Hold on Tight….

Perhaps frustration breeds acquiescence.  Perhaps everyone has their own point of breaking that may or may not (dog)star Keanu and I simply haven’t reached mine yet.  As this uncertainty has dotted the face of my romantic future like incurable and unsightly acne on a fresh face, one shiny cureall shines like a bottle of proactiv behind the bathroom mirror.  If I continue to look at delving into the unknown world of interdating as giving in and giving up, there is no chance in high hell that I will ever be able to see any possible fruits of this experience as being anything but tainted and myself as anything but an unintelligent Adam, trying to enjoy what is clearly wrong.  The issue lies not with the concept of keyboard courting itself but with my perceptions surrounding it.  Do I want to fix this?  Not really……………………………………for now.

Excuses become more necessary with time and as my reasons for solitude have barely changed and I continue to hold to them like a distraught child in the 80s smothers their popple, my convictions become stronger and my ignorance higher.  When my own mother brought up the whole idea of interdating during a particularly strong piece of reasoning on my part as to why I am very comfortable in my bachelorhood (truth!), the forces pushing me in this direction just found a new leader.  When combined with friends who have testified that if single they would totally slay chicks online, happy couples that have met through this medium and a fringe friend who apparently fills her entire week with meeting these strangers, my reasonable excuses threaten to become drowned by the tide of positive examples.  A life preserver?  I offer two: my unborn spawn, birthed from Emma16784 or whoever she may be and the drunken speech of a guest at our future lavalife sponsered wedding.

In relation to extremely reasonable excuse #1, I worry about an explanation.  When said fantastically handsome child would at some inevitable point ask how daddy met mommy my response would have to center around a bold faced falsehood, a series of indistinguishable grunts or an attempt to create a figure named Mr.Internet who happened to introduce us one night in a crowded bar.  While all of these options are entertaining, they are also lies.  As a parent I should strive to lay the path of honesty, not begin the snowball of deception in which I could certainly become wrapped up in when I’m asked to invite this Mr.Internet character to participate in the 4th birthday party festivities of my kid (which, if they were as I am hoping, to be held at the ACC for a craptors game I could easily bring a friend of mine and simply rename him for a couple of hours).  If holding to the truth, how can the magical quality of meeting your future spouse transcend the internet in a way that a child could comprehend?  My attempt:

‘After a six pack of special potion, Daddy started to feel lonely and entered the strange lava world, hoping to free one of the pretty princesses that were imprisoned by the evil Dr.Midtwentiesisolation.  He was overwhelmed with evil witches posing as beautiful maidens calling out to him at every corner, trying to waste his energy. Thankfully his special potion would only allow the prettiest princess to appear.  Daddy put a special message in a bottle and threw it to the most gorgeous princess who was trapped by the evil Doctor and kept alone in a scary world called Cabbagetown.  He waited and waited for the princess to send the bottle back.  Daddy cursed the evil doctor.  He called on his friends to help him reach the princess but they were all stuck in the far away town of Steadyrelationshipville.  Just when Daddy thought it was a horrible idea to enter the lava world at all and began thinking that he needed more special potion, the princess sent the bottle back with a magical message with instructions on how to help her.  The next day the two escaped the evil Doctor and met in the secret Greenroom to share in some potion together.’

With illustrations by Michael Martchenko, I think this story could sell.  What it can’t do is ever be repeated by me with any sort of conviction.  Perhaps I’m over valuing the experience of actually meeting someone face to face, locking eyes and falling in.  Perhaps there is more magic in this lava world than there is in waking up beside someone and realizing that you don’t want them to leave as quickly as you decided it would be a good idea to bring them out of the strobe-light and into your bed.  Maybe.  I however, will continue to believe that if I have to use evil doctors and secret lands to infuse magic into the story of how I met my yet unnamed spouse there is something dreadfully wrong.

My second reasonable excuse centers more around avoiding embarrassment in front of my closest friends and family in their Sunday bests.  Although I haven’t been a frequent nuptial observer, both pop culture and my few actual experiences have taught me that it is as inevitable as unnecessary text messages after 12 beers that at some point in the ceremony the story of how the lovely couple met is going to be publicly discussed.  As best as my efforts would be to currtail this outburst, I would fair as George Muresan would in a cruise boat limbo contest and fall flat on my back.  In all hope I would imagine that my good friends present would be as happy for me as possible, whatever means I came to the end aside, and do their best to avoid bringing up the first meeting in front of those elderly family members that wouldn’t understand what an eharmony is.  As much as I give them credit, I can’t avoid the premonition of a particularly drunken com-padre grabbing the mic and spitting out something like this:

‘So, it took what…..like 8 Kronenburg for you to finally sign up?  Yeh.  I mean, we’d been trying to pick his spirits up for something like a year.  He was all like..I’ll be fine on my own, I’ll just get a dog or something and then I was like, dude…dude…why not? It’s not like you’re getting any sitting around here with me?  Right?  Aren’t I right?  Ha.  So, uh….he puts his profile up and he’s not like…totally hammered but you know, like enough to finally do it.  We picked out a picture…you know, that made him look intellectual and…like, sensitive or something gay like that.  And right there, we started to look at profiles.  After the first five or six, which were all totally uberdorky ugmos we had a couple more beers and then he stumbled across this lovely lady sitting over there..yeh, I see you…ha.  Her picture was hot.  Like, not slutty hot…but you could imagine what she would look like if she wanted to get all foxed out.  So he sends her a smile and BAM! like…5 minutes later she sends one back.  So we have another beer and he writes maybe 5 or 6 drafts of a message…he’s all paranoid about wording it all proper and being like, you know, what she’s looking for or whatever.  He’s all frustrated and goes to the can….so I just hit send on the last thing he wrote, which wasn’t even done and probably had a ton of typos…I guess she found it cute or something and that’s pretty much that…they went out a couple days later and well, now we’re here.  See man?  I told you…’

Can’t you just see John Cusack playing the role of my drunken self?  Surefire romantic comedy hit.  It’s more likely that Keira Knightley would actually wrap her sweet bony body around mine than star in a story with as much romantic charm as this.  While I do understand that not every meeting that eventually results in love and marriage and a baby carriage merits a hollywood cast, I can’t avoid the unfeeling, impersonal feeling shrouding an intermatch.  The eharmony commercials try to diffuse this association with their charming testimonials, but there is nothing romantic about first seeing someone through a backlit screen.  That you could possibly be completely nude with last nights shawarma stuck in your stubble when your future wife’s face first crosses your eyes on a hungover Saturday morning is hardly the thing that movies, or even relatively acceptable wedding stories are made of. 

