Once, the firm held an offsite “retreat”, and six of us junior associates got to go along. It entailed a great deal of Laphroaig and Barolo as well as a few token workshops to make the booze deductible as a business expense. In one session, a consultant administered a personality test. Five of us scored as extreme Alphas. We found that hilarious and yapped and argued over who was whose bitch. The sixth associate did not join in. He was not an Alpha but a laidback Delta; he was laid off before Christmas. Dog eat dog, that was our ethos.
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Archimedes had observed an intriguing relationship between a circle’s circumference and its radius: it was constant! He’d publish the finding immediately, but he had to come up with a term. He couldn’t think . . . Mrs. Archimedes kept banging around next door. “Would you please,” he said, barging into the kitchen. “I’ve just discovered—”
From the moment I moved into the trailer park, I schemed to get the hell out. An early get rich plan involved the manufacturing of classy nautical barware. Overhead was small and involved only a Ronco Bottle and Jar Cutter. The raw materials were readily available as Old Spice Aftershave was the only thing Dad ever got for presents in both the Father’s day 2.5 oz (shooter) and Christmas 4.75 oz (tumbler) sizes. Unfortunately the chief investor refused funding. I was too young and dad came into the marriage with only eight fingers, so mom would have none of it.
The concrete floor of the new outdoor bandstand was still wet to the touch. On a lover’s whim they pressed their hands into it, flat-palmed but fingers linked together. Then they added their initials. Two weeks later the pair were back, dancing to Moonlight Serenade. In fifteen days he was dead, his Spitfire shot down over the North Atlantic. After a while she married a banker from the Caisse Populaire. They had three children. She died in 2000 at the age of eighty. Their ghost hands remained entwined until the building was torn down to make way for a St-Hubert’s.  |
| Edvard Munch, The sick child 1896 |
Everything’s getting downsized these days, even clothing. People feel better about themselves in a smaller size, even though they’re deluding themselves. It’s a mind game, and studies show that manufacturers accommodate it along socio-economic lines: expensive brands are sized smaller than cheaper brands. A woman may be a 0 or a 2, depending on what she paid for her jeans. |
| The Rape of Europa by Félix Vallotton |
Holidays with cousin Sandy were edifying. Depending on where she was in life I learned about typing, intercourse, neon tetras or how to clean a bag of weed. One visit found her dabbling in witchcraft. Always her fartleberry, I too had to dip my toe into the dark arts. I bought a book and read through it, my Catholic sensibilities suppressing the ancient woodcuts of naked potbellied waifs and their goaty familiars. Until one evening the summer breeze slammed my bedroom door shut. My framed picture of Diefenbaker leapt from the wall and I decided instead to become a pirate. 
Our first bike trip began with Andrew stuck on the idea of dispensing our food from ziploc bags. His theory was these would be easier to pack than boxes and would get smaller with every meal. In practice, it made his panniers unmanageable, the bags burst at the slightest impact, and he ended up trailing juice crystals most of the way to Orangeville. By then I thought he’d given up on the system, until I caught him repackaging the granola we’d just bought for breakfast, then caught myself considering the efficiencies of ziplocking Andrew and heading home on my own.
Wednesday was movie night in our little village on the edge of the Kalahari. We showed up at sunset not caring what film would show. The screen was an exterior wall, and everyone – locals, the few expats – sat beneath the southern constellations to watch, enthralled. That’s where I saw Zulu Dawn, in which Zulu warriors unexpectedly triumph over a modern British army. Burt Lancaster, playing an enlightened British officer, falls valiantly in battle – a scene calculated to generate sympathy in filmgoers. But that night, the crowd cheered enthusiastically at his skewering, and I realized how far I was from home.
The serviette fell from Terry’s lap and as she bent to retrieve it she glanced at the circle of Tevas parked under the adjacent table. A Fred Flintstone convention, one of the delegates attached to a piston-like leg that bounced up and down in nervous excitement. Straightening, she chanced a look at their faces, big, happy and red with too much microbrew and rib marinade. Although it was dusk each had prehensile sunglasses perched on a gelled head or hugging the back of a tanned neck. Together they remembered the words to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and sang it out loud.
Rusty sits on a rattan loveseat in her lanai. A small stack of 1963 headshots await the three fans who serendipitously found her website after trolling for old people porn. She picks up a photograph and begins. “Dear Walter, may all your ups and downs be in….” She hesitates and a pun comes weakly, “Bedford!” Then finishes off with her signature “Knockers Up! Rusty XO.” Morty is next and then a longer salutation for Bill who ordered her Banned in Boston CD. Her pink caftan rustles when she puts down the pen and massages her fingers, all marbles and bones.
X, you will remember, is the independent variable which determines the value of the dependent variable, Y. 
