Don’t Quit Your Day Job

Everyone but me is retiring. I had no plans to until I met Joanne from Kingsville. Joanne takes daily walks around the subdivision—the one behind the Zehrs—and returns deliciously scrappy.
     One day, she fired up her Facebook and posted that she counted seven—SEVEN—recycle bins that had been incorrectly placed, barcodes facing in, handles facing out, some left teetering, most lawlessly crooked.
     “Folks!” she PSA’d, “the barcodes should FACE the street!”
     She is my C.A.R.P. lodestar. She completes me. I want to hold hands and walk about, our feet pale as chicken meat in low-profile Mephistos.

Inspired by Weird Sudden Changes. Image from the Kingsville Ontario Recycling Schedule.

Weird Sudden Changes

The way I see it, maybe me and my planet are just growing old and decrepit together. And maybe the summers are getting hotter, because I sure as hell don’t remember sweating like this when I was a kid, or maybe I just didn’t care, and I just never noticed the weight I was putting on—that is, until the moment my innie became an outie; because, just like the planet, it is just me getting older and more prone to weird sudden changes.

     Oh, and if you haven’t already figured it out, I’m pretty sure I’m getting dumber, too.

Inspired by Just Weather. Image by the Meta AI.

Just Weather

“But temperatures are rising…”

     “It’s summer. It’s supposed to be hot.”

     “But I mean, we’re setting records. In Europe, this year’s all-time hottest temperature is 2° higher than last year’s, which was 2° hotter than—”

     “Yeah, Europe. Who cares about Europe?”

     “Glaciers are disappearing. Rivers are running dry. There’s drought everywhere. Hundreds of wildfires are burning out west right now. Up north, too. The air’s poisonous.”

     “There've always been fires in summer. When I was a tadpole—”

     “It’s raining ashes in Michigan today.”

     “There. You see? The rain will put out the fire. Really, kid. It’s just weather.”

Inspired by A Little Bit of Magical Thinking. AI image created by Angus Peterson.

A Little Bit of Magical Thinking

“It’s doomsday,” texts my son about the yellow miasma out there. Close the windows tight. Shut the doors. Put on the fans. Purify your air. Wear your mask. Help the evacuated if you can. Wish the firefighters well. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES reply to those idjits down south who think we’ve given them the stink-eye just to mess with their summer vacations. What would be the point? You can’t argue with magical thinkers. But do, while grinning, envision our crappy air infiltrating his gold-plated office and taking up residence in his lungs. After all, what goes around comes around.

Inspired by Heading Home. Image cropped from a photo by Cole Burston.

Heading Home

I found myself today on one of those crash course collisions with another human. You know the one—you make eye contact from afar, do the dosey doe but invariably end up sidestepping to the same side, as if you were a mirror image of each other.

It can go on for seconds until you stop, laugh (or are annoyed) and continue around. I genuinely laughed today. I wondered if we were magnetically drawn to each other by our atoms and why. What do we share together as two strangers that only the universe knows, prompting us to discover.

Inspired by What the…‽ Image by Etienne Boulanger.

Harold Edwin Doughty

It was a hot summer day in 1910, when Mrs. Eva Doughty caught her stepson, Harold, scratching his name into the bricks of their brand new house on Garden Avenue—egged on, no doubt, by the bad influence that lived next door. And so, the next morning, she walked up to Mrs. Mary Prescott’s stationery shop at 357 Roncesvalles and paid the twenty-four cents for a single insertion of the following classified advertisement in the Personals column of the Toronto Daily Star: 

WANTED—A good home in the country for the summer, where boy of 13 can make himself useful.”

The farm was but a short walk from the station in Emery, but not a long trip at all from Parkdale. John Watson, a widower, lived there with his daughter, Jennie. He was 88 when they responded to the ad, and Jennie—who had never married—was 53. Not a particularly exciting prospect for a teenage boy up from the city, but they promised his mother there was a boy his age—Mary Devins’s son, David—living on a farm nearby. History doesn’t record how Harold got on, but the 1911 census does show he went back the next summer.

Inspired by Mrs. Eva Doughty. Photo by the author.

Tainted Love

Perhaps it would be a stretch to call it a modern reiteration of Gift of the Magi, but a few Christmases ago, Jim bought Leslie a TUSHY. Unbeknownst, Leslie bought one for her beloved, causing an embarrassment of selfless exchange and bidet attachments. When it came to installation, Jim, handy but procrastinating, didn’t get around to it. Until last week.

