Everybody Thinks I’m Working

I went back to Vancouver last week, to visit my friends Meg and Catherine — Meg, who writes a blog all of you already read, and who posts approximately 65,000 more times per year than I do (given how infrequently I post, that actually only works out to about one or two a day, but still); and Catherine, who never had a blog (at least not one that she started), and maintained a quiet dignity that ran well above blogs and internet-centric life until Facebook ran away with her soul.

For those of you who know what Facebook is, I will say only that I have 13 “friends” there. Meg has about 100. Cat has 1,635,386,132.5. She actually has half a friend. Someone she knew in Calgary, I think, though whether she knew the top half or the bottom half she won’t say, and I’m sure as hell not asking. There is literally nobody that she does not know, or won’t know; she’s begun adding friends that she will not meet until she’s 60, because (a) it’s inevitable and (b) she’s not the sort to wait around for things to just happen. It’s actually only a matter of time before she becomes friends with the half-friend’s other half, wherever IT is, and then she’ll stick them back together with scotch tape and there will be a big tearful reunion, and Cat’s Facebook status will change to say that she is “Enjoying reconnecting friends”.

Fortunately, Facebook isn’t the end of things, or we would never have left the house. But for the second time in a year, they both put their real lives on hold (and in Meg’s case, moved out of her own room) and let me crash in their home while I got to explore Vancouver. Cat drove us EVERYWHERE, which is quite a few places, really, when you add them all up. We went to Whistler, took a ferry and drove around Gibson and Sechelt, watched hockey, ate lots of really, really good food, and played Scrabble (or were played, depending), and avoided the (apparently) overeager West Van police long enough to park and get out of the car at a park.

It was a seriously, seriously awesome time. I will write more about it this week. And post pictures.

I was pretty sure, after my visit last summer, that Vancouver was one of my favorite cities. Now I know it is. I know this for several reasons: First, two sentences back, I was tempted to spell the word favourite. I used to mock people for injecting ‘u’s into words that simply didn’t need them (you know, like “Vancover”) , and now I’m guilty of the same thing. I may have even twitched involuntarily at a road sign pointing out the San Diego Harbor, but I could have just had something in my eye.

Second, it’s a beautiful in the sort of way that takes words from you. I resorted to “stupidly” a few times; because after the 100th moment thinking that you’ve finally seen the most awe-inspiring sight ever, only to be proven wrong simply by turning left, it starts to become a little exasperating. You realize how shallow your vocabulary really is when it comes to expressing awe. And these people LIVE HERE, you know? This is their BACKYARD. In San Diego, when it gets cloudy, it just gets cloudy. There are clouds, and they are gray. When it gets cloudy in Vancouver, it’s gorgeous. That’s just weird. I was in Vancouver for four full days, and took over 300 pictures, a lot of which were shot from a moving car. Of the 300, the only ones that didn’t turn out were the ones where the camera was out of focus. And some of those still look amazing. Photogenic bastards.

Third, and probably most telling: before I went to Vancouver I stubbornly knew nothing about hockey, and didn’t care to learn. Here in San Diego, we would take pride in our ignorance of the game except that, in doing so, we would acknowledge we knew it existed, and that’s just putting us a little too close for comfort. Now I’m an honest to god Canucks fan, and have rearranged my work schedule in order to catch playoff games. And gotten mad when the ONE cable channel in San Diego that shows hockey games opted to show the Detroit-Calgary game instead of the Vancouver-Dallas game. I may, or may not, have actually sworn at the TV.

Okay. I did. It’s true.

If you add Meg and Cat’s friends together, there are 1,635,386,232.5, which is a lot of people even if you leave off the half-guy from Calgary. These are popular women. How lucky am I to be one of their friends? There are two answers to that question. The first one is not very; it’s obviously not an exclusive club, since it encompasses 25% of the population of the whole world, excluding only those who don’t shower and those who insist on proclaiming their love for Cirque du Soleil.