As much as I believe in my own reasoning skills, there persists a faint odor of avoidance of the truth within my words.  This I understand.  No matter how eloquently I attempt to make proper sense of why I choose to remain alone when a world of possible mates lies awaiting me in the address bar, the reality of bachelorhood is still the same.  What will come first, a change in my perceptions surrounding this oh too logical way to add a distinctly absent element to my life or the point of throwing my hands up in the air and on to the keyboard remains to be seen.  For now though, I will stick to the life preservers of my two very reasonable excuses as the tide of incredibly logical reasons to interdate tries to wash over me.  I only wish the life preserver had a name and excellent taste in music and wasn’t some overly complicated metaphor.

To Serge: Much Appreciated

The somewhat progressive and at least publicly perceived political correctness that I often bandy about my daily life by assuring my students that the test is ‘not a boy test that is sexually attracted to other boy tests,’ can’t always hold up.  From time to time I do nothing to hide my enjoyment of a well timed and directed lisp.  I feel little remorse in enjoying such crass humor as it is distinctly based in the stereotypical and the few people I have come across that would actually feel personally aped are walking parodies of themselves and have to understand their own magnetism to grade six jokes.  One man that falls directly into this category I never actually met, which makes it even stranger that I will attempt to use him to explain the beginning of my summer.  Hold on.

As a faceless number in almost all of my lower year undergrad courses I knew very few people beyond my own inane internal description of them.  Always brings a laptop guy, indie rock guy I should probably be friends with, guy that probably has angry sex with passed out girls, freshman 25 girl that doesn’t seem to care and should probably learn to dress to conceal and incredibly cute girl that I will never have the balls to even walk in her direction were all incredibly interesting characters in my own mind but remained almost totally fictional and unknown.  Thankfully my desire for meaningful belonging was satiated by my housemates who were all in a very specific programme and thus knew each of their classmates well and at times intimately.  Almost as an associate member of the programme I was privy to their parties, discussions about profs, due dates and curious lingo as well as being very well aware of the ins and outs of the entire class dynamic, which included one over the top gay guy.  

Since graduating to the world of big boy pants my memories of peripheral characters in my past days have become shrouded in the ocean fog of time and often they drown in the tide of the sea of beer I have since consumed, never to be fully or correctly recollected again.  In this particular case, never having actually met the man in question, I am only certain that his memory persists in a form unique to my needs and most likely in a way as opposite to reality as I am to an overly confident young pygmy hippopotamus.  What I have come to accept as truth is that his name was Serge.  Upon entering the room, Serge, in his most prototypical gay slinging of words would declare that a ‘power surge’ had just inflicted the room and that hopefully everyone had saved their work.  Why I have deemed this convoluted anecdote worthy of a place in my memory banks that should probably be home to just about any other piece of useful information is a testament to my immaturity.  That I just stiffled a smile is a testament to how I need to get out more; a realization that leads directly to the point of this diatribe.

The recklessness of the recent weather patterns in the fair city of Toronto has left my place void of consistent electricity, an affliction that would usually result in great frustration, lost files and reliance on my cell phone alarm clock.  When I arrived home after a day of pointless wandering this past weekend I noticed blinking numbers where my properly askew time should have been staring at me.  As an incredibly early riser, I am a slave to the piercing blasts of beeps and thus, I darted quickly to reset the time.  I stopped before I started.  The power surge that had run through my room left me with a perfect opportunity to reflect on the notion that I no longer required notions of time.  I left the numbers blinking.  The power surge had liberated my desire to sleep later than 5am, my love of rolling over and beginning to read exactly where my heavy eyelids had forced me to stop the night before and most importantly, the entire idea that once my bladder forces my feet to the ground there’s nothing stopping them from crawling back beneath the covers.  Serge, wherever you are and whatever you might look like, thank you for introducing the summer to me.  Here’s to more sleep.

This Was Supposed to Be About Zen Buddhist Plumbers

Beyond a few lines in ‘ironic‘ that neither make me laugh due to their outrageously awful attempt at cleverness or I secretly think are sorta genius and instead just bother me, I have minimal problems with Alanis Morissette.  It is thus with no slight of mind or malicious ignorance that I prefer to think of the popular carnation of the big G man as a wildly bearded and out of shape white man and not the half retarded female version Alanis personified in Dogma.  If I were to analyze my motives here, I would end up blaming my jealous, patchy cheeks for leading to this specific tendency with perhaps that touch of Latvian religious fervor that’s buried deep within me in a close second.  Either way, I’ve never had a personal problem with who I refer to as a him.  However, for whatever reason that Kayne would totally call me out for during the MTV video awards, I subconsciously but almost immediately begin to question my admiration of musical artists that overtly or even more so, secretly, sing about their admiration and love for the man in the clouds.  Case in point for today: Mike Doughty.

When last summer I struggled through a serious case of inertia and difficulty in providing a purpose to my unemployed afternoons, I often turned to a seemingly perfect set of Doughty lyrics that at the time I believed spoke directly to my issue.  From White Lexus, Doughty sings: 

Please show me how to live
Please show me how to have a day
I don’t wanna wake up now
Why do I have to wake up, anyway?

It was clear from further analysis of the song that as the protagonist, Doughty was trying to fight through urges to take his septum on a holiday to snowy Vail.  While thankfully I can’t empathize, at the time I felt a similar struggle against the pressure of the much less expensive or dangerous but infinitely more depressing and dweebish draw of reading about basketball on the interweb for hours at a time while getting totally wasted on coffee.  It was comforting to know that at least on some level, a man with much more talent and success felt a similar struggle as I did.  When early this week I started to think about writing an entry here about my inability to make proper use of my enforced week long vacation, I immediately thought of White Lexus.  What instantly followed was a revelation that the nameless receiver of Doughty’s lyrical questions was not the empty air as it is in my case but the great bearded one and that the way to live that Doughty asks for directions to is THEE way to live according to so many Baptists that I went to High School with.  I dropped the post idea like it was hot and have spent my week without writing.  Until now.

