More Music...

This one's dedicated to my stepfather, John McCallum.

This song damn near makes me cry every time I hear it. In some alternate universe the second verse would hold true. This video...Jesus, the man in it even looks just a bit like John at 21, the age he was when he first met me, and if you put Coke-bottle glasses on the kid...

Ramblings

So I guess spring's been cancelled this year.
A quick 10 cm of wet snow today knocked out our satellite dish for the first time in years. It's been out for something over four hours now...which figures, because the Leafs are playing the biggest game of the year tonight.
I'm listening to that game over the Net as I write this. It's a new twist on what used to be my standard routine on game nights. For more than five years I had no television. Not "no digital", not even "no cable"...no television. I became very well acquainted with the radio dial.
Now, of course, just about every radio station has a Net feed; there are about a thousand million billion all-music stations online; not to mention iTunes, which is the closest thing to online crack cocaine I have yet found.
Just after I joined the legions of iPod people, a colleague of mine at work told me he was getting unlimited downloads from iTunes.
"Yeah, right. How much is that costing you?"
"I dunno. But I downloaded 1500 songs last month."
"???"
"Yup. 1500. And it didn't try and stop me or anything, so I must be getting unlimited downloads."
I went home, booted up iTunes, and searched in vain for any way to get unlimited downloads...any way to get any number of downloads on any sort of monthly plan. No such thing existed (still doesn't, either).
The next night I conveyed my findings. "Whatever," he said. "I'm just sayin' I got 1500 songs. Actually, I got another coupla dozen this morning."
Two weeks later his Visa bill showed up. For those of you who don't do iTunes, songs cost 99 cents apiece...
Here's the capper: the day before that bill came, he dropped his iPod, which shattered.

I've said before that I don't feel schadenfreude--ever--but I should probably amend that. When the consequences of stupidity assert themselves, I'll be right there chortling every time. Even when it's my own stupidity...ever hurt yourself in some ridiculous way and been forced to laugh through tears of pain?

Eva's joined a gym. Actually, "gym" is far too pedestrian a word for what this place is. I toured it last night with her and had my mind blown. Spotlessly clean, of course, but that's just for starters: the equipment is all brand new, state-of-the-art, incredibly high tech. Free with your membership, you get what they call a PET: a Personal Electronic Trainer that plugs into any piece of equipment you use and tracks everything you do. Big fluffy towels are provided, gratis. Satellite televisions are built in to every piece of equipment: your choice of 24 stations. Cafeteria serving healthy food. Day care. Dry cleaners. Physiotherapists, massage therapists, even a dentist on site. An ATM that doesn't charge for withdrawals.
There's a change room built in to the shower for total privacy. Also a separate women's gym, only accessible through the change room.
No, here's just how special this place is: THEY CAP THEIR MEMBERSHIP. That's right: once they reach capacity, they will not accept any more members: you go on a waiting list, and good luck with that...there's a six percent dropout rate
I almost joined too, but decided not to: we've got gym-quality equipment at home. (After hundreds of miles logged on our treadmill, the arthritis in Eva's knees spoke up and demanded more sophisticated equipment.)

And that's my life in a screenshot.

Christmas 2007

...was pretty good. Despite many social obligations and a ton of driving, there are lots of people I didn't get to see, and places I didn't get to go, and I apologize if you're on that list. But everywhere we went and everyone we saw made us forget about the buttload of stress we've been carrying around since the beginning of the month.

You'll pardon me if this post tends to ramble a bit: I'm listening to a whackload of Brad Paisley as I write this, and so far every single song I've heard distracts me at least a little. Some of them lift me right out of the blog...hell, right out of the room. Maybe writing a blog to musical accompaniment isn't such a good idea...but hey, it's Boxing Day, we've survived the storm and strife of another Stressember, and I'm indulging myself.

I guess the music is where I'll start. This has been an exceptionally musical season: the iTunes cards from my loving wife provided me with four (count 'em) Brad Paisley albums, to go with the one I already had. I can't praise this artist enough. Not only is he my favourite country singer, he's probably my favourite musical act, ever, period.

Then there's the discs from my folks: Maroon 5's It Won't Be Soon Before Long and a Gordon Lightfoot box set. I'd never even heard of, let alone heard, Maroon 5 before yesterday...and was quite frankly stunned to find I like them quite a bit. As for Gordon Lightfoot, he's long been a favourite of mine...and I'm happy to have pretty much his career output here in one place, now.

Not quite music, but related: browsing the iTunes store, I was astonished (and ecstatic) to learn that the Vinyl Cafe is finally a podcast...not just a podcast, but the most popular podcast in Canada last week. Most of the people I know have never heard of Dave and Morley, Stephanie and Sam...and all I can say is how lucky all you folks are to have that experience ahead of you.

We reaped a whirlwind of gifts this year, all of it much appreciated...but when I look back on this Christmas, the gifts will be very much secondary to the atmosphere, the laughter, the love shared with family and friends. Which is what Christmas is supposed to be all about, right?

Eva and I made our annual Christmas trip up north last weekend. For once, the weather co-operated: nary a snowflake in sight going or coming (in fact, we could have floated back home, for all the rain).

Once at Rose Point, we found Jessie and his friend Maggie bellying up to the bar:

Two buds with their Buds

After a few rounds, the two pals decided to go out and terrorize the Christmas village:

Wolves at the door!

Some of the family weren't able to make it up this year, and they were missed. But we did get to see my step-bro Robbie, his friend Mihaela, and her daughter Lia, and together they added a great deal of merriment to the place. And dinner was magnificent, as it always is up there.

What was that about a long winter's nap?

I went into work on Monday, Christmas Eve, expecting Armaggeddon. As it turned out, the day was remarkably slow, almost dead, in fact. Once that shift was over, I came home to our puppies and awaited Eva, who had gone to see her parents.

Her parents are right at the top of that list I referred to. I haven't seen them in two years now: I think they must believe I'm imaginary at this point. Something always comes up: I either have to work, or have to stay here and take care of Tux and Georgia. Ah, well. Next year. Somehow.

My parents--my Mom and John, I mean, now (it gets confusing, I know)--2007 was the year we put estrangement firmly in the past and commited to a new, healthy relationship. They showered us with gifts this year, but never mind all that: I'm just happy to have them back.

Eva came home 'round eleven Christmas Day and since then we've had (almost) uninterrupted relaxation. Our gifts to each other over the past few years have been rather modest: we've established a Boxing Day tradition of hitting someplace frightfully early and getting one big family gift. This year it was Canadian Tire and an electric fireplace.

Laugh if you want, but this thing's ideal for this house: better than the real thing. A real fireplace, see, puts out heat, which Eva carries around internally in abundance 24/7. With this baby, the heat's optional: in fact, if you turn the temp all the way down, something akin to cold air comes streaming out. A cold fire. I do believe Eva has killed people trying to extract that particular secret. The dogs haven't quite figured out what to do with this thing. I can only hope they'll learn to toast themselves, because that's one of my archetypal images of home sweet home: self-toasting dogs stretched out, filling the hearth and heart.

And now: the World Junior opening game (yet another Boxing Day tradition), followed by a Leaf game. I'm in my comfies and I plan to stay that way for the rest of the day. Happy Boxing Day, everyone. Nobody ever wishes you that, and they should. It's a day off, after all.

Face-to-Facebook

You know how skeptical I was about iPods? And cell phones? And just about every new piece of tricknology that comes out?
Goes triple for social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. I mean, come on. Besides being completely redundant (there's nothing on Facebook that doesn't exist in a myriad of places elsewhere on the Web), the whole phenomenon fairly reeks of high school. Here's the popularity contest: people racking up hundreds of "friends" they wouldn't recognize if they ran into them on the street (but of course, that assumes people still go running on streets these days). You've got your juvenile applications like Send Hotness, which give you a nice superficial feeling of being superficially judged superficially "hot". And you also get to know the least action of any of your least friends: I swear, some people won't fart until they post it in their status line. ("Ken is Bisquicking his underwear.")
Ah, Ken, how do you know so much about Facebook if you claim to be so skeptical about it, hmmm?
Ahem.
See...uh...there were these three friends of mine. Real friends, not Facebook friends. Each from a different period in my life. And each one emailed me within a week, and each email basically said the same thing: why the hell aren't you on Facebook already?

Inside me there's this teenager. I don't let him out much: he's prone to embarrass me. I kind of locked him away at about the age of nine, which is when I decided I'd about grown up, and he's been aging ever so slowly in there since. He's been the source of every social mis-step, every awkward moment, every last misplaced affection I ever had. Anyway, he's about eighteen now, and just as prone to peer pressure as most people of that age. He perked up with each email, and eventually demanded to get on Facebook, just on a trial basis, you understand. Rational, grown-up Ken said sure, okay, no problem, we'll join up on this site and see how infantile it really is.

And so I joined up. And that was that. Now it's a daily staple, and if you came up to me and told me that I could only visit one website from now on, it's no contest which I'd choose.

So what happened? Simple. I started looking people up.

