Balls of Rice

Category: Writing

  • Youth (Me) and Why I Hate Them (Me)

    Santa called me at work. The recording of his voice seemed as if he cared less about Christmas than I do. Painfully forced. Knowing full-well that he hated his life. His voice brought forth images of a forty-nine year old male drinking from a 40oz of bad whiskey on the day before his birthday which also happened to be Christmas, wearing a vomit-stained cotton beard, just after calling his ex-wife about when he’ll pick up his sixteen-year-old over the holidays. A slouch. All the recording told me was that I need to be good so that he would deliver a present in my chimney this Christmas. Not even a promise of a free cruise. Just a pre-solicitation for something that may or may not include the loss of my anal virginity. This is Christmas.

    And children love him. They love the undoubtedly alcoholic, morbidly obese. The kids that cry at Santa photos are the ones with natural instincts to stay away from the downfall of mankind.

    But who am I to judge this digitally-recorded Santa? I have become that lonely old man who sits alone, thinking about the one(s) that got away, smelling the various disgusting parts of his body throughout the day. The man who constantly wonders what happened to the younger generation. Who loathes technology, the things considered as viable entertainment, many forms of social interaction. At twenty-four, I am that man. Different, but no better than the inebriated Santa robo-calling the nation with threats of gift-giving. But, I don’t know what previous generations were like, so I can’t responsibly say that I can see a cultural and intellectual decline. And saying that the world is worse off than it has ever been is history-ignoring naiveté.

    And when I’m thinking of points to my argument of why youth are despicable and why I don’t want to be a teacher or have a child, I have to check my email three times, look up the writer to an episode of television. My attention span has been shortened thanks to constant interruptions in my pocket and the ability to get any information that I ever wanted at any time.

    In the thirties, Evelyn Waugh’s characters of ‘Vile Bodies’ seemed to constantly critique the younger generation.

    ‘Don’t you think,’ said Father Rothschild gently, ‘…[t]hey won’t make the best of a bad job nowadays. My private schoolmaster used to say, “If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.” My Church has taught that in different words for several centuries. But these young people have got hold of another end of the stick, and for all we know it may be the right one. They say, “If a thing’s not worth doing well, it’s not worth doing at all.” It makes everything very difficult for them.’

    ‘Good heavens, I should think it did. What a darned silly principle. I mean to say, if one didn’t do anything that wasn’t worth doing well–why, what would one do? I’ve always maintained that success in this world depends on knowing exactly how little effort each job is worth…distribution of energy…And, I suppose, most people would admit that I was a pretty successful man.’

    -Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, p111

    The slight shift in the adage, and the youth become defeatist, single-use, one-task brains. Instead of attempting at excelling at many things—like how your dad can fix the car, build a bathroom, design a power plant, and your mom can fix jeans, bake the greatest pies known to man, know so much about health and the world—the youth decide that they will attempt to perform a single task adequately, while being useless at everything else. Because they can.

    The wise adults of this book then talk of success being the bare minimum with maximum profit and high efficiency. Success. Suddenly moronic youth with one skill-set and the inability to focus sound pretty reasonable. Like the success-hunting adults, but with a sense of humour.

    If Santa calls me back, I would like to talk to him. Not just listen to his nightmarish recording. He has seen the youth and he has seen them grow up. They have sat on his lap for the hundred years that he has existed, and he has seen them grow up into these success-hunting adults, placing their new children on his lap, and so on, and so on. He would know. He’d be able to tell me if the youth are getting dumber. If technology is ruining our ability to focus, or ability to give a shit, or ability to be shocked, or ability to learn and retain. I mean, he is the one making most of these toys and giving them to our kids. And at that revelation, Santa’s drunk voicemail message seems more threatening than before. Not only does Santa want to deflower my anus, he also wants the be a part of the plague of idiocy in our children. The dumber the children become, the more they need his gifts. The more they need his gifts, the fatter he becomes. The fatter he becomes, the more women he gets.

    Don’t call back, Santa. I’m already plenty dumb.

  • Losing Faith

    Nenem

    I recently received this in an email from a friend in India:

    Do you still remember my youngest sister Nenem, you may take her to be your wife if you have any interest. But it would depend upon your choice only though I say anything. Actually young girls needs a trustworthy, abled man for husband and they should be loyal. A lot of marriages are broken causing a lot of problems consquencly.

