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If I was there I'd stroke your hair until you fell asleep And in your ear I'd whisper "Dear, the Lord your soul will keep." I wrote that Hallmark sentiment in the late 90s for a friend who was going through a hard time. We've since lost touch but that hasn't stopped me from quoting it, or cut and pasting it, for a bevy of other people who have waltzed in and out of my life over the subsequent 15 years. I used to be friends with a girl from Ottawa named Linda. Once I pasted it to the bottom of an email I sent her. She replied that she appreciated the sentiment although she was not comforted by the implicit theism in verse two. Linda was an agnostic/atheist who found the idea of a creator god to be terrifying rather than comforting. My response, as a person who had just entered his 30s, was to apologize. I rewrote the second verse to something more inoffensive to her infidel ears. She thanked me for it and then went to bed. I'm in my ...

If you’re a member of Generation X and if you grew up in Calgary, then you have watched the Buckshot Show. It ran on CFCN-TV from 1967until 1997 and that was a good time to call it quits. The Buckshot Show could never survive in today’s environment of satellite television. That is not an indictment of the Buckshot Show; it’s a sad commentary on our fleeting attention spans and the prevailing zeitgeist that flashiness is the equivalent of valuable. Here is Buckshot, an affable Calgary entertainer named Ron Barge who wound up becoming one of the greatest children’s entertainers his country has ever produced. His set looks like a ghost town straight out of the old west. Buckshot is a middle-aged bespectacled man, appropriately decked out in cowboy hat, vest, and sheriff’s badge. It’s not hard to see that the Calgary Stampede – arguably the city’s biggest claim to fame – is the show’s chief inspiration. Buckshot lacks the extreme gentleness of Mister Rogers or the unapologe...

I used to know this girl named Mico. Most sensitive person you could ever meet. Say anything even slightly critical and she'd have a meltdown. No idea what happened to that poor girl to make her so fragile. I know she grew up on a farm and I think she was homeschooled. Sweet girl. Nice looking girl. She used to pick wildflowers and wear them in her hair. Never missed church. Never heard a dirty word come out of her mouth. She fell for some douchebag she met in a dive bar. Put her on the back of his motorbike, told her he loved her and she believed it long enough to give him her virginity. He was out of her life a couple weeks later. He was a player. Mico once told me she dreamed about being a virgin on her wedding night. I asked her if she'd told the douchebag that and she said no. She didn't think he'd like her if she told him that. - If you're super sensitive about something, chances are there's something you're trying to hide. - I ...

Francine came to my apartment the other night. She was dressed in her red dress, her red beret, and her gold rimmed glasses. Smoking a cigarette from a long black cigarette holder. Helps herself to a mug of V8 and then growls: "I'm hungry. Feed me something." Heck, I ain't got no groceries. Been a while since I had work. Doc Parssons paid me half a C to shovel the snow out of his driveway last week but that's all gone now. Bought some milk. Bought some smokes. Paid off my ma. Now I'm broke again. "You ain't bare in here," says Francine. "You got something to munch on, I just know it. I'm gonna look through your freezer." "Be my guest." So up goes the freezer door and Francine's inside, digging around. Not much to eat in there 'cause I use the freezer for storage. She pulls out some socks and some coffee beans and some of Nora Roberts' early novels and then, at the very bottom, she finds what ...

When I take my last breath, I hope that I am sitting in an easy chair and watching a video of my son when he was a baby. - Critics of the American playwright, Christopher Durang (whose birthday is in less than a week) say that he sometimes has difficulty ending his plays. - The greatest magic show in the history of the craft was, and still is, David Copperfield's 14th television special. His grand finale was flying. Seriously, the dude actually flew around the stage as if it was the sky. You can check it out on youtube and read comments from all the stupid youtube idiots about how Copperfield did it and blah blah blah. Shut up, idiots. My two cents is: "Wow, that was amazing. I don't care if you know how it was done. If you're so little that you have to wreck the magic by posting your idiotic comments here then I hope no one is ever foolish enough to hire you to do a show." - The problem with using a deus ex machina in a story is that it oft...