Over here's the guy I went to school with back in grade four. He was the Rubik's Cube champion for his age group when I knew him, and the closest thing to a friend I had at that age...one of the very few kids who didn't look at me and want to re-arrange my face.
And over there are a pair of twins who lived down the hall from my ex when she went to Humber College. Lovely, both of 'em. (Truth be told, I had a crush on them...nothing I let get out of hand, but my ex knew, which is why I never got the chance to say goodbye to them, and why I remembered their names lo these sixteen years.)
Here a cousin; there an ex-boss; and here's my wife's matron of honour. Friends I met through other friends: a friend I've never met, but whose blog I read religiously; three aisles full of co-workers. (My store employs fewer than 100 people, and 77 of them are on Facebook.)

And while I'm looking people up, people are looking me up. One day I got a message in my Facebook inbox from a girl I'd never heard of in my life. She asked me if I had gone to Byron Northview Public School in the mid-eighties. I had. Twice, actually. I told her so, also confessing her name didn't ring any bells. Whereupon she told me she had been a grade ahead of me, and proceeded to detail an awful lot of (accurate) things about my grade five self. I didn't know whether to be flattered or alarmed. By that weird online alchemy, we've since become friends of a sort.
Then today: Craig Robertson.
Craig Robertson: my closest male friend for a while. He was a couple of years behind me, but even in grade nine played trumpet at a professional level. At some point after I moved away from London, he melted out of my life. Friends come in and out like busboys in a restaurant, have you ever noticed that?

Okay, so I've got friends on Facebook. So what?

Well, there's Scrabulous...I've played eleven games of Scrabble online, winning six and having fun even when I lose. There's an application called "Books iRead", which offers the opportunity to browse the entire Amazon.com catalogue, review anything you've read and read the reviews of others. There's "iLike", which does the same for music and goes one further: type an artist's name and you'll find out if they're on tour, where they're playing any given night, and you're even able to buy tickets. And this is anybody, not just teenybopper bands. You've got all of YouTube at your disposal to troll for music videos. And so on and so forth. There are groups a la Usenet for everything under the sun, popular or obscure. That's like a magnet to me: search my name under Google Groups and you'll very quickly find out what happened to the last eighteen months of my aborted university education.
In short, Facebook is the entire 'Net in microcosm. There are truckloads of rough, but more than enough diamonds in there to justify daily sifting.

In all shapes and sizes...

I like fat women.

Yes, I've alluded to this in passing, but in truth I feel so strongly about it that I need to say it baldly, right there so you can't misinterpret me. Just in case, I'll say it again:

I like fat women.

Nearly everyone I have dated through my life would fall into the obese or morbidly obese category. There have been three people dear to me who have astounded doctors with their level of physical health despite their obesity. Ask a really fat person about the last time their blood pressure was taken. Chances are the doctor left bruises and obtained a normal reading.

And yet...

What's your first reaction upon seeing somebody that weighs, say, 300 pounds? Pity? Anger? Disgust? All of the above? And while you're thinking about that, does your attitude towards that tub of guts change if said tub of guts is a male?
It's funny, you know...I have no studies to support my belief, but I'm willing to bet only women would find a 300 pound man intrinsically disgusting--and maybe not even a majority of women. But I'd be willing to FURTHER bet that 90% of both sexes find a 300 pound women gross in more than a literal sense.

Think what that woman feels like.

Especially if she is, like many, many overweight people, eating "right", exercising "right", doing everything "right", and watching the pounds stubbornly refuse to melt off. Yeah, just imagine what that feels like.

I bet there's a few of you out there looking at that last paragraph and questioning it, poo-pooing it...'well, obviously, she must be doing something wrong if she's not losing weight.' That attitude is maddeningly pervasive. Okay, we've got our diets, let's line them up from Atkins to the Zone and everything in between...surely one of them's got to be "right", eh? And since everyone our hypothetical tubbo meets just swears by a pet diet, and they're every last one of them different, well, then she should just try all of them in succession until the weight magically disappears, never to return? Is that how it works?

Well, guess what. Diets don't work. That's been proven in countless studies, too many to begin to cite here, and yet there's still this multi-billion dollar industry out there pushing the next cure-all, capitalizing ruthlessly on people's (largely women's) shoddy view of themselves.

My gut feeling, pardon the pun, is that people should be loved for who they are. For me, a 300 pound woman just has twice the body to love, nothing more and nothing less. But chances are she doesn't feel that way. I've met countless fat women--I'm drawn to them, somehow--and the first one to fool me, to successfully fake total self confidence, was the one I married. Oh, Eva had a good deal of self-esteem, much more than your average obese woman, but she'd managed to create a very convincing 'holograph' that amplified and projected her sense of self-worth. It was a bit of a shock meeting the woman behind the curtain. I think she'd say it was a bit of a shock for her, meeting a man who wanted to look behind the curtain. In any event, I've done my best to tear down the curtains, open her blinds, and then open the window and let some fresh air in on Eva's perception of herself.

And it occurs to me that this is what I was put on earth to do: to go around uncovering angels.

There are an awful lot of angels out there who happen to be overweight. An awful lot. And the living hell of it is, they think they're nothing but husks. Large, empty husks.

We've heard stories of virgins approaching 30 years old, who've never so much as had a date. The first thing they'd think to look for when asked out by a man would undoubtedly be a bucket of pig's blood. (For those of you who have not read or seen Carrie, just let that reference slide, okay?)

I think this is a sad state of affairs.

I think it's time something was done about it.

And so, Eva and I are in the preliminary stages of starting up a support group for overweight people. NOT a diet group. NOT an exercise group. If our clients should choose to exercise and/or lose weight, good for them. But this group--very tentatively called P.A.L. (Plump And Loveable)--won't focus on weight loss. It will treat fat people as fat people ought to be treated. Like people, in other words. There's a hell of a lot more going through the mind of your average overweight person than the next fad diet. Or at least there should be.

Stay tuned as this develops.

The Monkey on My Back

Look for a long time at what pleases you,
and longer still at what pains you...
---COLETTE
 
I don't know who Colette is or was, whether it's a first name or a last. I ran across this epigram just now on a disembodied page sitting next to our bathroom sink. Live with us for any length of time and you will not find the preceding sentence overly odd...we have books everywhere, and some of the older ones occasionally molt.
In any event, I was 'bathruminating' on something that pains me mightily when my eyes were drawn to Colette's words of wisdom. It occurred to me that this thing should be dragged into the light of day (or at least the weak glow of my monitor) and examined.
 
Christ, it's heavy. Not that I've noticed the weight before, or not often--We Do Not Speak Of It. But I've carried this burden pretty much my whole life. Not only that, every chance I got I added to it. Proudly, even. By now, though, it's a monkey on my back, a big one, maybe actually a silverback gorilla. It can bite. It does bite. Like today.
 
This silverback has a name, and its name is IGNORANCE.
 
Does it strike you, dear reader, as odd that I am 32 years old and have just today used a whippersnipper for the first time? Yeah. Me too. But it's true. Of course, within seconds I had snapped off  part of the cutting spool. I stood there in the middle of the driveway, feeling a not-entirely-phantom pain as that not-entirely-phantom gorilla bit me on the ass.
This morning, I successfully mounted a hook on the back of our bathroom door for my towel. This is a simple job--it would only take your average guy without a gorilla on his shoulder about a minute. It took me ten, and when I finished it, I heard two things in my head: wild cheering, almost immediately drowned out by the sardonic clapping of the gorilla. Good for you, it said. You screwed two screws into the bathroom door and only dropped one twice. Not bad for an idiot. But just wait...later on today you're gonna use a whippersnipper. And then I'm gonna hoot and holler and jump up and down and bite you on the ass and laugh and laugh and LAUGH...

I was setting up my keyboard stand later on and I managed to strip a screw to the point of no return. I could blame this on Mr. Silverback, but he has an accomplice in matters like this, a little macaque named Slanty. Slanty lives deep in my brain and makes me think I'm holding things--like screwdrivers, say--perfectly level when in fact I'm merrily screwing myself crooked. (You'll also see Slanty at work when I'm carrying plates of food. On the list of possible professions for me, "waiter" ranks somewhere below "ballerina".)

On those infrequent occasions when I was forced to acknowledge the gorilla as a child, I'd like as not burst into tears and run away, not caring that it just made him stronger. Now, as an adult, I'm no longer allowed to cry simply because once again, I've fucked things up...but inside there's a little kid screaming.

I have no excuse. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I put this monkey on my back at least 25 years ago and I've been feeding it ever since. When Things Were Getting Done around the house, I'd make myself scarce. If that wasn't an option, I'd gladly be the guy reading the instructions. I could hold the whoozit steady with the best of them. If pressed, I could even hold two whoozits AT THE SAME TIME. On rare occasions, I'd be asked to willywag the whoozit into the bangzapper. That would usually end badly. Luckily, or so I thought at the time, I had a stepfather who could willywag whoozits into bangzappers with both eyes tied behind his back, whistling the theme from Love Story.  And while John was blessed with nearly endless reserves of patience in most things, it didn't extend to teaching willywagging to a kid who most assuredly had no interest in learning.

But now I've got this here house, see, and the sky is raining bangzappers.

