First Things First

One of the first things I did in Abu Dhabi was get a haircut. I even saved up some growth for the event. I was told it was something I’d want to experience. The barber pulled the red curtain closed and turned up what looked like Arabic CSI on the crappy little TV. Heroes with thick black moustaches pointed empty guns and mimicked recoil at the bad guys in thick black moustaches as they sped off in a getaway goat milk truck. Then the heroes had fits in the street with really frustrated looks on their faces. Sometimes the barbers would all yell at each other from behind their curtains about a certain scene – they were all on the same channel. After a standard head shave he reclined the chair for my shave. He drew his straight razor and began stroking it across the leather strap while still watching his TV. I really hoped he was going to be looking at me for this part of the procedure. This is the only time in my adult life that I have used, to a T, the advice my mother gave when I was a child and getting my hair cut: “be still like a statue”. But the service went well, but for a few nicks. I felt like De Niro as Capone in the opening scene to The Untouchables. This was followed by the barber slapping five separate layers of goop on my face for my (I guess customary) man-facial. It tingled, it was nice. So I sat there patiently with a giant goop beard watching all moustache TV before I was toweled off and sent on my way. The 30 degree breeze was actually cool across my face during the walk home.

How We Deal

So the entire 0.43% of the Earth’s land surface known as Saskatchewan suffered a 4-day, sideways blizzard which brought in a couple feet of snow. It blocked highways, cut power to communities, dehydrated cows and strained people’s relationships with their cars. But nothing brings otherwise indifferent humans together like being in the same boat. No car remains stuck on city road because people literally leap to push or shovel you out. It’s just standard procedure.

Speaking of which, here are the steps to successfully enter the roadway from your driveway after a snow storm.
1. Start car with remote start and let warm up for 15 minutes.
2. Get in car and back up just slightly past the neighbour’s house, snowman, tree, snow bank, etc, so that you can confirm no cars are coming from either direction.
3. Pull ahead again as far as you can.
4. Put vehicle in reverse and floor it so that you’re travelling at least 40 kmh by the time you reach the end of your driveway.
5. Plow back of car into snow shovelled onto road the night before.
6. At sidewalk, crank wheel in desired direction. This should launch the vehicle into a healthy sideways skid landing it in the middle of the road where other vehicles have bravely made tire ruts.
7. Put car in drive.
8. Get stuck.
9. Roll down window and thank neighbourhood kids for the push.
10. Continue driving.

This morning there was a guy whose truck had become stuck randomly SIDEWAYS at the end of our street. When I rolled up I got out to help push but it was a lost cause. It was a rear wheel drive pick up with no weight in the back and bald tires. He simply couldn’t get over the small bump in the packed snow that sat in front of his front tire. And he wasn’t helping because he just kept spinning his tires, creating enough friction to melt the very top of the snow which promptly refroze into smooth ice. Someone had even joined me pushing but had to leave to catch the bus. Finally he got out, flustered and agitated and started telling me about how he had been clean for the last few days in preparation for a surgery and this was the last thing he needed, “Maybe this will help.” He said jokingly, then added, “So if you see this truck abandoned later, you know where I’ll be”. The tire store, I hoped. He then grabbed the only thing he had in the back of his truck that could be used for digging which was some flimsy piece of metal siding and started hacking at the ice around his back tires. At this point I had to tell him I had to leave or I was going to be late for work. And that double-double wasn’t going to ordering itself on the way. Luckily we had pushed him back far enough for me to get around him.

Somehow, in the process of pushing his truck, I kinked my neck and can’t turn my head one way so have made a chiropractic appointment. Except I don’t like how chiropractors have turned into pussies. I liked when they used to twist you up and crack the shit out of you. Now it’s all about little baby pushes and tapping you with little plastic toys.

So we opened gifts the other night since Linz and I won’t be together on Christmas (at some point I’ll have to leave my family tradition and we’ll start one of our own). And watching the boy reminded me of the spectacle that is a child unwrapping gifts. Children virtually douse themselves with impatient gasoline sitting next to the tree and when a gift is handed to them it may as well be a road flare, setting them on fire with anticipation as they're rip into the paper, the sum of their imaginative wishes filling the contents of the package. It’s truly a magical event. It does makes some gifts anticlimactic, though. You can see the tension loosen in the wires that hold their excited face when all the paper comes off and it’s not the magic item they failed to will into the box but, say, tube socks. But the hugging is still fun, even though it may just be an exercise to them after gifts like those.

I went to the rental property after work to do a few minor repairs for the new tenants moving in that day, mirror, towel rack, drywall holes, shower head, paint. Then I helped the dude tetris in his couch while gouging every wall and scraping every corner, stuff that we would normally charge damages for if the tenant had done themselves. I took the very last of my stuff home including my junk trunk which contains stuff I’ve accumulated over my entire life. You know, little flotsam & jetsam of memorabilia, including a zillion wallet-sized pictures of people that have come and gone (some now Facebook friends), a torch lighter someone got me from Australia, pieces of paper with passwords to websites probably now extinct, a 9mm casing from an outing at the gun range, the earring I used to wear, textbooks, hockey trophies from childhood, etc. And a dusty picture of me with the ex and her boys which was tossed but not before Lindsey had a look.