The real answer, of course, is unbelievably lucky. The strangest way I can think of for people to get to know each other, for sure, and yet here we are. Two of my favorite people, who don’t mind when I come to visit, and who are always welcome to come here.

Favourite people, even.

And now I’m going to freak out a lot of people, so just, you know, breathe and sit down.

GO CANUCKS!

At the zoo here, the Orangutan enclosure is a remarkable piece of design. The enclosure is wide, fronted by an enormous, long pane of acrylic, and rolls away from you in a rough-hewn lawn, which dives down over an embankment and out of sight. The trees which push up from behind that hill (and thus outside the exhibit) look just like the ones on top of it. The result is an enclosure that seems to have no back wall whatsoever, which is strangely liberating, almost a relief, which is doubly strange considering we aren’t the ones in the thing. But the illusion is effective.

There are trees and ropes and metal poles among the rocks and grass and water, and the orangutans climb them all. Slowly. Orangutans are not fast, at least not when they’re just sitting about on an anonymous afternoon in March. There are exceedingly quick monkeys next to them, in the same exhibit, but the orangutans just sort of move about in a stately fashion, choosing their path and then following it.

Today there was an orangutan at the top of a pole very near the glass, sitting like a sage philosopher, except shaggy and orange, and, of course, a primate. He sat up there for quite a while, surveying the world before him, which included me and twenty other subjects.

While he surveyed, a knot of small lightning-quick monkeys wrestled one another in the background. Next to the wrestling monkeys, but sitting a bit apart, was another, who was calmly pulling grass up and eating it. If you looked hard enough, the monkey’s little knobby knee resolved itself into a little knobby baby monkey, who seemed about the size of a bar of soap, but — like the philosopher perched on the pole above — furry, and with arms and legs and a tiny head. The baby monkey was firmly attached to its mother’s leg and working at a blade of grass, which was nearly as big as it was.

The orangutan, who had satisfied himself that all was in order with the kingdom outside the glass, slowly descended the pole, and stepped to one side, ready to address the crowd. You think I’m engaging in hyperbole here, but that’s really what he looked like. He became a little old man, about to reveal a deep secret of life. He stood, hunched, and eyed us on the other side of the glass (one of the moving and disconcerting things about primates is that they make eye contact with you, and a conciousness registers when they do). Perhaps he cleared his throat, perhaps he didn’t. I like to think he did.

Even a soap-sized baby monkey can’t compete with the wisdom of the ages. We all watched the orangutan.

He began listing to the left, and his head turned ever so slightly that direction. And then he tipped completely over, and began to slowly roll, all four limbs extended. He completed one sideways somersault and stood back up, looking satisfied. And then did it again. And again.

The orangutan rolled in one slow, oddly graceful line, arms and legs out, the entire width of the enclosure, and then left to get some food.

In the end, after all the fighting to become better people is done, after we’ve done propping ourselves up for the benefit of people who may or may not deserve all that effort, and when we look back on everything and survey the ground gained and lost, I’m pretty sure there is no greater advice in life than that. You roll sideways for a while until you get to the wall, and then you eat.

So maybe he is a philosopher, after all.

I’m not certain at which point I traded my soul for a Chicken McNugget from McDonald’s. Perhaps the seeds were sown when I was a child, and McDonald’s meant all things good and exciting; when it was a rare treat, and before I realized how truly awful it is. Back then, a Chicken McNugget was a gift from heaven — a perfect food that required no forks, knives, or table manners, and came in an environmentally devastating styrofoam box that made a satisfying crunch when you squished it.

But blaming the loss of my soul to a deep-fried chunk of processed chicken on my childhood is a little cheap. It’s like blaming one’s problems on one’s parents. I may have gloried in the McNugget when I was small, but the fact that I am now 35 and, every three or four months, experience a craving for it that dims the very sun in the sky with its intensity, and scatters my ambitions to better eating like so many fall leaves before an exhaust-belching gas-powered blower, really must rest here. I must take responsibility for my problem.

