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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...