     The next day over coffee he recounted in discrete detail his tactile and hygienic awakenings, his metamorphic revelation of mysteries exotic yet familiar.

     He may not have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon, but it was still a moving experience.

Inspired by Potentially Useful Stuff. Photo of Agamemnon from Wikipedia, modifications by ChatGPT.

Potentially Useful Stuff

Henry would never move, because he’d have to get rid of things: furniture, personal effects, his salvage trove. His wife belittled the latter as junk. 

      This rankled him. There was virtue in thrift. When something broke, he fixed it—yes, perhaps imperfectly, but it worked (sort of). Before discarding anything, he stripped it of parts and fasteners that might prove useful, storing them in bins in the basement. “Why buy a hundred screws,” he told Margaret, “when a single repurposed bolt works fine?”

      She called him a hoarder. 

      “No,” he rejoined stubbornly. “I am the custodian of potentially useful stuff.”

Inspired by My True Nemesis. Image by cheetahlip on Reddit

My True Nemesis

I hate packing, so I’m never moving again. My kids will have to pack up all my stuff when I’m gone. So I’ve said countless times. But that was before the meniscus tear on my left knee and the onset of arthritis in both. Now I know my true nemesis—the one that might make me go back on my word—the stairs. It’s an Edwardian workers’ house, so they’re steep, narrow and worn. I am frantically exercising to strengthen the muscles around my knees—wondering if I’ve left it too late. While every day, my nemesis creaks with laughter.

Inspired by Existential Home Improvement. Image of her stairs by Nancy

In which a Nerd Confronts his own Mortality

Turns out there are only fourteen different calendar configurations: one for each day at the start of a regular year; another seven for leap years. Had I known sooner, I could’ve bought enough calendars to last my entire life.

Still, by 1995, I had managed to collect half of them, and so pulled out a chart I’d found, and for each wrote down every year for which it would again be valid. Pushing into the 2040s, I began to wonder just how much longer I might be valid, and ended up scuttling the project for fear of tempting the fates.

Inspired by Existential Home Improvement. Image by Meta.

Existential Home Improvement

Bee sat on my couch, looked up at our staircase and said, “Ah, geez, when you replacing that carpet?”
     I thought I just did, but that was 25 years ago. It owes us nothing, having survived five cats, three dogs and their pals, countless sploshed coffees and kid effluvia. It’s professionally cleaned twice a year, but there’s just so much you can do. So, we’re going to replace it. And much like our planned new water heater and furnace, once it’s done, we probably won’t have to do it again.

     Because we’ll be dead.

     Best to go with a neutral.

Inspired by Proof of Life. Photo by Laurie of the carpet that owes us nothing, soon to be replaced by the Stairway to Heaven.

Proof of Life

Roy knows I hate missing deadlines. Maybe that’s from years of client work (I don’t miss that), or my Navy days (I do miss them), but I’m never late to post. The “tell” for Roy is that I pre-post a draft the day before deadline, and schedule it to publish at 0830 on Due Day. So, this week, there's no draft from me at all, and Roy texts, tongue-in-cheek, “I need some proof of life.”

     I can’t imagine a better proof of life than a hike in the woods. So here's my proof, and my excuse for almost missing deadline. 

Inspired by Roy who is our Exquisite Corpse choirmaster. Photo by Jacquie Maund.

How I Wrote This Drabble

Spent the previous four days procrastinating
Reread Laurie’s drabble
Took a shower to think about it
Spent an hour phone scrolling
Made a cup of tea
Cleaned off the cat hair from my office chair
Answered emails
Went pee
Read Laurie’s again
Wrote
Deleted
Wrote
Deleted
Played Candy Crush
Wrote 340 words
Had lunch while watching an episode of Deep Space Nine
Answered emails
Cut it down to 88 words
Put some words back
Now it was 108 words long
Cut 10
Added three
Hyphenated-something
Got it to exactly 100 words
Found an image at the very last moment
Posted

Inspired by Routine. Photo by Nancy of Daisy, the culprit who sheds hair over Nancy’s chair.