My convoluted retort to the original idea of discussing Mr. Doughty was to examine how the ability to waste time and procrastinate is a sign of mental fortitude and higher level thinking.  This is a belief that I have strong convictions in as I myself am not only the president but a member.  My thesis revolves around the idea that in order to put off pressing tasks, effectively make your way through a day without doing anything you really should and remove yourself from the impending and inevitable stress of having to do what needs to be done in a shorter time span with your back against the wall is an indication of a very intelligent person.  To bury an agenda, ignore what shouldn’t be ignored is a sign of an advance control of your mental processes.  It takes incredible strength to find places within your mind where you can store all the stress and still get a good night’s sleep. 

To provide an example of how my idea could actually be useful and perhaps entertaining, the meat of my potential post was to be a fictional procrastination contest.  Like a game of chicken, the two contestants would be seated in front of each other with a task they both should really take of separating them e.g., two plumbers staring at a leaky faucet.  The first one to crack (ha!) and get to work would lose and be crowned the less intelligent of the two.  This was all well and fine and would have given way to some more humourous quips about bum cheeks and some classic self deprecation but I couldn’t get past the question of faith.

In every carnation of the contest I could imagine, even the naked ones and ones with identical obsessive compulsive twins and untucked shirts, the question would always have to come down to which contestant was on the best terms with their deity of choice.  The Zen Buddhist plumber would, without question, kick the agnostic plumber’s (insert bum joke) every single time.  I’m so certain that faith in your soul’s security would allow you to out procrastinate the best of the best (which I was determined to argue would have been a middle class pot head from Madison Wisconsin who worked at Blockbuster and could probably create a functioning world order in a couple weeks if he applied himself to tasks other than learning to recite every line in Easy Rider in Pig Latin).  Eventually the glorious contest would turn into a religious show down and it would probably end up being aired on Monday mornings at 4 on CTS.  Boo.

And that’s how Mike Doughty ruined what would have been a great post and probably a lot more exciting and humorous than this one.  Direct all complaints to www.mikedoughty.com      

As Good As They Seem?

At my age, nostalgia is stupid.  It is stupid because it mainly revolves around little nuggets of pop culture that we happen to stumble upon when a particular archive in the back of our minds is unlocked by too much beer or a clever reference in a Family Guy episode.  There is no overarching importance attached to remembering Punky Brewster.  Having a similarly aged friend spit out half a pint in an attempt to exuberantly exclaim that she remembers that too is good for a quick laugh and mop up by the waitress and nothing more.  This past week however, I bucked this idea.  I took it to the rim like Jake Voskuhl.

The decade between when I first developed a steady presence of armpit hair and now, when I often look at that hair and ponder the unattractiveness of its overly bushy properties has seen a lot of change in more important areas than pube growth.  I could easily make an argument for these past ten years as being the most shockingly chalked full of drastic changes I will ever experience.  I could also listen to the voice of the old bearded man and bring to light the whole notion that I have yet to actually experience more than 2.5 total decades.  Screw him and his beard.  I’m right.  How can you argue against the period in your life where you learn not to barf after five beers?  When you learn how to have sex for more than two minutes?  When you realize that you have to wear big boy pants everyday?  When you first look at yourself and see the cold hand of time under eyes, in your ever increasing forehead and in the hair between your nipples?  These transformations are jarring enough to make you believe that Carlsberg has sponsored the end of them because everyone needs to get totally beer blitzed after going through all that shit.  Thankfully, I haven’t been alone during this tumultuous tide of change.  I’ve had Hayden and friends to watch Hayden with.

Due to my proper choices to stay way from hallucinogenic drugs, flashbacks are a rare treat of the mind.  I’m usually whisked into the creaky vaults of my memory upon a particular sight that so specifically reminds me of moments past that I am forced to ponder the importance of remembering said piece of history.  In this particular case, I was 14 (or maybe 15 - my flashbacks aren’t always filled with easily identifiable empirical data as I didn’t remember seeing a button on the younger version of myself that read: I am 14 Years Old). 

I sat on the floor in the small, dingy and so quintessentially indie Oshawa hot spot, the Eclipse, emblazoned with an Archers of Loaf t-shirt and disgustingly dirty Doc Martens.  Beside me was a good friend who matched me not only in intense fervor for underground music but in poorly chosen thrift store clothing and awkward teenage uncertainty.  The two of us were surrounded by at best 48 other kids and strange lurking adults.  Enthralled, we watched a younger, shorner and more like a Schneider’s Red Hot in the grocery store (raw and actually not that bad to eat if you’re starving and on drugs but you know it could be better if it weren’t so uncooked and was covered in Our Compliments prepared yellow mustard) version of Hayden run through some songs off his 7 Inches and upcoming debut release.  It was teenageindierific.  We both returned to our parents’ homes and went back to being High School students and dealing with the whole issue of wanting really bad to touch a girl but looking and dressing like the direct opposite of what a girl would want to touch. 

Flash-forward to now, grab a Stiegl and then take a quick trip with Marty back to last week.  The same two guys sat and watched the same Hayden but in almost every other way, it was a completely different experience.  Instead of sitting on the floor in plaid shorts in Oshawa, I sat in a seat at the Danforth Music Hall in expensive pants that I consciously bought cause the nice man told me my ass looked great in them.  Beside me was the same friend but this version had a beard, could dress himself and has become quite the successful purveyor of media.  Beyond having 5 albums to draw upon and a sweet head of bigger hair, Hayden mostly looked and sounded the same; he even played one of the same songs.  There was however, one overt change that spurred this whole flashback into motion.