When we were kids, we used to dream about what it would be like to be stuck in a toy store overnight. I'd like to meet a kid who dreams of being stuck in a library. Imagine having all that knowledge - all that adventure - right at your fingertips. You could solve mysteries with Sherlock Holmes, hunt Moby Dick with Captain Ahab, or tour the circles of hell with Virgil. - The late American novelist Ray Bradbury once said that he didn't believe in universities. Instead, he believed in libraries. The point he was making, I think, is that knowledge is available to anyone and one doesn't have to spend thousands of dollars sitting in a classroom to obtain such knowledge. If you're interested in Canadian history, your local library probably has a few books by Pierre Berton. If comparative religion is your thing then you can check out the world's holy books, and numerous books about those books, at your local library too. The only drawback is you might...

I'm always bewildered when non-theists criticize Christian athletes for having, what they perceive to be, a myopic view of God. They thank Him when they catch the football or hit a home run or score a hat trick, but they extend no middle fingers to the sky when they fail. The idea is God intends them to succeed. When they fail, the almighty is simply taking a day off. That's ridiculous. When I hear an athlete praising the Lord, I know he's just doing his best to be humble. I know he lives in a society that glorifies athleticism. I know his salary is likely a hundred times what I make, I know he has groupies throwing themselves at him whenever he's on the road, I know he's constantly being offered booze and drugs and multi-million dollar endorsement deals. The temptation to succumb to this sort of faux-godhood must be overwhelming. Christian athletes are public about their faith not because they believe (or want others to believe) that they play for...

When I was in my early 20s, I used to make a lot of money performing magic on Electric Avenue. On the way home, I would pass a street vendor selling beef souvlaki, which was a skewer of beef chunks topped by a piece of toasted bread. I would sometimes ask for a piece of bread and he would give me one and I'd ask how much I owe him and he'd just wave me away. He gave me free bread. I have no idea who that guy was but I wish I could find out so I could thank him. Maybe I'd give him a Timmy's card. * My friend, Jeff, used to sell hot dogs on Electric Avenue. He was a stocky redhead with a mustache. The last time I saw him was 2001. I know that because I saw him at the University of Calgary where he was helping setup for the Amanda Marshall concert. Once I asked Jeff if he made a lot of money selling hot dogs. He said it depended entirely on how many hot dogs he sold. He also got tips. Alcohol was a great factor in determining his tips too. Jeff was on...

I was challenged to write about crazy things I did for love and all I can think about is what a doofus I was when I was in high school. There was this girl named Dawn Noelle and I was pretty much ga-ga for her for three whole years. I hate thinking about it today because it makes me realize that I threw my entire high school dating career down the drain. I'm not saying that I would have been a teenaged casanova at Bishop Grandin High School had I not been smitten by Dawn Noelle, but I'd like to think I might have dated one or two ladies during my time in those hallowed halls. I met Dawn in my Grade 10 French class. She was wearing white pants and I think she was a big fan of INXS, but I'm not sure. I remember thinking she had a beautiful smile and really nice brown eyes. Heck, I probably thought of her as Aphrodite. I was the only one in my circle of friends to see such unparalleled beauty in her. I remember the day I asked her for a date. It was early 198...

ANYTOWN, ONTARIO - No one has to convince Mary Smith that her 10-year-old son, Sammy, is a Sidney Crosby in the making. She says he's the best hockey player she's ever seen. Problem is, she's the only one who believes that. "My Sammy is easily the best skater on his team," an irate Mrs. Smith told the Upper Armpit Bugle last week. "But do you think his coach will let him play? No. I went to one of his games last week and I brought a stopwatch and he was only on the ice for six minutes and thirteen seconds." Sammy has been playing hockey since he was six years old. Presently, he plays right wing for the Anytown Aeros, currently enjoying a 3-11-1 record. It is Mrs. Smith's contention that the Aeros would be undefeated ("and probably win the Stanley Cup") if Sammy were given the ice time he deserves. She says it's personal reasons why he's being benched so much. Last summer, Mrs. Smith's husband, Donald, was char...

