Gorgeous George

This I Know To Be True

2008-03-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

There is no such thing as an “inalienable right.”

This is the truth.

There are rights are fundamental, rights that people across time and space have considered necessary for one’s basic quality of life: The right to live, the right own property, the right to free will. These rights are said to be God given, or the basic tenets of social contract theory. Without these rights being upheld, society falls apart. The idea of “inalienable rights” was central to the abolition of slavery. All men are created equal, and as such, are entitled to the same rights as anyone else. These rights are the basic ingredients for anyone being a whole person.

But they are not inalienable. They are taken away from people all the time. This is the truth.

All over the world, from my backyard to the far reaches of Asia, from wealthy advanced countries to third world shit-holes, people’s basic rights are consistently and often violently denied them. Religious minorities are murdered for their faith. Women are gang-raped as military scare tactics. The poor and the addicted are evicted from the only places they can afford to live to make way for expensive, unattainable condos. People are treated like shit all the time, everywhere.

I believe it is my responsibility to do what I can to help other people live the best lives they can. Not my responsibility like “You, Deryck Lafortune, are charged with the safekeeping of humanity. You are like if Jesus came from Krypton.” No, this is my responsibility as a member of the global community. My responsibility as a child of God. My responsibility as my mothers son. It’s something I want and need to do.

This is the truth, at least to me.

So to these ends, I’ve decided to join the military. Now I know what you’re thinking. Whoa whoa whoa dummy, why the army? There are a lot of avenues you can take to improve the life of your fellow man without getting shot at, or tortured, or going batshit Deer Hunter style. You could volunteer at a soup kitchen. Or become a counselor. Or give out free handjobs. And I’ve definitely considered these options. I know some people who work in areas that I really respect, jobs that exemplify the kind of work I want to do. I know people who work in the worst neighbourhood in Canada, ensuring that the down-and-out and the drying-out have a safe and clean place of sanctuary. I know others who work as an educator teaching kids, kids that most have given up on as lost causes, with compassion and a firm fairness many aren’t receiving at home. I look at the work these people are doing, the selflessly noble way they are improving the lives of those around them, and it is inspiring. That’s what I want to do, that’s the kind of improvement I’m talking about. The difference though, the reason I want to sling bullets instead of kind words or encouraging, is a more difficult truth.

Armed conflict is a fact of life. A truth, if you will. I’ve heard people claim otherwise, spouting shit like “you can’t hug children with nuclear arms” to which I say this: Don’t be such a fucking hippie. Disarmament is obviously and ideal goal but until then, you cannot ignore that there are people and nations that use military action and armed force to violate the rights of people everywhere. And as long as people are using force to take advantage of people weaker than them, there will always be the need for someone to use force to defend them. Someone like myself. I may be able to teach people, or counsel people, or something along those lines, but I know that I can best help improve the lives of other in that capacity. I know it might be dangerous, I know my life may be threatened at times, but that is a risk I am willing to take.

It will probably be nothing. I will probably be at the back lines the whole time peeling potatoes, or touring with the USO. But I want to do my part. I want to be a real boy.

And that’s the truth.

An Open Letter To Bar Patrons

2007-09-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

Dear People At The Bar I Work At: hello, I am your doorman. Sometimes I work at the front door checking your id but usually I am at the back door making sure no one sneaks in their buddy. You might remember me, I'm the guy in all black standing at the back of the club all night. I enjoy hanging out with you, I get to chat with people and get hit on by girls with daddy complexes and and get drunk after work for very cheap. Its good times, but there are a few of you that I have an issue with. I'd like to let you know whats going on, to prevent any unpleasantness later on.

Guy Trying To Give Me Twenty Dollars To Skip The Line: I get it. You want to look like the man in front of your date by pretending you have connections, so you shake my hand with four 5's in it and ask how long the wait is. Its exactly as long as it was before you greased my palm. We are at capacity, and if I let you in and we are audited, I get canned. So $20 isn't going to pay the money I could potentially lose in wages. If you slid $5000 into my hand, then we will talk.

Only Girl In Huge Group That Doesn't Have ID: Let me get this straight. You planned on going out drinking tonight, right? And you realize that if it wasn't for your huge fake cans, you would look like a twelve year old, right? The why wouldn't you bring your ID to the bar? I realize that belt you call a skirt doesn't have pockets, but I'm sure the huge hobo bag your fat friend is holding could hold your ID, your birth certificate, and possible your pediatrician to verify your age.

Girl Dancing On Table When "Ride A Horse, Save A Cowboy" Comes On: Do you know who does that? Strippers. It doesn't make you look fun and edgy, it makes you look drunk. And no, I'm not mad at you when I tell you if I see it again you're kicked out. Its just a hassle to clear the dance floor to get the paramedics in when you fall and land on your empty head.

Guy/Girl Wearing Sunglasses In The Bar: I realize those aviators or Ray-Bans or bug-eye face covers are part of the outfit, but you can't see anything and the way you are reeling around bumping into shit makes me think you are very drunk. Its distracting and i've got better things to do than break up a fight between you and one of the ten people you just caused to slosh their drink while you tried to get to the bar.

Guy Trying To Buy Me A Shot To Do With Your Buddies: Don't mistake my cordiality with friendliness. I am smiling at your drunken sexist banter because I am a host representing my employer, the bar. This doesn't mean we are friends, nor does it mean I will refrain from choking you out and dumping you in the alley if you get rowdy. Besides, I am working. How would you feel if I went to the cell phone store in the mall where you work and kept trying to hand you a Rocky Mtn. Bear Fucker?

Two Girls Exploring Your Sexuality By Grinding Together On The Dance Floor: Keep doing that. You are fine.

Guy Complaining About Having To Leave While He Still Has A Full Beer: Shut the fuck up. I've been standing for six hours watching idiots get drunk and cause trouble. I want to have a few beers, get paid, and meet that girl who slipped me her number earlier. I don't give a shit if you have most of your beer left; Last call was at 1:45 and its 2:20. Chug that fucking beer and get out or I am going to cut your throat and pour it directly into your stomach. If we can all be a little more concious of how we are behaving when we are out partying, we will all have more fun.

Sincerely, The Guy That Doesn't Want To Punch You In The Kidneys But Absolutely Will.

Death Race 3000

2006-11-22T15:45:00.000-08:00

A few summers ago (God, has it been that long?) some of the guys from my rugby team and I went to San Francisco for a rugby tournament called Fogfest. It was during Pride Week and was a full on event, with after parties and brunches and even a little bit of rugby. Six of us drove down in a nineteen hour, two day journey filled wiith farts and dance music and about fifty milkshakes.

We got there late the night before the tournament and after getting lost in the worst neighbourhood in the city, eating some seriously questionable chinese food, and a fitful night of sleep, we were ready to play. The tourney was harlequin-style, which means that everyone who enters is mixed around and split up and assigned to different teams. As luck would have it, all of us who came down were put on different teams, assigned different jerseys and stuck in wth total strangers. I was looking forward to playing against the other guys on my team, but it was not to be so. Rugby is a hungry beast that feeds on injured players, and we fed her well. Twisted joints, black eyes, crippling butt cramps, our guys were dropping like flies, and by the end, there was only two of us still playing. After the final whistle blew, and after copious amounts of beer was drunk after at least one of us picked up a stranger, we called it a night and limped home.

We watched the parade the next day, and basically took it easy. The following day, the last day we were in town, Shoulders, Shayner and I decided to take in the sights, to see what San Fran had to offer us. We shopped, took pictures, accidentally wandered into the ghetto and saw someone puke blood, the usual tourist stuff. We figured it would be fun to take a trolley down to Fisherman's Wharf, a kind of street market/entertainment locale/tourist trap. We jumped on the next Wharf-bound streetcar, and were on our way.

Streetcars are San Fransisco icons, up there with the Golden Gate Bridge and Rice-a-Roni for images that evoke the character of the city. They are romantic, nostalgic things that hearken back to the "good old days". They are also horrible, horrible modes of transportation. Loud, rickety, given to sudden jolts of acceleration and stopping at a pace that makes me wonder if the driver is slowing down with his feet Flintstones style. The damn things were made out of wood, for Christ's sake! Conversation was impossible; emphatic gesturing and monkey-esque face pulling were the only was we could communicate, though there was pretty much only one thing we would be saying to each other if we could: This sucks.

We endured the ride for about fifteen minutes until the streetcar stopped and everyone piled off. Relieved to escape the death-trolley, we clambered of, only to be surprised by how few people there were at the wharf. And how far it was from the ocean. And how suspiciously like Chinatown it looked. Shayner asked the street car driver, "Hey, um, is this Fisherman's Wharf?"

"Nope, sorry, this is Chinatown. There's something wrong with the streetcar, it's gotta be taken in. Bye!" and with that, the car took off back up the hill and around a corner.

Fuck.

We were stuck. We didn't know where we were, or how we had gotten there. None of us had cell phones, and everyone one we asked for directions sneered and muttered things that sounded suspiciously like "goddam tourists", "Leave me alone or else" and "You're dead meat, Deryck." I didn't know what we were going to do. Then our knight in shining armour showed up.

Actually, it was a knight in a shining white limousine. This was no pussy limousine either, but a big long prom-night special. Pulling a tire-screaming u-turn, it pulled up in front of us with one wheel on the sidewalk. "Where you guys headed?" came from the driver, yelling to be heard over the music.
"Uuuhhh, Fisherman's Wharf?"
"Get in, three bucks each!"
"Uuuhh, ok?"
We all piled in, because really, who wouldn't? It's a limo! Movie stars ride in limos! Diplomats ride in limos! Pornos are filmed in limos! We were ballers, and the idea of riding in a limo without having to rent a tux or buy a corsage pushed all childhood warnings from our parents about taking rides from strangers out of our heads. I mean, what's the worse that could happen?