    Directly after receiving this email, I booked a flight, moved to India, and took Nenem as my first wife. She is currently cooking rice and tending to our Kama-Sutra-conceived children while I sit in a mango tree, my feet being massaged by jewelled monkeys, my scalp being pampered by one hundred barbershop gurus.

    And just now, as the basement furnace powers up and blows cold air at my feet, I am transported back to my cobwebbed corner in my hole in the frozen ground—left only to the gurus of daddy-long-legs and head lice that pamper my once routinely- and professionally-kneaded head.

    Sweet India. Land of many faiths, land where I lost my own.

    The last time I returned from India a new man. It wasn’t I-lived-in-an-ashram changed, nor I-tried-forty-kinds-of-marijuana changed, or even I-was-almost-raped-three-times changed. I came back with a newly-filled gap in my mind. I came back with no interest in the functioning church in which I grew up, and which I partially went to support. I lost complete interest in proselytization or evangelism. I lost my faith and replaced it with a set of values. I became so fed up with the culture of organized belief, the culture of changing people’s beliefs, and the language of faith that inhibits people to speak in the realm of reality—reality, where suffering occurs but where nothing is done because of often blinding visions of a possibly non-existant afterlife utopia—that I handed it in and haven’t really looked back. My friend, Nenem’s brother, was unable to speak of anything but the Glory of Our Lord and the financial support he required to live and to preach. I didn’t write a list of for and against. It wasn’t an immediate disbelief in the resurrection that made me never return to church. It was part of a constant evolution of the mind that peaked while travelling alone, as it tends to do.

    It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.

    -Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter, p249

    Propagandhi’s Supporting Caste coincidentally came out during my last trip in India, and I somehow managed a minor miracle to download the album off of Indian iTunes. It was my only friend while travelling. One night, after calling home on my prepaid Indian cellphone, sitting on the beaches of Cochin at night, after four months of solo-travel, I finally realized that the greatest moments in life are better when shared. I have been able to enjoy things alone, but having the ability to acknowledge the greatest things with someone else, is the creation of joy. Joy isn’t a seasonal shopping opportunity at the Victoria Square Mall. Joy isn’t a faith-only feeling. I realized this again over the last few nights when watching my favourite band of all time. I enjoyed parts of the set alone, but the moments I was most elated were those when I sang aloud in the arms of good friends. Imagine the everlasting joy I would have if I actually just took part in arranged marriage to a conservative Christian girl in a village in India. Never-ending, tantric, yogic, conservative joy.

    My faith was replaced with something else. Something no less powerful. It was replaced with some sort of logical desire for decency and equality in the real and tangible world, both rooted in my Christian upbringing and my love for socially-conscious punk rock. Not that values didn’t exist in my life beforehand, they just sat at the back on my brain, washed out by uncertainty and contentedness. And as much as it pains my father to hear it, my faith was partially replaced with many of the tenets of a Winnipeg punk band. Neither the band nor the church would quickly agree that (what I would identify as) their basic doctrines line up—absolute equality, that the “unifying principle of this universe is love” (Propagandhi, Duplicate Keys Icaro). I connected my early life in the church basements in which I had grown up, to the realities of poverty, inequality, and hypocrisy that I had seen while travelling, and filled that gap with a set of discernible values that I seemed to lack previously. A serious respect still exists in the utmost for people who adhere to systems of faith, as it is another means to the end I am constantly seeking, and it helped mould my values to what they are now.

    The smell of glue was the answer to her prayer. She did not know this. She did not reflect, consciously, that the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful, and acceptable.

    -Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter, p295

    A man of faith is the same as a man of no faith, as long as both are acting positively in regard to humanity. Both are inevitably flawed. One puts hope in the unknown, one puts hope in something else—science, humans, another form of the unknown. Perhaps I put my hope in myself, not in a self-righteous, superiority-complex kind of way, but in the way that I am the only thing that I know can make an absolute change in, and hope things can move on from there.

