The Sand along the Streetcar Tracks

Those drifts of sand along the streetcar tracks? They’re from an ocean that covers Toronto in an alternate dimension. The sand sidles over, fine enough to reach us; the more you dwell on it, the more you’ll fathom the signs. Shell stations. Mhm. A suburban drywalled street named “Water”. An unaccountable odor of washed-up, long-popped seaweed.
     Lately that ocean’s been welling up again, resurging. Grinding memory into longing, then – and there – into here-and-now, and soon enough you'll find yourself scanning the shelves of Loblaws for a can of sardines that still opens with a key, salt slipping down your cheek.

Photo: David Heyburn.

Puff, the Magic Dragon, in a land of cottage cheese

Puff the Magic Dragon frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee, says the song. Good thing little Jackie Paper mostly brought him strings and sealing wax instead of cottage cheese. The low-fat no salt added pressed kind that lurks in squashy packages. Even with the munchies, Puff would’ve turned his snout up at the sight of this cheese smeared sadly into pumice-like Finn Crisp Caraway Ryes. Maybe he’d have liked my cauliflower cottage cheese mock frittata though. If you kinda squint looking at it, I’d whisper to Puff, it’s almost shiny. And the purple is onions.

Greeting Rituals of the Men of Anthro

Sociology’s forays into affirmative action have succeeded well enough that our hallways are peopled mostly with women. Our washroom, however, is exclusively male. The carpet leading toward it – past my door – has been beaten flat by the purposeful men of nearby Anthro. Each negotiates the twice- or thrice-daily greetings this affords in his own fashion. One nods abstractedly. Another pretends we’ve never met. It makes me miss “Edward”, now retired, who used to exchange Latin tags with me on his tos and fros. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” I might say, and he’d return with a random, gleeful “Ecce homo!”

Loosely inspired by Laurie Leclair’s “Housebroken.”

Housebroken

Deep in the garden, I was well-hidden. That’s when I overheard Joyce. Boy, did she hate dogs. It was only through a thin guise of familial rectitude that she tolerated Snickers, her great-aunt’s moribund poodle. With auntie freshly dead and the pooch dispatched she spoke with impunity. “I don’t miss those little turds, that’s for sure!” She didn’t specify whose turds but rather turned the conversation to me. “My neighbour goes and takes all these dogs away from Indians and finds homes for them here . . .”
     I bit my trowel.
     “Really, I’ll take my hat off to her . . .” she demurred, bare-headed.

Image from DogPoopSigns.

Nature Morte

August’s sand has snuck under the door and settled itself in the corner. The stove’s sticky from September’s chicken, and pots of unexpired goods keep naively fresh. She’s gone, but only just, so the rooms still vibrate with the newly-empty. Clacking puzzle pieces, an iced and boozy tipple melting in a highball glass and a charm bracelet’s silvery scrape on wood, like a handful of tight-fisted but tumbling coins, all betray the ghostly remains of happier days. It is such an odd time of life; not dead but not really alive. A still life, waiting. And everybody else waits, too.

 Original image by Yvonne Boothroyd

The NHL Fan Lockout

NHL Commissioner Patrick Bateman today upped the ante in the league’s lockout of hockey fans, calling their demands “unrealistic and naïve.” The NHL is demanding that fans accept a long-term expectations cap, and is pushing hard for acquiescence to the owners’ agenda: an overpriced, overlong regular season of largely meaningless games, the embrace of the neutral zone trap, and playoffs that last until the start of hurricane season. Observers expect fans to roll over and capitulate quickly. A fan spokesman confirmed this, saying he does not envision strike action. “The only fight we want,” he said, “is on the ice.”

Image: Chris Young/The Canadian Press

My laptop was a cat in an earlier life

My Dell Latitude E6510 laptop, I am convinced, was 99% cat in an earlier life. Calculating, passive aggressive, needy, needling, and fuck-you indifferent. Which makes me, in an earlier life, a would-be animal abuser. (“Would-be” because, even in my ire, I realize that slamming 6.6 pounds of “durability, security, and performance” into the wall won't help.)
     The other 1% is pure heart-melting dog, showing up right when I hit “Turn off computer." The screen starts fading hopefully to grey, like a dog with its leash in its mouth, asking if I really mean it. And each time, yes, I do.