I thought we were going to die. As soon as we got in the locks clicked down, and the driver took off like we were being chased by the cops. (which I realize now may have been the case). The driver, blasting gangster rap out of the speakers, was flying down San Fran's trademark steep hills at breakneck speed. Blowing through yellow and red lights, swerving around traffic, I was convinced he was going to drive us to a secluded lot somewhere and steal our wallets or our kidneys or both. I didn't want to be stranded in America without a wallet, and I definitely didn't want to wake up in a bathtub full of ice in an abandoned motel. I was crapping my pants, and my buddies were doing no better. Shoulders had his hands dug into the cushions trying (in vain) to prevent his head from smashing into the car's ceiling everytime we launched over an intersection Starsky-and-Hutch style. Shayner I think was weeping, but there was a very good chance he had just been hit in the face with one of the highball glasses that were flying around the cabin. This was it. This was the end. The car screeched to a halt, and I prepared myself for the worse.

We were in Fisherman's Wharf. We had transversed what I found out later to be a good portion of the city in about fifteen minutes, due to some seriously reckless driving and an elastic understanding of traffic laws. "Nine bucks!" the driver yelled from the front. We threw wads of cash at him and scrambled out, too relieved to be alive to feel embarrassed about the wet spots spreading on the front of our pants.

Speedies R.I.P.

2006-07-25T09:45:00.000-07:00

Speedies Skateshop is a small, old-school skateboard shop. It was here that I had my first, and best, steady job. Working every other day after school and one day each weekend, I suppose it was here that I got my first taste of responsibility, of working for my money and all that, but that wasn't the only thing I learned at Speedies. I also learned to put together boards, and how to build ramps. I learned the best way to convince someone that they are a size ten shoe, not a size fourteen. I learned how to give some kid's parents so much of a discount that I had to add money from my pocket to the till, because every day that kid came in with his ratty second hand clothes and beat up shoes and talked to me about how cool skateboarding is. I learned how to light farts. I learned how to griptape a board so that I cut off all the excess in one piece, like peeling a mandarin orange. I learned these things and a thousand more, but most of all I learned that sometimes your most important family members aren't even related to you, that sometimes you can't stand to be in the same room as someone and still be willing to stand up for them in a fist fight.

Speedies was right in the middle of Fraser Highway, located in the heart of Downtown Aldergrove. If Aldergrove could be said to have a downtown. If it could be said to have a heart. But if it could, we were right in the thick of it. The commercial life blood of Aldergrove flowed around and over and through us, pedestrians and passers-through and visitors from the nearby border crossing. Sandwiched between a pizza joint and a hair salon, it was in a storefront that was previously a coffee shop, an antiques store, and a used clothing store. There was no a/c, or really ventilation at all. When kids were skating the ramp in the during the summer, the heat and the smell of sweat and pizza would become so strong and oppressive I would spend pretty much the entire day sitting on the concrete barrier outside working on my tan and only going inside when a customer showed up. Not that they minded. Almost all of our customers were kids from Aldergrove, brothers and classmates and friends all. If you skateboarded and lived in Aldergrove, I knew you. I knew where you got your board from. I knew who your favorite skater was. I knew your mom was a drunk, or that you had a hot sister but that no-one was allowed to say so (at least, when you were around). I knew you.

Runnign a skateboard shop in a small town is different than other businesses there. It's not like a barbershop or a video store or a porno shop, where people in the town need your services and only have to pick which shop to go to. There was no rich pool of skateboarders clamoring for retail oppurtunities, so we created one. We organized contests, downhill races, scavenger hunts. We successfully lobbied the city to build a skatepark. We did skate trips to Kelowna, Portland, San Fran. After a while, it stopped being a business to many people (myself included) and started being a lifestyle. We were like a gang from The Warriors, going to skateparks in packs, dressing the same, skating the same. Our reputations preceded us. People knew when the Speedies Crew rolled into town, all fire and noise and flying bottles. Once, when skating a park in North Van this little kid came up to a few of us and asked "Hey, you're the Speedies guys, right?"
"Yeah dude."
"What's that shop like?"
"You've never been?"
"Nope."
"Then how did you know who we are?"
"You're the Speedies guys. Everyone knows who you are."

Being a part of Speedies coloured everything I do, made me the person I am today. That shop is in all the posts on this site, in the clothes that I wear and things that I say. It's difficult to accurately convey how I feel. I could tell you stories. I could tell you about the time that we held a contest to make the best spot in Aldergrove, which basically meant cementing up or chopping down some street barricade or stair railing to make it fun to skate. I could tell you about the time we went on a road trip in two vans back when Mcdonalds had 39 cent burgers. We ended up pooling our money and buying fifty burgers so we could whip them at each other while barreling down the freeway. I could even tell you about the time we tied up this kid Demon in the back of the shop. He hated red peppers, so naturally we were trying to force him to eat one. This escalated to us tying him to a chair and holding the pepper in front of his face, telling him we would release him if he just took one bite, which he refused to do. Afte about twenty minutes we got bored and I had customers to help, so we left him bound in the back room while the kids sat up front watching videos and I rang in sales. His pleas for release eventually became shouted demands, which happen to be bad for business, so I sent a kid back to untie him. Instead, this kid told Demon to shut the hell up and kicked the back of the chair. Kicked it a little too hard, unfortunately, for it tipped Demon over face first and unable to brace himself, as someone had cruely bound his arms. The pepper that had been left on his lap rolled onto the floor as he fell, and managed to perfectly position itself so that he fell open mouth-first onto it. He ended up taking quite a hefty bite from it.

I could tell you all these stories and a thousand more, and I couldn't get it right. I realize now, reading over this, that it is kind of like when someone is in love. The love they rave about, the feeling that raises their sun and nourishes their soul, is incomprehensible to some and boring to most. It's just a store, right? Maybe to you, but to me and the kids that grew up there and got in trouble there and hid out there, that's akin to saying it's just a church. She's just your mother.

A few days ago I went to a party at Speedies. It is closing. The guy who owns it, a good friend of mine with the same name and about a hundred times more character, is moving on to bigger and better things. I'd say it was the end of an era but that term is so cheesy, something said when Friends ended or when they stopped making the Camaro. It's just over. It went out in true Speedies fashion, with a death metal band and kids pissing off the roof and cops and smokes and laughs. I guess you could say it died the way it lived.

In The Ghettoooo

2006-05-31T09:33:00.000-07:00

In Vancouver, there is an area called the Downtown Eastside. Not merely a geographic location, this name is synonymous with poverty, and suffering, and addiction. Home to controversial and innovative programs like safe injection sites and the NAOMI project, it also has some of the highest addiction rates per capita of any region in North America.

This is where I live.

I live in a charming little bachelor pad above the Met, a "sports bar" that turns into a shitty club on the weekend. There are about 50 apartments in the building, all about the same size, which is approximately a hundred square feet. It's tiny.
Now, something that I've read about a lot, especially recently, is people in the DTES being evicted from their hotel rooms. These are low income people, usually recovering or current addicts, that live in Single Resident Occupancy rooms like the Balmoral or the Patricia. Many of the times these poor souls will be evicted from their hotels en mass with something like thirty minutes of notice, either because the building has been condemned or it is being torn down to build something better (and way more expensive). It's illegal, but because these people are living hand to mouth, legal recourse is usually out of the question unless an advocacy group steps up, and in the DTES, these groups are spread pretty thin. I've always pitied those that have to live in places like that. Trapped in poverty, they are often not unwilling but unable to escape their destitution. To me, living in an SRO was the last step on a downward slope that usually ended up on the street but rarely end with moving up and out.

So imagine my chagrin when in my mail I recently recieved a survey asking for the opinion of peopel living in SROs. How would I know? I live in an apartment, not a hotel. Sure it's small, and I guess it wouldn't acutally be fit for more than one person to live in, and theres no closet,but it's certainly not a hotel room, for Christ's sake. I showed the survey to my landlord, certain he would get a kick out of the obvious mistake.

"Well, technically, this is a hotel."

"WHAT!?"

"Yeah, the rooms are designated as SROs by the city, but they're pretty big as far as the average Downtown Eastside hotel rooms go."

Fuck. Great. Well, I guess it's not that bad. Maybe I've had a skewed view of what SRO life is like. Perhaps I've demonized something that I don't necessarily know enough about. After all, I've lived here for about three months and while it's been interesting, it hasn't been terrible...

Two days ago some dickhead slashed the soft top on my car not to steal anything, but to have a place to smoke meth in peace. I know this because in a rage, I started sweeping out the garbage they had left strewn all over the place onto the street, and I cut myself on the pipe they left hidden on the seat. Last night this junkie peice of shit pulled a knife on me and demanded my wallet a block from my place, and thank fully couldn't keep up when I took off.

I'm getting the hell out of Dodge.

A Long Time Ago, in a Skatecamp Far Far Away...

2006-05-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

We're doing a lot of tackling in rugby right now, lots of smashing into each other from the front, side, and rear, lots of learning how to offload and learning how to fall and most of all, learning how fucking much rugby can hurt. The question I seem to hear the most when we are doing tackling (other than "is it all right if I just watch this drill?") is what to do about the big guys. Rugby is known for producing some giant brutish louts, man-tanks that eat nails and shave with an axe, and for guys that measure their waist in inches rather than feet, these guys can be pretty intimidating. The answer to this question is always the same: Get low. It doesn't matter how big a guy is, if you can get his feet together, he's going down. Rather hard, I might say. It's kind of like a tree falling. But more so, it's like this;

When I was in high school, for grades 10-12 I was a summer camp counselor. And I was a camp counselor at the coolest summer camp around. This wasn't Camp Okey-Dokey, or Camp Wimpyhanna. This was Young Life Skate Camp, a week and a half of kids bombing around on skateboards, lighting farts on fire, and pissing out the window because the only bathrooms in the camp were a ten minute walk away. It was held at a giant Mennonite camp in Hope (which meant no meat with the meals, but everyone smuggled in beef jerky). There were two huge indoor parks, a pool, an outdoor street course, a volleyball court, and about a million square kilometres of forest. Pros came to the camp, and they would spend the entire time just hanging out with us regular kids, showing us crazy old school tricks and calling us by name. It was great times and for a lot of the kids who went, it was ten days when they could leave behind the sense of ennui that seems to have become the tapestry of their lives. These were kids who for the most part came from single parent homes or home living below the poverty line, kids who never really fit in with the team atmosphere of organized sports but had too much energy to sit on their ass all day. There were a hundred and eighty of these whirling hormonal dervishes at the camp, split up into fifteen cabins, with a counselor in each one.

