Rotating Pineapple

 It's been said that the closest one can come to Heaven on Earth is to sit around a campfire with the people you care about the most. Sounds great on paper but, pragmatically, it would be awkward. Need proof? Make a list of the 12 most important people in your life. Go on. I'll wait.  Okay, now that the list is done, do you really think you'd be comfortable hanging out with all 12 of those people at the same time? Odds are you wouldn't. That's because all of us belong to different groups and, more often than not, those groups don't co-mingle. I belong to a church. I belong to a work group. I belong to a family. I belong to a fraternity of magicians. I belong to a writers' circle. If I had people from each of those groups sitting around a fire with me, I'd be so worried that most of them would be bored out of their trees. It's got to be stressful being with a whole lot of folks whose only common bond is that they all know you. I wonder if that's h

 Hoarfrost is one of those words that sounds dirty. If I was in junior high, I would probably joke that hoarfrost is a prostitute working in January. But I am not in junior high. I would not find that joke funny now. I don't know why I just made it but I did. Here is what a CBC expert said about hoarfrost: "Hoarfrost forms under clear skies, clear and cold. Any moisture that's in the air goes from the gaseous state, meaning there is water vapour in the air and you can't see it. It skips that liquid phase and it goes right into solids. So it goes from a gas to a solid, it forms right onto the tree. There is no melting in between." Here is a picture of hoarfrost. I took in North Glengarry on February 17, 2016:  I now feel obligated to write a poem about hoarfrost. Here are some reasons why I feel this way: 1. The person who gave me this title, Scott Alderson, is a poet. 2. Hoarfrost has the same last name as Robert Frost, who was a poet. 3. Hoarfrost occurs in na

The best Canadian short story of all time is Roch Carriere's 1979 offering, The Hockey Sweater , which, on the surface, is about a young hockey fan who orders a new Montreal Canadiens jersey and is sent a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater by mistake. The boy lives in Quebec and all of his friends are fans of the Montreal Canadiens. When he shows up one day wearing a Buds sweater, his is ostracized. Call it CanCon if you want, but The Hockey Sweater succeeds as much more than just a piece of Canadiana. Its larger theme is that human beings are tribal by nature and that you can be kicked out of any group for the most picayune reasons. - As of this writing, the Montreal Canadiens are the last Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup; they won it in 1993 against the Los Angeles Kings. Since then, a number of Canadian teams have made it to the finals - the Ottawa Senators, the Vancouver Canucks, the Edmonton Oilers, the Calgary Flames - but weren't able to get over that final hump. - I have

 This note will be short out of necessity. I've got my kid at the hospital, waiting for an x-ray. 10-hour wait. I'm hammering this out during a brief recess. I don't think I had any new years resolutions for 2022. I have some for 2023. They are these: 1. Write everyday. 2. Read the Bible everyday. It doesn't seem right that a professing Christian like myself spends more time watching the Calgary Flames than he does in Bible study and prayer. That reeks of idolatry. Gotta get my priorities straight. What they say about the Bible is true: the Bible will keep you from sin or sin will keep you from the Bible. Another homey little Biblical axiom: A Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who is not. As for writing everyday, I guess I kinda do that. I mean, I do it unfailingly two months out of every year when I do note-a-day, but I'm talking more serious writing. The kind of stuff that might get published and - who knows - even change the world. I should b

Dad became a born-again Christian at a Billy Graham crusade in Calgary in 1981. Was that a life-changing event? I'd say so. Before that, he was a drinker. Since his conversion, I've never seen him drunk and I've never heard him utter a curse word either. I'm grateful for that. I had a good role model growing up. My kid has never seen me drunk (he never will, God willing) but I'm afraid he has heard an unmentionable word escape my lips from time to time. Today, dad serves as chaplain at Trinity Lodge, a small retirement home in southwest Calgary. He has said that he will never abandon that post until the Lord calls him home or makes it painstakingly clear that his time is up. - Because he is a chaplain, our house has been something of a way station for various pastors and preachers. One of my dad's mentors was a guy named John Lucas, who pastors Immanuel Nazarene Church in downtown Calgary. Pastor John told my dad that whenever he is preaching a sermon, he should