As blaming this addiction on my childhood is a cop-out, I will instead blame it on my car. No, really, hear me out. My car facilitated this problem from the very start. You see, the handles on my car doors — inside — sit in these little wells built into the door. The handle points up, and you pull it back to open the door, like an ergonomically thoughtful lever. And that well is, if I may say, freakishly well-shaped for holding a container of sweet-and-sour sauce.

I mean, there’s just no way the people at Volvo could not have known. I suspect they dreamed up the car while eating Chicken McNuggets. You put the container of sauce in the well, and then turn it ninety degrees, and it locks into place. Do you understand this? IT LOCKS INTO PLACE. It’s like a FEATURE. It probably got printed on the advertising literature, although it was inexplicably left off the manual. Tons of stuff in the manual about “oil changes” and “tire pressure”, but not one mention of the amazing sauce-holding-door-handle-wells.

This feature was left to be discovered by us, the end users, and discover it I have. And once that happened, the world became a different place. Eating this disgusting stuff was now possible while driving.

So, every few months — and I stress that it is every few months, so you understand that I do not mainline these things — when the craving strikes, and I lose interest in personal integrity, work, honor, and girls, and care about the only food ever to proudly bear the word “nugget” as it’s name, which contains parts of chicken that nobody really talks about at parties, I feel no shame. I get the nine-piece combo meal. With a Coke. I embrace my addiction.

And a few weeks ago, I had one of those moments: one of those “hitting bottom” moments that addicts talk about, the forward-or-forever-back decision moment. I was driving along, on my way to a theatre of some sort, when a car in front of me swerved across three lanes, racing for a left turn. I hit the brakes hard enough that the bottle of water in my passenger seat launched itself at my glove compartment.

But worse, the last Chicken McNugget that was next to it, secure in its little box also launched itself at my glove compartment. It flew off the seat, box and all, and dumped itself onto the floor.

Now, think about this for a moment. The floor of a car is not a hygenically sound place. It gets nothing put on it but feet, all of which have been God-knows-where, and probably a few places that God’s never heard of. And my Chicken McNugget, the last Chicken McNugget, was down there. I began to despair.

Then, in a grand epiphany, I realized that a Chicken McNugget is made of stuff FAR more horrible than feet. It’s made of processed chicken. Whatever is down there, it CAN’T be worse than whatever the nugget is made of in the first place; and really, exposure to it probably just increases the nutritional value of the things.

So I picked it up off the floor, blew the dust off (as a gesture to polite society), and ate it.

As I say, my soul has been lost. People have lost their souls for more romantic notions, made deals with the devil or sold out to get ahead in the world. I traded mine in for a Chicken McNugget.

I think I’m okay with this, but I’ll have to consider it for a while. I’ll get back to you.

Particularly in high school.

Around these parts, you read “The Scarlet Letter” in grade 11, which is as good a time to start reading about adultery as any, I suppose. It’s about the time you REALLY start getting into girls (or boys), so the possibility of getting into more than one of them at once has to be examined and harshly condemned, through symbolism if neccessary.

My English teacher back then — Mrs. Wroblewski, or “WroBlo,” which is a nickname you can’t buy — would sometimes let us cut loose on a subject after we’d done analyzing it, as a sort of reward. This should give you a good idea of how nerdy we were. We were rewarded by getting more work assignments.

Anyway, after we read and dissected The Scarlet Letter, Mrs. Wroblewski set us upon a free-range, creative-writing assignment: Tell the story of what happens to the characters after the book is over. No rules. And this was mine, which I just found in a folder in my desk, and which could lead you to believe that I used to be into some shady chemicals. And I PROMISE you I was not. I think it was because I was waking up so early at the time, and it scrambled my brain.

From the 11th grade brain of Eric.  You have been warned.

