Dec. 6: "I can't think of a title"

Oh ha ha ha. 

Rick Petraki has given me the anti-title. He is not trying to shirk his responsibility. He knows that giving me titles for note-a-day is inevitable. This is the first time Rick has given me a title. All hail, Rick. Most of the people who read these notes have given me titles before (except the ones from Algeria.) 

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I know that Rick actually can think of a title. "I can't think of a title" IS the title. I know this because Rick put it in quotation marks. I met Rick once. He came to see me do a magic show once. It was a charity show that I did on my birthday. About two dozen people came out to see my show, which raised money for autism research. Most of the people were from Eastern Ontario. Not one of them was from Algeria.

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At this point, I could be snarky and say that if Rick can't think of a title, then I will come up with my own title and write about that. Maybe I'll do that for a bit. I will pick a country at random and I will write about it. I will pick Algeria.

Here is a list of things I know about Algeria:

- The Algerian women's ice hockey team has never won a gold medal at the Olympics.

- Algeria is in north Africa and it has a crescent moon on its flag.

- There are more people in Algeria than there are in Canada.

- Algeria has one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world (it has almost as much natural gas as my friend Albert has after he eats Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.)

- Thanks to the National Post, I also know that Algeria is giving $100 million to Palestinian Authority. I am not sure what the authority does but I bet it doesn't have anything to do with helping the Algerian woman's ice hockey team win a gold medal at the Olympics.

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My brother and I both dabbled in improv when we were younger. He took it much more seriously than I did (if you can take improv seriously, that is.) I studied it in high school drama and I even captained the school's theatre sports team in Grade 11 (by far the geekiest accomplishment available to high school students.) My brother took his studies further, even taking classes at the world famous Loose Moose Theatre Company and scoring some coveted time on the company's hallowed stage. 

Improv doesn't work unless you get input from the audience. "Give us a non-geographical location," the actors on stage will charge the crowd and people will yell out things like "telephone booth" or "active volcano" or "embassy in Algeria."

It used to amaze me how long it took the audience to yell things out sometimes. But I guess that's only natural. If you were sitting on a park bench reading Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald and someone came up to you and asked you to name a kind of hat, it might take you a few seconds to say sombrero. It's not that you don't know anything about hats, it's that it takes a while for your brain to acclimate to this new task. I mean... it isn't very nice to have your brain focus on reading Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald and then have it switch gears to millinery.

Like my buddy, Rick, they couldn't think of a title. Well, they could... but you had to give it time.

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I used to have a job as a company driver for a flower company. Basically, my job was to drive pretty girls to all the bars in Calgary so they could go in there and sell roses to desperate young dudes hoping to pick someone up. One of them was Nah-lee, who I am still friends with. Nah-lee is now married, has two grown children, and lives in Airdrie. She has a friend who is colour blind.

Back when Nah-lee and I were in our 20s and working for the flower company, we would entertain ourselves by telling one-word-at-a-time stories as we drove from bar to bar. The stories never made any sense but they had to, at least, follow a narrative. I would say one word and she would say one word and on and on we would go until the story exhausted itself or I dropped her off at Malarkey's. I think I enjoyed the stories more than she did. The stories usually involved Billy – a creepy dude who haunted the French Maid, one of Calgary's strip clubs – inserting things in his rectum, which was pretty funny to us when we were in our early twenties.

So a typical story, proffered one word at a time, might go like this:

ONE
DAY
BILLY
TOOK
HIS
CAR
TO
THE
GOAT
DOCTOR
SO
THE
GOAT
DOCTOR
COULD
FIX
BILLY'S
CAR.
THE
DOCTOR
TOLD
BILLY
THAT
THE
ONLY
WAY
TO
FIX
BILLY'S
CAR
WAS
FOR
BILLY
TO
TAKE
OUT
THE
ENGINE
AND
INSERT
IT
IN
HIS...

Well, you get the idea.

Pressure was on, man... You can't say "I can't think of a word" when you're barreling down Deerfoot Trail in my 1981 Mazda GLC. The story has to be completed by the time we get to the French Maid. Then Nah-lee would go in and Billy would buy four roses from her to give to the waitresses and Nah-lee would try not to think about all the imaginary objects that, through the magic of improvisational storytelling, might be jutting from his posterior.

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Sometimes I would drive a girl who was not Nah-lee. There was Kimi and there was Janice and there was Jaye. I tried to introduce all three of them to the storytelling game but only Janice was interested in trying it out. Jaye was more interested in talking about college. Kimi was more interested in being anywhere else besides my car (like Razor Ramon's apartment or Algeria.) Janice gave it the old college try but she sucked at improv.

Scene:

Shteevie: Are you ready to start?
Janice: YES!!!
S: Okay here we go. I will start. ONE
J: Uhhhh...
S: Continue the story...
J: I CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING!
S: Well just come up with a word that follows one.
J: Umm... two.

I complained about Janice to Nah-lee once and Nah-lee told me that Janice had been through a lot in her life. She said that Janice had just gotten out of a terribly abusive relationship, one where her ex would keep her barricaded in the apartment (he had a deadbolt installed outside the door) and confiscated the phone. At one time, the wonderful ex got so angry at Janice that he picked her up by the ankles (she was very light, not even a hundred pounds) and dangled her over the apartment's balcony edge, threatening to drop her if she didn't change her behavior.

Nah-lee told me I should be flattered that Janice trusted me enough to ride in a car with her.

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I don't know how to end this note. I see that I have mentioned Algeria a number of times (not sure why, I go where the muse takes me) so perhaps I will finish by sharing a few random facts about it.

- The national anthem of Algeria is called Kassaman, which means "the oath" or "I swear." This anthem has never been heard at the Winter Olympics while presenting gold medals to a women's ice hockey team. 

- Algeria won its independence from France in 1962, which was the same year the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, was released in theatres. The two events are not related, though I kind of think they should be.

- The Sahara Desert covers nearly 90 per cent of Algeria. That means that if Algeria was a woman, people might call her Sandy.

 - Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, was from Algeria. 

- The country’s capital city, Algiers, is known as ‘Alger la Blanche’ (Algiers the White) because of its whitewashed buildings.

- Algerians like my note-a-day project and tend to follow it regularly.