As I mentioned before, I was one of these counselors. But being a counselor at skate camp was different at other camps. Being a counselor at skate camp meant organizing trucker parties in your cabin, where the price of admission was allowing us to draw a huge handle bar mustache on you in permanent marker.
Being a counselor meant dressing up like Boss Humungous for the skateboard jousts and coming seriously close to putting out a kids eye with one of your obscenely large shoulder spikes.
It meant convincing the kids in your cabin to raid the camp kitchen at night after you overheard that they were getting cake for the next nights dessert. It also meant that after realizing everyone grabbed a cake, you had to force the kids to eat all of them to get rid of the evidence.

But probably the best part about being a camp counselor at skate camp was that you got to take part in planning the day's activities. And the second year I was there, we planned the best (and arguably the most dangerous) game that camp has ever seen. Remember I was talking about wrapping up a guy's legs to get him down? Well, we took it to the next level.

Do you remember the Battle of Hoth, in The Empire Strikes Back ? The one in the snow, with the AT-AT's and the snowspeeders? Well, we wanted to do our best to re-create that. We built plywood AT-AT shells with handles on the inside and a slot cut in the front, that two guys could get in. We tied ropes to bicycles and milk crates to the ropes to make snowspeeders with the tether cannons, just like in the movie. We even got stilts to re-create the AT-STs. This was going to be the most elaborate game played. Unfortunatly, it was also the most poorly planned.

The idea was that the Empire guys (the guys in the wooden AT-AT's and the stilt AT-ST's) had to make across a soccer field into the Rebel base, basically a big spray painted circle. The Rebels had to defend this area, using their bicycle snowspeeders and water balloons filled with flour. They could use the ropes to trip up the walkers, you see? Well, before we even started we ran into trouble. Turns out no-one knows how to walk on stilts. So, instead of abandoning the idea, someone came up with the brilliant idea of duct-taping the stilts to the kid's legs. It worked, but it also means that if they did fall over, they were falling from about three feet higher than they normally would. With that problem solved, we got under way.

the kids started out slow, especially the four legged AT-AT's. Turns out, the slot we cut in the shell was way too high and way too narrow to see out of. They were wandering around blind, risking getting hit with flour bomb to lift up the shell and get their bearings.
Turns out the flour bombs were a little more to be reckoned with than we thought. None of the balloons were filled up enough to break when they hit a person. Instead, they just became rock hard projectiles that left welts when thrown hard enough. And believe me, they were thrown plenty hard.

The biggest problem, however, were the tethers. Remeber in the movie when the speeder flew around and around the the big AT-AT's with a rope attached, tangling up it's legs and causing it to crash to the ground? That was the idea here, but what we didn't realize (at least not until the first screams of pain and surprise) was that a) the guys in the AT-AT's couldn't see what was coming and hence didn't know when they were going to be tripped and b) even if they knew they were going down, because they were holding the shells, there was nothing they could do except hit the ground. The "snowspeeders" didn't have it any better. In the movie, the tether detaches from the speeder after felling the walker; in real life, as soon as the slack on th rope was taken up, the bike would stop and the kid on it would go right over the handle bars.

It was a fucking disaster. It was like Lord of the Flies with robots and stilts. Kids were bleeding, staggering around like footage of shell-shocked war victims. The guys on bikes soon learned it was easier (and less painful) to just abandon the bikes and walk around pushing over the AT-AT's. The ones with stilts taped to their legs started kicking at the other kids to avoid being toppled. Turns out if you fall over while strapped to your stilts, its impossible to get up with out help, and on this day it was pretty much every man for themselves. I tried to wade, to pull out the wounded. I got hit with two flour balloons and tripped by a bike before I decided it wasn't worth it. Fuck these kids. I'm going swimming.

For a Friends Amusement

2006-05-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

You know who you are.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Beautiful Poetry

2006-04-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

As i am currently too lazy to post anything interesting or insightful, and can't think of any entertaining (Read: embarrassing) stories about me, I offer instead today a peice of verse from that weaver of words, Beck. It's awesome.

Debra

i met you at JC Penney
i think your nametag said "Jenny"
i coldstep to you with a fresh pack of gum
somehow i knew you were lookin' for someone
like a fruit that's ripe for a pickin'
i wanna do you like that Zankou Chicken
'cos only you've got a thing that i just got to get with
i just got to get with you
and you know what we're gonna do

i wanna get with you
and your sister i think her name's Debra
i wanna get with you
and your sister i think her name's Debra

i pick you up late at night after work
i said "lady, step inside my Hyundai"
i'm gonna take you up to Glendale
gonna take you for a real good meal
cos when our eyes did meet
girl you know i was packin' heat
ain't no use in wastin' no time gettin' to know each other, you know the drill
cos only you got a thing that i just got to get with
got to get with

i wanna get with you
and your sister i think her name's Debra
i wanna get with you and your sister i think her name's Debra

lovely lady girl you drive me crazy
lovely lady girl you drive me crazy

I Know The Feeling

2006-03-21T15:04:00.000-08:00

Haha, who am I kidding. No I don't!

All Hail The Hypnotoad

2006-03-17T16:27:00.000-08:00

Turn your volume way up.

I Think That Stripper Likes Me...

2006-03-14T10:46:00.000-08:00

I used to work for Kinko's as a delivery driver, driving around the lower mainland dropping off copies and business cards and booklets to all sorts of people and places. It was a pretty cherry job. i would just spend all day with my cruising around in the companies Astrovan, listening to the radio and working on my trucker tan. The clients I met were varied, from huge businesses to little mom-and-pops, from amateur magicians to Christian punk bands to organic coffee shops. But every once in a while, I got a real kook.

For those readers who don't know, Surrey, a city in British Columbia, is the asshole of Vancouver. Cozied up to the wrong side of the Fraser River, the end of the line for the Skytrain, all of the human waste that gets passed through the bowels of Greater Vancouver end up spewed all over Surrey and the communities within its boundaries.
No-one lives in Surrey. They all live in Whalley, or Guilford, or Newton, anything to distance themselves from the stigma of being a Surrey resident, like it's politically incorrect to refer to them as such. It's not fat, it's rotund. It's not short, it's vertically challenged. It's not Surrey, it's a northern suburb of White Rock. Not that I blame then. With it's record high crime rate, soaring poverty rate, and general ugliness, I'd rather tell people I had herpes than say I lived in Surrey. (Though I think the two go hand in hand anyway.) It was in this delightful metropolis that I had to deliver business cards for a stripper.

I can't remember her name now, but it was something strippery. Candi, Krystal, Monique. She had her boyfriend (pimp?) design the card, and they were a treat. On the front was a pixellated grainy digital photo of herself naked, in a classic peeler pose, taken with what I can only assume was someone's cellphone. On the back was her creed, kind of a Strippocratic Oath. It went:

To seduce,
To frustrate,
and perhaps,
To love.
This is the way
of the exotic dancer.

Yeah, right. Whatever. So I was delivering these cards in the Surrey, up in the north end near the river, where it starts to get industrial. It was kind of nice; the place was in the middle of no-where which meant a long drive, and it was a beautiful August day. On one side of the road, trees and bushes crowded right up to the edge of the road, verdant green threatening to spill out onto the asphalt. On the other, stark industrial complexes belched smoke as freight train cars slowly clang-clanged their way to and fro. I drove up and down this road for about forty five minutes, trying to find the girl's house. It took me so long because I wasn't really trying, and also because the directions I got to the place were "the black gate with bushes around it" which was pretty much every single house on the street. But eventually I found it, and called the house to let them know I was there. The boyfriend said he would be right down.
The house was obscured by he heavy foliage surrounding it, and was up a long driveway, so I couldn't actually see the place. All I could see was the driveway leading up into god knows where. I couldn't see the boyfriend leave the house, but I could certainly see him bicycling down the driveway on one of those old ten speed road bikes, the kind with the handles that curve around like rams horns. I could see that, and I could also see that he was wearing only a pair of blue whitey-tighties that hung loose off his sketchy cracked out frame, pale and stringy in a way that makes you think of the bottom of a fish. After struggling to pull open a gate that turned out to be opened electrically, he told me to follow him up to the house and let me tell you, you haven't lived until you've followed a scrawny junkie in his ginch as he struggled to ride a bicycle up a hill in what looked like the lowest gear. I considered just throwing the cards at him and hauling ass out of there but I had an invoice for them to sign, and I was sort of curious about how this girl looked like in real life.
After what felt like a lifetime of trying not to look at this guy's pancake ass writhe on the bike seat, we finally made it to the house. And what a house! A rambling, sprawing Victorian slash Georgian slash Escher. There were porticullises and trellises and pillars and shutters and window boxes and the only visible entrance was on the second floor. It looked like a someone had gone back in time to ancient Greece and opened a plantation. And there were cameras everywhere, on the roof and over the door and even in a tree in the yard. Underpants got off his bike and climbed the stairs, ony to find the door locked. Cursing, he went around to the back of the house to try another unseen door. Apparently unsuccessful, he came back to the front and started banging on the door and waving at the camera.
"Who is it?" came the reply from some woman on the other side.
"Its me! The damn door is locked! Let me in!"
A pause.
"Umm, no-one's home right now, um, ok?"

Silence from both me and Underpants. I'm standing by the van, he's in front of the door looking at it like he's never seen one before. Then he explodes.
"What do you mean no-ones home? I was just in there with you! Come-on baby, let me in!" All this time he's banging on the door, pounding with his fists and somehow kicking with both feet. I've had enough. I put the cards and their copy of the invoice on a stump. "Mail us the invoice! have a good day!" I yelled from the window as I took off, with no discernable reply. Fucking Surrey. What a dump.

In Your Face

2006-02-22T14:21:00.000-08:00

This just in from the world of Dan Savage:

Pearl necklace is out. Cheney is in. As in, shot in the face. As in, "I pulled out and gave her a Cheney. that's how I dumped her."

Damn This Magnificent Cock!

2006-02-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

Right now I'm looking for a place to live in the city, a little bit closer to work and rugby. I can't afford my own place, mostly because I want to live within a thousand miles of the city, so Ive been looking for some shared accomodations. Mostly, I've been checking out craigslist for places, and am having a bit of luck. However, the search is made a little more difficult by one thing. I'll be looking around, minding my own business, when I will stumble across the perfect place. It will be like

"Room-mate wanted, large bedroom with private bathroom, kitchen, pool, cleaning robot, and furnished with revolving heart shaped bed and 90 inch plasma. Building is above a culinary shcool that will cook all your meals and pumps cinnamon buns smell into your room to wake you up.