* * *

Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl have succeeded in sailing back to the Old World without Chillingworth — he, having become quite taken with Mistress Hibbins, committed a certain sin of his own and was duly executed for it. Upon arriving in England, the trio cast about for a source of income. This was naturally a problem, but after some searching they did find a niche in the construction business; mostly building stone mausoleums for dead people of odd sizes, true, but it was work. Hester worked out the decorations to be etched into the stone — usually something quaint like the letter “A” or another revoltingly symbolic epitaph — and had Dimmesdale fix them above the door for all to see. Pearl wanted none of the family business, and in an amazingly profound statement about society, became a stripper.

The lives of our characters went smoothly for a year or so, and the graveyards of England found themselves dotted with mausoleums specially equipped for “the discriminating deceased,” covered with such witticisms as “Absolutely no one under 17 admitted” and “I’M NOT DEAD!” (reputed to be one’s last words). The routine changed abruptly one morning, however, when the once-reverend Dimmesdale was unexpectedly strangled by several long ropes of licorice. The debates as to why this happened have raged on for, oh, at least thirty seconds by now, and no one seems to have found a satisfactory answer. Suffice it to say that the lives of Hester and Pearl changed. Hester turned to the life of a seamstress — where she amused herself by sewing vicious caricatures of clients’ faces into hard-to-find-places in their clothing. The one woman ever to notice thought that a chunk of granola had somehow found itself into the weave. She returned it and told Hester that she “oght to take better care of her lunch, if you expect to sew for much longer. Sewing is veeery difficult work, you know. Why, I was a seamstress myself for many a long year, before my arthritis got too bad for the work. I always say it was the best thing I ever did with my life, but I never did eat my lunch, and that, my dear, is the reason I am bringing this dress to you instead of doing it myself,” etcetera. Pearl quit her job as a dancer and became a poet.

Hester died the following year when a brick fell quite suddenly from the sky and landed on her head. Pearl gave up poetry and became a barmaid. The only eventful day she ever had slinging drinks was recorded by an aspiring author who felt, mistakenly, that it might make for a good story line:

The room was dark and smoky, the light of several yellow candles flickering unevenly against the rough-hewn stone walls. The only sounds came from a gentleman who lay prostrate on the floor, his drink still carefully balanced in his hand where it was readily accessible should he wake. Pearl, the young barmaid, was about to fall asleep at the counter.

But then HE came in.

He walked slowly into the room, took a long, slow, powerful look around. A pause. THen up to the counter where he sat slowly, and looked up.

“Gimme a beer.”

“Pearl turned half-automatically, and then suddenly decided it wasn’t worth the trouble and spontaneously combusted instead. Bright red shafts of fire blossomed outwards. A crackling sound snapped violently through the air; yellow flames danced up, and whips of electricity played on the walls around her. Then there was silence.

The stranger stared. He looked blankly at the smoky region where, a few moments before, a bored barmaid was about to get him a drink, and slowly became aware of a powerful tension behind him. He looked cautiously around — and fourteen sets of eyes met his. Every patron in the bar was looking right at him.

He was profoundly embarrassed.

* * *

It’s certainly getting close to Christmas, isn’t it? And the surest sign that time’s almost up to complete your shopping is this: Public Television has been overrun by white people standing in front of extravagantly lit castles, singing songs written by other white people who are no longer alive to sing them themselves.

There has been a long, honored tradition of this stuff. In the beginning, there was Yanni; who, while he didn’t sing, had awesomely long hair and no fear whatosever of cheese (the combination of which, somehow, is songlike).

Then came Sarah Brightman, who combined Yanni’s long hair with a love of songs that didn’t know what genre they wanted to be — rooted in pop, but yearning for opera, they all ended up sounding pretty much like The Pet Shop Boys without drums. And female. She’s also one of the better case studies in It’s Who You Know And Not What You Know, or in her case, whether or not you can really sing that well; which is also known as the “Andrew Lloyd Webber Principle”.