    This is no where near the first time I’ve been proposed to, or propositioned, by someone in India, but it has been some time. Though I am flattered, though I wish I could get fifty-cent haircuts in India once a week, and though I think it could potentially work out better than a love-marriage, I will not take him up on the offer. This man, Nenem’s brother, is still a friend. And though many of his thought-processes irritate me as anti-productive or misdirected, I do not see my new vague set of values as greater than his faith. Mine will waver and transform as does anything philosophical. I merely lost my faith a while back, replaced it with something new. If he forgets his ultimate purpose, and I realize that I don’t have an ultimate purpose, and we work together to help those we know need it, then we can be mutually productive. The fact that he offered me his sister without her even knowing it, or likely even speaking English, is another issue that we’ll have to sort out after the marriage. Curry feast to follow.

  • Heavy Hands

    It is with a heavy heart that I write this today.

    My editor often comments that my writing is heavy-handed. Does this mean that my head is heavy-brained? Or does it mean that my hands are heavy-fingered? I usually don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, so I often have to ask him several times for several explanations. Those things you pick up in University that replace colloquialisms and make you sound smarter. If he just said, “That part sucks, that part sucks marginally less,” I’d get it.

    I just finished another Vonnegut book. I have read many, remember few, and still have more to go. He has the ability to write stories about humankind without being heavy-handed. Maybe it is because he seems to use short phrases the make the narrator seem like your quirky middle-school teacher.

    Hi ho.

    So it goes.

    And so on.

    Or maybe it is because he is smart enough to convey meaning in properly-placed, simple sentences. Or maybe he was a hard worker. I think he just got lucky.

    My heavy-handedness, which I see as the inability to subtly put meaning behind fiction that I am currently experimenting with, may stem from my tendency to over-think things. Or to keep things to myself. Or to think I’m smarter than I am. But let’s not get too heavy in the hand that offers psychological analysis, here.

    Recently while in the land of milk and honey and beer and tacos and large bridges and fog, the land of the originators of the fortune cookie, I got two fortune cookies. The first read, ‘Your future is rife with mediocrity.‘ The second; ‘You are to the opposite sex what “OFF” is to mosquitoes.‘ That seems somewhat heavy-handed. Like they took their hand, gripped a brick, and hit my face with it. At least it is the first fortune cookie that ‘hit the nail on the head’ (is that a colloquialism, or an idiom? I just taught myself both words. Self-education). I am still awaiting a sum of money that a fortune cookie promised me in high school. The second San Francisco fortune was maybe the most accurate. I am sitting on a stool wearing both pants and underpants and I can still clearly see my the hairs of my upper thigh through a hole in my crotch the size of a holiday ham. I am repellant to myself most days. Fortune cookies are always heavy-handed, even more so when they are pointing out your foibles.

    I guess maybe my editor just wants me to leave my overly philosophical way of analyzing things, my overly logical way of complaining about things, to this blog which has been rife with mediocrity for over six years, and is doomed to the same fate for six years to come. Because I am not eloquent enough to mask my complaints in literary metaphors. My hand is far too heavy for that. Heavy with the weight of the thousands of souls that have been lost from reading my writing.

    You are now soulless.

    Hi ho.

  • Apologia Pro Hippy Vita Sua

    The following short letter was written in response to a ‘Street Wear’ section in Prairie Dog Magazine that highlighted how grungy I am. The letter following that is my response.

    I’ve been reading your mag for years, even though I’m a staunch conservative; many aspects of it I love. Please though, stop featuring bums in your Street Wear section. These people are mostly wannabe hippies who work low-end jobs and are recognized for doing nothing more than working in a clothing store or coffee shop. Please start featuring people who contribute to society whether through the arts, science, education, politics…something! We all have the power to make a difference!

