Rotating Pineapple

Lady tells me she smokes, has been smoking for 25 years, gets her cigarettes from the black market. "That way I don't have to pay taxes," she says. Smiling. Her teeth are yellow. Money she saves pays for her cable TV. Cigarettes are awful but these contraband smokes are beyond that. Light it up and stick it in your mouth and you're inhaling death. Lady coughs. Might need a lung transplant someday. Yeah, that'll cost the taxpayers something. Not you though, doll. Not you Miss Smells-So-Sweet. Yeah you'll save a few bucks on illegal smokes but that money's not going back to our socialized healthcare system - the same one that's going to pay for that lung transplant after the ones God gave you are turned black by tar and nicotine and garbage. That's right. You just sit there and smile and blow your second hand smoke into the air. Happy you didn't ask me if I minded if you smoked. Would have died of shock. - She's talking about the...

It was the best mistake of my life. I am not sure how many times I've told this story but I will tell it again anyway. When I was 25, my life was going nowhere. I was unable to move out of my parents' house, stuck drifting from one minimum wage job to another, thoroughly depressed. I'd flunked out of theatre school and I was now old enough to realize that my childhood dream of being a professional actor would never come true. I had neither the talent, the drive, or the luck. What I did have was an idea for a novel. So I saved my money for eight months. When I had slightly over $3,000, I moved from Calgary to a small town in southeast Saskatchewan and I wrote. Over the course of my time there, I stumbled into journalism. Now, more than a decade later, I make my living in journalism. The kicker is that I was actually thinking about going to journalism school. But instead of doing the practical thing, I chased a dream. I'm glad I did because I got the...

So I was in this coffee shop tonight because I wanted to find some people to give me note titles for this blog and I didn't have much luck. I handed notes to people but no one emailed me or came over to me to suggest a title. There was one girl who worked there who gave me this title. She had blonde hair with black streaks (or black hair with blonde streaks) and she is studying to be a dental hygienist. I will not tell you where she is studying or what city I was in. I do not hang out in coffee houses. I think they are supposed to be trendy places where dudes in berets and goatees go to be unemployed and talk about Jean Paul Sartre. It is also supposed to be a place where impossibly pretty girls with long black hair and white cashmere sweaters read Jane Austen novels and not talk to me. I think I arrived at the coffee house at 7:45 p.m. I decided I would handwrite some notes about Rotating Pineapple and hand them to the people there. As I wrote, one girl in a bl...

I like tea. Tea is best when it is loose and not in bags. You put the tea in a strainer and then you lower the strainer into the hot water. Then you drink it. Ahhh! (That is the sound you make when you drink fresh hot tea.) Also, you don't have to throw away a used teabag. This saves the environment. Used teabags are the reason England is in such bad shape. The Brits insist on having tea every afternoon. They also eat sugar cookies that are shaped like windmills. These cause diabetes. England is a country where everyone has bad insulin levels and the landfills are overflowing with used teabags. For this reason, teabags should be illegal. - When God made tea, He never intended it to be ground up and then put in teabags. He meant for it to be drank the way I drink it. You can put tea in the freezer and then it will be iced tea but you have to add sugar. - When rock stars drink "whiskey" from Jack Daniels bottles onstage, they are actually drinking iced tea. ...

Only mean people play bingo. I adopted that opinion after an experience I had about 20 years ago. My opinion is probably too broad - I am surely painting all bingo players with a very large brush. But I will state it anyway because it allows me to tell a story. Here is the story. One day, I got a phone call from a lady named Dez (not her real name) who was the nursery supervisor at the Calgary Bingo Palace (not its real name.) Dez had one of those bitter-sounding voices, like she's smoked 100 cigarettes every day since she was six. "I want to hire you to do a magic show at the bingo nursery," she said. "How much do you charge?" I told her. Dez swore at me. We bargained. I wound up cutting my fee by about sixty per cent (I would never do that now.) Great. So now I had a show at the Calgary Bingo Palace. The day of the show arrives. I meet Dez, who is about sixty. Her face is free of laugh lines because she never smiles. Her eyes are co...