You will be sharing with single Pulitzer prize winning supermodel who won't be home as she must travel to exotic photo shoots between lectures. Will be home occasionally to practice her stripper routine, but when out of town you can use her Porsche.

rent is $47."

I find places like this all the time, and am nine digits into feverishly dialing the phone number when I see the punch line, those two little words that mean so much:

"Female Only"

Arrrggh! i got my hopes up and blam! This! What a rip-off! It's just not fair. Why should girls get special treatment? I mean sure, I guess there are so many mysogonists and creepos and jerks out there that many women would feel acutely uncomfortable living with a guy they knew, much less a total stranger. And I suppose cheaper rent is totally justified when society is set up in a way where women make less money doing the same job as men, with a glass ceiling preventing them from moving into a position where they could change that. I'll even give them the fact that a break on rent is nothing compared to the undeserved recieved benefits many men feel entitled to, the ability to be sexually aggresive without being a "slut" or reserved without being "frigid", to be "out of shape" but rarely a "fatty". All these things aside, barring all these incredibly unfair things women everywhere have to deal with, I'm still cheesed, because, well, because...

Oh man, i think its because I'm a total asshole.

And The Weiner Is

2006-02-07T21:34:00.000-08:00

Wel, the Oscars are upon us once again, and as I leaf through the latest Entertainment Weekly ( the Watch Tower magazine for pop-culture enthusiasts) I notice that once again, the slasher pic has been left out of the party. There are no nominations for any moive that could be even remotely considered a horror movie, unless perhaps you live in a red state. In that case, I'm sure the idea of a film about cowboy love winning a statue (of, ironically, a naked man) is more frightening than Jason, Freddie, Chucky and Paris combined.

I personally am a huge fan of gore flicks, something I can trace back to my early childhood. I remember watching The Blob real late one night, wrapped up in a blanket on the floor in our living room while the sitter snored on the couch behind me. I watched, rapt, as the mass of pink semi-opaque ooze flowed over and absorbed everything, voracious as it consumed doors and cars and people. I was horrified, not at the thought of the people in the film (and by extension, myself) dying encased in this pink snot, but at the fact that the killer was faceless, not even remotely human, but still alive. The blob wasn't killing that pretty young girl because she was cheating on it, or that old man because he was worth a lot of money. The blob killed because that's just what it did. It lived, and it killed. It couldn't help what it did any more than it could help what it was. It wasn't evil, it just was, and the thought that there could be something that was that horrible and yet not a mistake scared the Fruit Loops out of me. That night I had a nightmare, and though i don't remember what it was about, I'll lay my next paycheck on it that it had something to do with a certain amorphous wad of goo. What I do remember is waking up on the floor tangled in my blanket and screaming, screaming, screaming until the wide eyed sitter splashed me with cold water then made me promise not to tell my mother about the movie.

Classically, the penalty for stupidity or cruelty or just young nubility in a horror movie was death. The offender, after wandering into a room they obviously shouldn't be in or unearthing a grave they shouldn't be defiling, would be stabbed or shot or have their head cut off. They would die grasping their wounds or, in the event of a decapitation, their heads would land right side up and staring into the faces of the shrieking co-eds in the room. And in almost every instance, the look on their face would be one of astonishment, a "who, me?" of gaping mouths and staring eyes. Recently, however, I have noticed a kind of shift in the subject of horror movies. Maybe it's a reaction to the non-scary scary movies that flooded the market a few years back, the Grudges and the Rings where the characters are running from frightening theremin music and ominous close-ups and little else. These new films are the Torture flicks, movies with in-your-face, unflinching, unapologetic gore, where the camera doesn't pan away before that nail file is shoved in the victim's eye. No, the camera instead zooms and holds, putting the onus on you to turn away, to hide your face in the pillow and hope that when you look back, there isn't something sticking into someone.
Where did movies like this, movies like Hostel and Saw come from? Why has torture replaced death as the ultimate infliction, the negative that is to be avoided at all costs? It used to be bad enough that you just died, but now the death is excruciating, tendons cut and faces blowtorched by and invariably grinning maniac. Ironically, this horror is made worse when death isn't guaranteed, when the character could possibly be tortured indefinitely. This seems to frighten audiences more than anything, and of course, keeps them coming back in droves.
Have audiences begun to realize that there is a fate worse than death, that there can be some situations where death can even be a blessed relief? Maybe. But I think that fear has been around for a long time, and these movies have found a way to repackage them to seem fresh and new, brushing the dirt and Band-Aids of these terrors before putting them back into the display case. I am talking about the fear of damnation, of eternal torment popularized by such works as the Bible and the Torah and other writings found in some people's fiction section. As the world we live in becomes increasingly secularized, the concept of Hell (or wherever) stops being a place of unimaginable suffering and starts beign that firey, cavey place where Homer ate all the donuts. Hell as a place or a destination or a punishment stops being scary, but that fear of suffering is still alive and well. And apparently, very profitable.

Sorry

2006-01-31T11:11:00.000-08:00

Every time I start to feel comfortable about my white middle class male status, I go ahead and read something like this.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go apologize for having a penis to every girl I can find.

The Original J.Lo

2006-01-09T19:19:00.000-08:00

I heard a pretty funny story from a friend of mine recently. but before I relate it, I should probably get every one up to speed on a little show called Party of Five.

Party of Five was a television series that ran in the U.S. and canada from 1994 to 2000. It was about a group of five siblings that were orphaned when their parents were killed, hence the name (though it doesn't sound like much of a party to me). The only cast members that anyone gives a hot about anymore are Neve Cambell, Jeremy London, and most notably, Jennifer Love Hewitt. Often, when the show is mentioned, she is the first thing that pops into people's minds. The show, while popular in North America, is virtually unheard of in other parts of the world.

so my friend Kandy has been living in London for the last couple of years. While out for a night on the town with some of her friends, one of them alluded to an embarrassing incident while on vacation with his family. After much co-ersion (both verbal and liquid) he finally admitted that while on the plane back from Greece, he "pleasured himself" under the fold down tray while sitting next to his unsuspecting father. His firends were aghast. What? Why? Well, apperently the inflight movie The Tuxedo starred his celebrity crush. It was Jennifer Love Hewitt, and when Kandy heard this, she proclaimed "Well, it sounds like you were having a party of one! Ha!"

Nobody laughed. A tumbleweed could have rolled by. Her explaination of what Party of Five was, why it was funny, only made things worse.

Leviticus 19:28

2006-01-03T17:36:00.000-08:00

So, when I was fourteen I decided that I couldn't live without a tattoo. They were unique and different and besides, everyone was getting one. I begged and wheedled and eventually demanded that my parents sign for me, that I was going to get one whether they approved or not. (This of course was a lie; I couldn't ride my bike without a helmet without being crippled by guilt.) Surprisingly, my mother relented, and even offered to make it my Christmas present for that year. This is the same mother who said that tattoos were "low-class", who reminded me that the only people who got tattoos were drug dealers and criminals. This last admonishment she repeated to me while I was actually getting the tattoo, and I had visions of the word "asshole" tattooed across my back in four inch letters by an angry and insulted tattoo artist.

The tattoo I got then was Japanese characters between my shoulder blades that mean enkei, or peace and happiness. I was going through a pretty good spot in my life, and I figured it might not last. If things sucked ass later in life, I would be able to look at this tattoo and be reminded that things can be better. Why Japanese? Well, I always thought the language was very beautiful, and was facinated by amount of practice that is put into writing the characters just so. Also, I imagined that it would make an excellent ice breaker when I was trying to hit on sexy Japanese girls in school girl uniforms.

Since then, I've gotten two more tattoos. You know those little fishes you see on the back of cars sometimes, next to bumper stickers that say WWJD or remind you that life starts at conception? I've got one of those on my thigh, given to me by a guy who told me he once made his own tattoo machine by affixing a motor from an electric dinky car to a ball point pen.
The other one is on the small of my back, and is of a koi, one of those giant Japanese goldfishes. I got it when I was 18, just kind of the outline of the image. I liked the idea of it being obviously something that was drawn on my body, my back being a sort of sketch pad. It wasn't until recently that I seriously thought about getting it filled in with colour. I looked around Nanaimo, and found a good shop down the street from my house.

I got it filled in on the 29th of Dec., a Friday. It is black and red and orange and yellow, and hurt like a motherfucker. Have you ever been stung by a bee? Well, imagine that bee caught you in bed with its sister. Now imagine that said angry bee could sting you not once, but over and over again for four hours. its not nice, and I have to go back for more. All told, it will be about five and a half hours and you know what? It's totally worth it. It looks fucking rightous.

Meat

2005-12-21T19:10:00.000-08:00

I am still full.

On Sunday, two days after my rugby team's Christmas party, Mindstar, Chinnuts and I thought it would be a good idea to go to Costco, buy a side of beef, and eat the whole damn thing in one day. We thought it was a good idea the way people still think it's a good idea to wear fanny packs, the way Madonna thinks it's still a good idea to thrust her hips that way. I mean, what could go wrong?

Costco was a disaster. Take it from me, the best time to go shopping is not the last weekend before Christmas, unless you like screaming shoving stinky jerks knocking you down to get that last 30 gallon tub of cranberry sauce. I mean, I haven't had my ass "inadvertantly" rubbed up against so much since I was in Scouts. After stopping at a couple (read: every one) of the sample booths, we were able to finally fight our way to the meat coolers. Chinnuts picked out a prime side of beef, ninety seven dollars worth of bloody meaty goodness. It was so much meat, I just don't know how to convey it. It was as long as my arm, a slab, a chunk of cow that weighed more that I did when I was born. It was just what the doctor ordered.

After getting some essential supplies (cigarellos) for our day of gluttony, we went back to Chinnuts place to get started. We unwrapped the side and poured all the excess blood into a glass, planning maybe make a baste or a reduction or a pudding from it later. Steaks was what we decided on first, monster steaks two inches thick. We barbequed them on one of Chinnuts grills, one that I was a little apprehensious about being around. All the stories I had heard about it involved the words explode and fireball and eyebrows, but it worked just fine for us.