I found out really early in my relationship with Eva that she has a deep and abiding love for monkeys. Even the silverback on my shoulders doesn't faze her, often, for which I am profoundly grateful. Better even than that, she has both skill and an ability to teach. Knowing that helps soothe the gorilla bites just a bit. I can't deny, though, that it's days like today when, just for an instant, I wonder if she'll throw me on the discard pile...and whether I actually belong there or not. 

Home, sweet...is this really home?

It's been a month since we moved in here, and I'm still not used to it.

Moving from a one-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom, three-level house has its advantages. There's finally room for everything. Excepting, of course, our kitchen paraphernalia: you'd need a whole 'nother house to store all of that properly. Okay, I'm exaggerating, a bit...our cupboards are nearly overflowing, but there's still ten or so boxes marked "Kitchen".

This place is fully furnished save the two extra bedrooms. Realistically, our library has room for one or perhaps two more bookshelves--both of which we could fill easily--and that's it. The rec room downstairs is positively stuffed with furniture. I look at it all and wonder how the hell it came out of our old place. It's like seventeen clowns in the back of a VW bug, you know?

What I'm finding is that I just can't get used to the expanded space. Before we moved in here, we visualized a downstairs "living room" in which we would spend a good chunk of time. A month later, the TV works down there, but the VCR and DVD have yet to be connected, let alone turned on, and there doesn't seem to be any urge to get this done. The rec room has become a place to drag laundry through on the way to and from the laundry room.

Oh, we spend some time "down cellar". Like last evening, during the worst thunderstorm I've seen in a couple of years...I looked out the front window and up at the sky and noticed swirls of grey rotating away up there. Not a funnel cloud, but something that looked like it wanted to be a funnel cloud when it grew up. Ken promptly descended below ground level.

But primarily, we live our life on the main floor. That's something I would never have predicted.

This is arguably the squeakiest house I have ever lived in. You can stand in the basement and listen to people moving around in the living room...a very disturbing thing to hear when you're alone in the house, believe me. If you come up to investigate, you'll find a cat pacing. And not even the big cat.

I was a little apprehensive to learn that our home is abutted on both sides by houses rented to university students. Eva has reassured me that anyone choosing to live this far off campus is probably serious about their education, and my 'Animal House' musings are most likely nonsense. I believe her...mostly. I spent a semester living half a block down the street, and it was pretty quiet then. But I saw things during my time as a university student that firmly convinced me many students arrive in Waterloo direct from the other side of the galaxy, having heard that Earth girls are easy and the party never ends.Luckily, the dividing wall between our house and the other half of the semi is solid concrete, attic to basement. Armageddon could commence over there and we'd never know it.

I figure another month and I'll feel fully at home here...

 

 

 

The Adoption Option, Part II

I'm up writing now because I got tired of trying to sleep in an oven. Whew.
So we're adopting. The original plan called for us to move to Listowel, Ontario--about 35 minutes northwest of Waterloo. Why Listowel? Well, the house prices are about 40% cheaper than they are here in the city. I would commute with Eva until the kids came along, and then I would find a part-time job in town and be a househusband the rest of the time.
Except it turns out that adopting in Perth County is a six to ten year process. Here in Waterloo, we could have our children nine months from now, and will almost certainly have them in two years.
Thanks to an extremely generous gift from my father and stepmother, we were able to find a house here in town that meets all our needs. Living in Waterloo changes everything.
1) I can keep my job. In fact, I have to.
2) In turn, this means that adopting infants is out, as we can not afford to have one of us stay home.
(I have nothing against parents who choose to use daycare, but it is most emphatically not our choice, for two reasons: one, it would take almost 80% of my net salary, rendering my job next to useless; two, we'd prefer to raise our kids ourselves.)
3) Both of us work school hours, or something close to them, so that means we're looking at two kids at or very near school age.

Why two kids? That's more at Eva's insistence than my own, although I've come to accept and agree with her take on it. I'm an only child. Only childhood is what I know, what I am most comfortable with. Eva believes on some level that I missed out. In my more sober moments, when I'm not besieged by images of our kids beating the snot out of each other, I know she's right.
Narrowing it down further, we want to adopt siblings. This puts us in fairly rare company, apparantly. But consider: we're asking two kids to put aside their pasts and make our home their home. Imagine being shown around your new house, scared out of your mind: "here's your room...here's your new Mommy and Daddy's room...and see that boy there? That's your new brother." I figure the transition would be much easier with someone there who is familiar.
There are relatively few physical disabilities we're not willing to embrace. But we are simply unwilling and unable to cope with the rigors of raising kids who are mentally challenged.
The biggest attraction of parenthood, for me, is instilling a love of learning and then watching our children learn. Quite simply, a diminished capacity for learning would diminish our joy of parenting.
Look, I know I'm being an elitist snob. I'm sorry for it. I work with mentally challenged kids--we have a job skills training program--and I've learned that I am actually pretty good with them. But I couldn't do it full time. I regard you parents who do as something akin to saints.
So two siblings who are at or near school age and not mentally challenged. I suspect that last detail is the one that's going to trip us up a bit, as it seems that most of the kids moving through the system have problems in that area, be they Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or something more immediate.
We shall see.

On the outside, looking in

My -- oh, this is just great, to stop dead exactly one word into this entry! -- what the hell do you call the husband of your step-sister? Step brother-in-law? Yecch. My brother-in-law and a dear friend both wrote me in the aftermath of the other day's kvetchfest to say basically the same thing: why the hell should I care what others think?
Simple answer is, I don't. Except when I do.
Yeah, that was clear, eh? Like fine, transparent mud.
----------------------------------

I used to be Popular.
Quit that sniggering, damn it. I'm telling the truth. From Grade 1 through Grade 3, I was the most popular kid in the class. In those years, nearly every recess was devoted to kissing tag. I don't think there's a girl in my grade 3 class I missed.
Oh, weren't those the days?
Then I moved. And got glasses. At the same time.
Either one I could have overcome. If I hadn't moved away, my contemporaries would have seen me for what I was, Kenny-with-glasses. If I'd never acquired the glasses, I would have simply made new friends. But no...
INSTA-NERD!
Oh, I'd been beaten up before. Actually, through my first three years of public schooling, I used to get gold stars if I went a day WITHOUT fighting. But those were *other* kids, not in my class, some of them three years ahead of me. You never forget the first time you get kicked in the nuts...that feeling that says 'howdy, how's about we shit our pants while we puke our guts out?'
But within that first week of grade 4, it became evident I had something London boys didn't like: a face. They wanted to change it, redecorate it, open new holes in it, just generally renovate to their heart's content. And when they were done with it, they'd just throw the body it was attached to into the nearest garbage can.
And my days of kissing tag? So very over.

We moved an average of once a year from then until grade 10. Who knows why...I sure don't. My parents seemed to get bored really easily with any given house. My mother would always announce each new move with the words "fresh start". I rapidly got to detest those words. "Fresh start" meant that within a week there'd be a fresh cotillion of bullies to start pounding the shit out of me.
Oh, I made *some* friends. Well, one, actually. His name was Tim Gauld; I've written of him here before. I remember practically everything about him except how it was we got to be friends in the first place. (That's pretty common: although I can accept people's friendship in theory, I often think they like me because they are mildly crazy.)
High school brought its own set of stresses, like high school always does. In grade 9, I got exactly five signatures in my yearbook, all of them from teachers. It wasn't until grade ten, at Westminster Secondary, that I started to finally come into my own. I will always revere that high school as the place that allowed me to do that. No cliques there. You were just left to be as you were.
I was really settling down by grade 11, so of course we had to up and move again. Can't let Ken get too comfortable, can we? I carried a torch for Westminster through the first five months of my OAC year, and dismissed my Ingersoll high school as a dump. It's strange, now, looking back: I haven't been in touch with anyone from Westminster in almost six years, but Ingersoll District C.I. netted me my two best friends, a woman I dated for two years and was briefly engaged to, and a plethora of other people I counted as friends.
By the time I got to university, I had finally discovered that I didn't have to fit in to somebody else's group...I could make my own. Said group never numbered more than a few. I took to heart something my grade 13 classics teacher, Reverend McCombe, once passed around the class: "One good friend and you're lucky. Two and you're blessed. Three is impossible."
--------------------------------------
To make a long story short, I spent most of my life on the outside looking in, never noticing I had the tools and materials needed to build my own little place. Even after that place was built, I sometimes looked around and only noticed the shitter in the corner.

I have a saying I try very hard to live by: "there are two kinds of things in the world, those you can control and those you can't. Those you can control, you can control, so why worry about them? Those you can't control, you can't control, so why worry about them?
Occasionally I forget myself when the things in question are nasty opinions held by other people. That's all. I must try to remember, too, that I can't be responsible for how clearly my messages are received, only for how clearly I send them.

The Adoption Option, Part I

Every once in a while, either Eva or myself runs into somebody who has yet to learn that we are planning to adopt kids. Their reaction upon being informed speaks volumes.
Nine times out of ten, the first thing out of their mouth is something like "you'll get pregnant..."
And, damn us, we always play along.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, as soon as the adoption is finalized, you'll get pregnant!"
"I don't see how that's possible."
"Well, my cousin's best friend's sister's boyfriend's mother, see, she went to adopt kids because, like, she'd had trouble, you know? And behold, she gave birth to the entire population of West Bumfuck, Iowa. You watch, it'll work for you too.
"What'll work?" We're really being dense at this point.
"Oh, c'mon, you're just doing this so you can have kids of your own." The person shrugs, as if she'd just announced that two and two are four.
Around and around the mulberry bush we go. Half a dozen times, the acquaintance has actually said "how much you wanna bet?"
"One million dollars. Hand it over. You ever heard of this neat invention called 'birth control'?"
"But...but...but...why would you do that?!"