“And now it begins.” sighed Fiver, sniffing the air, his half-chewed carrot left to one side.
There were certainties when we were youngsters. Canada was the best country in the world. The U.S. was good, too, our best friend, and we were Americans also because we lived in North America and talked like them (especially the ones who’d freed the slaves). We were also part of that pink grouping on the globe, and all those pink countries were good, because they stood for fair dealing and wise governance by white people. Riots, strikes and human rights violations were the work of evil, godless communists. 
He always hated libraries and all those irritating readers, their noses stuck into books. It was all he could do to get through The Tower Treasure without moving his lips. The creepy bookish types were comfortable in the silent stacks while the telltale rasp of thigh meeting Husky-sized corduroys betrayed his every movement. Back in the classroom others soared ahead to the green and the gold sections of the SRA Reading Lab yet he forever treaded aqua. But he was good at football and he would show them. Right after he finished that bucket of Lil’ Henry VIII Buster Fries. 
They are old now, and dying off, men who only reluctantly acknowledge who they were in their youths: a teenaged stoker on a sea-tossed corvette, an air-sick tail gunner over Hamburg, a starving POW in Yokohama. These are men who stand when a woman enters the room, whose strongest curse is “damn” or “hell”. They offer details shyly, as if they could not possibly matter and you, a kid, could not possibly be interested. They never dwelt upon themselves, nor needed a reality TV show to demonstrate their worth. They did so early on, then got on with their lives.
So if our Twin Mayors can’t pick Margaret Atwood out from a crowd, and they believe that pools and libraries and art galleries are things other people use, what does culture mean to them? Dinner theatre at His Majesty’s Feast? The 99 Burger at Wayne Gretsky’s? At the end of the day do they sink into their leather sectionals, their flubbery pink arses encased in Windriver sweatpants and crack open a Tom Clancey? I see kitchen design inspired by the Olive Garden. And the art on their walls? How about an autographed jersey from Dougie Gilmour’s rookie year? Totally bitchin’
So, I ride up slowly to one of those girls that work the corner at King and Wilson Park. It’s a cold night and already she’s sizing me up . . . like she usually takes her dates down to the parking lot at Sunnyside or maybe one of the alleys off Queen, but how in the world are we going to get anywhere on a fucking bicycle? But there she has me all wrong, because I’m really a lot more lonely than I look.
Incorrect: Click Send, and your message will be delivered to the R-Mail Server.
Correct: Click Send, and your message is delivered to the R-Mail Server.Using the future tense, especially when describing features or functions, can be confusing. It might even lead our customers to believe that what you’re describing isn’t possible now, but will be at some point or perhaps in some future release of our software . . . and you certainly wouldn’t want to get their hopes up.
“No, I did not ‘anticipate the scourge tobacco would become’,” Walter Raleigh replied tersely. “The Indians enjoyed a pipe and didn’t go overboard. They seemed perfectly healthy.”
Two ancient sisters run a tiny German gift shop. For decades locals go there for their delicate foil-wrapped Christmas chocolates, but clientele is waning. That’s because these gals have a hate-on for children ever since Hansel and Gretel escaped their clutches back in 1812. Now, child hating is completely condoned, even encouraged in my house, but it’s absolute fiscal suicide on Roncesvalles. They might not like little Mack mouthing their baguettes, but successful shopkeeps know that if they don’t welcome the Lululemoned and their Hummer-sized prams into their establishments with open bpa-free arms, they’ll be consumer toast before long.
“What’s the first thing that attracted you to me?” she asked, head resting on my shoulder.
Ted tried to convince his brother Ernie that he could stop being queer if he only bought a Cordoba. He urged him to forget the Euro-gay lines of the contemplated Pacer and embrace this manliest of coupes, a vehicle so macho it had the power to convert even the most committed fag. And more: the debt of such a large purchase kept him at Chryslers, and the tactile bliss of rich Corinthian leather engendered a pleasing placebo effect, assuring Ernie’s place within the closeted folds of family BBQs and Knights of Columbus spaghetti dinners. It would be a sweet ride.
Comes a time in a man’s life when he must face a digital exam. I don’t mean one involving bits and bytes. This one involves an old fashioned digit. And you don’t exactly face your examiner.
In the summer of 1972 the toads came out of the bush. Tons of them. It was like a plague upon the trailer park, punishing us for our ungodly lawn ornaments. Being resourceful urchins we invented the Webbwood Estates Toad Olympics and it was here that I discovered my gift. Fellow wranglers would bring me their exhausted athletes and I’d resuscitate them by flipping them over and rubbing their warty tummies. My reputation as a healer spread as far as Carolyn Buckwheat’s house, meaning that it successfully crossed the highway. Which is more than I can say for the toads. 