After Sarah Brightman, we got Charlotte Church. I think about Charlotte Church what I think about most talented kids — please, PLEASE let this not go to their heads. Please let them keep studying. That girl will be UNBELIEVABLE in a few years, after she can, say, drive.

But weird circus-sideshow element aside, we white folks really enjoyed her, for a while. After that slightly creepy experiment, we were ready for something completely different: The (Insert Number Greater Than Two And Less Than 100) Tenors. The Onslaught of the Tenors, which sounds like the least-terrifying war of all time (”and in 1736, between the hours of 1:00 PM and 1:05 PM, was fought the Battle — nay, the Onslaught — of the Tenors. None were killed, six tenors complained mightily of sore wrists, and all took a brief respite and tea after running across the battlefield without stopping. Let none forget what has passed.“) There were three, and the next year there were ten. Because really, can you ever have too many tenors? It’s like a clearance sale.

And this year, we’ve got Celtic Woman. They take care of the requisite demographic right away: White performers (check), European location (Castle, check), blissfully overprocessed and overproduced material (”Sail Away” by Enya, check).

I watched them for about half an hour last night. Then I got mad and couldn’t watch it anymore. It was too irritating. It was just bizarre, really. I mean, “Caledonia” should make you cry, is all I’m saying, and they pushed the tempo up and had thirty backup singers, step-touching in uncomfortable dresses like the largest bridal party of all time, back there. By the castle.

I think it made me angry because, for the strength of the material and the obvious talent of the singers, it had no soul. Not only no soul, it had NEGATIVE soul. It had antisoul. It had smiles and white teeth and perfectly applied makeup, and was like aural wallpaper. Nothing got too slow or too sad, nothing got too fast or too syncopated. There were two huge percussion sets and two huge players playing them, but no matter how hard they beat the drums you never heard them. And EVERYBODY was doing this step touch thing, for an eternity.

Look. It’s not that I want everything to be edgy. Edgy gets old just like anything else, and there’s nothing quite as refreshing as comfortable material, honestly and beautifully done.

But say what you will about Yanni, back there at the beginning of this tirade — he surrounded himself with killer musicians, and he let them play. Those live concerts felt live. Whether you liked the music or not, you wanted to stop and watch and listen, to see what would happen next, to hear what his guest artists were going to do.

So, all of this said, I’ve got an idea. I’m going to make my own PBS special. All I need is a castle as a background (or any old ruin, really, provided it’s made of very large hand-hewn bricks), and a LOT of synthesizers. I can borrow fancy lights that make everything turn the color of blueberries. And I’ll sing the best version of Come On Eileen you’ve ever heard.

All I need is a studio audience to smile and weep gently during the audience cutaway shots.

Who’s with me?

I realize that I have failed to post for a record two hundred forty-three years, which is a long time no matter how you look at it. I will only say that I have been remarkably busy; the sort of busy that leaves you dumbfounded at the end of each day, with nothing really to be done for it except passing out on the couch as another revered cinematic actor proves that they can’t really do comedy on Saturday Night Live.

I was thinking of going with this, as a schtick of some kind. Like David Blaine, who used to do close-up magic (and well!), and then decided he would much rather lock himself into curiously irrelevant environments and do… nothing. Which must be a relief for him, having come up with these ideas in the first place. That must be exhausting. Trying to anticipate the needs of a fickle public, and hitting a home run with “I SHALL FREEZE MYSELF IN A BLOCK OF ICE,” just like it was nothing. And then the masterstroke of having it held up by a crane! Sheer genius. Much more dramatic to do nothing at all in a block of ice that’s twenty feet up, than to slum around on the ground with the rest of us. Plus, it makes it easier to see the sheer amount of nothing that he’s doing, if he’s up there. Nobody to block the view.

Don’t think I don’t appreciate the difficulty of being David Blaine. I totally get that.