WHY WE WOULD DO THAT

It was always our plan to have one child and adopt another. Have the one for the same reasons that everybody has kids; adopt the other because there are millions of kids out there in need of a loving home.
And we always knew that the first part of our plan was going to be a bitch. For various medical reasons, Eva has known since her late teens that her chances of successfully carrying a child to term were just this side of nil. My blood is incompatible with Eva's, so her chances of successfully carrying MY baby to term are zero to at least seven decimal places.
But we tried. And after every failure, we got to listen to the dunderheads out there blabbering about their uncle's friend's hairdresser who had, like, seventeen miscarriages, you know, and then went on to give birth to the entire population of East Bumfuck, Michigan.
Then came that blessed day when Eva was declared pregnant. Happiness surged through the house. Everything proceeded along tickety-boo for a while. At the three month mark, she went in for an ultrasound so she could see the baby's heartbeat. That's when she found out our baby was dead, and had been for two weeks.
Short of actual stillbirth, I just can't imagine anything worse. I don't know how it is that she got through the ensuing day, let alone six months.

You can maybe begin to understand how an event like that can change your attitude just the slightest bit? Good for you. Because that didn't stop the dunderheads, spewing bullshit about getting back up on the horse. The parallel that kept running through my mind: a bunch of people trying to set me up on blind dates at my wife's funeral. Fuck off, okay?

Okay?

So, on to plan B, right?
No, not really.
We had always planned to adopt, remember?
Eva asked me on occasion if I was really okay with this, if I secretly wanted children "of my own". Dutifully, I thought it through.
Assuming for the moment that there was some way to actually plant that little bugger in there and have it come out on schedule--something that would now require more money than I make in a year, most likely--was I really that vain about my genes? Was it crucial to me that I look at my kid and see my fucked-up teeth?
Not only was that utterly unimportant to me, I couldn't understand why it was so damned important to everyone else. I always thought you had kids so you could share the joys and sorrows of life with them, watch them grow and learn, and send them out to make their mark on their world. I never once believed that pushing them out of your crotch was required.

I bristle every time I hear that phrase "your own kids." First off, people, you don't own kids. Slavery was outlawed several generations ago, for good reason. Second, the language is invariably used to denigrate adopted children: "natural" children...does that mean adopted kids are unnatural? "Biological" parents...does that not sound like any adopted kid is a robot? "Your own" children...that means adopted kids really belong somewhere else, right?
Eva's made to feel like a traitor to her gender for not having any desire whatsoever to get pregnant. What's really bizarre is that some of this vitriol comes from self-proclaimed feminists. I'm made to feel like I'm somehow not fulfilling my own biological imperative. I couldn't disagree more strongly. Our children will carry my name, if that satisfies anybody; they'll grow up with a basic grounding and the freedom to chart their own course, and that satisfies *me*.

I'm sure East and West Bumfuck are beautiful places, but I'll stay here, thanks, at home with the kids.

Ceci n'est pas ma maison!

My father, my stepmother and my aunt Dawna have been here for the past couple of days. My cousin Terri joined them the first evening. It's not quite "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"--the rooms are still all the same size--but nevertheless this house has taken leaps and bounds since they got here.
The kitchen, which was once a sort of industrial booger colour, is now a very pale yellow. Its cupboards (and our baker's rack) now match the table; a big ceiling fan has been put up. The bathroom has been painted and gussied up real pretty-like, and our bedroom has been transformed, from beige-y taupe into "cornsilk". (Painting that was a tassel.)
Curtains have been installed throughout, very nice ones. And all of our appliances are now up and running. Let me tell you, that was arguably the most, well, "interesting" part of the last two days.
Hooking up a washer and dryer ought to be child's play. This was child's play's total antithesis: adult work, and quite a lot of it. Blood was spilled. Curses rained down until they coated the ground.
With the washer, it was a matter of actually getting the $%^*ing electrical cord out through the back of the ^&*(ing thing. It was secured in there like the ^&*(ing crown jewels: four nuts, six large washers, two monster braces, all behind four Liliputian screws set at impossible angles.
This washer and dryer was made in America. How do we know this? Because every last @#$^ing screw is a slothead. The anti-Americanism emanating from around our house over the last couple of days would have done Carolyn "damn Americans, I hate those bastards" Parrish proud.
Obligatory Canadian plug on Canada Day: Robertson screws, a Canadian invention, are vastly superior. There oughta be a law...
The dryer vent required a master's degree in engineering to install. (Final exam, worth 100% of your grade: get a pipe four inches in diameter to fit into another pipe four inches in diameter. You have four hours...)
In the end, we managed to acheive this with the use of a slightly wider bore collar, a couple of clamps (with slothead screws, the %^&*ing Yanks), some drywall screws of our own (that'll hold ya, you sonofawhore!) and a whole lot of duct tape. Yup, Red Green was in the house, with Ken here playing a very good Harold. (Why in the ^&*( is that aluminum vent piping so &*()ing fragile? It unravelled every time we tried to clamp it and tore outright in three places.)
The word of the day is "cock-knocker", boys and girls. Say it with me!
Anyway, it's done. We've done some much needed laundry, and I have a recommendation for all of you: BUY A FRONT-LOAD WASHER. This thing *rocks*. Well, it did until we levelled it. No really, the spin cycle on this practically dries your clothes by itself. My pants were going around so fast I swear I saw pant-puke dot the inside of the door.
I couldn't be more grateful to my parents, my aunt, and my cousin for all the stuff they've given us and all the work they've done. There's more coming, too: a whole truckload of furniture, including a hutch. (We brought enough furniture from our one-bedroom apartment to do a creditable job of filling this three-bedroom, finished-basement house!)
Thank you so much, folks.

Now to continue the unpacking...

Home, sweet home. Where the hell's my shirt?

Well, that was five days to remember.
THURSDAY NIGHT: Three trips to drop off valuables--the last valuables to come being our cats, Streak and B.B. ("B.B" is short for "Bug Butt", because she runs around like there's one way up there. Other possible derivations: "Blonde Brain", "Beautiful Bubblehead"...well, you get the point.)
Our last move saw us cram both cats into a carrier. Streak took it stoically; B.B tried to claw my face off. So this time I took the little one in my arms for the trip over. She clung. I have divots now. Streak miaowed pathetically from her carrier and got B.B. going too...caterwauling fit to break your heart and at least one ear.
I curled up in a corner of the living room floor and started to go to sleep.
The fridge compressor came on. I peeled myself off the ceiling.
THURSDAY NIGHT, LATER: Woke up and stopped cats from killing each other.
SLIGHTLY LATER: Fridge compressor goes off. I wake up and look for the bomb crater. Went back to sleep.
FRIDAY MORNING, EARLY: Woke up and stopped cats from killing each other.
FRIDAY MORNING, LATER: Woke up and stopped cats from killing each other.
SLIGHTLY LATER: Mused to myself about throwing the fridge through the living room window.
FRIDAY MORNING, MUCH TOO FRIGGING EARLY: Alarm going off. Strongly consider using one cat to kill the other.
Awaiting the electrician, who will change the fuse box into a bunch of circuit breakers. And delivery of a futon. And the guy who's going to replace the master bedroom orange shag carpet with something considerably less tacky. And oh, yeah, our stuff.
Once the power goes off for the day, I have no clock. Time stops, then reverses out the driveway and saunters off around the block.
Where are the cats? Seventeen frantic searches around the house yield nothing. On the eighteenth I look in the drawer underneath the oven. It's decidedly furry in there. They've very temporarily stopped trying to kill each other in order to curl up together against this hostile new world. Drills are going off, sounding like ten thousand kittens being simultaneously squashed, only louder. Thuds are reverberating throughout the house like cannon fire. Oh, I pity these cats.
The stuff shows up. Not surprisingly, they've booked the wrong size truck and two trips need to be made. We're also short one mover, leaving us with two 22-year old whippersnappers who spread piss and vinegar hither and yon, but do an admirable job. I don't envy them carrying in that treadmill.
Let's try a load of wash. Hmmm. This washer's capacity is amazing: approximately nine outfits (that belong to a three-day old infant). The dryer takes, count 'em, 140 minutes to do its job.
HOMEOWNER LESSON NUMBER ONE: If the house comes with appliances, THERE'S A REASON.

SATURDAY: Up bright and early and back to the old place to clean clean clean clean clean. Then off to The Brick, who's having a convenient sale. We brought a front-load washer and dryer that cost a bit more than we wanted to spend, but will easily pay for themselves over the next two years. The washer takes half as much water, half as much energy, and half as much detergent to get your clothes twice as clean. And the dryer has a moisture sensor, so the cycle lasts only as long as it needs to. I'm impressed.
We also bought two fridges, one for upstairs and a bar fridge for the basement. No more compressor bombs.