 I have had to say goodbye to two best friends. The first I met in kindergarten, the other I met through work when I was well into my thirties. Cancer claimed the first, a combination of booze and bad luck claimed the other. The two of them never met but there was a brief time when the two were sort of involved in each other's lives. Jason, my first friend, was in hospice, fading fast. I had been planning to fly into Calgary on May 3, 2009 - a Sunday - for a final visit. Jeff, my second friend, called me on the office cell phone while I was covering an assignment at a local high school. My mom had called the newspaper and left a message that Jeff relayed to me: I had to get on a plane ASAP. So I got on a plane on the morning of April 30 and I flew out to Calgary and stupid old me didn't know that my best friend passed away the previous evening. I never got to say goodbye to him. I'm still mad at myself for that. I should have trusted my instinct and got on a plane sooner. -

About a five minute drive south of where I live is the small community of Green Valley. I don't know if Green Valley is considered a village or a hamlet; it's definitely not a town. The biggest business there is Roy's Chevrolet Buick GMC, but there's also a seniors' residence and, I think. a convenience store. There used to be a pizza place but that went under. About two decades ago, there was a French Catholic school - Ecole Ste Marie - but it was closed down so the school board could build a bigger school in a nearby community. There is also a Catholic church in Green Valley. The church has a wonderfully sloped roof and a giant stations of the cross outside. There's even a tiny cave where you can meditate on Christ's burial. As a journalist, I have visited Green Valley on several occasions. Once I watched firefighters put out a fire there. I have eaten in that now-shuttered pizza place. And I visited the Calvary with my mom. According to City Facts, Green

 Whenever I think of mustaches, I think immediately of Lanny McDonald, former captain of the Calgary Flames, particularly the Stanley Cup Champion team of 1989. Lanny's mustache was legendary, a big ginger walrus, and he was known as much for his facial hair as he was for his puck-handling skills. Lanny McDonald wrote a book, which happens to be in the Dalkeith library near me. I read part of that book when I was in the library one day and I came out of there really liking Lanny McDonald. Lanny is my favourite mustached person ever. Here are some other famously mustached people who are not as good as Lanny McDonald: - My Grade 9 science teacher, Ken Wasylenko. - My former boss, JT Grossmith. - Stacy Keach, who played Mike Hammer on TV. - Tom Selleck, who played Magnum PI. - Lemmy of Motorhead (now dead.) - Freddie Mercury of Queen (also dead.) By the way, Canada agrees with me because of all the people I mention above, Lanny McDonald is the only one who received the Order of Canada

My daddy worked construction My brother too He got me in the union I'm payin' my dues Oh but the woman I love Has expensive taste She's never satisfied The latest things A diamond ring A car with an ultra-glide I work so hard Payin' for all that stuff Eight shifts a week It's never enough I'm layin' pipe all night long Layin' pipe I'm workin' so hard I'm layin' pipe All night long Layin' pipe To satisfy that woman Those lyrics come from David Wilcox's 1987 song, Layin Pipe, which is about a man whose existence revolves around pleasing his ultra-materialistic partner, presumably his wife. Yes there's a double entendre with pipe - particularly the lines "I put the pipe in and I take it out again" - but the bulk of the song is that this dude's raison d'etre is trying to buy his lady's love. Personally, I think he'd be a lot happier if he just kicked her to the curb. - The Bible is hostile to divorce and

 So I had this dream that my friend Kat got to play left field for the Toronto Blue Jays. She was the only woman in the world who the MLB thought was good enough to play in a men's league. So Kat joined the Blue Jays and she got a whole bunch of home runs and RBIs and other great baseball stats. And then in April, she got traded to the Cleveland Guardians and she helped them win the World Series. That would be a dream for me and my dad, and for Kat too but in the end it might be a nightmare. - I like those dreams when you figure out you're dreaming and you try your best to take control of the dream narrative. I had this dream once where I was on a football field that was filled with people and animals and cartoon characters. I was talking to one man who was about seven feet tall and he was wearing a red blazer and he had silver hair and glasses and he had a button on his lapel that kept changing between a moose face and a piece of cheese. I told the man that he wasn't real

"You are such a geek," Debbie said to me. She was sitting on a desk in our Grade 9 classroom, idly listening to me talk about a magic trick to Alison P, a fellow student who may or may not have been a geek. That I was a geek was absolute and this was because Debbie, who was not a geek and who was an authority on what qualified a person for geekhood, had deemed me to be one. Debbie did not hurt my feelings. There was a wry smile on her face when she made her pronouncement. Her indictment was not tinged with nastiness but rather the resignation that I couldn't help myself. - It was explained to me that a geek was someone who was interested in things that were not considered universally interesting, also known as "things that are cool." Skateboarding was cool so someone who was interested in skateboarding could not be a geek. Collecting wrestler dolls, Dungeons & Dragons, playing the bassoon, crocheting, and Star Trek were all somewhere on the periodic table of

