Rotating Pineapple

Both of my best friends dealt with addiction. They are dead now. One died despite his addiction; the other may have died because of it. "You should get down on your knees every day and thank God that you don't have an addictive personality," one of them said to me. I don't thank God every day - mea culpa - but I understood the sentiment. He was saying that for some people, it's easier to fall into addiction than most. I myself have experimented with nicotine. I have been drunk a handful of times; I am ashamed of this. But have I ever been addicted? Not a chance. - From the National Institute on Drug Abuse: Many people don't understand why or how other people become addicted to drugs. They may mistakenly think that those who use drugs lack moral principles or willpower and that they could stop their drug use simply by choosing to. In reality, drug addiction is a complex disease, and quitting usually takes more than good intentions or a strong will. Drugs c...

 We had a family zoom chat tonight. At one point, dad asked us kids if we had any happy memories of childhood Christmases. He asked it in a roundabout way, telling a sad story about how neither he nor my uncle had a whole lot of happy Christmas memories from when they were kids. Indeed, their happiest memories of December 25 mostly involved fleeing the house after what passed for good tidings of comfort and joy had come to an end. I guess all three of us knew he was looking for reassurance, so we gave it to him.  My younger brother talked about the living room of Hooke Road, which, I'm pretty sure, is the first house he remembers. The Christmas tree was always situated in a corner of the living room and, he recalled, waking up on December 25 and seeing the living room overflowing with presents. It was a typical middle class 1980s Christmas. Times were booming and a two-income home like the one I grew up in could afford to spoil the kids.  Again, I told the story of Electr...

 Today, the shortest day of the year, the Rotating Pineapple breaks new ground. For the first time ever, the note-a-day will include a recipe. I channel my late grandfather, Edward Morris, who ate this for breakfast many a morning before trudging outside to his giant green John Deere tractor (I hope) and then tilling the wheat fields of his Saskatchewan farmland. You need the following: - bread - butter - tomato juice. 1. Toast the bread. 2. Butter the bread. 3. Cut the bread into strips. 4. Pour tomato juice into a glass. 5. Dip the bread/toast strips into the tomato juice and eat it. - I am not a farmer but this is one my go-to breakfasts. I substitute the tomato juice with V8 and usually add a pinch of Mrs. Dash, but the recipe remains pretty much the same. It gives you the energy you need in the morning. - There is not much else I can say about this except that I can picture my granddad doing this. He gets up while the household is still sleeping, while my mom and her sisters a...

In 1843, Edgar Allen Poe published his classic horror story, the Tell-Tale Heart. Is it about a man who murders another man, cuts his body into pieces, and lays them under the floorboards of his bedchamber. When the police come to investigate, they find no sign of foul play. But the murderer eventually confesses because his guilty conscience makes him believe that the dead man's heart is still beating, even as it lies buried underfoot. Thump thump thump. - I became aware of this short story in Grade 9 English class. That was not because our teacher had chosen it as acceptable study material. No, he mentioned the story as a tangent. He wanted his class to study three songs from Alice Cooper's 1975 album, Welcome to my Nightmare. Apparently, one of his superiors objected to this, deeming the material too morbid. My teacher countered by asking why Tell-Tale Heart was still on the list of approved material. When it comes to depraved acts of violence, Mr. Poe had Mr. Cooper well bea...

 It is comforting to see that young people today like the same music that their boomer and Gen X grandparents enjoyed. Take a stroll through your average high school and you'll see kids with T-shirts extolling the likes of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Guns N Roses. They know that something happened to popular music around the turn of the century - that songwriting stopped being an organic in-studio process of self-expression and started being a factory-produced collection of computerized synth-beats. Kids got tired of the phoniness of top 40 radio. Craving real music, they went back to the past, and they found it there. - The phonograph dates back to the late 1800s. For more than a century, it - along with its descendants - was the most popular way people would listen to music. By the 1940s, the phonograph became known as the record player. Those things got workouts in the 1950s when rock and roll was all the rage. And with the advent of LPs, musicians had another artistic o...

 Is Santa a gnome? I’m not sure. - I’m not sure why garden gnomes are so popular, or any lawn decorations for that matter. If I had a front lawn, I wouldn’t need it to be a visual curiosity. - I’m convinced that the primary purpose of the garden gnome is to be kidnapped. Said gnome should then be taken around the world, be photographed in front of various landmarks, and have those photos sent back to the gnome’s owner. It is less expensive to take a garden gnome on a trip around the world. This is because airlines charge admission for flesh and blood, not for paint and plaster. - I recommend the movie, Amelie, which is one of the best movies ever made and also features a scene where a garden gnome is kidnapped. - I used to own a gnome. His name was Glengarry. Glengarry my gnome. We used him famously in a competition at the Glengarry News. I was the biggest fan of that competition. It has since being retired. And this note is now being retired.