Routine

Body dysmorphic clothes buying (63–6*=57 years)

Three species daily pill-taking (38 years)

Vegetarianism (40–1.5†=38.5 years)

Friday meals in the living room (32 years)

Over planting then bored by August (27 years)

ELE but still buying wool‡ (20 years)

Bringing Donna pecan buns 

              at exactly 11:00 A.M, December 25th (18 years)

Pirates at Hallowe’en (10 years)

Misko barks at bottle lady (3 years)

Pip finishes Rich’s cereal milk (2 years)

A clean, decluttered home (2 hours, 15 minutes)

─────────
* The year mom took me to Weight Watchers
† Regular visits to Nipissing First Nation
‡ Knit Café, 1350 Dundas Street West

Inspired by Pasquale Fuoco. Image, Pip sous la vitre, by Laurie.

Pasquale Fuoco

In 1972, Pat was renting a chair at Charles and Yonge. We had just moved to Toronto, and Promenade Men’s Hair Stylists was simply the closest barber, and his was the first empty seat.

     Still, in 1983, when Pat started his own shop, I followed him there on the 45-minute trip up to Steeles, with no guarantee he’d even be working that day.

     And I’d probably be going there still, were it not for the fire that gutted the entire plaza. I didn’t have Pat’s phone number and—after sixteen years of haircuts—I didn’t even know his real name.

Inspired by Oh Claude. Image by Barbicide.

Oh Claude

I’ve always had long hair, except when I was seven and solo-parented by my father, whose barber gave me the go-to ’70s bowl-cut. More recently, I wore it short when I thought it was faux-pas to have long hair over 50 and worse, long and gray. Then, with my growing indifference to everything, the mane flourished. Claude judged me—I’m trying too hard, wrote he. I was planning to home-chop it, when I ended up in a random conversation with a human on Bloor carrying a Gucci under her silver flow. 
     Leave it and love it, she said. 

Inspired by Being Judgey (or, Okay Boomer!) Image from The New Knew.

At The Pearly Gates

Something had happened below. There was an ungodly crowd at the Gates. A burly man with a red tie pushed to the front. 

     “Table for one.” 

     St. Peter was taken aback. “This isn’t―” 

     “This guy’s low IQ, I can tell you that,” the man told his followers. 

     Peter exchanged glances with the Archangel Michael. “Sir, we aren’t―”

     “Check your list. They’re expecting me.” 

     Michael whispered something to Peter, who nodded. “Ah, yes,” Peter told the man, pointing. “Our golden escalator will take you straight there.” 

     They watched him descend. “‘They’re not sending their best’,” Peter muttered. Michael shrugged.

Inspired by Being Judgey, and the numerous versions of Heaven I've imagined, the first one being on this link. Image by Marjorie at NightCafe.

Being Judgey (or, Okay Boomer!)

I don’t understand selfies. Who needs so many pictures of themselves? I don’t understand taking a selfie while pulling down a branch laden with cherry blossoms (right beside a sign that says: “Don’t pull on the branches please. It damages the trees”) and then getting into a car and leaving. I don’t understand people who post a picture of their food before every meal. I don’t understand spending every second of your vacation taking photos (most of which you delete eventually) instead of just being there. Are these experiences not real unless they’re recorded? Do we only exist on screen?

Inspired by The Rule of Turds. Image by Nancy not understanding.

The Rule of Turds

Our neighbourhood is beautiful. And Judgey. For flavour, have a look at the Roncy/Parkdale Friendly Neighbours Facebook page which boasts a toxicity rate of three. Feeling spicy? Write something about dogs . . . or kids . . . or kids interacting with dogs. Here’s how it works:

(1) The Micro-aggressive Opener: “Hi gentle neighbours, just a PSA to pick up after your floofs!”

(2) The Axe-grinding Second: “My toddler stepped in dog shit yesterday at Sorauren Park . . .”

(3) The Closer: “Dogs should be banned from public spaces!” (Followed by an AI-generated image of a Rottweiler chasing a terrified child). 

Grab your cortado, and watch the fur fly.

Inspired by Judge Not. Photo—Placement—by Laurie.

Judge Not

Sure, I hadn’t shaved for days; and maybe I hadn’t had a haircut in months. And yes, I’d most definitely fallen into the habit of wearing my jeans till the knees wore through—though in my defense, it was sort of the fashion at the time. Still, I was my own boss, making good money—and so, who really was I trying to impress?

Turns out it was the social worker outside the Metropolitan United Church downtown, who met my eyes with such a bald expression of Christian love that I knew in that instant he thought I was homeless.

Inspired by Devastation. Image cropped from an ASOS fashion shoot.