Image: Trollable.

She is My Daughter Too

Malala Yousafzai is a fourteen year old schoolgirl. For this, she was yesterday shot twice by the Taliban in Pakistan. As I write, she is in critical condition. Whichever God you pray to, pray for her.
     How has it come to this – that attending school can mark a child for execution? A spokesman for the Taliban (“the students”) says “Let this be a lesson.” Yes, a lesson, but not the hateful one he draws. “Malala is my daughter,” says Pakistani Prime Minister Ashraf. “She is Pakistan’s daughter.” And she is my daughter, too – and yours, if you believe in humanity.

Image: Hazart Ali Bacha/Reuters

Your Mess, Not Mine

In Kindergarten we were told we could use the paints anytime we wanted for our craft projects, provided we cleaned everything up afterwards: the brushes, the paint pots, the water jar, and any other mess that we made.
     My solution was to not make a mess in the first place.
     I stopped using paint and fell back on crayons for everything. Crayons were neater; and we each had our own set, so I would never be saddled with anyone’s mess but my own.
     The question is: did school make me this way or did I have these hang-ups going in?

Photo by Grzegorz Ślemp on iStockphoto.

The View Inside Dad’s Window

The recliner faces the flickering SONY. At its left a waste-paper basket and arm caddy holding a TV Guide, Kleenex and a back-scratcher. At the right a side table with more Kleenex, a glass containing manicuring tools, gum, a pen for the crossword, clown-button remotes and the phone. A dish supporting a cemented lump of peppermints promises a taste somewhere between sidewalk chalk and the Eucharist. This is the command centre for the elderly. We may progress from highchair to school desk, Poäng to Eames, but we end up here, camouflaged in an acrylic afghan and battling our own mortality.

 Image: canoe.ca

The View from Dad’s Window

In the twenty years that we knew him, Dusty Rusty changed neither his clothes nor his habits. He was always a little sour dishrag of a man who sat bolt-upright watching television in his Cinema Noir fish bowl of stained wallpaper and cigarette smoke. Everything about him was tidy-filthy, like the perfectly folded Elliot Lake Standard he used for cannibalized butts waiting to be rerolled into damp but serviceable smokes. Age and loneliness had made Russ a shower, and his uncanny ability to simultaneously entertain and repulse never disappointed. Particularly so on the day he showed us his personal groomer.

Image based on Ashtray Full of Cigarette Butts from 123RF

Conundrum (Lament for Modern Man #3)

From Sharp’s Q&A column, a pressing man-issue: bushy eyebrows – pluck or wax?
      Let me take this one.
      First – grow a pair. Then slip into the chair for a haircut at Joe’s in Little Italy. Joe has been clipping my remnants these many years. He decides, unbidden, if my eyebrows are too bushy. Scissors flashing, he’ll suddenly freeze, blades hovering and open before my eyeballs, to study the evidence, then carefully reach forward to snip one briar, then (for balance) the other. He’ll even clip an errant nostril hair, or something suspicious inside my ear. Disconcerting, manly, effective – and pain free.

Image:  Angie Muccillo

For the original inspiration for this series, see here.
For Part 2, see here.

The Häagen-Dazs Grapefruit Question

Of course any nutritionist worth their salt substitute could tell you a grapefruit is more healthful than Häagen-Dazs and blah blah blah. But what if it’s your charted destiny to consume coffee icecream blanketed in cinnamon, ideally having liberated it from Kitchen Table at 11:30 pm? (The walk there being exercise. Ish.)
     Then, the pressing question for nutritionists is actually:
     If, in a feat of extraordinary restraint, you’ve kept a quarter of the pint to scrape out of the container next morning for breakfast, wouldn’t mounding on 47 extra calories worth of grapefruit be somehow injudicious?

P.S. Never skip breakfast.

Joyride

Saturday mornings are up at 8:15, dress, and drag my daughter to dance . . . except for the Saturday I awake to the realization that, although I took the wagon to school yesterday, I never did bring it home . . . it’s been out all day and all night, and I have no other way to get Nola to class in time. So today, it’s get dressed, rush to the schoolyard, and worry until . . . it’s still there! Five feet from where I left it—a rail is missing, but I find that nearby—like someone took my wagon out for a very short joyride.