    No Name
    Presumed Reginan

    Dear Staunch Conservative,

    I feel that you best be more forgiving of these hippies that sell you your clothing, coffee, and meals. Although should I assume that you only shop at Walmart? (If you keep voting the way I assume you do there won’t be any immigrant labour to work there, so I don’t know who you expect to run your shops and sell you food—the elderly are dying off quickly. How staunch are you, exactly?) The fact that these hippies don’t have post-secondary educations, they sleep on the floor, they don’t have cell phones, they don’t eat meat, they don’t own cars, and they work at what was recently named by Prairie Dog Voters as ‘Regina’s Best New Store’, is obvious reason to assume they contribute nothing to society. Often I am too busy smoking illicit substances (Legalize, man!), playing bongos in Vic Park, or creating my own pachouli concoction to help out my community through volunteerism, or to actively take part in politics. I’d rather just lounge on my beanbag chair next to my hookah and watch documentaries about Buddhism. I do, however, agree that the ‘Style’ section is a waste of space. I have no style, you have no style. We live in Regina, man. People just stopped frosting their tips last week. But maybe we should include a business section in which you write a column suggesting how lowly shopkeeps could do something worthwhile with their lives (business degree, violin lessons, cure cancer, run for mayor), leaving their low-end jobs for the immigrants and those on welfare. We lower class citizens would truly appreciate the guidance.

    Peace and Love.
    Your Local Wannabe Hippy,

    Nic Olson

  • Blog Action Day 2012 – The Power of We


    In my career as an eligible voter I have celebrated no victories. Not a single representative I have voted for has been elected, not a single party I have supported has won. On the contrary, they have usually lost quite successfully. I am well aware that my beliefs and values do not reflect those of the majority, Balls of Rice and my voting record reflect that quite well. This has all led me to a familiar cynical place where I have found myself many times before, for many different life issues. The Underdog Syndrome, where whenever I cheer for the underdog, they are doomed to fail. Sports, nerdy gentlemen in a bar, elections. The principle is the same, and my support seems to kill it.

    Because of my lack of success in democracy, I have been debating whether it is worth my time to vote at all, not out of apathy or resignation, but as a form of protest. Because the voting system is off, and democracy is nothing more than choosing between egotistic businessmen who are often charismatic beings, but not exceptional people who love people—the wealthy who are already in positions of power, but want greater power to create greater wealth, and yes, I have a hard time not seeing all political leaders in that way. I still do believe that one human being should not and cannot properly represent an entire population, and that it is possible for there to be order and progress with no single person in charge. I’m still stuck on this one, but until I decide, I will continue to vote.

    Then I came to understand protest. Dissent. The Occupy Movement, which many see as a futile collection of hippies, bums, and anarchists who decided to join together in several groups around the world to be able to collect welfare and charity more easily. A group of undemocratic urchins who, if they really cared about the system, would pull themselves out of the mire and contribute to society in a pragmatic, businesslike way. And this is likely why it resonated. Groups of likeminded people gathered to express their dissatisfaction with the structure of the system, the inequality and corruption. My ability to relate to such a movement likely came from my upbringing and affinity with the punk scene. Coming together in hundreds of different communities with no clear goal apart from stoking the young flames of revolt. Disapproval shown in groups of people physically gathering together. It felt right.

    Despite the overly utopian seeming title of this year’s Blog Action Day, I have grown to understand the power of groups of people that come together with dissent, goals, and hope in common. The more I see the importance of participating in politics, the more I see that this means something greater than simply voting when an election is called. Although I will likely never in my lifetime see someone I voted for in a position of power, I can rest comfortably knowing that other actions can be taken. That groups of people outside of the realm of electoral politics can change policy, and are often necessary to do so. Regardless of whether or not my vote will ever be on the winning side or not, it is evident that the solidarity between groups of people is equally as important as being politically active. A group of people with a common goal may not make an obvious difference, but it always has the power to make a significant one.

    When the cops and the courts refuse to confess the sins of the few, what is there left to do? The answer’s there right before your eyes: rise.

    –Propagandhi, Note to Self, Failed States

  • The Fury of the Dispossessed

    When I’m excited, I ride my bicycle very fast. After a day that lacks progress, one that sees no new knowledge or discovery, I bicycle home like a grandmother on a cruiser bike. Most days, average days, I ride home in the middle of my three gears, head up and feet wide. Today after starting a new job, and after a lecture by one of the greats, I biked home on the highest gear, bouncing on my low front tire, more excited than I’ve been in a long time to finally feel, for once in years, that I am where I am supposed to be.