Due to reasons of creepiness, Hayden felt he couldn’t sing about pinning for the love of a 16 year old.  As someone who works with 16 year olds on a daily basis, I understand the feeling.  In ‘Bad As They Seem,’ the girl of Hayden’s dreams magically turned from being 16 to being 23 (an arbitrary age based on how it good it sounds with the word ’seems’).  Quite obviously, this gave the whole flashback comparison some empirical data to work with.  How did I go from wanting to sell my sole to see a 16 year old girl’s boobs to having Hayden, who is older than me, change the lyrics of his first ever single because it’s too creepy to even sing about 16 year old girls (and if it were me, I’d probably end up with my ass fired)?   

Unlike drug related flashbacks, my experience last week actually meant something beyond giggling and thinking ‘whoa…..I remembered that.’  Being slapped with such an easy comparison of events and how they were so completely the same yet so completely different forced me to take account of the decade and a half that occurred in between.  Should I be concerned that I was effectively doing exactly the same thing with exactly the same person that I was when I was 14 (or 15)?  Is this not a sign of stagnation and inability to branch out and experience life beyond the Greater Toronto Area?  Shouldn’t this decade of immense change have actually altered what I do and who I do it with?  No.  And I’m glad it didn’t.   In a rare moment of self appreciation, I think if I were able to feel pride (I have a medical condition that doesn’t allow that to happen) I should be proud that I have survived such a clamorous decade and can still enjoy the same thing I did when I was 14 with the same person at my side.  Now, if we were still dressed in over-sized t-shirts with matted hair and unattended B.O., sitting on the ground in Oshawa and were pinning for the love of 16 year olds……….that’s a bird of a different feather.

Here’s Your Future!!!

Having yet to procreate is not the driving force behind my ‘eloquent self deprecation.’  I am currently more interested in the coital act designed to produce my spawn than the actual output.  The complaints / ramblings / over analytical bullshit you read here are usually not based in a lack of opportunities to watch Diego on a Saturday morning and much more firmly rooted in a lack of opportunities to roll over on a Saturday morning and participate in the act that could possible produce a future Diego fan.  I do however, from kilometer to kilometer of mindless commuting consider if my inability to breed at this point in my life has any negative repercussions and if I should seriously contemplate ordering a white Russian that doesn’t come from behind the bar in order to get on with the passing of genes.  My most recent conclusion comes from an evolutionary perspective.

If we can assume that all Christian Fundamentalist Creationist theory is as comprised of fanatical dogmatic devotion as my weeknights are of beer and basketball and the 99% of DNA that we share with our public self wanking Chimp friends is not a strange coincidence, there could be a reason that I have not passed on my chromosomes based more on the purposely selective nature of those with the wombs inside them.  Perhaps women see in me physical and mental traits that they feel should not be a part of the future generation.  Perhaps if all men with these traits never produce a child we will eventually eliminate them and the future will be a better place.  Valid point or overly critical whining?  Either way I think it’s worth a look at what 5 of these traits may be and what their elimination from society may bring.

1.  Shyness

If I were more forward and less picky I would have more to kick out of my bed than my own hungover ass.  Having the rocks to put myself on the line and ask the cute girl in the frozen vegetable aisle if she also feels that the Zen Garden would be much more zen-like if the ratio of carrots to baby corn were more in favor of the corn would definitely increase my chances of procreating and possibly result in fantastic après vegetable stir fry romping. 

What the Future Holds if Shyness is Eliminated From Society Through Selective Breeding:

The hardest hit industry would be science fiction.  Without anyone too afraid to leave the house, sitting around eating pringles and dreaming of little cloaked men with light bulbs for eyes selling used robots to overweight moisture farmers with German first names for last names, future cinema would have to focus on plausible plot lines based around the complex love lives of Venezuelan alpaca breeders.

2.  Ability to Endlessly Watch and Read about Basketball 

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if Canada’s most impressive invention  (yes, I am aware that we developed the snow blower) magically went the way of the dodo bird.  Then I feel like Shannon Doherty in Mallrats:  I think about it and I cry. 

What the Future Holds if Basketball Fans are Elimintated From Society Through Selective Breeding:

There would be darkness.   With the sun blocked out by flying raccoons draped in Bobcats jerseys, Bill Simmons would lurk in the allies, selling stories of Andrew Declercq’s fiery temper to anyone who will listen.  Shunned by society, NBA players and coaches would take to the corporate world and driven by their vindicism to woman for eliminating their fan base, complex buyouts of John Freida and Playtex would be negotiated.  Colour safe shampoo and tampons would no longer be produced.  Women would be angrier, less comfortable and have more gross roots.

3.  Insecurity

I enjoy watching people’s faces when they’re vigorously cutting rug.  Security with one’s self is most evident in the face you make when you dance, whether sober as shit and inwardly blaming your first dad’s problem drinking for the wreck that has become your immediate family at your mom’s 3rd wedding or drunk as hell trying to forget your week at the Dance Cave.  I admire those that can close their eyes, sway their hips and not give two shakes of a cheetah’s tail about how off time they are or how much they resemble Carlton Banks minus the unnecessarily tight polo.  I admire them because they so easily do what I can’t.  I smile.  I make the annoying puckered lip face.  I look at the ceiling.  Nothing says I am so earnestly concerned about how I look at every single moment of the day than the awkward dancing face.  I am the king of that.

What the Future Holds if Insecurity is Eliminated From Society Through Selective Breeding:

Men would feel that wearing muscle shirts they bought on an all inclusive vacation while totally drunk and buying Cheetos at the resort gift shop is not only always socially acceptable but completely attractive because it’s totally ’skin to win’ all the time.  There would also be a drastic increase in the sales of custom coffee mugs with the owner’s face on it above bubble lettered ‘#1 Human.’

4.  Ability to Poorly Play and Sing the Same Few Songs on Guitar Every Damned Day without Learning a New One

If Whiskeytown never existed I’d end up playing E major over and over and over again.  Nothing else.  One chord.  I’d probably sound like Flecton Big Sky minus the dress and barbed wire necklace and never be able to live within hearing distance of another human being.

What the Future Holds if Horrible Singer Songwritters are Eliminated From Society Through Selective Breeding:

All the bands that understand how to properly write songs would have no ‘local favourites’ to open for them when they come into a city without a touring partner.  When waiting for a band to stop drinking beer backstage and take the stage there would be no generic strumming and boring vocals to talk / clink bottles over top of.  Bands would sell more t-shirts and bars would sell more beer.  Eventually our hearing and ability to to talk loudly into someone else’s ears without spitting and producing a second level wet willy would become obsolete.  We would become a society of low talking drool machines.