But the thing is, I never really wanted to be like him; and yet here I am doing nothing, just as he does, and for considerably less money. All things being equal, I’d really rather do something. This is as good a place as any, and it’s much more comfortable than a block of ice. Although I am considering having my laptop suspended by a crane, twenty feet off the ground, just as a small homage.

So. How has everyone been?

It’s my civic duty, I know, but I believe these things conspire to arrive in my mailbox at precisely the worst moment. My schedule runs along like an old beloved junk car; it chokes and coughs and surges and stalls, but it always goes somewhere, powered by some voodoo ritual that only it understands.

Other people shake their heads and ask, “But how can you plan anything? How can you live like that?”

And I respond, sagely, “I can’t, and I don’t know.” Nothing makes you sound more sage than a concession of defeat followed by an admission of ignorance, I find, so I try to do that as often as possible. I’m awfully sage.

No matter how bizarre my schedule is, the Jury Duty Summons anticipates it and appears like a time bomb. Oh, I could go this week. This week I could be Juror #5 and take careful notes about the believability and character of the defendant. But when they actually want me to go, I will be running between three theatres, none of whom give time off for abstract concepts like “civic duty.” And of course, I can’t really guarantee that any point in the future will be less mad than this one, so the concept of a postponement is a risky gamble.

The only remaining course is to request an excuse from my civic duty; which I believe lands your official summons in a cement bunker somewhere deep underground, a special room without air conditioning reserved for dealing with people who think they are above the system. I always imagine the people who read these excuses to be so jaded they’re actually tinted green, although that might be the lack of oxygen down there. So, how pathetic does one need to sound in order to gain the mercy of the court?

Because now, suddenly, I feel like Ferris Bueller. Except I’m not going to call in sick and then go crazy, running all over town, having a great time and dining in restaurants I can’t afford. I’m going to be working. But I’m convinced that the people in the Jury Duty Excuse Bunker think I’m gaming them.

“Hey, Bob, look at this one. This is a good one. ‘Works in theatre, cannot possibly help determine the guilt or innocence of one of his peers.’ Ha, ha. He’s probably going to spend the week watching ‘Mythbusters’ on television.”

“Works in theatre? That’s lame. How would he feel if he got hauled into court for something he didn’t do, and nobody could make the time to be on HIS jury?”

“Boy, that would be some justice, there, wouldn’t it? If they all worked in theatre and couldn’t make the time. What’s the word for that? There’s a word for it. Some kind of justice.”

“Blind?”

“No, no, something else, starts with a ‘P’ I think.”

“Plaid?”

“Plaid justice? That’s your guess? ‘Plaid Justice?’ They gotta turn up the A.C. in here.”

“Well, send it back. He’s got to have a better excuse than that if he wants to evade his civic duty.”

“Yeah. Lazy bastard. What’s that word? This is gonna drive me crazy. Political? Pasta?”

“‘Pasta Justice’? You wouldn’t let me have ‘plaid’ but you’re going with ‘pasta?’”

“Peony.”

“Polemic.”

“Ooh, that one’s close. Maybe that’s it. ‘Polemic Justice.’”

“That’s it. That’s totally it. Wonder what that word means?”

I realize, of course, that it’s probably nowhere near that ridiculous. Maybe. And I have served on juries, and I no doubt will again; it’s just that now is… well, extremely difficult. So how does one find an excuse that is, at once, truthful, sufficiently pathetic to win the approval of the jaded bunker-people, and worded in such a way as to relieve any guilt I might feel for avoiding my responsibility? There IS a check box for “Physical or mental disability.” Which I realize is probably not meant to be used facetiously, though you have to admit I’ve got a passing shot at the second category.

I suppose I will just try for a postponement and see what happens.

By the way, the single most frightening line in a jury duty summons is this: “The temperature of the jury assembly areas and courtooms can be unpredictable, jurors are encouraged to dress accordingly.”

And the word those guys were looking for is pulchritudinous.