SUNDAY: Eva's brother has kindly given us an electric lawnmower, and it's time to tackle the yards. Well, one of them; the front yard is a mix of weeds and dirt. The back yard, however, has yet to be mowed this season. So it's a jungle out there.
It's also very uneven, in the sense that the Himalayas are a chain of rolling hills.
The tree stump reveals itself within about two minutes of my turning the mower on, but much too late to avoid my hitting it. No problem: back and fill, back and fill, what the f---
It's like somebody lit the world's most prodigious fart: a huge belch of flame roars out from the underside of the mower, accompanied by a SCHMUCK!!!! noise, as if to say, you fucking SCHMUCK, you ran over the extension cord and cut it in three places!
In the sudden silence following this, my Eva storms out of the house and announces that the dryer vent has fallen off, turning the laundry room into an insta-sauna.
Off to Canadian Tire, and home with a push mower. No cord to break, no gas to fill; just walk and push.
The stripe on our Visa card has actually been observed to sweat.
"A man's home is his hassle", or so the saying goes. Still, it's nice to be here. This house is going to be a truly great place to live. Once we're unpacked and all the new furniture is together and all the appliances are up and running and the list of six million, three hundred and forty five thousand, three hundred and eighty two--no, three--things are done, I will be able to sit back, relax, and say
"Time to sell."

Excuse me while I go grow up

Well, the papers are signed, the boxes are (sort of) packed, and Ken's yawning a mile a minute: it must be almost MOVING DAY!
I was supposed to get to bed EARLY last night, as I won't tonight and I *really* won't tomorrow. But, of course, the AFI's 100 best cinematic songs were profiled on TV last night. So we got to watching and listening to that whilst packing, and once you're fifty songs into a countdown, what's another (yawn) fifty? The upshot is I didn't get "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" until after eleven. For some or most of you out there, that's normal. Not for me. Especially since I hardly slept the night before. So far today I have fallen asleep three times.
Tomorrow figures to be a fun day. The moving commences. It looks like I will be staying in the new place tomorrow night, alone but for a couple of cats...the more time we have to acclimatize our cats (9 and 13) to new surroundings, the better. Last time we moved, I honestly thought our little one was going to claw my eyes out. Oh, all the stairs they're going to have! They'll love it. They'll see.
Is that a pillow dancing across the screen?
*swat*
*zzzz*

*jerk*

I better go. There's work to be done. See you next week, dear blog: reality intrudes.

Dad's day

Today is the day set aside for fathers. It seems so unfair, really, that we only designate one day for them, after they've given so much to us.
Like my friend Jen, who recently wrote so eloquently of her dad in her blog, I had two fathers, the one I was born to and the one who largely raised me. Like her, too, I'm no longer on good terms with one of my dads. In my case, though, it's not from a lack of respect.
My first sight of John McCallum, the man who would soon become The Man in my life, came in August 1980. I was eight years old; he had just turned 21. Some mutual friends were moving, and John was helping them. I was sent out to introduce myself. "Hello", I said, "you must be John."
His first impression was of a polite little boy. Mine was of a giant. True, he only stood 6'2", but there was something about the way he carried himself that bespoke a man of substance.
His first impression was dead wrong: I was a spoiled little brat, a sore loser, and an inveterate whiner, all of which he found out later that very day. My impression of him, though, has remained fairly constant through the years: he's been a giant influence in my life.
It was John, as I wrote in my last entry, who forced me to get out of the house and make friends. It was John who, with the patience of a saint, taught me the things any normal eight-year-old should have mastered years before. And it was John who unflinchingly coped with my excesses, my insecurities, and my general childishness, even into my teenage years.
There is simply no way that I, at 21, could have dealt with myself at eight years old. The very thought chills my blood. Yet John did it without hesitation. I'm not kidding when I say that he pretty much singlehandedly turned around a childhood that, left alone, would have ended in jail or suicide.
What do I remember of John? His was the voice of reason in my house. He would talk to me about anything, and he rarely lost his temper, no matter how many times I'd screw up. It's true that at the time, I would tune most of his gentle lectures out, but I've absorbed them subconciously nonetheless: play fair. Be respectful. Don't be lazy. Find the joy in everyday life. Think before you speak, and think twice before you act. These little lessons were never spoken so succintly, but rather modelled implicitly: John's every action was one you could at least seriously consider emulating.
My mom ran in two modes: irritatingly happy or just plain irritated. John tended to just be John. He never stopped working. "Relax" wasn't in his dictionary. But through all the work--which included, at one point, gutting a house and rebuilding it by himself from the inside out--he kept a remarkably even keel. Failure was not an option, and success was not to be boasted about. In short, John McCallum was and is a great man. Despite the fact that my relationship with the woman he married in 1981 has rotted away, it wasn't his fault.
John: I respect you.
-------------------------------------
I never felt comfortable calling John "dad", though. I tried a few times; there was even a time when I strongly considered changing my name to Ken McCallum. But in the end, I couldn't do the latter and felt supremely uncomfortable with the former. Because I *had* a dad. True, he lived five or six hours away, and true, I'd go months without seeing him, but he was there, all the same.
My father and my mother: a match made in the deepest pit of hell. How it lasted seven years is beyond me. Somebody must have broken a mirror. But I was a product of that union, so I guess it wasn't all bad.
I have very few early memories specifically of my dad. What hazy memories exist are reinforced by countless pictures in old scrapbooks. Nearly every weekend through the summer, we'd pile into our Ford Maverick, drive to Parry Sound, pitch the tent at Oastler Lake Provincial Park, and drive into town to see Grandma Breadner, my aunt Dawna and uncle Ted, the Hoburns, and, hell, most of the rest of the population. My father couldn't walk six paces without somebody saying "hi". It's still the same today. To say that Ken Breadner the Elder is a District of Parry Sound icon is to put it mildly.
Dad was downsized to part time as of '77, and my relationship with him entered a new, if predictable, phase. I'd only see him three or maybe four times a year, and he believed he had to pack a year's worth of affection (read: stuff) into maybe ten or twelve days. I can't deny this had an effect on me. I'd rarely sleep the night before going 'up north' and I would be horribly depressed every time a trip was over with. That included what to date have been my only two extended trips outside the country: to Florida in '84 and Venezuela in '86.
Only once did I ever think about running away from my London life and making 'up north' permanent. It was immediately after a huge fight with my mother when I was seventeen. Only one problem: my dad's second wife. Although she tolerated me for the brief periods I invaded her space, I believe she would have booted me out after no more than a month.
Since I got married and my mother dissolved from my life, I've begun to have a much better and more rounded relationship with my dad, thanks in no small part to his third wife, Heather. (Third time's the charm for dad: this one will stick.) And I've come to realize there really is a lot of my father in me.
Stuff I've learned from my father: live life to the fullest, so when you die, you die happy. Laugh a lot, and make others laugh with you. Extra points if you can get people to pee in their pants. Make sure that every person you meet will remember you, and try to make sure they'll smile when they do it. Help others in any way you can. Stay in touch with history: it's how you got to where you are. If you have a knee-jerk response to something, let it out: then at least you have something to edit.
Now, my father's retired from his lifelong career as a police officer, but he's still serving the community as a volunteer firefighter and as a Lion. He'll do that until they tell him to stop, I suppose, and then he'll find some other way to be of service.
I envy the years I missed with him, and I'm glad I now have the chance to make them up.
Dad--I love you.

Slow down, you move too fast...

