Kampatimar Shankariya hammered at least seventy people to death in the course of two years until he was hanged in 1979.

And now we move to South America for the crème de la crème of non-state-sponsored killers:

#8: Since Brazil has a thirty-year cap on prison sentences, that’s all Pedro Rodrigues Filho got for taking 71 lives and claiming responsibility for at least thirty more. Included among his victims was his own delicious father who’s heart Filho did some nibbling on.

#7. Columbia, officially world’s worst place to be if you’re an unaccompanied child, was home to Daniel Camargo, strangler of at least 72 virgin girls; possibly as many as 150. He escaped Columbian prison, resumed his hobby in Ecuador and was there caught and murdered while in jail.

#6. Pedro Lopez confessed to killing 300-plus girls and was convicted for 110 of them. He was released from that same Columbian prison in 1998. Current whereabouts unknown.

#5. Columbia’s king of child-murderers, Luis Garavito, a.k.a. La Bestia confessed to the murder of 140 street children in the course of five years and was suspected of about 300 more.

Moving on to the real pros:

#4. U.S.A. president Harry S. Truman directed the efficient deaths of at least 129,000 Japanese civilians, largely women and children, by means of atomic bomb. There were plans for three bombings but he quit after two on account of being such a humanitarian. He passed away in a medical center at the age of 88 and has received many honors from adoring Americans.

#3. Cambodian dictator Pol Pot drove up to three million of his own citizens to death through executions and predatory policies.

#2. Joseph Stalin’s communist regime is open to debate in terms of its murderousness but its victims are widely agreed to be in the order of millions.

#1. And of course… Germany’s wacky and lovable Chancellor Adolf Hitler, through his spiffy S.S. organization, orchestrated the murders of approximately eleven million victims including two-thirds of all European Jews. He had specific plans for the dispatch of another thirty million lives if he had won his little war. Alas, he did not. But he did manage to add a last-minute tally to his score by taking his own life; undoubtedly his single greatest achievement.

abolish /əˈbäliSH/

He was running for election in the federal riding of Hamilton Mountain in 1993, representing the new Reform party; the brainchild of a couple of jolly old fellows by the name of Preston Manning and Stephen Harper. Standing outside his campaign office on Upper James Street, he told me that as a white male I was currently, in effect, the most persecuted “minority” in the country, but not to worry, for his party was destined to take power, not immediately, but by the following election in 1997, and that gradually, over the course of years, his party would roll back immigration levels until finally the borders would close entirely. I was amused by these multiple layers of deranged idiocy but was careful to exhibit no reaction to his claims, either positive or negative. I wanted to hear his spiel in its most honest form.

Where are these honourable men now, you ask?

Craig B. Chandler

Currently Craig Chandler is a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta where he is well known for publicly opposing gay-straight alliances in schools and, not surprisingly, same-sex marriage. Renowned homophobe and all-around brontosaurus Preston Manning officially retired from politics in 2002, while Stephen Harper, if you’re Canadian, is your very own Prime Minister. Sorry about your luck.

abode /əˈbōd/

It was many abodes ago when I last thought of a dwelling as home. My organic urges have become entirely nomadic. But the systems of our society hold me back from that way of life: health care, taxation, government ID, licensing, provincial jurisdiction, land ownership, arbitrary bylaws.

Stability breeds capitulation, dullness, wealth and poverty.

aboard /əˈbôrd/

A black hole falls through space, a galaxy of stars circling, pulled along with it, and towed by them: the planets and moons, and with one particular planet: you and me.

Universe, galaxy, star, planet, passenger. All the same thing: hierarchies of revolution; matter and energy in temporary forms. All propelled by a big bang, perhaps just one big bang of many.

Perhaps this space we call the universe is but one sector of a bigger multiverse, one sector just waiting to collide with another.

abnormal /abˈnôrməl/

Send me the loners, the misfits, the criminals. Send me the artists, musicians and writers. Send me the dreamers. Send me the abused. For the outsiders there is always hope and opportunity for change. For the soldiers of normalcy there are only the walls of normal, blocking great vistas of reality from perception.

abnegate /ˈabniˌɡāt/

I do not respect any law, imagining that it is right. I regard the law for the sake of the comfort of those who mistake it for right.

This is no kind of anarchy. I respect harmony instead, which the law often flirts with and rarely champions.

ablution /əˈblo͞oSHən/

I know now the illusion of continuity; the sense of self, when in fact the human being is a new person with every new moment.

But as some do, I underwent changes of a sweeping nature. Can I then forgive myself for my sins of the past?

I can accept the causal reality; be at peace with it; yes. But I cannot regain the freedom lost. That man is gone. There is only the future. The sins of relevance now, are those yet to come.