In Grade 11, my social studies teacher wanted to do a fundraiser for earthquake victims in California. The class decided to do an auction. Everyone was to bring a couple items we had lying around the house and we would auction them off. There was this one kid in the class who I didn't care for. I'm not sure why. He never did anything to me and I never did anything to him. I guess I found him threatening somehow. Bottom line is I didn't care for him. Anyway, this kid wound up buying pretty much everything - I think he spent about $50 buying old T-shirts, bottlecap collections and Whitesnake posters. When the class was over, this guy approached the teacher and told him to keep all the stuff and try to sell it at a garage sale. "You can make even more money," he said. I liked him after that. - An old boss of mine had an interesting way of differentiating between liberals and conservatives. He said that liberals believed people were basically g...

So there was this Christmas elf, see? Actually, he wasn't a real elf. He was a theatre student at an undisclosed community college in an undisclosed large city in the Canadian province of Alberta. This elf needs a name so we'll call him Mr. S. Christmas was coming and Mr. S wanted to get a part-time job so he could buy Christmas presents. There was this event planning company in his city so he went there and told them he was an actor and they said they had a shitload of Christmas parties coming up and they would happily pay him minimum wage if he dressed up like an elf and went to these Christmas parties. He put on the elf costume and he looked like this: His first Christmas party was for the The Oomfoofoo Corporation (Oomfoofoo being an old Gaelic word for 'Business comprised of middle aged men who like to get horribly drunk and say outrageously rude things.) Mr. S went to this Christmas party and was told that his job was to ensure that everything ...

A gay predator once stalked me for an hour while I was performing magic in a bar. At one point, he cornered me and pretty much demanded that I accompany him to a place "more intimate." I explained to him that I wasn't interested and that I was straight. He was nonplussed. "That doesn't matter to me," he said. "I like straight boys." The dude wouldn't take no for an answer and eventually I had to use some pretty ugly language to get my point across. I told that story to a lady friend and she was unsympathetic. "Now you know what women experience every time they walk into a bar," she said. - My lady friend was right. I have seen men do unspeakably horrible things to women to punish them for the crime of not sleeping with them. On Electric Avenue in my native Calgary, I saw a former classmate punch a girl because she wouldn't succumb to his lame pickup lines. Once, while doing magic at Claudio's restaurant (als...

So apparently there's this show on TV called The Big Bang Theory and it's about nerds who live in an apartment and one of them wears a Green Lantern shirt a lot. Also there's a girl across the hall and she is not a nerd and I bet she is physically attracted to non-nerds but she can't help but feel a deeper connection with the nerds in the apartment across the hall from her. I tend to not absorb a whole lot of pop culture. I have never seen an episode of Friends or a complete episode of Seinfeld, Family Guy or Breaking Bad. When I go to the movies, I favour foreign films with English subtitles. I have not seen Titanic or Back to the Future but I like James Bond. I guess James Bond is about as pop culture as I get. So maybe I should just spend some time talking about the actual big bang theory, which is a pretty nifty way to explain the origin of the universe. This theory holds that billions and billions of years ago, all matter was contained in one very...

Whenever I read a magician's biography (usually on their website) I know I'm probably going to read about how they found a magic set under the Christmas tree when they were nine or ten. "From there, I was hooked." That wasn't the case for me. My friend, Matt, got a magic book for Christmas and I got a box of space Lego. Matt didn't care for the magic book and I didn't care for the space Lego. So we switched. Today I am a magician and he designs spaceships. I'm 41 (almost 42) and I am happiest when I am performing magic. - My favourite memory of high school was the magic show I did for my English class on the last day of school. Everyone was so excited that they asked if they could invite their friends into the class too. This baffled me. I'd always thought that my classmates didn't like me and wished me nothing but failure. Now here they were - not just consenting to being entertained by me but actually looking forward to it...

As a rule, I don't like buffets. I'm of the opinion that food should be served fresh. Buffet food is not fresh. Who knows how long it's been sitting under those heat lamps? Is there anything more depressing than biting into a forkful of lukewarm scrambled eggs? I didn't think so. - I used to work at a hotel that had a buffet. The restaurant manager was an idiot. After learning that I was a writer, she tasked me with finding adjectives to describe every item in the hotel's breakfast buffet. I came up with "delicious French toast." I think I also came up with "fresh eggs." Most of my adjectives were rejected as "not imaginative enough" so the manager went ahead and came up with adjectives of her own. The sausage was "farm sausage." I always hated that. When I think of it today, I imagine speaking those words like I'm singing a nursery rhyme to children. "And then the prince and princess ate a big plat...