Manvertisements (Lament for Modern Man #2)

Dapper fashionisto poses on Italian scooter, sockless, helmetless. Obviously, he lives life on the edge (helmetless – in the city!). A beautiful woman gazes quizzically upon him (thinking, “Is this it? I should have scarfed that tub of Häagen-Dazs last night after all.”). Another ad features a kohl-eyed boy in a frilly tux; most of his face is obscured by a whopper bang. He’s shilling for some chichi scent, but selling lifestyle.
     Fashion slaves unite! Why seek inspiration from glossy manvertisements?  Take my free advice.  Forget the über-bang, and never, ever, smell like a girl. (I realize I’m becoming my Dad.)

Image: © SHARP FOR MEN
(For context, see the original Lament.)

Are you slinging me a porker?

What’s up with the Man Hats? Any knob can’t just enter Sherway Mall, buy a trilby and emerge a hipster. In fact, my friend Stephen who rocks a master-class wardrobe wouldn’t be caught dead in any of these lids. Sadder still, these heinous things can be spotted perched like plaid pixies on hairy toadstools while their douchie owners peruse a menu. Given my own wonky stylings, I shouldn’t cast sartorial stones, so I’ll just put this down to the priggishness of age: By all means Dude, wear your stupid hat, but take it off when you’re eating that fish taco.

Image of the dreaded Alpine hat,
taken from The New Adventures of Steven Fry.

Lament for the Modern Man

This week, another glossy men’s magazine thumped onto my porch, concealed discretely between sections of my newspaper. Yes, a newspaper – how retro! And no, not that kind of men’s magazine. This one’s full of beauty tips and lifestyle advice for the modern man. On the cover, a banner announcing thirty-seven pages of power suits. (Wassa matter, pretty boy, yo’ momma don’t dress you no mo’?) Inside, man recipes, and a saccharine review of whisky, calculated not to offend any potential advertiser or region. Read up, and you too can namedrop.
     What is a man without his own opinion? A market.

Image: Sharp Magazine
(For Part 2, see here)

Just One Canadian

Citizens of the world! Before boarding any vehicle, look to your left. Look to your right. If you spot even one maple leaf patch in the queue, step aside. Studies have found Canadians on board in nearly every calamity in recorded history. When a twin-engine plane crashes in Sitka, there are six Canadians on board. When a cruise ship sinks in the Antarctic, six again. When the Jamaican tarmac is overshot, a Colombian bus veers from the road, or lightning smites an Air France jet: Canadians on board. In threes, in twos, in humble ones. It takes just one Canadian.

Image: Proton Charging.

The Lawyer’s Gone to Fat

Last time I saw Rob, he’d just finished a course in legal ethics. He was studying to become a lawyer and had been taught, for instance, that it is wrong to take on a divorce case and use information you receive from the husband to seduce his wife.
     Remarkably, he told me this one week after I’d broken up with my first girlfriend, one week before I learned he’d taken all I’d told him of that relationship and decided to ask her out.
     He, at least, knew what he was getting himself into, but I wonder if she ever did.

And so it was, years later, that one of my many spies encountered my first girlfriend’s next boyfriend downtown and reported back that he had gone to fat. Forget that she and I were last together a lifetime ago, and ignore the fact that she and her fat lawyer had by then lived together longer than she and I had ever dated, even now these furtive sightings help pass the time over beer with my high-school friends as they tease out the small lingering pleasure I can still enjoy hearing the details of the poor choices she made after me.


Inspired by Husky Cross. Photo by ZoneCreative/iStockphoto.
 

Midtown Moment

Recently dear friends took us to a wine tasting, a treat for Rich’s birthday and a chance to leave our neighbourhood. Although Roncesvalles is fast becoming a Mecca for every brunching douchebag from Mississauga, at least for the moment, it’s familiar. But in crossing the pristine threshold of the Summerhill LCBO we stepped out of the wardrobe: So many clean, white people in one room. A veritable casting-call for Williams Sonoma. I caught Rich eyeing a man beetling around in tight denim and red gingham.
     “Wear socks, you prat,” he breathed; hoping a cheeky rioja would wash the image away.

Image: Lucy Learns