I bought hair dye tonight. I bought it because I got a haircut and that uncovered all the gray in my hair. I do not like it. Gray hair is bad!!!!! - Forrest Gump was wrong. Life is not like a box of chocolates. In life, you may not know what you're going to get but with a box of chocolates, you do. Every box of chocolates I've ever had has come with a diagram telling me which chocolates are coffee flavoured and which ones have coconut. The most famous analogy from a 90s movie is actually deeply flawed. This is only appropriate since Forrest Gump should not have won best picture that year. That honour should have gone to Pulp Fiction. History has vindicated me on this. - I have dyed my hair a few times and, quite frankly, I never know what I'm going to get. This is particularly true if I'm bleaching my hair or dying it green (tried that for a lark two years ago the day before my friend, Melissa, shaved my head for charity.) My hair is often all...

I like how the the alternate title of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, is The Modern Prometheus. It just goes to show that even in the early 1800s, writers were still starved for original plots. They had to borrow from mythology. Star Wars did the same thing. * I have not read Frankenstein but I have read Bram Stoker's Dracula; the image of the count climbing the castle walls will stay with me for life. I know that Frankenstein, like Dracula, is told in the same manner - by employing found items like letters and diary entries to tell the story rather than relying on straight narrative. How appropriate - the Frankenstein monster is built from parts stolen from various corpses while the story itself is put together with various writings of the story's players. How appropriate. And how educational. A story is very much like Frankenstein's monster. * Let us look at a fairy tale. An evil dragon has kidnapped the king's daughter. He sends fo...

Time for something enlightening. A friend of mine who teaches high school tells me that students are always misplacing their iPods. When he finds one, it's usually pretty easy to identify the owner. But my friend is a bit of a snoop. He doesn't peruse the students' emails or text messages but he does look at their playlists. I guess he's just curious to know what today's teenagers groove to. And yes, he says that there's a lot of Demi Lovato and Bieber and Nicki Minaj and Brittney Spears. But there's also a lot of Zeppelin, a lot of Stones, a lot of Aerosmith and Ozzy and Eagles. "They know good music," he says. * In high school, I loved Alice Cooper. When I walked to school, most of the time I had an early Alice tape in my walkman. From the Inside was my favourite because it was an album about crazy people. I liked it because I thought I was crazy. I wasn't crazy, of course. I just needed to believe I was crazy so I could differen...

They say that the most comforting sound is that of a human heartbeat. It reminds us that we are alive and it may be the very first sound most of us heard (in utero, of course.) I have never understood how the heart works. I view it as a magic organ. This funky little pump pushes blood throughout your body. Ever neat. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!! * They say that the best love songs have drum tracks that mimic the human heartbeat. This is certainly true of The Beautiful Ones by Prince and the Revolution, which is the best love song of all time. Val loves that song and she says it is her favourite song in the world. She listens to it 67 times per day. * They say that rock and roll is the bastard child of voodoo, that the rock beat mimics the voodoo ceremonies where people get possessed by certain spirits. They say that life is full of rhythm. * I have a certain amount of respect for Gene Simmons, who has never experimented with drugs or alcohol. Here is what he said: "The...

The Quirky Carrot has yummy grape soda. I know this because I have bought five bottles of it over the past three months. The grape soda is made with real cane sugar, not high-glucose corn syrup that gives people diabetes. The grape soda is usually presented to me by Viv, who is the barista at the Quirky Carrot. Viv is six feet tall and she has long black hair and she is a health nut. Once I saw her eat homemade cream of cauliflour soup. She used to drive a red car but now she has a white one. She works with Youth for Christ. I will go into the Quirky Carrot and say "Hi Viv, I would like a grape soda" and then Viv will give me one and I will pay for it and then I will drink it and then I will be a wee bit unhealthier. Grape soda is probably the unhealthiest thing that is served at the Quirky Carrot. The Quirky Carrot is probably the healthiest restaurant in the county. Once I ate a salad that had a bunch of tiny beige round things in it. The beige round ...

