It was the wee hours of January 1st. You stole the cab I’d been waiting on for forty minutes. You were with two guys, one who reminded me of John Edwards and another one who looked like he was calling his mommy. I’d actually been following you around all night since I saw you hustling near the pool table at Pepperjack’s. You had that “stalk me around the city” sort of quality, and I thought between the hipster raveathon at Pepperjack’s, the uninhibited queer abandon at The Embassy and the cold and lonely trudge through the frozen wasteland of early morning Hamilton that I’d get a chance to talk to you away from your menfolk, but it wasn’t meant to be. I think we had something special. Comment me back if you feel the same. Maybe we can get refused service in an Italian restaurant together sometime.

Friday Round-Up (Four Days Late)

Real bloggers blog every day.

That keeps me from trying to excuse my behaviour. I am not a real blogger. I am not a real engineer. I am not a real activist. I am not a real person. I am not a real anything.

The Friday Round-Up that was due last week can be summarized in a two-step process:

1. Dress up and attend meeting.
2. Repeat step 1.

I kept having to shave. It was very onerous.

The weekend was a different matter. I attended a rally. This included holding a clever sign, shouting while walking, and making remarks in the cold using a megaphone that I found tricky to operate. I got my photo in the paper. I am a local queerlebrity. During the email blitz of the 24-hour pre-rally organization period I got a jaded email from a friend telling me all the ways in which rallies are ineffective. Before the rally I wrote an impassioned rebuttal of his points. After the rally I had to retract my statement and concede the point. How embarrassing.

On Sunday I braved the unnavigable streets of the city (so much snow you’d literally barf if you looked at it) to go to the ballet. Just to hammer home the point that this weekend was about pretending to be things I’m not. When I was handed the ticket I asked “What does C.Y.B.E. stand for?” and received the answer “Cuban… ‘Y’ something… ballet… ‘E’ something?” A fair guess, as it was the Cuban Ballet presenting the Nutcracker. But an incorrect one. Only after the real lights were dimmed was the proverbial light shone on the situation: a disembodied announcer welcomed the audience on behalf of the Canadian Youth Ballet Ensemble.

Youth.

YOUTH.

I’m not a great fan of youth, and it turns out I’m even less a fan of them attempting ballet. I’ll allow that the mice were cute but they were more ‘children that have not grown out of default cuteness’ than they were ‘youth’. But as for the youth proper: I did not pay good money to sit beside Aunt Betty and take in little Suzie’s pivotal recital-on-the-big-stage. Of course the professional dancers from Cuba were amazing. Technically so, at least. Ballet does not speak to my soul. (Assuming there is one in here.) Or perhaps my capacity to feel joy through dance was impaired by the horrible woman behind me who kept up a running, spoken conversation with her 9 year old daughter. If you’re going to teach your kid to be an asshole, at least teach her how to whisper.

More interesting was the article in the newspaper this morning about the fact that three of the Cuban dancers used the trip as an opportunity to defect to the United States. I really thought that sort of thing only happened on The West Wing.

I could continue and speak of the victorious end to the mouse war (real mice, not the pre-youth kind), my recent struggles to become more materialistic, my almost-missed date with a Rabbi, and the glowing review which may or may not have been a scathing insult on a recent email I hammered out, but I see you’ve grown tired of reading this.

Friday Round-Up (By request, and Two Days Late)

Let me share with you a list of things that I neglected to take a photo of this week, and having done so would have been able to provide a more visually stimulating review of:

• The massive bruise on my left shoulder that as the week progressed shifted through all the colours of the rainbow (or at least two of the less aesthetically pleasing ones) and which I am confident but far from certain was earned while trying to get home during the ungodly early hours of Sunday morning, during blizzard-like conditions, wearing Michelle’s coat because Constant and Dependable Coat-Check Guy switched our tickets on the way into ember and I was too inebriated to adequately cope with this development on the way out. It wasn’t the small coat that bruised me so much as the falling down while trying to get from one side of the city to the other over ice and snow in shoes without tread because the same state that made it impossible to sort out the return of my rightful outerwear also made the proper use of a taxi apparently beyond my grasp.
• The expression on my face when I woke up on Sunday morning, immediately conscious of the fact that Michelle’s coat was downstairs but Michelle wasn’t, and that in addition to Michelle I had no idea where my phone was.
• The boy who lives two hours out of town, came to town last weekend to go to ember, found my jerkberry beside the dance floor, took it home with him, and with whom I played a rousing game of ‘I am nothing without my material goods’-branded phone tag, during which his vague communication style (despite his helpful nature) made me feel like it was the first step towards me eventually waking up in a bathtub full of ice missing a kidney, and which finally culminated in a brief meeting outside The Elephant & Castle where I was reunited with my electronic beloved, revealing all my fears as the paranoid delusions that they were.
• The muffin on the Portuguese Canadian Bakery sign on Dundas Street in Toronto which struck me as the single most underwhelming article of marketing collateral that I have ever encountered, though it is probably not as funny or as generally interesting as I considered it to be at the time.
• The family of mice with whom I have continued to wage war, having moved from chemical to mechanical means, and of whom the photos would not be pretty. I have lost a certain part of my squeamishness in this past week and with it, I think, yet another tiny piece of my soul.