I've been a Toronto Sun reader for almost as long as I could read. No, I don't look at the pictures--not even the one that used to grace (?) page three and now resides somewhere near the back...the one of the half-naked sapling with the navel stud "who loves dancing, shopping, and anal sex". In fact, I rarely read the news articles, which are often sensationalistic, sloppy, and riddled with typos. No, the appeal of the Toronto Sun, for me, resides below all that. For one thing, they don't censor their opinion writers, like most papers do: you'll often find two writers feuding with each other in print, which is both entertaining and edifying. For another, its sports coverage is among the best on the continent, and miles ahead of any of the other Toronto dailies'. And for a third, the Sunday Sun in particular is always a cornucopia of diversion, with a huge, compulsively readable entertainment section, at least three quizzes that are weekly staples in this household, and a number of very good lifestyle columnists.
That said, I've taken to reading the Saturday edition of the Toronto Star each week. Once a week is about all I can stand: they lean so far left they nearly fall over under the weight of their pomposity. Somebody high in the Star's pecking order has established an inviolable rule that some Minority or Social Cause of choice *must* appear on the front page each and every day. If a shopping mall blows up, they'll write that story from a black (sorry: African-Canadian) wheelchair-bound lesbian homeless person's point of view. Any article that portrays conservative (either fiscal *or* social) policies in anything remotely approaching a positive way must be offset by pages of Liberal propaganda, so that its inclusion might conceivably be explained as an oversight.
But...there's some good writing in the Star. Long, meaty articles that have the power to make me forget I'm reading a paper which once criticized Mike Harris in its FOOD section.
Today, the topic was childhood, or rather, its disappearance. Apparantly, many kids now have to be *taught* what to do on a playground.
Now, many who know me might think that I fell into that category myself, as a kid. Not so. While it is true that books were my usual playground, I played quite a few games all through my childhood. Most of them I stunk at, true: but I excelled in a few and even created one: "bockey", a hybrid basketball-hockey that actually became something of a fad around London.
This article got me to thinking about the last time I saw a street hockey game. When the hell was that? I don't remember. It's been years.
My first really close friend was named Tim. It's been nearly twenty years since I last saw him, but I remember scads of detail. The usual stuff you'd expect Ken Breadner to remember: his street address (341 Stephen Street), his mother's weird habit of running the fireplace on sweltering July days, his family's TRS-80 Model I computer, his incredibly cute (and incredibly snotty) sister. But so much more: the snow forts we used to build; his ability to name any bird that caught his eye; a raisin fight we got into one night, the remains of which were still being discovered three years later. We had a lot of fun.
One thing I remember very clearly about Tim was that he was *always* busy. It seemed like every year, there were at least two more extra-curricular activities, until his days rivalled those of corporate CEOs' for sheer stress. I recall thinking that Tim was going to burn out before he hit 30. He repeatedly told me he *liked* all this activity, and he was certainly good at just about everything he did, but I sometimes thought I could see a different truth in his eyes. Help, they said. Help me, I'm in childhood prison here.
Today, there are millions of Tims, male and female, all of them tried early and convicted of the heinous crime of being children. At the first sign of unstructured play, their parents bound and shackled them into a brutal regime of ballet, piano, karate, chess club, debating team, football, Brownies, Irish dancing...the list is endless. If parents could find a way to fit all of that in one day and still have time for six hours of homework, you bet your teenage ulcer they'd do it.
All this play looks a lot like work, doesn't it? Work, you know, the very thing most adults claim to hate? Why in the hell are we inflicting it on our children? Do we honestly believe that making kids embody the worst behaviour of adults will ensure adult success?
---------------------
6:30 a.m. We're heading for work, doing the speed limit as we proceed through a school zone. Car after car whizzes past us, and we can't help wondering: if everybody's in such a God-damned hurry, why didn't they leave the house a couple of minutes earlier? Can they really be *that* eager to get to the office? Boy, they must *love* their jobs.
Our society is obsessed with speed. In my grocery store, the fastest-growing segment is frozen prepared dinners. A cursory examination of the ingredients on any one of these things will baffle a chemist. But you can cook them from frozen in only nine seconds!
Supposedly, nobody has time to cook any more. Meet Nobody: Eva Breadner. Not only does she cook, she can cook anything and cook it well. Her knowledge of food preparation techniques is encyclopaedic. She taught herself how to make chocolates, and her chocolates have netted us a small fortune. Until low-carb bread came on the scene, she was routinely baking her own recipe of same. You get the point: I may be biased, but only because familiarity breeds contentment.
Well, people say. You two don't have kids yet. You'll see.
You don't know my wife.
If anything, kids are going to make us slow down even more, so as to really savour each moment. We won't be thrust into the rat race, because even when you win the rat race, you're still a rat. We'll be living our own bucolic, pastoral life right here in the city, on our own schedule. Our kids will pursue anything they're interested in, but they won't be straight-jacketed by our expectations for them, because we have none. We have no ego invested in our children becoming NHL superstars or surgeons or corporate lawyers. Our kids will be kids. If that means they while away a day staring up at the clouds, well, that's where dreams live. It's a pity so many parents have forgotten that.

Red-letter day

If history is any guide, I'll be having a memorable day today. To know why, you'd have to step into this here contraption. It merely *looks* like a Whirling Vortex of Death, but it's really my little memory machine. C'mon, let's go....*whoosh*

1989

I'm seventeen years old, and I'm in love.
At least, I call it that. I'm sure that's what it is. But that love is, tragically, unrequited; the girl (I'll call her Janet, it's one of her three middle names) wants to be "just friends"...oh, the pain of that little two-word phrase. "Just friends" means I have to listen to the endless litany of crushes she has, most of them on guys not worth half a booger (or half one of *my* boogers, in my humble estimation and if you catch the drift of my thoughts here.) "Just friends" means that I actually need to *console* her whenever the object of her affections treats her like a turd. This last happens quite often, confirming the low opinion I have of these braid-dead hunks. (Hunks, alas; Ken, you little puny stick-figure nerd, you don't stand a chance...*sigh* *moan* *little lost forlorn teenage tear*
It's been nearly two years of frustration...3.68 eternities, in Teenage Time. My interest in other women is inversely proportional to Janet's perceived interest in me, which means one innocent smile on her part and all thought of other girls shoots from my mind as if on wheels.
What's more, Janet's moving at the end of this school year, to a city on the dark side of Neptune, a day's drive from here. We found out about this almost a month ago: her family's getting transferred. NEWSFLASH: SUN BEING EXTINGUISHED IN THREE WEEKS, ALL LIFE TO END. What do you do when every morning the newspaper in your mind has that same headline, counting down? Not much you can do--you just muddle along and hope that when the sun finally snuffs it, you go quick.

Sunday, June 11th, 7:50 p.m.

The phone rings.
Janet. Cool. She, like, almost *never* calls me.
"Ken, I'm lonely. Wanna go for a walk?"
Hmmm, now which of six thousand answers should I give to *that* one? Yes? Hell, yes? Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?
After checking with my parents and assuring them I'll be home before full dark (man, I am one *whipped* teenager), I set out from my house and meet her about two blocks down. She's wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt that I, with my infatuated teenage eyes, think she's simply adorable in. We walk to the school, and I ask if she wants to go sit on the bleachers. "No," she says, "there's people over there".

Right there, my heart chooses that time to start up a little dialogue with my brain. "Okay", says the heart, I've been beating now for, oh, aeons, and I've *never* heard anything like that, much less from *her*, so I think I'll just stop beating here for a while, how's that?"
To which my brain says "..."
"Hey, brain, you hearin' me?"
"..."
"Oh, damn it, Brain's gone into total meltdown, I guess I've gotta pick up the slack...Hey, Face, smile! Look calm! Walk normally! Shit, BREATHE!"

Subsequent events are the stuff of which only love-sick teens can empathize. The funny thing is, I never so much as kissed Janet, not once. We walked through the woods that abutted the school grounds, to a clearing, where I sat down and she immediately laid her head across my lap and looked up at the moon through the dusk. There was a lot of energy in the air, some of it emanating from me, some--I'm sure of it--from her. I thought about kissing her and found, to my surprise, that I couldn't do it...not because I didn't want to, but because we both seemed to be on hair triggers. Once *that* path opened up, I was going to walk it to the end.

You can lay your head back on the ground
Let your hair spill all around me
Offer up your best defense:
This is the end of the innocence

--Don Henley, "The End of the Innocence"

After a time that was *much* too short, we got up and walked, hand-in-hand and then arm-in-arm, back home. And that was the end of my day. She moved, on schedule. Later that summer, I got mail from her proposing marriage. To my adult mind, it sounds almost corny: "Save me the aisle. Let me do the honours of being your one and only". It rocked my teenage mind on its heels. I wrote back, saying I loved her and would gladly marry her in time, but she should concentrate on school for now. Knowing, of course, that somebody else would probably come along...for both of us. He did--Janet's married now, with a kid who'd be eight or so. And she did...three shes, actually, a little procession, each one a step up and now I'm at the pinnacle, three and a half years married and happier than I could have imagined in 1989.
Haven't talked to Janet for years. I think about her sometimes, though. You never forget your first love, even if you've got your best love.

Speaking of best love...

Here, step back in here, I've got another tale to tell.

*whoosh*

1999

I'm 27 years old, and I've been through the wars.
Said wars always start with my own carelessness/stupidity/reckless disregard, and always end with me standing on the sidelines, asking "which way did she go?"
Just got through a long war of attrition, actually, with lesson learned: if you *ever* betray somebody, better to just break it off immediately, 'cause brother, there ain't *no* way you can still be friends afterwards, and you sure as *hell* can't start the relationship over fresh. No matter how many times you apologize, no matter how you show you've come to your senses, you'll forever be tarred with the cheater's brush. So kill the relationship after you have an affair. Better yet, don't have an affair, you feckin' idiot.
Back in February, relationship kaput, job yanked out from underneath me, my prospects looking increasingly bleak, I applied for a position at a market research company. Market research (he hastened to tell you) is *not* telemarketing, although the people on the other end of the phone seem to think it bears a striking resemblance. The interview was among the more interesting I ever in my life: my prospective boss, Eva, and I spent more time talking about Stephen King than we did the job at hand. Needless to say, I got the job.
I'm not very good at it. Like most jobs, the people you work with are the only reason you get out of bed at all most days. Among these people (pretty high on the list, if I'm being honest)is Eva herself. She's that rare combination of street-smart and book-smart, and she's a study in opposites. I'm slowly discovering I could spend a lifetime learning about her, and enjoying every minute of it.
But she's my boss, so best tread lightly.
In May, we went on what I thought of then as an 'excursion' and now recognize as a date. We went to Costco, K-W Used Books, and a movie. [2004 Ken intrudes: that's funny, it's exactly the kind of date we still have now!] The movie was The Matrix, something I had seen before by myself and thought 'this is exactly the kind of movie Eva would enjoy.'