 Now and then, I think about the machine in the mall. It was the summer of 1991 and I was working at a T-shirt store the year I graduated high school. Outside the store was a machine, no bigger than the monitor of a desktop computer, that would tell you what you should look for in a mate. How it worked was you put in a quarter and then the computer listed a whole bunch of traits and asked you to pick the one that was most important. If memory serves, those traits were as follows: - Good looking - Sexy - Romantic - Intelligent - Healthy - Wealthy - Compassionate. After you chose the trait that was most important, you picked the trait that was least important. 18-year-old me said that "good looking" was most important. Least important was "wealthy." The computer told me that I was a shallow and immature person who only wanted a nice piece of arm candy to impress his friends. "Pretty accurate," I thought. - That was my mindset throughout high school. I wanted

The Elvis Presley song, Can't Help Falling in Love , was covered by the Canadian singer, Corey Hart, sometime in the 1980s. Corey's version was the first one I heard, so for years I erroneously credited him with its origination. It may be anaethema to say this, but I never understood the appeal of Elvis. Maybe he was just too before my time. Maybe I had to be a teenaged girl. Maybe the Elvis I remember is the older sweaty bloated dude who looked like he'd have a heart attack if he tried to reach that high C. In my playbook, Prince > Elvis. Hey, Prince wrote his own songs. Sign O The Times is a hundred times better than Elvis's Greatest Hits. I have a favourite Elvis song. It is Jailhouse Rock. There are only two acceptable versions of that song. One is done by Elvis. The other is the one that the cast and crew of The Blues Brothers did at the end of their movie. - Can't Help Falling in Love was featured in the 1961 movie, Blue Hawaii. In that movie, Angela Lansbu

 Here is a list of all the Thomases I know: - Tom Philp. He was a reporter at the Brighton Independent back in 2000. We worked together. Former police officer. - Tomas Ulbrich. I went to junior high and high school with him. Exceptionally smart. Math wizard. I believe he is a Eucharistic minister somewhere in Calgary. - Thomas Ogas. He is a lawyer in California. We met through random chat on ICQ 20 years ago and created something of a friendship. We went to see a Flames-Sharks game in San Jose about a decade ago. He likes the Golden State Warriors.  - Thom Peterson. An American magician who put out one of my favourite magical instructional DVDs (Behind the Curtain.) He revolutionized the McCombical deck. - Tom McIlhenny. He was the debating partner of a guy named Mike Hessler. Mike and Tom would always whoop me and Jason in various debate tournaments. - Tom Stone. He is a Swedish magician and genius inventor. I hope to adapt one of his most famous creations for my 2023 performing seaso

When we were kids, we wanted to go Christmas carolling on December 1. Dad wouldn't let us. "Too early," he said. I disagreed. I reasoned that if I could open the first door of the advent calendar, then I could go Christmas carolling too.  By that point, Christmas was already in the air anyway. Maybe a third of the houses on our street had their lights up, there was snow on the ground, and Christmas stuff had been in the stores since Halloween was over. Still, no dice. "The week before Christmas is when you can go." - Here in Glengarry, the first Santa Claus Parade takes place in late November, sometimes more than a month before Christmas hits. This year, the weather was unseasonably warm. Rainy too. There was absolutely no snow and no one was wearing their parkas or toques.  Same thing for the other parades. I don't remember the mercury dipping too low for any of 'em. But right now there's snow outside. Lots of it too. The weather people tell us we g

Tonight, my son and I are going to watch On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which is the best Christmas movie ever made and, quite possibly, my favourite movie of all time. It is the very best of the Bond movies, the first where 007 is allowed to be completely vulnerable. It is a movie that should NEVER be watched in the summertime. Now, with snow flying outside and Christmas right around the corner and with COVID still in my lungs, this seems the opportune time to watch it. I don't know how the director, Peter Hunt, did it, but he managed to capture a mood of isolation. I've watched that movie perhaps 30 times by now and every time I watch it, I'm concerned for Bond's survival. Not just for him, though. If Bond doesn't get to the bottom of that mountain - evading those SPECTRE agents with machine guns - then the whole world is in danger. Toward the end of it, Bond has just dispatched his nemesis, Blofeld, on a bobsled track. A St. Bernard comes to Bond's resc

