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My Favourite Word

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What is your favourite word? I’ll tell you mine. I like words. Actually I love them. Catch me when we’re talking in person forgetting what you said because I was watching your mouth do its thing. If you think about it, your lips are the LAST check on your thoughts. The final governor before you put your voice out there. Thats why cowards love the internet. They can clickety-clack stupid things on the keyboard without saying them and the likelihood of getting knocked out drops exponentially. Once I was working at some bar and this nice young lady barked at me that she had “VIP” privileges. I furrowed my brow and politely asked, “What does VIP stand for?” Half way through the word ‘IMPORTANT’ her eyes sort of died. Like a light went out when she realized how dumb she sounded.

So do this: IF YOU CAN BREATHE right now, shove air up and out your chest. Let it bounce around and scratch past your vocal cords. You are opening and shutting your throat like a valve, and your lips are working with your tongue against your teeth, and the roof of your mouth to regulate the delivery. All these tools and muscles work together to ensure what comes out of your mouth isn’t just a scream. Unless you want to scream. You say what you want to say. I mean obviously the brain is involved here but if we get into that we’re gonna get into the disconnection between the two and that is not what this is about. So air, throat, tongue lips. A real team effort that we don’t often think about. Words are like this puzzle for me, written or spoken. I tried to explain to my 8 year old the other day, how I ‘see’ words when I close my eyes. “BULLSHIT” she bellowed. She looked at me quizzically and I told her that I see words spin around when I close my eyes or when I’m half asleep. You might see them too. These words, they couple and uncouple and drift apart and around and back together on axis like double DNA helices in space. Letters drift apart on Scrabble tiles, then come back together to form words or phrases that make no sense lain out. In my mind they form fully coherent sentences, conversations and delightful little turns-of-phrase that I see myself speaking in a big hall or at an event and everyone there just understands. When I see this storm of characters, I know just what to do. I know how to arrange them. It is not something I’ve ever told anyone but her. I’m forty-eight. She’s just now learned about this thing I’ve had all my life and both of us are equally unclear on how it all works. She then asks me, like a kid should, “What’s your favourite word?” I told her that I like “infected”, when the stress is on the ‘FEC’. You hear that and you’re like, “EEEEW! PUS!” “Subterfuge” is another one that I love. It is just so a rich a word. Its hard to fit into your day-to-day. If you don’t know it, subterfuge is like, okay its 1940’s Germany. A girl from the village walks past the colonel’s window every day to and from picking flowers. She sees him and smiles. He smiles back. Weeks and months pass, and, after a hundred or so nights in his bed, she’s gathered all the info she can. He trusts her. She is a part of his life. Not fully, but one he looks forward to. One he would rather not be without. While he is snoring his fucking nazi snores she puts a letter opener in his fucking nazi throat, slips out of his nazi bed down his nazi stairs and out the cellar door off into the night. The flowers. The smile. The walk and the weeks and the months, that’s subterfuge. My favourite word, though, by far, is “Rebellion”.

You should say it out loud right now. If you’re gonna shout it, then spit the ‘B’ when you shout it. If you whisper it (I know the kids are sleeping) leave some saliva on your bottom lip. Rebellion. Doesn’t it make your heart sing? It’s like the peal of a great bell in the centre of town. If the word gives you pause, or even frightens you, well you MAY be on the wrong side of all of this. If you’re in the middle, you gotta pick a side, here. C’mon. It’s time. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need you on my team for this one. I’ve come this far without you. YOU need you. Rebellion. I could look it up on the internet dot com but I don’t need to. The word ‘rebellion’ is an African word. It is an Algonquin and an Arapahoe word. It is Russian. It’s a Jewish and its a Polish word. A Somali word. Rebellion is a Canadian word, too. It is, and make no mistake about it and never, ever let them tell you otherwise, “rebellion” is an American word. I’m not sure what your news or your social media feeds or your LIFE is full of right now, but mine are full of Rebellion, and it is glorious.

No Kings

Magic Part I

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My brain sees it as this wild amalgamation of 80’s movies and cartoon machismo, but I was twelve years old at Regina beach one day, and this happened.

Radios were blasted. Greasy bags of salty, salty fries were wolfed. Car tires screeched their complaints. Cigarettes jutted out from under many a high school moustache. Bikini’s were worn and sun dappled cheeks sweat under a prairie sun. Breasts moved and shifted in space independent of their owners and absolutely none of it had anything to do with me. The wind and winter snow in Saskatchewan would leave scars across the land were it not frozen solid. That gets all the press, but a summer day on this square patch of land smack in the centre of the country, it is fucking KILN-like, kid.