5.  Belief in Making Eye Contact from Across the Room as a Solid Pick Up Move and Not a Creepazoid Stalker Preview

My way around actually talking to women while at a party or a bar is to stare at them.  I assume that my original logic behind this move was based on emitting the sensation that their intense beauty is so captivating that I could do nothing else but look in their direction.  Even in the middle of intellectual banter about the future of the ottoman as a legitimate piece of furniture I am often taken by the looks of a girl across the room.  Making eye contact isn’t a bad move, I’m sure some pickup artists would even endorse it.  My problem is with the follow through.  Instead of building a solid base with a returned stare or two and then going in for the conversation, like a big man without a left hand, I keep going right with the stare even though it eventually gets blocked at the rim / fat dude between us every single time. 

What the Future Holds if Making Eye Contact as a Pickup Move is Eliminated From Society Through Selective Breeding:

Without a need to tell obnoxiously goateed men to go fly a kite before they saunter over in their lugz to ask them where their boyfriend is cause they obviously must have one cause they’re so hot, women would loose the art of giving the stink eye.  As men, we would be subjected to more frequent verbal refusals / talk to the hand moves.  Our collective confidence would be destroyed.  Shattered, men would resort to well, themselves.  Sales of assless chaps would skyrocket.

Conclusion

All men would be gay, walk around in tight tank tops emblazoned with the Cuban flag and assless chaps spitting quitely into the ears of angry uncomfortable women with bad roots while watching horribly boring film with ZERO laser content.  Your choice ladies, this is your future if I don’t breed.  Is this perhaps the most convincing personal ad you’ve ever read?  I should also mention that I love smokey jazz bars and red wine and love just ‘exploring’ the city.

The More Swedish, More Musical Version of My Complaints

As often as I listen to music and as much as I stare blankly into space, whether it be unsafely while barreling down the 401 each morning or as I have done more recently, staring through the poorly written sentences of a high school history paper, it is surprising that I haven’t had a revelation over a song until this past week.  Like most things that I do, my revelations effect basically only myself and are quite forgettable after a few days / beers have past. Either way, these quakes in my usual thought pattern make for good musing and thus, excellent practice for my typing skills (and your reading skills).

In my younger years I read a ‘magazine’ (I’ve put this in annoying floating quotations to signify that although it looked like a magazine in size and shape, the journalistic qualities were laughable and most likely the articles were written by the illegitimate son of one of the staffer’s best brohans that has been sleeping on his paisley couch after being caught cheating on his girlfriend Sheila) called Hit Parader.  The reason I asked Mom and Dad to bring home this trite mesh of flashy colours and ads for band t-shirts was to further my unmanly and rather creepy obsession with my favourite bands.  I couldn’t know enough.  If there had been an article on the teeth brushing habits of Alice In Chains drummer Sean Kinney (god, why do I still remember that) I would have read it until the cheap inked bled from my over-greased pubescent fingers.  Very much to the chagrin of those at Hit Parader, which surprisingly still exists, I no longer feel this need as more wordly concerns, re: basketball, beer and girls (in that order) have presented themselves.  Thus, I am somewhat happy to say that while I from time to time obsess about bands and songs that they have recorded, this is strictly a musical relationship and I no longer feel the urge to know the middle name of the drummer’s cat.  I’d rather discuss how great of a job a song does in describing my life.  How adult is that?  

Songwriters are esoteric by nature.  As much as some will try to disguise their inward inspiration I can’t believe that an artist like Hayden sits down at the piano with the plan to write about man’s quest for love.  He writes about his own quest for love in a way that some dork in Alabama will finally hear the lyrics and think ‘man, this guy gets what I’m going through with Julie, I mean he totally understands that I leave the fridge open in-between when I take the milk out and when I put it back because I think shutting it causes undue stress on the hinges and totally not cause I’m too cheap to pay for air conditioning.  It’s not my fault she grew up in an A.C. paradise and I grew up with a dad that looked like an older fatter A.C. Slater.’  Though I fully understand this concept it still sometimes feels like my life is the subject of a song written by someone I’ve never met.

Case in point:  Jens Lekman.  Jens has a sister.  I have a sister.  Jens is unlucky in love.  I am unlucky in love.  Jens’ sister is lucky in love.  My sister is lucky in love.  Jens sings about this in ‘The Opposite Of Hallelujah.’  I write about it.  Jens is Swedish.  I like the looks of Swedish girls and wish they would touch me.  The similarities are hard to ignore.

The narrative of the song finds young Jens struggling to explain his melancholy to his sister who is clearly happy and knows nothing of his ‘unstoppable sorrow.’  Jens tries to make a metaphor, and simalar as to what happens in these very paragraphs, the metaphor ’falls flat’ in it’s complicated intentions.  Jens feels the sadness that his sister doesn’t even come close to understanding because ‘it passes right through her,’ and young Jens rides his bike home as a failure, still unlucky and with a sister that has ’so much to live for.’  If it weren’t so snowy or if if I were a more accomplished retro bike rider, this very moment could occur in my life tomorrow.   

The reason I’ve decided to bore you with this unshattering revelation is the very reason that I am boring you with this unshattering revelation.  Jens Lekman may describe a situation eerily similar to my life and I may feel the a tinge of empathy directed my way but Jens does this through an unbelievably catchy, head bopping pop song.  I explain myself through hanging clauses, odd adjectives and overly complicated diction peppered with strange pirated photos.  Jens, you are the winner.  I would rather listen to ‘The Opposite Of Hallelujah’ than read myself go on and on.  If I were blessed with a sugary sweet Swedish baritone and more than a laughable ability to play instruments perhaps you wouldn’t be reading about my inability to make my sister see that because she’s been so lucky in love it’s hard for her to understand my exact opposite experience.  To you, dear reader, if you’d like to know about the parity of sibling experience in relationships and their effect on the less fortunate of the two, listen to Jens, he does a better job describing it than I ever will and you can’t really sing along to a blog (although I’d like to hear someone attempt that).