Two hours later, hamburgers and fajitas was decided as the second round. Inwardly I groaned, as the giant steaks were still making their way through my system. But I agreed wholeheartedly, because Meat Day (as we had dubbed it) wasn't about comfort or health, but about eating a lot of meat. So we went out and got all the fixin's, and came back to prepare the beef.

Now, I wasn't facing Mindstar when this happened, and Chinnuts was in the john, so we will have to take his word for it that the glass of blood we were saving was precariously balanced on or around the remaining beef. All I know is that I heard a clink, a sploosh, and a "Damn it!" and turned around to see blood everywhere. It was on the fridge, around the fridge, under the fridge. It was on the katchup, the mayo, the beer. It looked like Chinnuts' little fridge was finally becoming a woman.

The day progressed. Hamburgers as thick as my fist, delicious fajitas that were tortillas warpped around beef and very little else. I was sweating steak sauce, and my companions were suffering headaches that felt very much like meat hangovers. And still we were not finished. The were three giants steaks left with our names on them. Chinnuts cooked them up while Mindstar and I did our best to convince our bodies to digest faster. The steaks were served, and we dug in.

Have you ever been so full that you put a bite of food in your mouth and you think to yourself, "nope, I shouldn't have done that, I'm too full. There's no way for me to swallow this."? That's what the first bite was like. And it was downhill from there. Jaws clenching, faces frozen into a rictus of discomfort, we powered through these last steaks until the last bit of sauce was mopped up, the last piece of fat swallowed. I was woozy, and driving home, my heart was beating alarmingly fast. I kept thinking of those stats you hear about the number of heart attacks around the holidays rising, many attributed to over eating. I got home, and after a small piece of my brothers birthday cake, collapsed into bed, where I had nightmares about eating so much I exploded like that guy in Monty Python.

And I'm still full.

Geurrilla Christmas

2005-12-02T15:39:00.000-08:00

The other night, my room-mates and I went out to get a christmas tree for our apartment, determined to get our garishly painted, always cold place a touch of holiday cheer. However, after touring a few tree lots, we quickly found that trees are prohibitively expensive. Thirty six dollars for nothing more than a shrub with uneven branches and sparse needles and an aroma of dog urine? No thanks. For that much, the damn thing better play MP3s. (I may seem miserly, but now that I'm paying for everything from groceries to socks, there is a new hesitation to whipping out the old wallet. Cry for me. ) So, instead of buying one, we decided to steal one.
Of course, I don't mean steal one as in hop the fence at a lot. Or pry open the door at an orphanage and grab the Charlie Brown tree in the foyer, laughing and stomping on all the presents on the way out. But there is about a million acres of forest out there, doing nothing but growing and foliaging and not really doing anything useful. Whats one tree?

After driving for about an hour along twisting rural roads in the dead of night, we found a relatively secluded spot that was perfect for tree poaching. It was in the middle of nowhere, and we assumed it was Crown land, and you can't really steal from the government. So, after an hour of trudging up and down the road, journeying into the forest periodically and cowering in the ditch whenever a car drove by, we found the perfect tree. Not perfect because of its shape, or its even branches, or its refreshing pine smell, but perfect because it was near our cars and we were all freezing. The lumberjack in our group chopped it down, and we dragged it back to our cars. Seeing as no-one wanted to scratch up the top of their cars, (or wanted to be caught by the authorities with a stolen tree) it got strapped to the top of my Miata and we were off. Driving homw was a little precarious, seeing as how the tree was longer than my car, but we made it home just fine.

It wasn't until we got the tree into some proper lighting that it became apparent just how ghetto our pilfered tree was. Wider at the top than at the bottom, there are probably about twenty branches on it altogether. The braches are almost too flimsy to hold ornaments, and unless we put the candy canes right up against the trunk, it will fall over in its improvised tree holder / spare tire. It's the perfect tree for my first christmas away from home.

See You In Hell (From Heaven)

2005-11-17T23:50:00.000-08:00

Almost two years ago I went to a school called the Automotive Training Centre, taking a course that would prepare me for a career as a mechanic. Now, after about twenty two months of handing out resumes and interviewing and and trying to fan the flame of an expiring hope, I was offered an apprenticeship. I am finally able to start my career, and what's more, it's at a shop where I have access to a wealth of knowledge and experience in my boss. The only thing is, the job is on Vancouver Island, in Nanaimo. So, I am moving out, and away.

I am going to miss the hell out of everyone. Nanaimo is not that far way. I can talk to people on the phone, through Messenger, by posting here. The ferry is close, and it's easy to walk on and I'm sure there are tons of people who wouldn't mind picking me up, as my irresistable charm is hard to do without. However, I am still going to miss the hell out of everyone. It won't be the same, you know? As much as I'll be able to keep in touch, nothing can replace that person to person feeling. It won't feel natural talking to Mindstar and not have to worry about being randomly sacktapped, knowing there are thousands of metres of water and two computer screens between us. How is Mouse going to tell me my emphatic hand gesturing is out of control if all my gesturing looks like this :> :( ;) ? I can visit, yes. But I know what these visits will be like. Desparation to squeeze all quality time potential out of my brief stay will rob it of the casual, relaxed-to-be-in-your-company element that is a hallmark of a good friendship. The deafening tick-tock of time draining away will drown out the signifigantly meaningless conversation, the ability to relax and unwind unfettered in another's company.

As much as this sucks, however, it's not the thing bothering me the most about moving to Nanaimo. Nor is the idea that I might not make it onto the rugby team there, or that I won't get along well with my room-mates. These things all trouble me, but they are not what keep me up at night, what makes my smile feel painted on when people ask me if I am excited to be moving. No, the notion that vexes me the most is that I wont be able to cut it on my own. I will be moving away from home for the first time, and I've never really had to rely on myself to his degree. Everything I've done up until now has been with my fingers crossed, knowing that if I ever got into a really sticky jam, someone else (read: my parents) would be able to bail me out. Not now, however. I am determined to do this myself, to go it alone. I think that to really know yourself you need to strip down and strip down and strip down until you are laid bare and living at home, or even close to home, I'm not able to do that. So I'm moving out, and away. But what if living on my own, depending on myself and only myself, is something I can't do? What kind of a manchild would I be?

Bah. Enough of this belly aching. Millions of others have had it way worse. I'll be fine, and soon enough, I will rule this town with an iron fist. This blog will be filled with tales of debauchery and bacchanlia. (There is a thesaurus sitting right next to me. I don't think I've ever heard that word included in anyone's day to day lexicon.) To lighten the mood, I leave you with a joke.

"What did the fish say when he ran into a wall?"

"DAM!!"

Buh-GAWW!!

2005-11-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

I like to golf, but I am not very good at it. The practice, the early mornings, the endless hours of discussing pro's swings, all these things necessary for becoming a good golfer really take the fun out of the game to me. I like to treat a game of golf, whether it's at the country club or the pitch and putt, like a game of mini-golf. A chance to shoot the shit and goof around. You can have a lot more fun that way, and sometimes crazy stuff can happen.

I was playing a round in Langley with two of my friends, NP and Mouse. We had just teed off (Don't ask me from which hole; it was a while ago and I was barely paying attention anyway) and Mouse's ball landed right by a watertrap. This trap was a beaut, long reeds obscuring the view of the hole and about ten metres of water to hit over. His ball landed about five feet from the edge, next to the ball of a guy from a team of slowpokes we had decided to play though. This guy was a middle aged paunchy duffer with a sweater vest and a frown that looked like he was born with, the kind of poopy-pants you see complaing moudly about his service at Burger King. He had teed off before his cronies had said we could play through, and seemed like he was a little pissed his buddies had sold him out, frowning that frown and muttering to himself. Mouse ignored this, and prepared to hit his ball over the trap.

Now, before I go on, let me tell you something about my friend Mouse. He is my best friend in the world, and an awesome person. He will give you the shirt off his back and the burrito out of his hand, and he won't even ask you your name. This compassionate, caring nature, however, does not extend into the animal kingdom. He has no time for the likes of PETA or those who rail against fur, and is only half joking when he says he would kill for a pair of baby seal skin gloves. Don't get me wrong, he would never treat an animal poorly. He's had the same goldfish for almost ten years now, honest to God. it's just that he is very cautious about giving non-humans too much credit.

Where was I? I've nearly rambled my way out of sight of the story. Ah, yes. Mouse was lining up his shot, wiggling his ass and setting his feet. He brought the club up nice and fast, intent on clearing the trap and dropping the ball right on the green. At the same time, from out of the reeds flew a heron, rising slowly and majestically in that way that only large birds can, lazily flapping its wings and gaining altitude steadily. It would have been a beautiful sight except for the fact that it was right in Mouse's line, and he had his eyes on the ball. He hit the ball nice and solid, excellent contact, and it flew traveled about ten feet and hit the bird square in the neck. It fell back in the water screeching and splashing and squawking while we all looked on dumb-founded. The duffer that was waiting for us lost it, waving his arms and squealing in a much higher than expected voice that the bird was dead, oh god, it's an endangered bird, we're in so much trouble, oh god, oh god, etc., etc. Mouse looked at him, and while waving his hand Jedi mind-trick style, said "You saw nothing." He gathered up his clubs, and we moved on the next tee.

We gave ourselves par on that hole.

Workin at the Carwash...

2005-10-25T22:26:00.000-07:00

The guys at my work have started calling me Deryck LaForeskin.

I guess I should feel lucky that I went 23 years without anyone thinking up that particualr moniker, but I don't.

The Back Of The Bus

2005-10-16T23:14:00.000-07:00

After all the media attention it's received, I feel I need to throw my intellectual hat into the ring regarding the teacher's strike here in BC. I'm not going to tell everyone what they are doing wrong, and I'm not going to try and outline a resolution to the issue here on my obscure, read-only-by-cool-people blog. (Though I have heard a lot of noise lately about blogs being the new fifth estate, the last bastion of non-commercialized information.) I just wanted to talk about my feeling about the whole fiaso, to wander in and out of the shadow that is this illegal job action / civil rights movement. I'm sure a lot of what I have to say has been said before, but never with the style and panache that I bring to the table. If you want to read about it from the point of view of someone directly involved, read this.