So in the end maybe it’s a plus that the camera that goes with me nearly everywhere never makes it out of its case.

Listening to I Get Around by Dragonette, playing in my head.

I arrived at work to this:

What? I thought, outragedly. I have a Super Wall?

My most hated of all walls. Perhaps my most hated of all facebook applications. And from past experience we know that I have a lot of hate to give when it comes to facebook applications. (You thinks the lady does protest too much? Perhaps I am a facebook application.)

Mercifully it was not the case that between drunken bus-based love letter writing and drunken fried-midnight-snack preparation that I had unadvisedly granted Super Wall blanket permission to my life and all information therein. It was some buggy hiccup (or deceitful worm-like Super Wall marketing process) that conjured lies about a fictional wall belonging to me after someone else (Sandy F, if you must know) added the wall to her profile. Hopefully drunkenly.

I am, on a daily basis, regularly served with much to be upset about upon arrival at work.

This woman’s toothy sneer appears in my inbox about seven times a day. She is the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-irritating stethoscoped stock photography model that is the blurry human face of a thousand randomly-selected URLs which presumably all point to the same sketchy, off-shore mail-order ePharmacy selling rockets as Cialis.

Shouldn’t technology be able to improve our quality of life by filtering such things, rather than supporting and encouraging them?

Though if anything could make a wall super, it would be Sandy writing on it.

Who knew that when he’s not busy dumping Paige’s older sister or proving that the Degrassi Ass is far superior to the Degrassi Back that Marco Del Rossi likes to tear it up at Madonna-only club nights in Toronto’s Little Italy?

Yes Adamo Ruggiero was at Can’t Stop Esther last Saturday. Yes we freaked out about it. Yes he made out with Glynis a little bit on the smoking patio. Yes it was almost the highlight of the whole evening. (It was an all Madonna party. Even confirmed Canadian celebrity sightings can’t top that.)

But from that dizzying height to a terrible low… I got food poisoning the next day and haven’t stopped telling and/or reminding people about it since. There’s something about a dysfunctional digestive system that makes you wanna milk your temporary disability. (While ironically avoiding all dairy products.) “Oh my God I feel sooooo baaaaaad, I have to tell eeeeeeeeeveryone!”

So now I’ve crossed you off that list. I’ve also crossed the electronic name dropping which has been on the list since I failed miserably at posting from my sub-par, non-expectation-meeting room at the Toronto Days Inn (“what did you expect?” I hear you asking) whose COMPLIMENTARY INTERNET ACCESS was both free and non functional. (This was just post Madonna and just prior Poisoning.) Do these people not realize I would forgo oxygen before giving up a reliable connection to the real world¹?

Recovery from the digestive unpleasantness is also crossed off, but everything I was supposed to be doing this week (instead of placing my pain on a scale of 1 to 10 for a telehealth nurse at 3am) remains decidedly uncrossed. Bah!

While I’m meandering I feel I should make a clarification. Though I did feel that the back-pointing triangle I had the misfortune to visually experience on Thursday was the worst application of facial hair grooming I’ve yet encountered, this should not be taken to imply a general dislike for facial hair or even a personal policy against the classic Goatee. In my experience less (to the point of none) is often better, but some hairy chins are hawt.

My grand plan to write the world’s greatest novella in 30 days is off to a rocky start. Based on my careful calculations (50,000 words divided by 30 days) I am 7,501 words behind schedule.

When I logged into the forum to access the previously promised community-powered support network for struggling participants, I saw posts from people that are up to 20,000 and 30,000 words. At 1am on day four. Then I started reading some excerpts.