Knowing how much I love movies, my mother has assigned me, as topic-de-jour for note-a-day, to write who I think will take home the big six Oscars this year. And I must be honest and confess that I have no idea. Hey, I'm a new dad and that means I'm broke all the time. I have a beard right now because I can't afford razor blades. I surely can't afford to be traipsing off to Ottawa to watch movies three times a week. I have seen only two of the films nominated for best picture - The Wolf of Wall Street and Dallas Buyers Club (which I watched on DVD last night.) Matthew McConaughey is the frontrunner to win best actor for his role in the latter - he already won the Golden Globe, Critics' Choice and Screen Actors Guild awards for it - so I'd bet my money on him. Cate Blanchett won those same three awards for her turn in Blue Jasmine so she looks like a lock to win best actress. Three of her fellow nominees - Meryl Streep, Dame Judi Dench, and Sa...

Sharon, Lois & Bram did a lot of drugs in the 70s. My guess is they did copious amounts of marijuana, LSD, alcohol and heroin. It screwed their brains up so much that they actually thought it was a good idea to sing the children’s song, skinnamarink,  that uses these lyrics: Skinna-a-ma-rinky-dinky-dink skinnamarinky doo. Now why would you write a children’s song with the word “dinky” in it? Don’t these numbskulls know that the only thing it’s going to do is give kids the giggles. It sure gave me the giggles when I was asked to sing it in music class at St. Gerard’s Elementary School. And we got in such trouble from the teacher too. Yep, all the detention I served in Grade 5 is the fault of Sharon, Lois & Bram. - I have it on good authority that Bram and Raffi hate each other – both of them wanting to claim the title of Canada’s best-loved bearded kids’ musician. Bram doesn’t even think Raffi should qualify, stating that the Baby Beluga singer was bo...

When I was 10, I had this idea for a movie about this kid who suffered really bad hallucinations whenever he saw anything that was yellow. Poor kid had to live in a house devoid of bananas, lemons, and little Lego men. And he couldn't go outside during the day. Not with the sun. The name of this movie was to be Illusic Yellow. There is no such word as Illusic (Microsoft Word has underlined it in red both times it appears in this paragraph) but I didn't care. I decided it would be a portmanteau of illusion and sick. By the way, I think that is the first time I have ever used the word portmanteau in anything at all. Yay me! I told only one other person about this idea - a kid in my class named Fernando Urego. I decided that Fernando would be perfect for the role of the kid who saw devils and monsters and teachers unions everytime he saw the old Vancouver Canucks home uniforms or everytime he looked in the toilet while going pee. Fernando loved the idea and we ...

The only thing that changes the heart is life experience. Arguing doesn't change the heart. It doesn't matter if the arguing is ultra-abusive or ultra-courteous. People won't change. There is scientific evidence that people will hold on to their ideologies - even when it can be demonstrated that there beliefs are false, dangerous, or both - because their self-identity is so wrapped up in what they believe. If you are a liberal, you will likely cling to liberal dogma while dismissing everything that comes from right of centre. And vice versa. Same if you're Christian, atheist, Jewish, or a rooster worshiper. As Vonnegut pointed out, Solzhenitzen came to conservatism after surviving Stalin's Gulag archipelago. My dad came to conservatism after he moved to western Canada. I am a conservative Christian Dr. Pepper drinker because I take pride in not changing ever. I'll die believing the same things I did when I was 10. When people talk politics, o...