    Chris Hedges, journalist and intellectual, lectured at the University of Regina. The writer that I will forever aspire to be, the thinker that I will undoubtedly never become, gave a rousing account of how we came to where we are now, stuck in an “inverted totalitarianism” where we are ruled by the faceless being of corporate capitalism. Where the cannibalization of nature exists for straight profit and greed. He spoke of how after World War I we were placed into the “psychosis of permanent war” where the masses would offer up their own slavery, and how we have now reached an age of the moral nihilist. (I am essentially just listing my notes in sentence form.) We have reached a point where food, water, air, and human beings themselves are being treated and sold as commodities and this has built a quality of self-annihilation.

    When he spoke of “sacrifice zones,” the places that were abandoned by unbridled capitalism, left in disrepair and a humiliating culture of dependency after being used and left behind because of their lack of monetary worth, I thought of Saskatchewan in fifty years. A place where natural resources are plentiful and long term thought is not. Accelerated environmental review processes that inhibit the ability for proper research and long-term preparedness have been put into place while Saskatchewan is in its infancy of exploiting these resources. I envisioned ghost towns, alien landscapes after plundering the earth and failed nature reclamation projects. I saw people abandoned by the elite that they once, for some reason, loved and trusted. I could see the future because of what has happened in other parts of North America. The current policy makers refuse or are unable to see what Hedges has shared in his latest book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, and because of the propaganda of the elite, the people are often unable to see it either.

    One might ask how I could be so excited, riding home banging my head with a bike-lane-wide grin after a night of being pummelled with the desperately depressing truths that we find ourselves facing. All of Hedges books that I have read deal with these deflating facts, hundreds of pages of them, but always end in a short breath of hope that the elite will fall. I cycled home feeling like I’ve finally found even a small piece of a greater purpose, directly assisting those the system left behind. Feeling like I’ve found the inspiration and motivation to create, to think, to encourage others to think, and to practice dissent. Knowing that the “fury of the dispossessed” can eventually bring enough fear into those mediocre in positions of power, and will see reform because of it. “The formal systems of power are no longer capable of reform,” he said. We need acts of resistance. This excites me.

    “You can’t use the word “hope” if you don’t carry out acts of resistance…But we have a moral obligation to the world the corporate state is bequeathing to our children. We have betrayed their future. At least that generation will be able to look back on those of us, hopefully their parents, and say that they tried, even if we fail. Not to try is to be complicit in what is happening.”

    -Hedges in Katherine Norton’s article.

    Someday, as I told my father, I hope to be smart enough to be able to ask a coherent question at a lecture to a man such as Hedges. Instead, for now, I will continue to skim off of his brilliant works to make mine look greater than they are. But I’m trying, and I guess you have to try.

    For more Hedges go here, for more Balls of Rice articles that ride on the coattails of Hedges go here.

  • The Dumbening

    If you aren’t getting smarter, you’re getting dumber. There is no in-between. There isn’t a place where you sit content with the exact amount of knowledge that you have, where you remember it all and where it feels good. You will forget the things you’ve learnt unless you continue to use them. If you continue to use them, you can continue to learn new things that relate to the things you already know. If you don’t try to learn more, you are getting dumber. Getting dumber is easy, maybe easier than anything else in the world.

    The last month I got dumber. I didn’t read. I didn’t write. I didn’t think. I drank. Likely no more than an average man of my age, but more than what I usually do. I went to watch my brother’s band at The Fez in Saskatoon, bussing both there and back on the STC. In the true spirit of youth, camaraderie, and a sense of defeatism, I drank too much. The bus ride home consisted of a nap, but the work day consisted of simple profit margin calculations that trudged in my brain like graduate-school mathematics. Like rubber boots in a foot of mud. Someone told me that alcoholism inhibits the ability to learn new things. You can function properly, like a normal human being, but you cannot progress. You plateau, and then you get dumber.

    Since I am not attending a place of ‘higher learning,’ I force myself to learn on my own. I read as often as I can. I write when I’m not reading. I think of reading and writing when I cannot do either. I consider these as study, not as leisure. I watch as little television as possible. I attempt to regulate my time spent in front of a screen. I take notes. I write down quotes. If I don’t do these things, I am not getting smarter, and if that is the case, we know what is happening. Then I get depressed. I try to self-educate. Smart men were taught by smart men. Smarter men taught themselves.