 In elementary school, you always learn division last. You start with addition because that's easy.  Teacher: "If you have two apples and I give you another apple, how many apples do you have?" Shteevie: "I don't like apples." Teacher: "Well then if you have two Luke Skywalker action figures..." Shteevie: "R2D2 is my favourite." Teacher: "Fine." (Rolls eyes.) "If you have two R2D2 action figures and I give you one more R2D2 action figure, how many do you have?" Shteevie: "Three." Teacher: "Good boy. Here's a gold star." - From there, you move on to subtraction, which is just addition but in reverse. Then there's multiplication, which is just doing addition over and over again. In Grade 3, we mastered the multiplication tables. Those tables ended at 12x12. I memorized that answer, which was 144, so I could be math champion whenever our teacher, Mme. Di Batista, did the flash card challenge. T...

 My son is getting a vacuum cleaner for Christmas this year. He even picked out the make and model. Thank God it's an inexpensive one. He doesn't want Star Wars stuff or a PlayStation or whatever the new toy trend is. All he wants is a vacuum. So Merry Christmas, son. I look forward to a noisier environment. - If I had a dollar for every picture of my son with a vacuum cleaner, I'd be able to buy a very expensive vacuum cleaner. I have learned that whenever I take my son to a new environment, he will immediately search for a vacuum cleaner. Whenever we go to a place he's been before, he will tell me what colour the vacuum cleaner is there and then he will go find it. My mom can testify to this. If she's going to FaceTime me, she knows she has to be sitting next to the room where the vacuum cleaner is. That's because as soon as my son sees her face, he will immediately start yelling this: VACUUM WHITE! My mom has a white Miele vacuum. My son adores it. It might b...

 Last night, I said that I might watch the Charlie Brown Christmas special while lying in bed. Ash told me it's still too early in the season for that. - When does the Christmas season start? Well, according to the marketing department at stores everywhere, it starts the day after Halloween. In fact, in many stores, it starts BEFORE Halloween. Witness all those China-made plastic Santas hovering in the far aisle at Dollarama around October 21, you'll know what I'm talking about. - Here in Glengarry county, I'm fond of saying that the Christmas season starts with the annual Christmas tree lighting in Maxville. That always takes place in late November, usually the week after the Grey Cup is played. That same weekend, Maxville hosts its Santa Claus Parade. As a journalist, I have covered it about 20 times. One year, it was so unseasonably warm that people were watching it in T-shirts. Tis the season indeed. - When we were kids, we wanted to go Christmas carolling on Decemb...

Here is a partial list of things I have won, or got stuck with, at various white elephant gift exchanges: - Pack of Dr. Pepper flavoured gummies - Firewood - Obi Wan Kenobi sticker - Can of Ovaltine  - Svengali deck* - $5 Tim Hortons gift card (I bought a coffee and 85 per cent of a donut) - Mint flavoured Aero chocolate bar. Here is a partial list of things I didn't win at white elephant gift exchanges, although I was really hoping I would: - Three decks of Bicycle playing cards - Snickers chocolate bar - Mad Magazine holiday special. Here is a partial list of things I'm happy I didn't win at white elephant gift exchanges: - Gardening gloves - Poster of Jabba the Hutt - Cinnamon flavoured crackers - Plastic E.T. - Cheap Dollar store Barbie doll ripoff - Magazine with Brad Pitt on the cover - Panty hose**  -   Of all the things I won, the jar of Ovaltine remained in my possession the second longest. (The first is the Obi Wan Kenobi sticker, which, I think, is still in a b...

 It seems fitting that this be my title since I am writing this from Williamstown. I was in Williamstown twice today. Once for the annual Santa Claus Parade and then again for the hockey game between the Glengarry Brigade and the Embrun Panthers, which Glengarry is winning 1-0. And now, just as I typed return on the above paragraph, Embrun evened the score. How is that for wit? - Here is the definition of wit:  clever, humorous intelligence, the ability to make sharp, funny remarks, or the person who possesses it   I think I am a witty person. I wouldn't be very good at my jobs - journalist, writer, magician, note-a-day guy - if I was not. So since the game is now in intermission, I will eavesdrop on what people at the game are saying and give witty replies. - Someone at the snack stand: I want a hot dog.  Witty reply: Well, you are what you eat, weiner. - Someone at the entrance: How much are 50/50 tickets? Witty reply: One dollar each but you're the only person who...

 The worst office Christmas party ever was in 1994. I was 21 and had been working as a collection agent for a television cable company for about three months. It was an awful job, which consisted of visiting people at their homes, reminding them that they were delinquent in paying their cable bills, and, preferably, collecting payment then and there. I got $1.50 every time I collected payment, 45 cents whenever I just left a reminder notice. Very few people paid me. Most of the time, they insisted that they had already paid and then they invited me to get off their property. My supervisor was a military wife who lived in a condo in southeast Calgary. At the end of the day, I had to take all of my invoices and paperwork to her house and throw it in a lockbox that she kept on the deck of her condominium. The thing that I was doing as a full-time job was, to her, "pin money." The work Christmas party took place at a comedy club in downtown Calgary. The company paid for our admis...

