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.

Want Something To Do Tonight?

Every day the paperboy rides his bike along his paper route. Each morning he comes to my country house to deliver my paper. To get to my house each morning he has to cross the gravel road. Dust is always kicked up from the gravel road from a truck that occasionally drives along it. When the paperboy crosses the gravel road dust always hits him in the face. He does this each morning at the same time.

Tonight, August 12th, the dust will hit him hard in the face and create one heavenly show, where a day is actually a year, and the paperboy’s face is actually

And my country house is actually

And the dusty gravel road is actually the trail of debris left behind by what the truck is actually

Swift-Tuttle Comet

And each speck of dust is actually

So tonight’s the night to remember to look up and catch a few. One to two a minute, they say.

Smell My Finger

You know those company-wide emails that remind you that you can’t wear anything scented because it irritates your coworkers? When I get them I always wonder, “who are these people and why do these complain-aholics have so much clout when it comes to lowering the common denominator?” Well I finally met one. My supervisor is one of these people that react violently to any kind of fragrance. One time she was in my cube and her eyes started tearing and she started coughing. She asked me what scent I was wearing, I said “uhh, pit stick”. This morning I went to ask her a question and after a couple seconds she started recoiling in her chair as I was standing next to her. It was a strange thing to watch, as if a ghostly hand had extended from my body to slap her about the ears and face. Then she actually asked me to find and start wearing unscented pit stick as a favour to her. My thought was, “Uhh, no. I’m not going shopping for you. This is deodorant, not odorant. Anyway, I don’t think you want the alternative.”

There has to be a principle involved here. Cologne, after shave, perfume, even Binaca, fine, I can consider them unnecessary but I’m not going to scale back this already basal level of personal hygiene to exclude the only basic defense I employ against smelling like four straight days in the desert. At some point, the level of freshness I have to maintain must outweigh your unusual aversion to anything with a scent. What are we talking here, 1, 2 parts per million? Is she a freakin’ shark? Chopping onions must knock her right out. One day I should hang out in her cubicle reeking of B. O.

Oh man, that reminds me of the worst case I’ve ever encountered of an odour coming from a human body not yet deceased. My buddy and I were on a flight from Kingston, Jamaica to Toronto and we got seated across the aisle from this giant black woman who, no word of a lie, smelled like she was smuggling fish into Canada under her arms. We sat there inhaling our ties, wondering if the pilot would let us crack a window at 35,000 feet, until her eyes met ours. “Lots of fish in Canada, dude. Don’t have to bring your own.” Luckily the flight was a relatively open so after takeoff, when the stewardess gave us an understanding nod, we leapt out of our seats and moved about 20 rows back.

So what shall it be, my over-sensitive coworkers, pit fish or “ocean surf” Right Guard?