  

Cat + No Booze = Vince Chuckin’ Threes

I am cat sitting.  Insert here a bad dad joke about hoping that I’ve lost the Christmas pounds before I plant my ass on it.  To make this experience more interesting, I have also given up drinking both coffee and booze for the month of January strictly to challenge my demons.  When combined, I now feel so close to the height of loserdom that my Vulcan ears are poking through my hat.  It’s almost as if Doc Brown picked me up in my depressingly torn and tattered pajamas this morning and whisked me forward in a Ghost of Christmas Future moment to show me myself, age 40, sitting in the same place with less hair, more fat, many less friends and many more cats in an attempt to stop me from continuing down the path to dweebness that it appears I am currently heading towards.  Thankfully I don’t need Emmett or Marty or Jacob Marley to help me out.  What I really need is a cold beer. (Although I’m very much cognisant of the fact that single men with cats is a close second to single men who live with their mom on the list of very unattractive things, my vacationing friends would be more than slightly peeved if I abandoned my post as cat minder due only to feeling like a dweeb)

I am aware of the evils of alcohol.  In my younger days my body battled with booze to hammer out where we stood and after long bouts in the bathroom, unnecessary conversations and unneeded fried food we figured it out.  I discovered the dark side, came to respect it and have since settled into a nice working relationship with alcohol.  The issue at hand is that this has been a fantastic relationship, the kind that makes your stomach flip, the kind you want to tell your mom all about and the kind it hurts to leave, even if it’s just for a weekend while she’s out of town on business at that international conference for tall blonde women who love listening to indie rock while watching basketball naked.  Forcibly ending this union has of course, been rough.

It could easily be assumed that admitting the leading role booze plays in the Broadway adaptation of one’s life would be on par in embarrassment with discovering your genitalia was secretly photographed for use in Sex Ed textbooks across the country.  In my case, I’m totally okay with it.  My life has been much worse since I put down the bottle and combined with the cat, I am a picture of boredom in an advertisement for social anxiety disorder.

To further explain, I offer an overly complicated basketball analogy:

Much to the chagrin of the bitter like broken hearted teenage girls Toronto fans, Vince Carter is undoubtedly the best dunker the NBA has seen in the post Harold Miner, pre Jamario Moon era.  His ability to finish is the exact opposite to Mike Dunleavy’s ability to grow hair. 

In 2004 Vince told the press that he didn’t need to dunk anymore.  He was through with throw downs.  Although Vince was dealing with some nagging injuries, his motive for consciously moving away from his bread and butter was based more on proving that he could and less on his stupid knee.  The results were as painful as my social life has become.  Why go away from something that makes you happy, you’re good at and have been doing for quite sometime just to prove that you can?

To drop the 4th checker of my point in the secret diagonal stack of explanation I’ve been building in the corner, giving up booze, which is my bread and butter makes me feel like a dork because like Vince without the dunks, I’m not the same and certainly not as exciting.  There is so much stagnation in my life that I’ve come to feel like Vince drifting out near the three point line for quarters at a time with those around him shouting ‘Get to the rim! Do what you do best! You’ve practiced it for long enough and you’re boring us all to tears!’  Sadly, the rim in my case is of a beer bottle and the fans shouting at me are mostly the cat that I’m looking after.  Where Vince failed, I will succeed.  I will listen to my fan,  even if it means taking the unattractiveness one step further and believing in my temporary cat’s transcendental nature.

I Have Only My Fly and Forehead to Blame

Sometimes my good excuses aren’t good enough.  The little comfy space in the back of my mind where it is totally not my fault that basketball and beer are my only consistent companions and all mutterings of maternal pestering magically turn into the records that Superchunk and Pavement forgot to make in the mid 90s is usually quite accepting of my thoughts. From time to time though, I can’t find the key.  As much as I truely think that my profession, age and social circle greatly hinder my ability to meet anyone, there are moments where really, I can only blame myself.

Although I believe myself to be a capable conversationalist under the right circumstances, I equally understand my extreme short comings when there is really nothing to say to someone I don’t know.  The art of small talk remains to me, as baffling as the art of macramé yet much more applicable and possibly with sexy results and not tea cosies.  Thus, it is more than slightly disappointing that when given an opportunity to bypass all the awkwardness by actually having a topic to discuss with attractive Stranger A, I drop the ball like Milt Palacio on a breakaway.

It’s not everyday that I strut down the street armed with can’t miss banter in my pocket.  Most days find my jeans filled with unnecessarily awkward weather talk with that little coin pocket holding only blank stares and stammering ‘yeps’ and ‘yeahs.’  Perhaps my unfamiliarity with feeling confident in my chit chat skills had me in a situation like Cyclops without the dorky Oakley sunglasses; so much power I couldn’t focus.  Whatever nerdlinger simile I want to use can’t hide my glaring failure to take advantage of a double peanut M&M like situation; rare and tasty.

I don’t buy my mother lululemon yoga clothes everyday.  If I did I would be broke and probably even more single than I already am but for much creepier reasons.  Christmas is different.  I can be honest in admitting that deciding to give this bafflingly expensive gear was at first a choice driven by my desire to give an appreciated gift.  I cannot however,  pretend to hide my secondary motive of  knowing that when I walked into the boutique the inevitably fit young salesladies would find my choice touching and paint me as a caring, sensitive guy that easily outshines the myriad of jerkstore boyfriends wondering around complaining about spending so much on pants that make their girlfriends’ asses look fan-frigg’n-tastic.  Thankfully my prediction came double true (just like Google Maps being the bomb).  I tried my best to appear charmingly befuddled with the oodles of selection and my long blonde savior came to assist me.  Although she was great at telling me what style of pant would be best, what I really needed assisting with was the embarrassingly shiny line of perspiration on my forehead.  Apparently strutting takes more energy than I thought.  All the confidence I came in with went the way of poor Kira’s life essence in the Dark Crystal.  That was until, I went to pay.