I used to go to school with this girl named Kim, who sat directly behind me in English class in grades 7 and 8. Kim was a figure skater and she was up every morning at 5 so she could skate. I was amazed at this level of dedication and always wondered if she'd make it to the Olympics or - failing that - the Ice Capades. Then in high school, I bumped into Kim in the school's parking lot. I asked if she still figure skated and she told me that she did a little but she had to give it up as a career choice. "My knee," she said. Knees are everything if you're a figure skater. * I grew up in Calgary and I was there for the 1988 Winter Olympics. The only event I actually witnessed live was bobsledding. I actually saw the Jamaican team wind its way down the track. My mom scored tickets to the closing ceremonies. I didn't want to go but she insisted, saying I'd likely never have the chance to go to a closing ceremony ever again. kd lang sang. We all lit...

True story. I was in Chapters tonight because I had an hour to kill. I'm lugging my son, who now weighs 12 kilograms, my winter jacket, the baby's car seat and the baby's diaper bag, which feels like it's loaded with lead balloons. And I had this itch on my back. Like, right on my spinal cord and between my shoulder blades. You can't scratch an itch like that. Not when you're hot and sweaty and one hand is full of squirming baby and the other is full of stuff to make baby's life manageable. But my back was driving me crazy, friends. It was like beetles had infested my skin. I was going to go mental. Finally, I'd had enough. I went over to one of the bookshelves, pushed my back against one of the edges, and rubbed. The itch went away at last. In the scratching process, I'd knocked a book to the floor but since it was one of the Twilight books, I didn't bother to pick it up. That was a bad itch but there are some itches that ar...

More than 30 years later, I can still remember how Jason Abdeljalil’s face fell when he laid eyes on his new pair of brown corduroy pants. We were gathered in Jason’s basement to celebrate his ninth birthday. His guests sat in a circle, clutching their presents, waiting their turns to hand them over. Igave Jason a Darth Vader action figure. Stewie gave him some Hot Wheels. The last present he opened was from some other kid, who had got him clothes. “Clothes!"  Jason exclaimed about a half second after I saw how disappointed he was. Not even 10, Jason had already learned that compassion is more important than brutal honesty. Had he been honest, he would have said: “Why the heck did you get me clothes? I’m a nine-year-old boy. Do you think clothes are going to put a smile on my face? Come on... get me a sled or an Atari game or something with spaceships on it. But not clothes." But he said none of those things. He said thanks and he pretended to be delighted wit...

I learned to drive twice. First I learned to drive, then I learned to drive a standard. Let's take them one at a time. I got my license in the summer of 1990 just before I entered Grade 12. Before I did that, I had to endure driving lessons, which took place in the spring of 1989 at the Chinook Driving School, which was located at the Canyon Meadows Plaza. My schooling was divided into two parts - 15 hours of classroom work and 20 hours of on-the-road experience. Holy Crap! It's still there. The classes were taught by a fat guy who liked to eat hoagies. He said that he had driven all over the world and - as far as he was concerned - the four worst cities to drive in were Cairo, Tokyo, New York City and "the fourth one you're sitting in right now." He was talking about Calgary. The average classroom session involved lectures, studying our driving manuals, listening to the instructor tell stories (some of which had nothing to do with drivin...

When I was 10, I had this idea for a movie about this kid who suffered really bad hallucinations whenever he saw anything that was yellow. Poor kid had to live in a house devoid of bananas, lemons, and little Lego men. And he couldn't go outside during the day. Not with the sun. The name of this movie was to be Illusic Yellow. There is no such word as Illusic (Microsoft Word has underlined it in red both times it appears in this paragraph) but I didn't care. I decided it would be a portmanteau of illusion and sick. By the way, I think that is the first time I have ever used the word portmanteau in anything at all. Yay me! I told only one other person about this idea - a kid in my class named Fernando Urego. I decided that Fernando would be perfect for the role of the kid who saw devils and monsters and teachers unions everytime he saw the old Vancouver Canucks home uniforms or everytime he looked in the toilet while going pee. Fernando loved the idea and we ...