    But when you can’t teach yourself because you are too busy trying to enjoy yourself, or forget the past, or be social, you get dumber. You may make more friends, more inebriated memories, more checks off of the list of movies you need to watch, but your brain is rotting into a sludge that is of no use other than feeding and fattening livestock.

    I am slowly pulling myself back together from a month of self-pity, drink, and becoming dumber. It didn’t work out. I cleaned, I baked, I did laundry, and I now sit in a beanbag chair. The greatest minds of all were nurtured in beanbag chairs, so this is where I begin.

  • Realistic Ideas

    I was pretty damn close. I don’t repair other people’s shoes, but I sell them. And I repair my own sometimes. And up until fairly recently, I inhabited my parent’s basement. It has almost been ten years since I wrote that in preparation for my Grade Nine Farewell, looking forward to the horny days of high school, when I would fool the masses into thinking I’d amount to something.

    I mean, at least I was realistic. However I know for a fact that my Grade Nine graduating class includes several doctors, dentists, optometrists, teenage pregnancies and rich suburban lifestyles, and they likely wrote exactly that on their one powerpoint slide at our Farewell. I mean, it is hard not to be realistic when you live in a rich ‘bedroom community’ of a booming city, especially when your position in life and your family’s affluence could give you anything you wanted. Such was the White City way.

    If it is that simple to predict what life will be like in ten years, and if my prediction has any weight on what actually happens, it looks like I will indeed be that long-haired dude that lives in your back alley under the pile of old plywood that the city won’t collect. That jaded and stubborn ass-of-a-man that always talks about how he could’ve been earning six figures a year but didn’t want to sell out to the man, then the booze got ahold of him.

    Six years ago today, when I started this pathetic attempt at expression originally called ‘Partying since 1988’ and more recently but no less childishly named ‘Balls of Rice,’ I expected to end up being an Engineer by now, this blog simply as an outlet to stumble through as I learned my maths and sciences. Instead, this blog nurtured a trade that I have grown to love, and instead, I am unable to get a job distributing food and washing dishes because of my lack of experience in anything that apparently matters.

    I’ve often lamented at my life of a well-to-do Canadian, with opportunity bowing to me, getting essentially everything I’d ever tried for, and now that I got what I wanted in the form of not getting what I applied for, it was the wrong time.

    I picked beets and carrots today at the garden. Good carrots. One great carrot, photo worthy and sweet. Sitting in the vinyl chair and chewing on carrots still covered in dirt I watched cream-coloured butterflies rise and fall. I used to think those were moths, simply because they hadn’t the pattern of the Monarch. But I didn’t realize the difference between the flight of a butterfly and that of their night-dwelling cousins. Moths with the straggly bearded bodies, the combative flight patterns, the ability to strike unwarranted fear into humans four-thousand times the size. Moths are moths and butterflies aren’t, and if they were silly enough to sit in the cocoon thinking they could come out as whatever they wished, then I feel sorry for them. And us.

    I obviously knew that I’d be a shoe repairman. I was as realistic as a caterpillar, just waiting for his day.

  • My Musk

    Like a vanilla plant soaked in coconut oils growing on an island of lilacs, crop dusted with the scent of a million ripe raspberries. That is my scent sample.

    I have somehow fallen into writing those self-righteous pieces where I take an already impressively dull, regular life occurrence and attempt a subtle philosophical turn that only adds to the already established monotony in hopes that it will make you think for several days about the dire situation we as human beings find ourselves in.

    I’m tired of that shit.

    So today I will talk about summer musk, opposing all of my instincts that tell me if I want a girl to talk to me ever again, then I will avoid this. But after five years of self-deprecating, self-disgusting posts, it would be irresponsible of me to stop now.

    Musk is more than just a moist underarm. I hosted a few CouchSurfers last night. One of the free-spirited girls, a very sweet and bubbly traveller from Montreal, had unshaven armpits. I noticed. And for whatever reason I thought about it. I still am thinking about it. The sight of curly rough hair immediately brings about thoughts of unfortunate scents, when, at least my scientist brother told me, hair actually prevents the accumulation of sour smells, which is why it is found where it is found. The wonders of body hair.