Things are progressing nicely.

Friday, June 11th

Well, for the ninth year in a row, nobody's going to call me up and ask if I want to go for a walk. And for maybe the first year since Janet *did*, that'll be the last thought I spare for June 11th, 1989 all day.

I'll draw a curtain of privacy around the details of this date. Suffice it to say it lasted overnight. The thing that most enthralls me, though, isn't anything remotely carnal: it's that Eva and I can talk about *anything*. There's nothing taboo. Already I can't imagine anything interesting happening to me that I wouldn't want to tell her right away. We actually talked about getting married, sometime in October of next year. It's not like I proposed, or she did. Nobody asked--we just sort of told each other.
Isn't that odd? Well, it would be, with anyone else. With Eva, mapping out the future is an exercise in pointing out the inevitable.

This is different from any 'love' I've been in before. That's because for the first time, I'm happy with myself, not looking for somebody to "complete" me. Instead, I'm looking to share in the "completeness" of life.

Oh, what a feeling....what a..

*whoosssssssssssh*

2004

House coming, kids coming, happy wife, happy life...can it get any better than this?

Domesticity, our version thereof

Twenty three days to go until the BIG MOVE. And we're packed.
Well, one room is.
Okay, one wall of that room.
It's almost packed. Really.
But there's lots of time, right?
To all of you out there with kids, read this and weep: I'm currently sitting here, in the bedroom, and my lovely wife is asprawl on the bed behind me, reading. Blessed silence prevails. And that's utterly normal around here for this time of evening. The only thing different is that she's studying insurance law. (Wait, maybe she's asleep...nope, not yet. They haven't exactly gone out of their way to make this textbook exciting, according to her. Maybe they oughta get John Grisham to try his hand at textbook writing.)
I've said here before that I'm not a night person. What I am is a lark of the most chipper and irritating variety. After a shower (which is my version of a couple of cups of coffee), I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, out cruising for worms.
This contrasts with my wife, who will tell you that the early worm *deserves* the bird. We've worked out a routine in the morning that minimizes the amount of time we have to be in the same room. I'll be listening to the six a.m. news (because hey, twelve whole hours has gone by since I *last* saw the news, and damn it, something must have happened!) Sometimes I will hear something that I just *know* Eva would find interesting, and without thinking, I will sprint to the other end of the house and blurt it out, earning, more often that not, a "that's nice, dear." Translated from the Eva, that means "unless you're telling me that I can go back to bed, shut the hell up."
In the evenings, the process reverses itself and I become the snarky one. Is it bedtime yet, I wonder. No? When will it be bedtime? Soon? How soon? And God help you if it *was* bedtime half an hour ago, because I'm being kept up against my will.
Both of us work hard at our jobs. Mental stress is a fact of life for Eva, and my job can often be physically demanding. When we get home the last thing we want to do is more work. Which is why one wall of one room is almost packed.
And, let's face it, the desire to keep this place clean rests comfortably to the left of zero. I know that with pride of ownership, we'll be a lot more interested in Mr. Sparkle.
Twenty three days and counting...

Part II, as promised

I don't drive. There, that makes me different. It's kind of funny, actually: almost without exception in our circle of friends, there's one out of every couple who doesn't drive either. It's invariably the female half of the couple, though. There aren't many of us 32-year-old males out there who don't have a license.
Part of the reason I'm nonvehicular is my eyesight. Thanks to having been born premature, I spent most of the first four months of my life in an incubator, which damaged my eyes. The thing is, my corrected vision is supposed to be just adequate to drive. When I was seventeen, I aced the written driver's ed test but barely passed the eye exam--the sun was backlighting everything and making it difficult for me to focus, I said as much, and for some reason they let me pass. I felt like I'd failed, though.
I found, when I took driver's ed, that the only kind of driving I felt comfortable with was the 401. Reason: no cross streets, next to no chance of kids suddenly running out into your path, seemingly no need to have six pairs of eyes. (I've just got the one pair, thanks, and the peripheral vision is iffy.) I found, too, that I could perform "difficult" tasks fairly well (parallel parking, for example), but would then botch the simplest right hand turn.
(I've found that throughout my life in lots of different things. Playing goal in a floor hockey game, I would make a spectacular save and then have the puck shoot right between my legs in the next ten seconds.)
Anyway, the thought of what a poor driver I was simply reinforced itself over the years. I tend to view driving like a video game, with one major exception: when you crack up out there in the real world, it's not a matter of a pretty little fireball, five seconds off the clock, and an instant brand new car. And I've never managed to play a racing-themed game for very long without crashing.
This little phobia of mine has disappointed an awful lot of people, I know. My Dad in particular, which is understandable, since he's lived his life behind the wheel. I'm sorry that people feel that way, but I make no apologies for the way I feel about driving: I'm just not up to it.
I've been lucky, though. My wife, bless her, hardly ever grumps about doing all the driving. (The only time is on long trips to her or my parents' places: also when I feel most guilty for not having a license.)
The thing is, there are now very practical reasons for me to remain a non-driver. Have you seen the price of insurance lately? Or gasoline?

While I'm on this little soapbox, why is a driver's license the only acceptable form of identification for some places? It's the first thing they ask for, and sometimes the only thing. I've been turned away at video stores, as if a permit to drive has anything to do with how trustworthy a person is. Just a couple weeks back, I tried to cash in a chit at Mohawk Raceway. The sign said that 'government issued photo identification' was required. My Ontario Health Card satifies all three qualifiers. It's government-issed; it has a photo on it; the photo can clearly be identified as me. But it wasn't good enough for them. Barring a driver's license, well, they'd accept a passport. Fair enough, except last I looked I WAS STILL IN MY OWN COUNTRY.
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What else makes me an odd duck? Well, I love individual people, and lots of them, but tend to hate groups. I'm supremely uncomfortable in party environments. I feel insecure as hell if I have to interact with a bunch of strangers. (I'm a crackerjack public speaker though; that's different. Nobody's talking back.) I'm also uncomfortable around a large group of friends, simply because I feel my attention being pulled too many ways at once.
I watched so very little television as a child, preferring books. (One of many things that amaze me about my Eva is that she's a confessed TV addict who also reads more than I do.) I once went three years without any TV access, and to this day, I can take or leave most television programming. There was precisely one show I'd classify as "can't miss" last year: Joan of Arcadia. Aside from hockey games, and what I'm sure Eva feels is an unhealthy fascination with news, there hasn't anything else that's thoroughly captured my attention.
And I do wish all so-called "reality" shows would go off and be on their own network. Take "Survivor", for instance. What's the one thing all Survivor locales have in common? That's right, heat. Why is that? Two letters, baby. T...and A. A "real" episode of Survivor would see the tribes threatened by very large, very hungry bears. The people who could improvise some sort of a weapon and kill the beast or at least drive it off, would be said to have survived. Their reward? Life. That's "survival" in reality. What the T.V. Survivor is is a soap opera. Nothing wrong with that, if you like that sort of thing...just don't call it "reality".
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Well, that about wraps it up. Until next time, goodbye from the Breadbin, where we're crusty on top, but soft and squishy beneath.

Things that make me different

I found this T-shirt on a recent trip up to the in-laws that I kind of had to have. It expresses "me" perfectly. It says:

You laugh at me because I'm different
I laugh at you because you're all the same.

Well, I don't always laugh, come to think of it. Sometimes I want to scream. Sometimes I feel pity. Usually, I just don't get it.