 Tell you what, friends and neighbours, I have COVID tonight. Yep, took the test yesterday and saw those two pink lines on the free test they gave me at Shoppers Drug Mart. All last night I had a pounding headache, a wet cough, and a nose that wouldn't stop running. Today has been a day of relaxing and get-well-soon. I expect to "push it through", as it were. COVID is annoying but, for me, it's much less severe than allergies or that really nasty bug I had a few years ago when I couldn't even walk. Seriously, I had to crawl around my apartment. I called to have groceries delivered and they left it right outside my door. Crawling over to it was Everest. In the end, I sat against my front door and drank orange juice right from the carton and felt sorry for myself. - As providence would have it, I was surfing the Christian web the other day and came across that passage in Luke 18 about how it's easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than it is for

 God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. That is the Serenity Prayer, commonly attributed to the American Reformed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The prayer, often uttered at AA meetings, is rarely quoted in its entirety. The full prayer includes pleas for the ability to take life one day at a time, accepting hardships, surrendering to the the will of the almighty. But the first little bit is all anyone remembers. The late American novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, sure remembered it. He ended his novel, Slaughterhouse Five, by describing how those words were inscribed on a locket that hung between the breasts of a pornographic film actress named Montana Wildhack.  - I have read Slaughterhouse Five a number of times. I think the point of the book is that everyone has good memories and bad memories and that we would be a lot happier if we reminisced about the good times instead of brooding over the last

 Hello. (Hello Hello) Is there anybody out there? Does anybody read this blog? I'd really like to know. Come on (come on) now tell me in the comments that you're a fan of note-a-day and you've got something to say. Relax (relax relax) I'll need to get a title first. I'll assign you a day  and you can make me hurt. There is no nightmare like a blank page A distant muse, that won't start breathing The words are coming through in waves My fingers move, but I don't know what I'm saying. When I was a child, I had a daydream I'd be a famous writer, yeah. Now I've got that feeling once again I can't explain, because I'm old now I will not talk. I'll do, instead. I think this blog is thoughtfully sought    [guitar solo] Okay (okay okay) My son wants my attention I'll tickle him and (ahahahaha) And soon he'll fall asleep. So now I'll sit down I do believe the muse is back I might not hit a home run but I'm still on the attack.

When my son was born, I fantasized about how one day, he might follow in my footsteps as a magician. I'd start him when he turned seven by buying him a few mechanical magic tricks, get him used to performing for an audience, maybe even invite him onstage with me as a "guest performer" for some of my shows. Then, we he got older, I might give him more of a challenge. I'd give him a cups and balls set, for example, and tell him to forge a routine. Then would come the day when he would be my roadie, helping me set up my shows at various campgrounds and county fairs and school gymnasiums and theatres. Then would come the day when I would be his roadie, and then the day when I would retire and he would inherit his old man's world. But God gave my son a mind of his own. The B-Man doesn't have much interest in magic. He is autistic, doesn't quite grasp the emotion-over-logic mindset that good magic depends on. When I show him a trick, he is never amazed. He is ei

 I had to drive up to Ottawa to do a magic show today. There was a blizzard. It took me longer to get to Ottawa than expected. The lights were against me too. It seemed that the universe had conspired to make me late for my show. About 15 minutes away to the venue, I'm stopped three cards back behind a red light, trying to make a left turn. On the meridian to my left appears a beggar. He (or she) has a dirty blue backpack and an empty Tim Hortons cup, which he (or she) is using to solicit funds. I had nothing I could give and I was in a foul mood anyway, because I don't like being late for magic shows. Then the person in the car in front of me rolled down their window and gave the beggar a $20 bill. The beggar was happy. Not overjoyed, but happy. He (or she) had probably grown accustomed to the occasional $20 bill. It's rare but no so out of the ordinary that it makes you want to happy dance. The light turned green and the car in front of me drove into the intersection, ski

Before I became a father - in a time when I could afford it - I would regularly take sojourns to small motels so I could write. Some people didn't think I was going there to write; they thought I was going there to consort with prostitutes. They were wrong. I went there to write. When choosing a motel, I stayed off the beaten path. I never consulted Expedia; never looked for fancy hotels with swimming pools and room service. I wanted isolation. I didn't want to be disturbed by happy families on playgrounds, by rock bands in nearby bars, by corporate parties in the hospitality suite. I wanted to be alone with the muse. Me, my fountain pens, a big yellow legal pad, and Bach or Wendy Stark on my iPod. Later, I would order pizza and Dr. Pepper.  Sometimes I would go 48 hours without seeing another human being. One winter, there was a massive blizzard at the motel and I was snowed into my apartment. The motel owner called me, panicking, promising to have me dug out by evening. I ass