First of all, I would like to address the concept that teachers so't need to be paid more because they are not in it for the money, they teach because they love to teach, they are answering a higher calling. While I'm sure there are many teachers who do love to teach (and many who don't) why is it the general perception that this applies to everyone in the teaching profession? Why is every teacher the teacher from Dangerous Minds or Welcome Back Carter or High School High ? I think that it is because no parent can fathom the idea of a person wanting to babysit 20 (or 30 or 40) screaming hormonal chimpanzees, that the compensation is far outweighed by the mental and emotional stress of being responsible for the education and protection of other people's babies. There must be something other than a paycheck that brings these people back to work everyday, some sort of personal stake in what they do for a living.
This may be true, but this sounds like an excellent argument for more renumeration, not less. We shouldn't be taking advantage of their passion by trying to squeeze profit from them, by manipulating their commital to our children. For even though wage may be secondary to the kid's welfare for many of the teachers, this zeal will only stretch so far. Even Jesus doubted his Father's plan when he was pushed far enough. ( And by pushed far enough, I mean nailed to something.)

Secondly, I hear a lot of noise about how the strike is illegal, that the teachers are setting a bad example to our kids by picking and choosing which laws they obey. Is that what they are teaching kids, or are they showing them that if there is an unjust law, there are options for citizens to protest them. I don't want to say this is neccesarily a civil rights issue, to bandy around names like Rosa Park or anything, but the truth is, the provincial government broke international labour law by legislating the teachers back to work. What, it's ok for the gov to break the law, but the teachers are no worse than dealers because they are protesting this law? I call bullshit on that.

Baxteriffic

2005-09-26T10:42:00.000-07:00

This past week I was house-sitting for some good friends of while they attended a wedding in the desolate wasteland that is Manitoba. Their house is fairly centrally located in Vancouver right near amenities and Skytrain, a short train trip away from clubs and bars and dear hedonism. Staying there is a real treat for me, for I live in the Appalachians of the lower mainland, Aldergrove. A town on the cusp of civilization that, while being nourished by the reflected light of one of the most progressive, culturally diverse cities in North America, still produces stunted asshole cowboy fruit not above organizing violent brawls inspired by S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Needless to say, I spend quite a bit of time commuting into the city for a breathe of fresh cultural air.

While I was at the house I was taking care of Baxter, the owner's dog, and I came to realize something. I know that this is common knowledge, that many other have already dicovered this, but it was new to me; dogs are an excellent ice-breaker. Better than a funny t-shirt or an eye patch. So many people approached me out of the blue to ask em questions about this dog. The only thing is, I don't really know anything about Baxter. His breed, his age, his origin, all of it is a mystery to me, so I did what any man would have done in my situation; I lied. I said he was seven years old, then eight, then five, that he was a lab / bassett cross, a beagle / lab cross, a rare Dutch retreiver.

My crowning acheivement was when I was asked where I got Baxter. I spun a fine tale about a Chinese junk floating into English Bay in the dead of night, deserted save for Baxter alone and hungry in the captain's quarters. I pictured warm food still on the tables, candles still burning, and a haunting wind blowing through the sails. Possibly my finest lie.
And of course, totally unbelievable.

Shit When I Cum Part 2

2005-09-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

Greetings, Constant Reader. This post is a continuation of a previous one where I detailed the exploits of some rugby buddies and I in Summerland. The story I am about to tell was already related on Mindstar's blog. This is how I saw the events, my perception of a truly bizarre evening.

The day after the cougar hunt, a Sunday, was a slow uneventful one. We toured some wineries, lazed around the house, whiled away the day and knowing in deep down inside that the night was going to be a good one. At about ten we made our way from Summerland to Penticton, and headed to a bar called The Blue Mule. We left behind only our buddy Chinnuts, who after hearing of the packs of roving angry young men coursing through the streets, decided he wasn't up to getting in a fist fight in a bar for accidentally making eye contact with someone in an open shirt and puka shell necklace. Fair enough.

The Blue Mule. A half assed cowboy bar that plays Fifty Cent followed by Shania followed by Dwight Yoakam, serves watered-down over-priced drinks and hosted booty dance contests, all the time showing the first twenty minutes of Rush Hour on the big screens over the dance floor. In other words, the perfect bar. We stationed ourselves in a booth and started drinking, shots of Fireball following Rusty Nails following beer. Mindstar's plan was to get me drunk enough to puke, not a tall order seeing as I have the alchohol processing ability of a five year old. Before we could really get the vomit ball rolling, however, Paris Hilton showed up. Well, not the real Paris Hilton, but the brunette knobby knee Penticton version of Paris Hilton, complete with a hotel owning father and the distinct odour of sex floating around her like cheap perfume. Oh, and a liberal dose of actual cheap perfume. We had seen her floating around earlier in the night in just a bra and flapper skirt, and then inexplicitly in a Playboy bunny shirt with no bra later on. (Where did the shirt come from? Where did the bra go? All mysteries.) Paris started hanging all over Mindstar, nibbling his neck and leaning against him and totally ignoring the stricken semi-disgusted look on his face. To give you an idea of where this night with this girl was headed, when we told her that we were staying in Summerland (a twenty minute drive from Penticton) she replied by telling us that was too far for her to go, and booked us two rooms in her daddy's hotel. Two rooms for six guys that I assume we'd have to pay for by passing Paris around like a bottle of grain alchohol. Disasterous.

I eventually came to Mindstar's rescue by graciously accepting an invitation to dance with Paris, drawing her affection and nibbles and pretty much expecting to go home with her. For as much as I've maligned her, she was attractive and personable and had that submissive "I was unpopular in high school" attitude that gets me going. I mean, the sex would probably not have been that good. You know how pudding gets that skin on it when it gets cold? Well, imagine that skin never broke. Now imagine you were having sex with a bowl of said pudding. Thats what the sex would have been like, but hey, everyone has needs right? But it was not to be. She was being harrassed by jerks all night, and I think the reason that she was hanging around us was because we were probably the biggest guys in the place that weren't working there. Every time she was approached by one of these guys, she would kind of hide behind one of us. Eventually she left with her brother, leaving us with a blown (germ laden) kiss and an invitation to visit her at the restaurant she worked at.

Last call was announced about twelve times, and then the ugly lights came on. I went looking for my teammates and found BC talking to a waitress we met at a deserted bar two nights earlier. She was with her friends, one of whom two handed grabbed my ass after I introduced myself. I returned the favour (turnabout is fair play) and learned her name. Everyone in the bar poured out onto the street, throngs of drunken hooligans yelling and carousing and shouting at cabs. The waitress and her friends invited me back to their house for a party which apparently consisted of half a dozen girls and myself. I was in like Flynn, one of the girls offering to "eat my hotdog", and the other one handing me the keys to her house. This blog entry would have a much more interesting ending if not for Mindstar.

I didn't puke that night, so he needed to find some other way to shit in my bed, and denying me an all girl gangbang seemed like just the ticket. He started out by telling the waitress that I shit when I cum, to which she replied, "At least he can cum. I know girls that never have." Awesome. The possibilities for the night expanded by an exorbitant amount. Having failed with what should have been a guaranteed deal breaker, Mindstar whipped out the forbidden, the taboo, a phrase that should only be used on your dearest enemies. he held up his phone and called out, "Hey Speednuts, your girlfriend is on the phone. She wants to know when you are coming home."

The girls looked at me with disgust, and told me maybe they would party by themselves. The girls, who didn't have a problem with feces spewing out of my ass when I busted on their backs, where appalled by the idea that I would cheat on my girlfriend with them. After they left a cab was called and all six of us piled in. We went back to Summerland, and I cried myself to sleep.

Shit When I Cum Part 1

2005-09-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

This Labour Day long weekend I went to Summerland with some guys from my rugby team. We were staying at a friend's parents house, and the trip turned out to be a gong show of such incredible magnitude that I will not even be able to fit the tale into one blog entry.

The first night was Saturday, a night of debauchery and dancing and vomiting that started where such nights often do; at the liquor store. After declaring the night to be an evening of blended drinks, of pina coladas and mango tangos and seabreezes, we bought two bottles of rum and some coke and left. (Though not before I accidentally told the 28 year old clerk she was old. I have a real way with the ladies.) Back at the house, we downed generously proportioned rum-and-cokes and shot the shit, lounging around telling bawdy stories. We polished off the two bottles of rum by about 10:30, left, and crashed a wedding.

Ok, it wasn't a crash in the traditional sense. We were seperated from the groom by about two degrees, and received a secondhand roundabout invitation from him. And the wedding was nice, with delicious Okanagan wine at every table and a twoonie bar. I danced with the bride, and danced alone to Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler, gorged on fruit and gin. Later on in the night, there was some noise among our ranks of leaving, of catching a cab into Penticton and picking up some action, but I knew it wasn't to be so. Everyone was reeling about, drunkenly teaching each other to foxtrot or irrigating the parking lot with vomit. I knew I'd have to go it alone if I wanted any kind of coitus, so I slipped into the night in a town I didn't know and couldn't navigate sober. And ended up in front of the Perch.

The Perch is one of those cookie-cutter pseudo-sports bars, the licenced equivalent of Zellers. There was a long bar in a too well lit room with pool tables and dart boards and the median age of the patrons was perhaps thirty. I shambled in just as they were announcing last call and I knew I had very little time to work with. And then I saw her, sitting at the bar alone nursing a highball and casting about with those hungry end of night eyes I know so well. I strolled up to her, brimming with confidence, and asked her if she would like a drink. She demured, (probably because I had totally forgotten about last call) and asked me my name. I was in.

Now, I don't have a thing for older ladies, the silver foxes. I don't use Centrum Silver as a Viagra subsitute. However, I know that people older than me have something to offer, and have there own needs and wants. More importantly, I was quite drunk and desperately horny. That's why it didn' t faze me that the lady I ended up walking out of the bar with was in her late forties, a geritol goddess who could easily be described with the word "handsome". I was following her to her house when we passed a Jehovah's Witness temple and I convinced her to accompany me to the dark alley beside it, so we could make out like teenagers (which I realize now would have been 1975 for her). Leaning against her, her against the wall, we nuzzled for a bit , and then I closed my eyes for just a second.