What don't I get? Well, for one thing, the cult of celebrity. I don't understand why so many people spend so much time, money and mental energy tracking every little detail in lives that will probably never impact theirs in any way.
Since I am a big hockey fan, I'm willing to bet people think I can rattle off vital stats for every Toronto Maple Leaf player. I can't. There are two of them I would probably recognize if they came up and said hello--Mats Sundin and Tie Domi--but I couldn't tell you the first thing about their lives off the ice.
I actually take pride in my ignorance. During the O.J. Simpson trial--the kind of event I expend great effort ignoring--somebody told me a Kato Kaelin joke and I didn't have the slightest idea who that was. I'd make a perfect juror if it wasn't for my dad the lifelong police officer.
Once, when I worked at 7-Eleven, I served Elvis Stojko. (No, it didn't change my life or make me a better person in any way. And it wouldn't have done so even had I recognized him.) My co-worker was in the back room at the time and emerged just as he was getting into his chauffered limousine. She actually slapped me with a sheaf of papers, over and over, in time to "HOW could you POSSibly not KNOW who that WAS?" All the while I was wondering how in the hell she recognized him, and I made the mistake of saying so, earning a "God, you're dumb" look.
Sexual fantasies about celebrites confound me. The mental calisthenics required to make myself believe (a) I might actually meet Kate Winslet and (b) she'll immediately drop to her knees and [......], well, they're just too tiring.
I am firmly convinced this would be a better world if celebrities were let alone to live their lives, and filmed only with their knowledge and permission.
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Another thing that earns me a lot of strange looks is my taste in music. I have a very broad range of musical acts I like, but comparatively few are popular these days.
Take, for example, John McDermott. For those (all) of you who have no idea who that is, he sings old Irish and Scottish folk tunes, some of them dating back five or more centuries. He also does tunes from the 1930s and 40s. We've been to a couple of his concerts. Both times we were younger than the rest of the audience by an average of one hundred and seventeen years.
I used to work a lot of graveyard shifts, at McDonald's and 7-Eleven both. I'm not a night person and never was; it just so happened that in first year university residence, it was impossible to sleep any time before three in the morning, what with the constant lacrosse games in the hallway, drunk people careening off the walls, and omnipresent par-tay. So, I reasoned, seething, if I was just going to lay here awake, I might as well be paid.
Anyway, to get me through the nights, I'd bring in classical music, New Age music, opera, anything in that ilk so long as it was slow and soothing. I must have had three hundred people remark on it over the years, usually some variant of "Why aren't you falling ASLEEP?" I would always shrug the question off because I couldn't very well tell the truth. "This music may put you to sleep, but what it does for me is keep me from leaping over the counter and strangling obnoxious drunks."
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Which brings up another thing that has convinced people I'm actually from Rygel-6. What in God's name is the deal with alcohol?
An old roommate of mine (who should probably remain nameless) once drank himself into such a stupor that he threw up, shit himself, and passed out. He came to four hours later with dried puke running down the front, dried shit running down the back, and a head that apparently felt like a cement mixer on high. He vowed he'd never drink again. That lasted a week.
Okay, I (sort of) understand addiction, but not one so strong that it would cause your mind to dismiss the spectre of yourself covered with shitty puke. "Oh, that was fun, let's do that AGAIN!"
It's not just the hard-core alcoholics. I saw an awful lot of people parading through my store in the wee hours of the morning, forty-seven sheets to the wind. Almost without exception, they were rude, prone to violence and petty theft, and SO FREAKING LOUD!!! What I'm trying to say is that drunk people act like brain-dead imbeciles. What's the attraction in acting like a brain-dead imbecile? Damned if I know.
I got drunk once. Once. Just to see what the big hullabaloo was. I found that I knew and understood everything that was going on around me and I just didn't care. I'm not sure how many degrees of blotto there are beyond that, and I sure don't have any pressing need to find out. It's not fun when Reason goes absent without (or with) leave. It's disturbing.
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I've never climbed a tree. Never done anything like that. I've never been the most co-ordinated person, and the risk of falling out and breaking something, in my case, is just too high. Those of you who tell me I missed out on all the fun, go fall out of a tree and tell me how much fun you're having.
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Part II to follow.

Love/like/looks/life...rambles

I once took a class in university solely so I could re-write a high school essay. The class was 'The Philosophy of Love, Sex, and Friendship' and the essay was simply called 'On love'.
When I say 'solely to re-write a high-school essay', I mean just that. I never attended a single session; merely walked in a few minutes ahead of everyone else the first night, grabbed the syllabus, and left. Thereafter, I did the readings proscribed and wrote the required assignments, handing the latter in to the professor's office mailbox on the dates given on the course curriculum. I walked into the final exam, written in Laurier's Athletic Centre gymnasium, without the slightest clue what would be asked of me on that test. Despite all this, I got a B+ in the course overall--and that's one of many things wrong with liberal arts degrees these days.
Anyway, my thoughts and beliefs about love are as unorthodox now as they were in high school and university.

"Sweet Marie, she loves just me
(She also loves Maurice McGhee.)
No she don't, she loves just me
(She also loves Louise Dupree.)
No she don't, she loves just me!
(She also loves the willow tree.)
No she don't, she loves just me!
(Poor, poor fool, why can't you see
She can love others and still love thee.)"

--Shel Silverstein

You ever wonder where jealousy came from? I see it as a corruption of envy, which is a natural emotion. Envy is wanting something that someone else has. Without envy, there'd be little impetus for growth. Doesn't the little child envy the things his brother can do?
Jealousy, though, is envy corrupted. Jealousy is "wanting something someone else has, such that they can't have it anymore."
Nothing curdles love faster than jealousy, because true love is unconditional and possessiveness puts the most monstrous restrictions on it. If love is something you gain by giving it away, and you're not allowed to give it away, then your love will dwindle and die.

If a runner is one who runs, and a sleeper is one who sleeps, than shouldn't a lover be one who loves? It's not, you know, not in this society. A lover in this society means one with whom you have sex--often, in fact, sex without much love in it.

How come a woman can tell another woman 'I love you'--in public--without anyone thinking they're lesbians? If a man told another man he loved him, eyebrows would be raised. If they were unrelated men, the assumption would be made that they were a couple of queers. That's kind of sad...first, that the assumption would be there, and second, that men should care about it.
Corollary: women can have 'girlfriends' and men can't have 'boyfriends'. That's even more odd. Shouldn't a boyfriend be, simply, a friend who's a boy? Or can men not have simple "friends who are girls", either? More thoughts on that in a second.

The Greeks had four words for love. I'd argue English needs at least that many. Love has many permutations, from the love you have for ice cream right up to the love you share with your lifemate. It seems ridiculous that one word is supposed to suffice for the entire spectrum of love.

Sex further complicates things. Many men, in particular, seem to be capable of sex without love at all. Myself, I'm not. At the very least, I have to convince myself there's *some* degree of love there for sex to be anything other than seventy-eight pumps, a tickle and a squirt.

Ever heard someone say "I love you, but not in THAT way"? People tend to take that as an insult. They shouldn't. If you want to get scientific about it, what they're saying is that your pheromones just don't do it for them, but they love you anyway.

But then there's some people (often parents of rebellious teens, I've found) who say "I love you, but that doesn't mean I have to like you." THAT'S crap. A better way to put that is "I love who you ARE, but that doesn't mean I have to like what you DID." Kids who feel unliked also feel unloved. It's the same thing to them.

Can a man like a woman without loving her? Or better, can a man love a woman without lusting after her and making a fool of himself?
Yeah, but it's rare, and first you usually have to go through the process of making an ass of yourself. If you're mature, you do this only in your mind. There isn't a guy alive who hasn't thought about sex with any and every woman friend he has. (Sorry, girls, but it's best you know.) That said, a man who can get past the superficial sexual attraction can indeed have a platonic and deep friendship with a woman in which the very thought of sex never comes up. Almost never comes up. Hey, we're men, give us a break!
The best thing to do is to take the best of those friends and marry them. At least, it seems to have worked for me.

Do you remember when toothpastes were marketed as things to clean your teeth with? Now there are pastes and strips and all manner of gewgaws to "whiten" your teeth. Because white teeth are supposed to be important, somehow. They shout to the world "here is a person who will strip enamel off their teeth and endure a great deal of pain in so doing, all to satisfy some artifical standard of beauty. How appropriate that we keep such things around the "vanity" in the bathroom.

Or consider high heels. They're awkward for women to wear, can certainly be painful, and they can even permanently damage your feet. But oh, do they push those boobs out! What kind of society-sanctioned torture is that?

Looks mean very little to me. In fact, the typical male fascination with ogling beautiful women utterly mystifies me. Most of the conventially beautiful women I've seen have struck me as snots, airheads, bitches, or some combination of the three. Besides, such things as intelligence, a fine sense of humour, caring and compassion (all of which my lovely wife has in spades) elevate even the plainest person far beyond what mere looks can do. Although my Eva won't make the cover of Penthouse, she's beyond compare to me. (Let's face it, I'm nobody's stud, either.)

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms
Which I gaze on so fondly today
Were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms
Like faerie gifts fading away
Thou would still be adored, as this moment thou art
Let thy loveliness fade as it will
And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself verdantly still

It is not while great beauty and youth are thine own
And thy cheeks unprofan'd by a tear
That the fervour and faith of a soul can be known
To which Time will but make thee more dear
No, the heart which has truly loved ne'er forgets
But as truly loves on to the close
As the sunflower turned on her god when he set
The same look which she turned when he rose

--Traditional

That was the wedding song I chose for our first dance. It still holds true today, as it will (God willing) thirty or fifty years down the road.
EVERYBODY'S looks go. In fact, they're the first thing that does. In this screwed-up society where aging is ridiculed instead of revered, people spend millions of dollars trying to prolong their physical beauty. To me, it's a mental illness, one our psychiatry still hasn't gotten around to identifying. It manifests in so many ways: spray on hair (for God's sake, it's a bunch of fur growing out of or not growing out of your head...it signifies NOTHING); makeup (sure, it has its uses, but daily wear to me signifies low self-esteem); wrinkle creams and nostrums; and something else that merits a paragraph (or book!) of its own:

DIETS. Look, I'm going to say this as bluntly as I can: there are fat people out there whose health is or may be forfeit. Those people have to do something. The rest of you, the most of the rest of you, pardon me, are TOO DAMN SKINNY. Women are not supposed to look like twigs you can snap over your knee. EAT something, for Christ's sake. I shouldn't be able to look at you and count ribs. Skeletons aren't sexy in the slightest. And if any man should happen to walk up to you and call you an ugly fatso, you can tell him to go fuck himself. Or you can SIT ON HIM until he screams. The latter is more satisfying the more you weigh.

"KNOW THYSELF"

--the Oracle at Delphi

"LOVE THYSELF...LOVE EACH OTHER"

--the Oracle of the Breadbin