Revitalized by the cuter, more bubbly and more forced to talk to me cashier, I felt the mom bomb burning a hole in my pocket.  Tossing out the whole idea of it being strange to buy clothes for my mom that men usually love to see their girlfriends in turned a smile.  Discussing the advantages of being a last second shopper turned another one.  We avoided all talk of the weather, I managed not to start and end my sentences with ‘yeah’ and then I walked out the door.  Good for me.  All that banter and no phone number.  It’s not like I have another excuse to walk into a lululemon boutique (even though they sell men’s clothing…weird).

What originally appeared to be a failure of taking the next step and putting myself on the line later revealed itself to be somewhat of a blessing.  It became clear to me once I sat down at the theatre shorty after leaving the store that my attempts at forwardness would not have been reciprocated.  Through the flash of previews I noticed my crotch.  Staring straight at me, protected by gaping dark denim labia were my boxer shorts.  Fly down, sweaty forehead, buying sexy pants for my mom - picture of attractiveness.  God.  I would have had just as good a chance of picking up the Shopper’s Drug Mart cashier after buying Preparation H, herpes cream, condoms, body wax, wart remover and Rogaine. 

Something To Do With Marketing < Freelance Sports Journalist

Despite the countless evenings and years of experience from which to draw upon, I have few storied tales of debauchery or beer blurred lurid affairs that have sprung forth from unnecessarily heavy nights of pouring pints down my throat.  Perhaps because I have grown accustomed to my evenings on the town ending with me stumbling into my bed with chicken shawarma on my breath and my socks still on rather than with cop blood on my knuckles and expensive lipstick on my collar, I haven’t taken the time to record the odd night that breaks my boring yet much less arrest worthy mould.  To remedy this situation and make some sort of half cocked attempt at an end of the year post, I present the best drinking story of 2007.

Getting on the bus and taking the role of a chaperon at 8am on a Saturday morning was rather contradictory considering that I still smelled like the bar and had the annoying buzz in my ears inflicted by Elliott Brood whom I had seen on stage only hours before.  Nonetheless, I am a professional and was prepared to fight through the lack of sleep and beeraches to fulfill my duty as an authority figure for the out of province weekend long field trip.  Of course, the deviousness of my urge to intoxicate myself was well prepared as I full-out understood that when the students were in bed I didn’t necessarily need to be.  Sunday night offered itself as prey to my desires and young Tour Guide and myself took to the town.

I’m not one to pickup girls at a bar.  I haven’t cultivated a taste for slightly spearmint masked alco-breath and I fear the public humiliation of putting on my best impression of the walking boners that I have come to hate for their rum induced forwardness.  I am missing the fortitude of memory to keep the names of strangers straight and I have the tendency to smile awkwardly when confronted with sentences I don’t fully hear over the Timberlake back-beat that may likely include the phrase, ‘fuck off you drunk wanker, I have no intention to ever sleep with you, let alone continue to listen to your spit drenched attempt to be both poignant and sexy which we all know at this point in the night is as plausible as me taking you home .’  Nevertheless, meeting new people is fun and by meeting I mean having someone else put their balls on the line to make it happen and by fun I mean only when I know from the outset that I have no carnal urges towards these people.  I’m a born wing-man, much more of a Wedge than a Luke.  Enter Tour Guide.

Sitting in a half empty pub swilling pitchers and listening rather infuriatingly to a younger, better looking and much more confident man complain about his romantic plight after being single for a few months while I stare through the bottom of my increasingly transparent stein and playing out the inevitable conversation between my brain and libido where it is laid flat out that after half a year it is time to come to some uncomfortable realizations is not the most promising start to an evening.  Just as I came to believe that I would be better served asleep in my hotel bed, the first note came.  

 Dropped off by the confused waitress was a receipt that for the first time didn’t include a tally of what I owed.  Instead, written on the back in looping cursive was a brief hello and introductory instructions for Tour Guide and myself.  We were to raise a number of our arms straight into the air if our reason for being in this certain city was one of two options.  We complied, felt like dorks and looked about for any particularly incriminating stares from what we assumed (and hoped) would be two girls.  Nothing.  More notes came, followed by some hurried and unfruitful light detective work.  Being rather apathetic to the whole situation, I was content with downing more draught and continuing in my pathetic attempts to warn young Tour Guide of the difficulty trying to meet people after university has finished.  Tour Guide however, was a lot more proactive. Before getting up and walking over to the two girls that we had both finally realized must be the culprits / interested suitorettes, he devised a plan that reeked of immaturity and obliviousness to the attractive qualities of being a young educator.  He proposed that we take on alternate identities.  I assumed that this scheme sprung forthfrom the apparent unbombshellness of the ladies and his immediate decision that it would be much more fun to challenge ourselves than it would be to sleep with them.  Having no care and enough beer to begin to look towards the early morning beginning of our next day’s itinerary as a potential disaster, I agreed.  Because there was a visiting hockey team in town, Tour Guide’s plan was to present ourselves as being somehow connected to the team.  In theory, athletes are sexy and thus, at it’s conception the plan didn’t seem too awful.  Where everything went wrong for him and subsequently right for me was in our decision of what capacity we were related to the team.   

I’m long in the tooth enough to have realized that one’s occupation is as heavily related to one’s attractiveness as drinking three cups of coffee in the morning is related to peeing one’s pants on the drive into work.  Having already given up my truthful and provenly sexy occupation for this situation, I reached into my dreams and countered Tour Guide’s incredibly boring ’something to do with marketing’ with ‘a freelance sports journalist.’  Crafty. 

 The ladies proved to be capable conversationalists and perhaps because of their overly obvious intoxication levels or perhaps because of my cunning beer driven thespianism, they never figured out that I was presenting myself as a lie.  The next hour flew by as a golden pilsner coloured halo shown upon the cultured, sensitive wordsmith I had become.  At points I had the attention of the entire table, recounting stories of travelling through Eastern Europe and the pains of meeting deadlines.  Where had this confidence come from?  I can’t recall a moment of self doubting beer label pulling, nervous laughter or any of the myriad of other dorkwad moves I always tend to pull in situations like that.  And just like that, they had to leave.  As we stood up to say goodnight, neither Tour Guide nor myself were particularly forward with the ladies.  Neither of us had called dibs as we both knew what we had from the outset: they weren’t slutty enough to lead to a sacrifice of sleep nor were we able to keep up this charade all night.  My ego had been stroked enough during my dominance of the conversation that I didn’t desire anything else to be stroked that evening.  From the minute they stood up to leave I was mentally pulling back the sheets in my hotel room and trying not wake my slumbering 50+ music teacher roommate.  The ladies however, had another trick up their sleeves (quite literally). 