Perhaps more than a second. I opened my eyes an undetermined amount of time later, disoriented and in the dark and still quite drunk. The woman was gone, presumably having wriggled out from under my unconcious body. I stumbled out from the darkness and across a parking lot where I was spotted by my friends, who were curious about where i had dissapeared too.

I wish I had been sober enough to lie.

Strapped

2005-08-29T23:17:00.000-07:00

we had our first game this weekend, playing against the Seattle Quake at Brockton. The weather was gorgeous, high blue sky and blazing sun, good rugby weather. (It occurs to me, though, that I have heard the term "good rugby weather" applied to everything from a mild balmy day to a goddam monsoon.) While we didn't win we still played very well, scoring two tries in each of the halves and putting up a hell of a fight. I'm frustrated by my damned butterfingers, but that will just take practice and someone whipping balls at me like I'm a nerd in a high school gym class.

I usually play in an athletic supporter, a jockstrap. (And, you know, the rest of my kit.) I know they have fallen out of style, but I like the simplicity, the fact that it is purely functional. Normal underwear offers the support, but thats not all they do. Regular underwear offers a degree of modesty, covering parts of people they don't want to show off. Fashion is even a factor, designer ginch and pink y-fronts making statements all over the place.

But to me, this stuff isn't necessary when you are playing a sport. Being fashionable should never be a factor in deciding what gear you are going to rock on the pitch, especially in rugby. I'm not going to wear Gucci boots if they aren't going to last as long as Canteburys. (Unless Gucci starts making kangaroo skin boots. I have my limits.)

And the modesty should never, never be an issue to an athlete. A person who is relying on their body, their physique to get the try or the dunk or the checkmate cannot feel uncomfortable with their body. I think that when someone cannot be in good graces with the way their body appears, they won't be able to rely on the way it performs. Now, I don't mean that everyone should think they are hot shit, because they almost never are. I just mean that you shouldn't feel that your body is something to hide. This is your instrument. If it sounds good, why worry about if it is polished?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

2005-08-05T14:03:00.000-07:00

A lot of weird things happen to me. Sometimes its funny, sometimes it sucks, but most of the time it's just weird. You may notice, Constant Reader, that this blog is made up primarily of accounts of these things. I used to think this was my destiny, that to have strange things happen to me was my dharma in life. There is an ancient Chinese blessing / curse that goes "May you live in interesting times", and I certainly am.

I'm beginning to realize, however, that this is perhaps a fate I have brought on myself. You see, I am not exactly the brightest bulb on the tree, the sharpest knife on the rack. I wouldn't say I'm dumb, but I do dumb things, you know? I came to understand this while relating a story to a friend today.

A few years ago I worked at a car wash as a "wash bay attendant". This basically meant that I would wash peoples cars when it was sunny, and during inclement weather, I would do odd jobs for my boss. My boss was a strange little man who is barely secondary in this tale, a twice divorced, thrice bankrupted gnome who doesn't even warrant a paragraph break. he was fanatical about keeping up the appearance of the washbays, having me clean them hourly and paint them once a month.

This is what I was doing on a dreary February day, standing on a pallet that was raised into the air by a forklift. I had a ladder to use to get down to the ground, and a dozen buckets of sky blue paint for the ceiling of the bay I was in. I was about twenty feet up, and from my vantage point I could see directly into the office building across the parking lot. The office was strictly Dilbert, with a bunch of cubicles facing the window. I could see the office personnel working and presumably, they could see me.

Now painting is dreary, uncomfortable work. Holding my hand over my head for hours was killing my shoulder, I was cold, and every once in a while some idiot who was washing his car in the rain would need help with the machine. ( "The coins go in the slot." "Oh. Thanks.") My only saving grace was that strung around the ceiling was a P.A. system, speakers blaring a local radio station. the music kind of distracted me and periodically, they would play a pretty good song.

Well, after a while I kind of started to jam along with the songs, you know, bobbing my head or singing quietly. I was bored and am easily distracted, you see. eventually, they started playing more good songs, and I started getting more into the music. I was painting a lot less, but I was having more fun. Then Eye Of The Tiger by Survivor came on, and all bets were off. I wasn't even pretending to paint anymore. I alternated between using the paintbrush as a microphone and an air guitar. I did high kicks. I did air humps. I even dropped to my knees to do a face-melting guitar solo. And in the middle of a flamboyant spin, I caught sight of the people in the office building.

What seemed like the entire staff was lined up at the large bay windows laughing their asses off. And pointing. One woman was laughing so hard she was doubled up, holding her stomach and using the window as support. These were people I saw every day, knowing some by name and many well enough to say hello to. I was mortified beyond belief, worse than anything you read in YM about having your period in front of your crush. I panicked, desperate to get out of their view, and in my rush to get down, kicked the ladder away from the forklift. i was trapped. I considered jumping, risking a broken leg to save face, but didn't have the balls. Instead, I resumed painting and startign thinking about looking for another job.

Scrum Down

2005-07-24T22:48:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, we got our scrum machine today.

I play for a senior men's rugby team in Vancouver called the Rogues, a team which I can honestly say is the best rugby team I've ever played for. We have been needing a scrum machine for a while to help us step up our game, and thanks to a recent and very generous donation, we were able to pick one up. We got it from a company on the island called Scrum-Master, and it is mint. It has tons of options, like the ability to change the weight of the machine and being able to use it to work on turning scrums.

I'm really excited for this upcoming season. We have a whole new crop of fit, athletic minded players who are also really good guys. We have a game against Seattle coming up, and I think if we can do well against them, we will be a force to be reckoned with in the VRU.

Before R. Kelly made it cool.

2005-07-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

One summer when I was nineteen, me and a few of my friends were hanging out at Albert Dyck Lake, a small man-made kiddie pool in rural Abbotsford. It was a beautiful summer day, one of those day writers commit thousands of words to describing without ever adequately doing it, wearing the sheen off of words like "golden rays of sunshine" and "azure sky". It was a nice day.

The bottom of this lake is quite steep, descending at about a 45 degree angle from the shore, for it was chiefly designed for wakeboarding. As a result, there is a small raft that is quite close to shore yet in water deep enough to dive into. This is where we were, myself and my friends NP and Wolfman. the three of us were taking full advantage of the day, sunning ourselves on the raft, having a couple beers, and flexing our abs whenever a young lady swam by. (Albert Dyck in the summer was the local meat market, bedroom eyes and wolf whistles filling the air.) The day was perfect.

Actually, not totally perfect. The one blemish, the one pimple on the prom night that was this excellent day, were the three or four school age kids playing on the raft we were on. This gaggle of eight year olds were a screaming cacaphony, demanding we watch them do cannonballs, pestering us with questions about skateboarding, etc. (And why do people demand you watch them do cannonballs? It's the diving equivalent of slam-dunking on the hoops in an elementary school.) They were really doing us no harm, but on a day where we just wanted to relax in the sun, to shoot the shit and maybe get mildly buzzed, they were a scourge.

So Wolfman came up with a way to dispose ourselves of them. He jumped off the raft and swam under it, going under one side and emerging on the other. This was relatively safe as the raft was pretty small, and it was floating high enough off the water that if you for some reason couldn't make it, you could surface under the raft and get some air. In fact, the slats of wood that made up the surface of the raft were spaced far enough apart that you could watch someone swim underneath, or if they came up under the ramp, you could have a conversation with them.

Now, Wolfman's stunt electrified these kids. In no time they were jostling with one another to be the next one to swim under, racing each other and screeching at us to watch them go, to tell them if we saw them, all that. I know this may seem to be counter-productive, but bear with me.

After a few passes under the raft, Wolfman suggested that one of the kids try to come up underneath of it, and we will tell them if we could see them. All of them, not just the one he had talked to but all of them, jumped off and within seconds were squealing from below. Wolfman went and stood over them, blocking the sun. I can just imagine what they were seeing, this towering monolith blotting out the light, hands on his hips, dripping water on them. He must have seemed a hundred feet tall, this adult who had stooped down and been nice to them.

"Can you see us? Can you see us?" Issued forth from between the planks, little fingers curling around the boards.

"Oh, I can see you all right." He replied, grinning at NP and I. We had no idea.

"We can see you! We can... hey, what are you doing? What is that?"

"Why, that's pee. I'm peeing right now." And he was. Urine was darkening the front of his shorts, running down his leg, and dripping all over the hands and presumably faces of the kids below. There was turmoil belwo the raft, and then they popped up on all sides of it. Some faces were furious, some were disgusted. They swam back to shore, and that was the last we saw of them. Wolfman jumped in the water to clean off, and we enjoyed the rest of the day with our solitude.

Hair Raising 2 - The Vengeance

2005-07-10T23:07:00.000-07:00

Tonight I tried to cut my own hair. Partially because free is cheaper than going to a barber, and partially because of a guy I went to school with named DE.

DE was our student body president, class valedictorian, captain of the snowboarding team, and could fly. He had scholarships to pretty much every learning institute in Canada, and while giving his speech at our grad ceremony, he did a standing backflip.

Anyway, DE used to cut his own hair. His hair was always amazing, and he used to tell girls that he did it himself, with no mirror, in the dark. Not totally true, but it was more impressive to the ladies than a pilot's license. Bastard.

Anyway, I figured if he could give himself amazing haircuts every time, I should at least be able to buzz myself. Turns out, there's a reason he has an engineering degree and I wash cars.

The clippers I was using were manufactured in 1954. There's a deafening snap when you turn them, and they kind of stink of ozone when you use them for too long. They were given to my grandmother by her mother, and I thought it would be cool to use them, like I was cutting my hair with history. What I didn't take into consideration is that the plastic that the clipper attachment is made of is fifty years old and not flexible at all. So I was doing just fine at first. The hair looked good, I felt good, it was all good. Then the attachment popped off. I went from a number 3 attachment to nothing at all, and buzzed all the way down to my scalp. Twice. Now there is a one inch bald spot on my hairline and a much larger one on the side of my head. I look like I have the mange. It is a disaster. Not even my natural beauty can compensate for how goofyI look. My only saving grace is that I know the guys on my rugby team won't make fun of me, that I will be treated with dignity and respect.