 So this is based on a true story. It is the story of the cat of Ash. The cat's name is Ollie. Here is a picture of Ollie.   The cat was a kitten then. The cat is no longer a kitten. His personality cannot be described here, but it rhymes with gashole. The cat likes to attack me when I am going down the stairs. I do not like the cat. Ash loves the cat. Everything kitty does is adorable. KITTY!!!! - So a long time ago, when gashole kitty Ollie was a baby kitty who was not yet a gashole, Ash was in a pet store with her best friend, Jenn, who has tattoos and a motorcycle. Here is the way Ash would tell what happened next: "So Jenn and I were walking past the cats and that's when we saw Ollie and there was something about Ollie that was so adorable so I picked up the cat and immediately the cat latched on to me and I knew Ollie was destined to be my cat." Here is what the cat was really thinking: "I was sitting in my box thinking about how wonderful I am and how I am...

 I have spent an extraordinary amount of time this week covering South Glengarry's budget meeting, which took place last Friday. The meeting was uploaded to YouTube the next day and I got to follow nearly eight hours of riveting discussion on levies and bridges and tax rates. Don't get me wrong. The budget is an important meeting but I challenge anyone to sit through eight hours of number crunching and not lose focus at least once. My job, as a journalist, is to distill that meeting to its essentials and report on it in a way that is clear and informative. Still, reporting on budgets is my least favourite part of my job. There are three of them that I have to cover and they all take place around this time of year. Thank God that North Glengarry is waiting until January. I will have four weeks off. - Around this time last year, I wrote about a new writing device that enables writers to focus on writing without the distractions that modern day writing devices have. My writing mac...

 For a while now, my dad has supplemented his income by officiating at funerals. He's a pastor/chaplain, so he's most comfortable invoking the Lord at these funeral services, but there have been times when the family strictly forbade him from mentioning anything divine or metaphysical. At one of these occasions, dad had to wait for the family to show up at the graveside. They wandered in fashionably late. Several were hungover and a few were wearing attire more suitable for a strip club than a funeral. They seemed bored and listless as dad spoke the words that would see the dearly beloved into the ground. "Does anyone have anything they'd like to say before we depart?" "Yeah," one guy says, and then breaks into a story about how the dearly departed took a lot of money off some recent immigrant restaurant worker who was trying to make a little extra money as a bookie. The poor guy didn't understand how things worked on this side of the pond and he los...

 Here is the legend of the Christmas pickle. I am not making this up. This is an actual legend that involves Santa Claus himself, St. Nicholas. According to legend, a long time ago, an evil butcher killed three little boys, cut up their corpses, and put them in a barrel full of brine, hoping to sell them as pickled pork. St. Nicholas - perhaps fresh from throwing money in a poor girl's stockings or punching Arius in the face - happened on this butcher shop and, with a holy touch and a prayer, restored the three children to life.  I should think that those three boys suffered from PTSD the rest of their (new) lives. And even today, it is customary in some homes to hide a Christmas pickle on the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. Whoever finds that pickle gets an extra present or gets to decide on the order of the present opening. As for me, I want to see a movie about the life of St. Nicholas that incorporates all the legends: punching Arius, resurrecting hacked up children, and ...

 Snorting lines of snow with my basset hound, José Through Spokane we go oozing all the way Dwarves with static cling causing urban blight. What fun it is when geese perform at supper clubs tonight, Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way oh what fun to clone George Bush with the ghost of Henry Clay Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way oh what fun to change your sex anytime but Christmas Day. - The above Jingle Bells parody was made by me with the help of Frank Jacobs, who wrote a do-it-yourself sort of Jingle Bells parody maker in Mad Magazine sometime in the 1980s. I was a big fan of Mad Magazine. That parody has remained stuck in my mind since I was 10, when I first read that parody in the MAD Magazing Frank Jacobs collection, Mad Zaps the Human Race, which was purchased for me as I recovered in the Foothills Hospital after nearly losing my life to carbon monoxide poisoning. Years later, my dad and I were driving somewhere in December and the radio was on playin...

 Chuck Klosterman is one of my comfort writers. I have read a few of his books but two of them have stuck with me. I WEAR THE BLACK HAT is a meditation on villains and the nature of villainy. KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE is about a cross-America trip in a rented car where Klosterman visits the various sites where rock stars died. It should come as no surprise that the book ends with him dropping in at the place where the music died. February 3, 1959. A plane crash that claimed the life of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and a pilot who no one remembers. The pilot's name was Roger Peterson. I mention him here because his life was also valuable even though he wasn't a rock star. Roger Peterson, died at the age of 22  I listened to the audiobook of KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE today while driving up to Petawawa to do a magic show. It is about the sixth time I have listened to that book. My brain is stupid. Instead of seeking out new information and new stories, it keeps insi...