Rotating through the handshakes and insincere farewells I failed to notice that the older, more professional lady had mysteriously shaken Tour Guide’s hand with her left.  When I met her right hand with mine I felt more than just clammy bar skin.  She had slipped us yet another note, this time specifically to me.  Politely choosing not to feverishly unfold and read her last scribbling until they had left our eyesight, we watched the two of them leave before we both poured over the familiar scrawl.  She had left her phone number and what was most curious, a request for me to call ending with the word ‘please’ and a girlie :).  Desperation?  I needed to know, and as is the custom of a heartless dweeb like myself, I texted her.  Her reply was an invitation back to her place.  God.  Why then?  Why then when all my little students were asleep in their beds while visions of another day on the stinky tour bus danced in their heads?  I couldn’t.  After a strange excuse about a ’security breach’ at the hotel (what? Was I tapped out of interesting stories?  Seriously, what does that even mean?), I politely declined and stealthily back in my hotel room, washed my hands of an evening of beer and lies. 

A month later the vibration of my phone woke me up about half an hour before my nausiatingly early alarm clock was set to.  My caller ID didn’t recognize the name and my sleepy memory couldn’t recognize the area code.  Instead of taking the smart way out by ignoring the nonesensical but very Foglelike text telling me what time it was, I surprisingly replied with a question mark.  It was the note slipper.  She couldn’t sleep and stumbled across my number in her phonebook.  And, inline withmy character and inability to just not give a shit, I confessed.  I told her everything.  I was a teacher on a class trip and the boring quiet ’something to do with marketing’ guy was the Tour Guide.  I even Grade Two’ed it up, telling her that the whole false identity thing was Tour Guide’sidea.  Of course, with all of this transpiring via text message, I couldn’t judge her sense of disappointment or anger but I can deduce that by finishing the converstation with’well, if you ever want to meet in real life, let me know,’  she was okay with it all.

I haven’t head from her since.

The meaning?  I’ve struggled with it.  Do I lie all the time only to man-up and confess later?  Should I be a lumberjack next?  Perhaps I could be a doctor, returning from some famine stricken country to take care of his sick dog and put the finishing touches on the homeless shelter he built with own hands on the site of his former house which was demolished to bear the materials needed?  Was this a lesson in the possibilities that approaching a situation with confidence can bring?  Was this a lesson in the benefits of going out on the town with younger, better looking comrades?  I’m befuddled.  Either way, it’s made for a great diversion from the leftovers taunting me in the fridge and the 5th and 6th beers from holiday six packs calling my name, that is at least, until now. Happy Boxing Day.

the 11th Wheel

There are some aspects of my life that are hard for me to admit I enjoy.  Despite the bloody sleeve that I wave in your faces, I am not as upfront with every little part of my being as I could be.  The frivolity of many of these hidden nuggets is extreme and really, I won’t feel much better letting the cat out of the bag that I secretly enjoy raw hot dogs from time to time.  I have a Star Wars stuffed toy on my desk that is currently staring me straight in the eyes as if to ask, ‘do you feel any better letting the 5 people that read this thing know I exist?’  I also carry and have carried for quite sometime a torch for pointless dating / ‘I’ll do anything to get on t.v. including losing all my dignity’ programs, one of my all time favourites being the 5th Wheel.  Although I feel only slightly relieved having published this embarrassment, I have more importantly created a sweet segeway to the meat of this babble.   

A weekend or two ago I believe I set some sort of record.  I’m pretty sure that the Guinness Book doesn’t have ‘most couples at one party with just one single loser eating all the food’ as a category but if they did, man,  I should send them a picture of me elbow deep in cheese dip listening to the rest of the party discuss the merits of their children and other fun things about being old and married.  I was the 11th wheel. 

The 5th Wheel brought together 4 dirt bag club rats who on a good night at the bar would have probably slept with each other in a puddle of vodka cooler puke without the cameras or host Aisha Tyler ever playing a factor.  Once these breathing advertisements for herpes prevention flirted and rammed their tongues into the throats of the others, the 5th wheel was introduced.  In a way, the 5th Wheel was the king of the dance-floor, the individual whose over confidence, unabashed sexuality and complete disregard for embarrasement inflicted upon their parents allowed them to swoop into the mix, steal away the most attractive member of the opposite sex and have them become the next notch on their dangerously disease ridden belt. 

Thankfully (for the state of my conscious, health and avoidance of awkward interactions in the staffroom) being the 11th wheel did not bring with it the usual traits or role of the 5th wheel.  Instead of trying to impress the established couples with my abs barely hidden beneath my obnoxiously shiny shirt and bragging that I’ve been called ‘totally the best kisser ever’ and they should really find out why, I was more concerned with polishing off the Tostitos.  Glamorous the 11th wheel certainly isn’t.

And yet again, basketball saved me.  At the point of the party where my bachelorhood felt as if it had crawled on top of my head, stolen some tattoo needles and neatly inked ‘dateless dork’ in annoying kanji lettering across my forehead, I found Kevin Garnett.  On any other night, including those when the empty beer bottles outnumber my friends in the room by more than 10, I would hate seeing KG dismantle my precious Raptors.  On this particular evening the Celtics could have beaten us by 60, Brian Scalabrine could have dropped 40 on us in his way too form fitting shorts and Doc Rivers could have blown raspberries in Sam Mitchell’s face the entire night; I wouldn’t have cared.  In truth, the game was uglier than my post-game realization that I was further away from marriage than my colleague’s 3 year old son who I was playing catch with.  Yet, for 2 plus hours, I watched every missed shot, every ugly turnover and every blown defensive assignment.  To me, gluing my eyes to any game, uglier than Shawn Marrion’s jumpshot or not is better than being the 11th wheel. Eat that Aisha Tyler.