I'm a dead man.

Monogamy is not a type of wood.

2005-07-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

Gentlemen, why is it so hard to keep our dicks in our pants?

I mean, come on. I 've heard about a hundred stories today about how "I totally nailed this chick and then my girlfriend found out. It was awesome, heh heh." All of this was spawned by the only woman in our section at work explaining that she was sad today because a guy she was seeing cheated on her.

Nice.

It's not that hard. it's not like you can just bump into someone and have your cock slide into them. Sleeping with someone takes at least a little time and effort, and if you are in a relationship where monogamy is agreed upon or at least implied, that little bit of time should be enough to shout no, to zip up, or to imagine your wang getting slammed in a car door.

Oh, what's that? Monogamy is not natural, you say? Do you know what else is "not natural'? Driving a car. Or wearing clothes. Or singing along to the new JT track. You still do all that, right? I hear all the time people saying, "Oh, listen to your gut. Your first instinct is untainted, the right decision." Untainted by what? Reason? Consideration of consequences?

Your base feelings should motivate you, not control you. If you see a sexy person at the club or the park or passed out at a party, don't throw out the entire relationship because your inner caveman thought they would be a good mate.

Weekend is a Verb

2005-06-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

So, this was a busy weekend. The best kind.

On Friday, after work there was a going away party for this guy at work, one of the cooler guys there. It was fun, but someone there got super drunk. Normally this is funny, but as soon as he started bad-mouthing his boss, (who was there) things got real not-funny real fast. It was a disaster, so I excused myself and got out of there with haste. Then I went and got laid.

I read an interview once with a famous prize winning jockey who was asked if he had sex before a race. He replied in the negative, saying that to win, one had to focus their mind and body towards their goal, and sex is an unnecessary distraction. Fair enough. I can see where he is coming from. (Or not coming on, whatever.) But then I read an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was asked if he ascribed to the same practice. He laughed, and replied that before shows he and the other body builders would pass around muscle groupies like bottles of grain alchohol. A definite no, and where is he now? King of California, while that jockey was probably eaten by his horse years ago. So before games and before big practices, I do my best to get some.

Practice, on Saturday, was awesome. It feels fantastic to get back into tackling, and we have some pretty promising new guys. We started off with some conditioning, a twenty minute interval training excercise. I've been running a lot on my own and let me tell you, being fit makes a world of difference. Before, when I got tired, I would basically be on automatic pilot, not thinking or aware of my surroundings. Just picking them up and putting them down. Now, I can concentrate, and am more aware of what's going on around me. I think it will make a huge difference in games.

Sunday, I went skateboarding in Abbotsford. Fun the park was deserted, but geez, does everyone in that dump have a crappy souped up car? Every three seconds someone would peel out in their 89 accord with a big fart cannon on the back. Dang, I would think you would want to bring as little attention to that off-white pop-up headlight sedan as possible.

That was my weekend, abbreviated. I'm sure it was more fun than yours but that's ok, they usually are.

Skate or Die

2005-06-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

I used to skateboard a lot. I still do, but not nearly at the level that I did when I was younger. When I was in grades 10 through 12, skating was my life. I skateboarded to school in the morning. I skateboarded at school during break and lunch. I worked at a skate shop called Speedies after school, and I helped run a Evangelism based skateboard club at night. It was my life. I wasn't just a guy who skateboarded, I was a SkateBoarder. Capital S, capital B.

I grew up skating in Aldergrove, which was a trip. It was like being in a cult, but without all the free grape Kool-Aid. How do I explain it? it wasn't just tooling around on our boards, getting into trouble and being extreme to the max. Skateboarding in Aldergrove was cementing transitions on parking barriers and cutting down rails to make them more skater friendly. It was organizing a downhill battle joust at midnight on a residential street, with maybe two dozen guys racing each other to the bottom while nearly a hundred high school kids cheered them on. It was eight or nine of us piling into our friend's old Volvo on a snowy winter day and doing doughnuts in the parking lot at the zoo. Skating in Aldergrove is doing a roadtrip to an abandoned pool in Bellingham, and having to explain to the border guards why one of us is returning to Canada bleeding out the ears. (He fell and hit his head and didn't have health insurance.)

That isn't it. I can't convey the way it was. When I remember it, everything is sepia tinted and everyone is laughing and it makes my heart ache a little. I remember waking up in the summer at nine in the morning not because I had to work, not because I had chores or a meeting or resposibilities, but because the sun was shining on my face in bed. I would make my way up to the skatepark, not bothering to call my friends because I already knew they would be there. We would skate in the sun, shooting the shit and playing horse, until two o'clock, when the sprinklers came on and we'd cool off. Some days we would try to conquer the legendary spots in town, the Four Star rail or the ten set at the high school. Some days we wouldn't, we'd just lounge around at the skateshop watching videos and goofing off and none of this was a waste of time, for we were young and invincible and were never getting old. Peter Pan didn't have shit on us. At night, there was either the lit spots in town, or scaling the of the outdoor public pool and going skinny dipping. I look back on this and I want to skake my younger self and shout enjoy this! This is fucking awesome and can never be repeated!

But you know what? I think part of the magic was not knowing, not worrying about whether or not I'm maximizing my enjoyment, not having this part of me that is standing back and thinking this is fun, but could it be funner? Could I be doing more? Just doing it was enough. Growing up in Aldergrove, this weird Gummo-esque burb, is a trip, but so far, it's been a pretty good one.

Hair Raising

2005-05-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

I think there should be a code of ethics that hair-dressers should have to follow, like a stylists Hipocratic Oath. Someone has to be responsible for all the mullets and box cuts and frosted tips.

They could lose their licences for giving someone a bad perm, and there would be illegal back alley hairdressers that would give banned haircuts for the right price. Radical new haircuts would be tested on animals, and holistic barbers would offer "alternative" up-do's.

Thats the way it should be.

OMG

2005-05-24T23:17:00.000-07:00

So, I guess religious intolerance is the new black, huh? I don't get it. Everywhere I look, people are trying to be as tolerant as possible. New politically correct terms are introduced every day, stereotypes and misconceptions are being replaced (albeit slowly) with a deeper understanding of other peoples cultures and ways, and any sentences that start with "those people" are met with indignation and acrimony. These are all steps forward. We (well, at least my part of the world) are moving towards what is generally agreed upon as a new era of tolerance and equality. There is still a lot of room for improvement, but the prevailing direction is onward and upward.

This all makes the attitude towards the faithful I have witnessed in the last few all the more confusing. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not painting everyone with the same broad brush. This is the type of generalization that I am trying to move away from. It's just that, more and more often, I find that people who are in every other regards enlightened and open-minded will drop such delightful bombs as "man, Christians are DUMB!" and "I can't stand Muslims."

I understand that religion is a hot topic. Your concept of autonomy, your way of life, even when you are allowed to eat pork, all of these important factors are affected by your choice of faith. And having someone say that the manner in which you live is so wrong that you will be punished forever can be pretty fucking insulting. But please, don't catagorize whole groups of people because you don't agree with the way they lead their lives.

Jeez, that ends my sermon. Reply if you agree, or if I've imflamed you. But please, think about it.

Lucky Blaarrgh

2005-05-15T10:19:00.000-07:00

When I was in Grade Ten, my friend NP and I were laying around my house after school. It was a beautiful day, we were both fit, and there were numerous outlets for us to go out to express ourselves in the community.

We were bored out of our minds.

In search of something to occupy us (and something to eat), we found a COSTCO sized box of Lucky Charms in my pantry. This box was massive. I swear it was seven or eight pounds of cereal. We each had a bowl, and NP said, "Man, wouldn't it be awesome if there was a cereal that just had marshmallows?" (For those of you who don't know, Lucky Charms is a grain based cereal that has sugar coated shaped and pastel coloured freeze dried marshmallows. The marshmallows are the only reason to eat the cereal.)

So what we did is dumped out the whole box into a mixing bowl and started picking out all the marshmallows. By hand. It probably took us about an hour, and by the end we each had a large bowl of just marshmallow hearts, stars and rainbows. It was the best bowl of "cereal" I've ever eaten.

It wasn't until about half an hour later that we started to feel a little funny. My stomach was doing slow loops, and NP was pale as a ghost. I started to say that I didn't feel so hot, and my buddy stood up and walked out of the room. Anyone whose had too much to drink knows the walk; it starts out slow and nonchalant, and as soon as the person is out of the room, it turns into a full on sprint. That set me off. I dashed into the kitchen and lost about a pound of marshmallows into the sink. At the same time, I could hear my buddy shout, "Oh, what the fuck!?"

Though some abomination of chemisty, when mixed together and partially digested, the pastel pinks and blues and yellows of the marshmallows turns jet black. It looked like there was tar spewing out of my mouth and nose. It was ichor. It was horrible.

I blog now

2005-05-10T20:19:00.000-07:00

So.

This is blogging. I like. Its like leaving your diary out open to the page where you talk about how you scored with your hot milf neighbour, except the whole world can read it.

FYI, I probably won't talk about how I scored with my hot milf neighbour, because I don't have one. And, even if I did, I' m not exactly what you would call "good looking". Or "bearable", for that matter. Don't feel sorry for me though. What I lack in high cheekbones I more than make up for in robot style break dancing.

Now for the obligatory bio. My name is Deryck, I live in Canada, in the Vancouver-ish region. If you've never been, think Seattle with more gay marriages. I am trained as a mechanic and wash cars for a living (god, its even embarrassing to type). I skateboard, though I do it infrequently. I also play rugby, which is the most fun I've ever had in my life. I haven't been playing for very long, and am not very good, but when I'm on the pitch I feel like I'm nine feet tall and ten inches long. I f you've never done anything in your life that makes you feel like this, you've never lived.

There's more, but perhaps later. (Did you think you were going to get the whole she-bang on the first date? You didn't even buy me dinner.) I leave you with a joke, stolen from a guy on my rugby team.

A man walks into his doctors office and says,"Doctor, I can't stop singing 'Whats New, Pussycat?' Whats wrong with me?"

The doctor replies,"Oh, I've heard of this. It's called Tom Jones-itis."

"Oh. Is it common?"

"It's Not Unusual."