Me: Oh my god, look at this.
Linz: You guys had a “family” portrait done? Hee hee.
Me: Yeah. That once, I think.
Linz: This thing is terrible! You still have that ugly shirt!
Me: Oh, right.
Linz: How come she doesn’t smile?
Me: That’s just the way she smiled, never with an open mouth.
Linz: In fact, it doesn’t look like any of you are smiling.
Me (laughing): That’s cause we were all miserable!

I was kidding, or course.

When Linz and I finally made separate meals for ourselves it was 9:30. We ate while watching a couple episodes of our newly and collectively favourite show, Californication. Then she went to bed and I proceeded to get meleed by suburban teenage or pothead 20-something Americans. In other words, I brought a gun to a knife fight and lost.

Last night? I went and sat at my house for a final open house session. No one came so we awarded the suite to a young couple, one of only two parties that came to view it and fill out an application this past Sunday. Then I went home and ate. The new tenants showed up to pay some of their damage deposit. Vance had a bath. I did some event work on Crackbook for our upcoming hockey team pub crawl, took down the ads for the suite from Kijiji. The dishwasher shot water everywhere so I took it apart, right down to the core to see if I could find the source of the clog, among other problems (I felt quite handy) then put it all back together while Lindsey manually washed dishes and surfed her laptop for a new dishwasher. Then I watched the Flames tie Anaheim with 18 seconds left to force overtime. I screamed when they did and Linz sent me a text from upstairs in bed saying I scared the shit out of her and to shut up. They eventually lost in a shootout. Then I played some Modern Warfare 2 online and slowly started to improve from my usual routine of getting INSTANTLY SLAIN UPON DISCOVERY by other players. Then I had a smoke and went to bed. You?

Last night? We had a delicious Thai rice & beef dish that Linz made for dinner. A neighbouring boy came over to play with Vance. He has ADHD and so it was fun to watch how he played. “WOW! Cool car tracks! Can we make some paper airplanes? I’m hungry!” When Vance went to bed Linz and I watched Land of the Lost with Will Ferrell. A few laughs but entertaining throughout (we’ve become impatient with unentertaining movies since we just download rent them for free by the dozen and often shut them off half way through). She went to bed and I made some toast. Downloaded an update for FlightPlan on her iTouch. Watched John Stewart and a bit of Colbert then went to bed. You?

Home Version Soon To Be Released

For a year I lived on the ranch with my good buddy Charlie. Okay, it wasn’t a ranch, it was a 3-acre acreage but we lovingly called it the ranch. We were thinking of calling it other things too, like “El Rancho de la Muerte” and “Live Fire Test Range”, but none of them stuck.

It was an adjustment. I’d been evicted from my apartment as the result of a drunk and destructive roommate – evicted from the rush and livelihood of downtown Calgary. The unpredictability of life had wrenched my unwilling fingers off the pulse of big city night life and the Red Mile. So I packed all my toys and did what any city boy would do and moved to the middle of armpit-fuck-nowhere, to the ranch with Charlie. There, in the rolling hills of rural Alberta, no dwelling was in sight – and, luckily, .22 caliber range – of another. I used to gently fall asleep serenaded by the hum of the streets, the hush of traffic, the honking, pedestrians shouting, the occasional glass breaking, now I was laying in bed wide-eyed to the deafening sound of… absolutely nothing.

But it wasn’t long after that my neck got a little redder. I started to see the appeal of country living. I resigned to my current destiny and embraced being a billy of the hills. It wasn’t uncommon for Charlie to drive up the gravel road to the house to see me sitting on the porch in my straw hat with the rifle in one hand and a beer in the other. We both spent that summer unemployed, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Most of our days started like this:

Charlie wakes up off his couch.
I wake up off my couch, put on my straw hat.
Charlie: What do ya figure we git done today?
Me: Let’s done git drunk and blast things.
Charlie: I’ll done git the gun.
Me: I’ll done git the beer.

Give two miscreants enough time and alcohol and they will find other dangerous and nonsensical ways to entertain (and injure) themselves. For example, I don’t think there exists a type of molecule chain, natural or artificial, that we didn’t attempt to burn in a gasoline-assisted fire. In fact, I don’t think we had any fires that weren’t gasoline-assisted.

Then there were the more creative, beer-fueled, limb-endangering activities. If you've ever seen Cowboy Poker you'd know it's a ballsy rodeo event that involves cowboys playing poker at a table in the middle of the arena in which there is a loose, angry and unpredictable bull. The last one to flee the table wins the hand. We played Hillbilly Cowboy Poker in which you fire up the ride-a-mower and rig it to run full speed on its own with the steering wheel turned and tied off to one direction. Then set up the poker table in the middle of its turning circumference. The mower will jerkily deviate from its orbit and dive inwards toward the table. The last one to dive-roll out of its way wins.

But the piece de resistance, my friends, was a game we called Mailbox Roulette. See if you can guess how it’s played with this list of materials:
- 6 large size mailboxes and 6 fence posts on which to nail them (representing the 6 barrels in a six shooter)
- First aid kit (read: bottle of whiskey)
- 5 friends
- 1 pickup truck
- 1 baseball bat
- One die cube
- And one cindercrete block

Can you say STINGER? Forget connecting with an inside fastball just above the hands, trying hitting a mailbox with a cindercrete in it block at 60 kph. "Woo hoo! Ha ha! Fuck, that hurt. Pass me the first aid."

So next time you see a hillbilly with, say, a missing a finger, go ahead and ask him how he lost it. I guarantee it’s nothing Hasbro ever thought of.