 Honestly? A massage. My shoulders are unbelievably sore. I'm not sure why. Maybe my computer desk isn't at the proper height, causing me to strain myself when I type. Or maybe it's all the magic stuff I was lugging around during my recent week-long tour of Toronto. But ouch, do my muscles ever hurt. I need someone to stand behind me and squeeze them for a good hour or so. Man, that would feel so good. - Having someone massage your shoulders from behind is one of life's sweet pleasures. In college, in acting school - where students are encouraged to bond - it happened a lot. How many times did I wander into parties or down times and someone was massaging someone's shoulders? There was nothing sexual about it. No kink. Just relaxation. In Grade 8, my social studies teacher would, from time to time, massage my shoulders. That probably wasn't appropriate, though it never creeped me out. I sat in the back of the classroom - we were seated alphabetically - and my des...

 At this stage, I'm the only one left. If I ever finish your story, it will be for me and me alone. Maybe God. I don't know. I hope He likes it. Yes, your story is dark, but so is my soul. - I have procured something. A weapon. Something that will help. Still, I no longer speak of you. The time for dreams has long passed. I will not be an old man when you are finally liberated. -  How many times have you saved me from death? Or from a life of mediocrity? And which is worse? -  When my lights are on,  you are in the presence of genius.    Believe.

 When I was 12, I decided that there were four levels of fame. You could be famous, really famous, really really famous, or Michael Jackson famous.  An example of a famous person might be Father Flannagan, who was the parish priest at St. Gerard's and was pretty much well known around Haysboro, which was the Calgary community where my family lived. Other people who might be famous were Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein or Calgary Flames captain Lanny McDonald, who were both well-known in their insular communities but might be treated as strangers should they venture outwards. Same thing for Spencer W Kimble, who used to be the prophet for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. An example of a really famous person might be a television star or a lesser known politician. Martin Short, Jean Chretien, David Copperfield, the two bearded guys from ZZ Top, Stephen King, Bozo the Clown, David Lee Roth, Fred Dryer (who was on Hunter) and Charles Schulz all qualify as really famous pe...

One Christmas morning when I was in my early 20s, I opened my bedroom door and found 12 cases of Dr. Pepper waiting for me. Santa Claus, evidently, did not believe in diabetes.  I don't know when I discovered a love for Dr. Pepper. It has become my soft drink of choice (though I admit that as I get older, I also enjoy the humdrum taste of flat ginger ale.) Dr. Pepper is best served cold and best served from the fountain. You want it to fizz. You want to smell that cherry flavour. Can you dig it? When I see someone else drinking a Dr. Pepper, I almost always comment on it. We have an impromptu conversation that usually goes something like this: Me: You're a Dr. Pepper drinker too!!! Them: You bet. Me: Me too. Coke and Pepsi are too boring. Them: Tell me about it. And then we go our separate ways. I am told that the Dr. Pepper brewed up here does not compare to the Dr. Pepper made in the southern United States. I agree, but I don't know why. I do know that Dr. Pepper is the o...

 My church. Martin Luther King once said that Sunday is the most segregated hour, meaning that we tend to go to church with people who look like us. The integration, by contrast, takes place the other six days of the week. This does not apply to my church. I go to a Dutch Christian Reform Church in Cornwall. That denomination, by the way, supported the South African apartheid movement and because of this, was expelled from the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in 1982. Four years later, it changed its stance - thanks, Holy Spirit - and, following repentance, was allowed back into the alliance four years later. It is a dark blot on my denomination's history. We look to the future while learning from the past. - My church is not segregated. There's a whole lot of people from Myanmar there. One of them is a gifted musician who plays a mean guitar and has an amazing voice. There are three Myanmar girls who, from time to time, do interpretive dances to Christian hymns.  My church...

Paul Simon's Graceland might be one of the best albums of the 1980s. Somehow, he took a concept album - creating a pop/rock songbook that blended African music with American folk - and wound up tapping into the existential angst of the baby boomer generation. Graceland and George Harrison's Cloud Nine are the only two modern rock albums that my father actually went out and purchased. That's saying something since his music of choice has always been country music from the 1970s and earlier. For a while, Graceland was the soundtrack of our house when I was a teenager. It was so beloved by him that my brother and sister even did a lip sync act to the album's lead single, You Can Call Me Al. I didn't like Graceland but I didn't dislike it either. At the time, I found more relevance in the music of Alice Cooper. But now I am older - older than my dad was when he discovered Graceland, in fact - and I can tell you that Graceland comes on my car stereo a heck of a lot m...