I may have been making some false assumptions about the level of quality expected from the end product of this exercise.

Granted I haven’t adequately sampled the tens of thousands of people trying to do this to get an accurate picture of what’s going on. Maybe the ones that are producing something readable aren’t busy posting on the website that it’s OK to just write a book about nothing at all and spending time creating godawful signature banners that have no identifiable purpose.

Damn it, that’s 168 words that could have gone into my ‘novel’.

I can’t wait until you stop
your everlasting games.
You don’t no ’cause you’ve never seen me
biking in the rain.

When I arrived home from my early-morning bike ride to ford the great obstacles of man (a.k.a. to find a bike route across the Red Hill Valley expressway construction site) Pothead Neighbour was out on his porch. This is the neighbour whose family replaced Best Neighbours Ever two months after I moved in. (Yes, I took their departure as personal rejection.) There is certainly nothing wrong with Pothead Neighbour or his son or his wife… they’re just loud (hacking smoker cough at 6am loud) when they’re on their porch, and always on their porch.

Being an asocial person I have to get geared up to interact with people. It’s not a chore to do on my own schedule, but when I get ambushed by “other people” getting home from a 14 hour workday or while retrieving something from my car, it gets wearing.

And so, soaked-through after my hour long bike ride through the rain, I was not in the mood to be greeted and have the details of the collapse of Pothead Neighbour’s marriage related to me at length.

Call it callous and self-centred, I will stick with the label asocial. I had not seen Mrs. Pothead or four year old Billy Pothead for quite some time, though while Potty had recently taking to responding to my “How’r things?” with a bleak “I’m suriving”, I had taken that to mean he was still bummed about being laid off a few months ago. There in the rain, though, I learned about their months of marriage counselling and how she had sent the police to the house to pick up her belongings and tell him “You’re wife says it’s over and you’re getting a divorce.”

Obviously my sense of empathy is broken and I’ll need to have it taken into the shop. Because I just wanted to get inside and make a breakfast burrito.

• I have uncovered a previously unknown skill: making holes in walls. I have yet to develop the skill of repairing them. This is all related to the ongoing search for those god damn pipes somewhere in the walls that feel a thimble full of water is all you need to shower on a frosty autumn morning. (And P.S. I am against paying market rates to skilled individuals for quality work.)
• While doing research in a attempt to properly capitalize the title of this love letter, I realized that I didn’t remember (or maybe ever know) what a preposition was. I remain unclear as to whether said capitalization has been correctly executed.
• P.S. stands for “Pretty Sure”
• I went to the pound today and saw sad dogs and wanted to take them home. The cats looked like they didn’t much care either way. But I was still afraid of the shelter workers. Because they’re bitches! (Repressed trauma.)
• When you put 5318008 into a calculator and turn it upside down, it looks like BOOBIES. But 55378008 is way funnier. As a testament to how the non-stop march of technology makes the world suck more and more, when I put it into the calculator on my jerkberry and turned it upside down, it looked like upside down numbers.
• I purchased shaving cream and toothpaste today. I considered it a great accomplishment. Then I felt great shame. Then I forgot about the shame because of a boy in a mohawk also buying shaving cream.
• In November I am going to write a novel.
• If I was faster at taking pictures or a less careful driver, I would have confusing and hilarious billboard pictures to share. Pictures that call the professional skills of the communications department of the city’s waste management division into serious question. And that make you exclaim with glee “Hey, that collision centre looks like something collided with it!!!”
• Sketchy straight drug dealers who bring their guns and attitudes to gay bars so they can be arrested on the evening news love my girlfriend and want her to “come party with them”. (She’s a girl who’s a friend. It’s not like I’m not a fucking homo or something.)
• I’m out of points.

Since Mr.LeJerk has already submitted a stunning visual display about chopping up rabbits, sheep and horses, I should extend this trend to yaks.

I have enclosed the above picture, because S. LeJerk was so enamoured by it on the evening that was Nuit Blanche.  On and on he went about his disturbing fantasties to provide low cost psychosurgery to the public.

Mad man or revolutionary? You be the judge.

Is it Wednesday already? WTF.

Today I marked some X’s at random, fixed the computer of a woman with a bad attitude and an ugly baby, saved the day for some photographs of real estate, sent a war and peace email that spun my shortcomings as strengths, and brushed my teeth.

I forgot ‘blogged’.

I am the most productive ever.