    I can often be found pedalling down Victoria Avenue with my arms spread wide, my free Large t-shirt flapping wildly off of my ever-thinning body. Airing it all out. My musk might be broken down into the following parts: One part bonfire smoke from a week straight of evening fires, one part garlic from cooking garlic-heavy vegan food, one part human sweat, one part vegan and aluminum-free deodorant, one part basement mustiness, one part woodsman. These parts sum up into a salt-and-vinegar chip, sharp and sweet tomato plant, fishing on a Southern Saskatchewan lake, kind of not-entirely-unpleasant scent that characterizes myself.

    Someone once told me that any artificial raspberry flavouring comes from the anal glands of a beaver. Scents and flavours, same thing.

    Maybe Old Spice and the other chemical concoctions that call themselves colognes should start a line of scents from everyday men like myself. Mine could be called Basement Breath, with subtle bouquets of dumpster and old shoe. It could also be called Watertrash Willow Whisper, or Beaver Asshole Bold, or Greasy Glacier Mist.

    I have encountered several people who have very distinct and evident scents. These scents are always pleasant, like a subtle calling card sent directly to the nose. I have never been able to tell me if this is an artificial, conscious-decision of a scent or if it is rather a physical attribute to the gallantry of a man or loveliness of a woman. A pheromonal release that occurs at all times, especially in times of stress, sexual attraction or bad stomach illness. I am just discovering my own. I am finding myself as a person in the same way that I am finding my musk. I am finding my musk in the same way a beaver finds proper logs and trees for his huts and damns; chewing on everything, working hard with no time for bathing, and secreting a fruit-flavoured scent out of my rectal area.

    My musk.

  • Creating the bean sandwich.

    If I were writing an ‘About Me’ for one more shitty social network, using the same technique as a sixth-grade exercise where you wrote your favourite food, your greatest fears and a story about what makes you special, I would say that I make an excellent, and creative sandwich. That I like to create new things in the kitchen. That it is freeing for me. Like a lie on a resume I would flower up the language to make me seem greater than I was. I’d choose a photo that captured my good side, the fuller beard, the less-gapped teeth, and use it as my profile picture. When the entire truth is, my creativity when it comes to sandwiches has been caused by nothing more than using what I’ve got. I stopped eating meat and cheese, so naturally cucumber and carrot became a sandwich staple. People call me nuts. I run out of cucumber, and the garden is producing beans, it only seems logical to make a raw green bean and carrot sandwich, no condiments. More delicious than you may ever know.

    And in continuing my fifth-grade activity I would list my greatest fears. I remember in eighth grade, when this same exercise was slightly modified into the format of a poem, I wrote one of my greatest fears being knives. In parent-teacher interviews, Mrs. Dudley lauded my creativity and comic nature. Recently, upon listening to an old song by the Weakerthans, I quickly noticed that my greatest fear was subconsciously stolen from lyricist John K. Samson. Creativity foiled once again. If I were to be honest in these fine days of the present, my greatest fears constantly renew themselves. Social situations. Forever loneliness. Death. In a repeat cycle. In grade eight my fears likely included unwanted mid-day boners and drunk high school kids.

    In sixth grade when being introduced to the newest band teacher, Mrs. Verity, we played an icebreaking game. We were to write down one thing that no one knew about us, and write it on a small piece of folded paper. She was to pick the papers out of a hat, or out of a saxophone horn or something, and guess which student wrote which original fact about themselves. I wrote, “I plan to grow a six-foot pink afro.” She didn’t guess it was me, but the students knew exactly who wrote it. Creativity proven useless once again. I can’t think of a thing that makes me special because of cynicism. Because I don’t think there is one. Out there, there’s a million WordPress sites spilling the exact same confused rhetoric, a million disillusioned kids tired of the same old bullshit, a million morons who think they have something special to say, when it’s simply not true.

    If ever it comes to the point that I become famous for making popular the bean sandwich, and people ask me how I ever came up with it, or if my bean sandwich restaurant franchise has an ‘About’ section on its corporate-run website, then I will copy and paste this, and it will spell it out for the masses, just like I was writing for my grade six teacher or creating another pseudo-personality on a soulless internet domain, that I wasn’t creative for creativity’s sake, I was creative because I had no choice. I was creative out of necessity.

Is this your new site? Log in to activate admin features and dismiss this message
Log In