Ok, Regina Beach. This sore thumb of a twelve year old black kid on this main drag type thing. Amid the din of the cars and kids to my left and the BLEEP BLOOP BLEEP of an arcade on my right, the throngs on the beach ahead, I’m standing there in orange and yellow “Cougar” sneakers and red gym shorts. There’s an untamed afro on my head. I don’t have any pimples yet but they’re in the mail. I’m wearing a union jack sleeveless shirt because of Joe Elliott and a RED VELCRO WALLET on my WRIST that MOM got me so I don’t LOSE my MONEY ‘cause “I’d LOSE my friggin’ HEAD if it wasn’t SCREWED ON”. God help me I don’t know who the fuck I am (who would, in this get up?) or what I’m supposed to be doing. There are girls everywhere and I have exactly what I am supposed to have right now, and that is all the charm and style of a twelve year old with a RED VELCRO WALLET on one wrist and a calculator watch on the other. I move to the arcade just as a bunch of high schoolers pour out the door and hang right in front of it, blocking my entrance. Curses! I don’t wanna get beat up or have illegal drugs pushed on me by these obviously illegal drug pushers. I mean, JEAN VESTS? Criminals, gotta be. I move off of the sidewalk to go around them I HAVE NO DESTINATION IN MIND IM MAKING IT UP AS I GO ALONG and just praying nobody asks me what I’m doing ‘cause I would turn to them and scream, scream that I don’t know. Two banana boards under the feet of more teens whip out and scare me back onto the sidewalk. I move past the arcade boys and walk and Oh god I’m heading beach ward and what the fuck am I gonna do there and this blue Camaro comes out from between two buildings. Just misses plowing into our hero. A late reaction on the brakes leaves the car half in the road and half in whatever alley or driveway it had come from. A car full of girls. Jesus. Just what I needed. Laughter from the back and the driver, a blond girl, hadda be eighteen, has her left hand on the wheel. Passenger seat girl hunches down to get a look like you do when your’e in that position. There is beer in her lap. The driver is blond and her hair is feathery feathered, the style at that time. She’s wearing these mirrored sunglasses and lipstick to match her red bikini top. There is this guitar riff blasting from the car radio and I’ve never heard anything like it. Like a stomping riff with this punchy keyboard holding it aloft. I’m standing flat-footed, directly in front of the drivers side door and I see an image of a complete dork reflected in her shades. Lord. Just then out of the speakers of this Camaro, a voice that I now know to be Ric Ocasek’s, drools the words “Summer, Summer, Summer… It turns me up side down…” Laughter from the back seat and the driver, like some woman out of time, looks me up and down. Left hand on the wheel her right hand comes up from the shifter or whatever and pulls down her sunglasses. The words ribbon out from between her lips. “Hey peck. You’re kinda cute.”, she breathes. Like a starlet might.
Ok so now there is this electricity shoots out from the centre of my chest. My throat closes and my head swims and my ears are hot. This jolt takes forever to reach my extremities, but it all happens in a heartbeat and all of my fingers are numb and If my knees buckled i don’t know, cause I couldn’t feel my legs. I don’t think they buckled. The shock collapses back into my chest, then sinks down to my groin, bouncing around in my tighty-whities where it remains to this day. She smiles. My mouth is agape. Probably have a lil boner at this point. Tires crunch gravel, bump over the curb and off they went. There I stood in that moment, in their rear view mirror. And it was something man. It was fucking Magic.

I think about her sometimes, that faceless beauty. Where she is or what she’s doing or if I heard her correctly and If I did, what she meant. I don’t know what a peck is but that day, that moment, I was one.

The truth of this all is that it was a Saturday night, Sept. 14th, I spent drawing pictures and listening to music with the headphones up high sipping a little rum. I mean I’m fucking middle aged, man. And that song came on. “Magic”, I mean. And I was brought back to that day at the beach. Do you want to know how I know it wasn’t the hour or the rum or rain on the window brought me back? I know because hearing “Magic” always brings me back to that day, that moment on the sidewalk, every time. And at or about 1:30 am I swore to myself that if Ric Ocasek ever passed away, I would write about what that song means to me, where it takes me and how wonderful it makes me feel. I’d write about how that woman and that song to me are timeless. I’d write about how at that point in a boy’s life, they stoked all the wonder and hope and fear a boy could have. And most importantly, I’d tell you that there are some sounds in that song, some interminable moments that I believe are mine alone. Sounds that make me close my eyes ‘cause they break my heart every time I hear them. The next afternoon the news tells me he is gone, at 75 so thats what you just read.

Let It Sit.

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I have a lazy bone and it all the fault of advertising. I love it when the instructions for doing something I didn’t want to do in the first place tell me to ‘let sit’. I can’t wait to get to that step. Its usually right after spraying a stain or wiping something. As a bachelor, on an annual trip for cleaning supplies I’d look for for two things on a bottle of solvent;  a) multi-surface and b) insistent that you let it sit or soak after a good spraying. Those ads that suggest that there is an team of molecules or a navy of small anthropomorphic brushes happily and eagerly doing the work for you can be real appealing.

Scrub

With the hive-mind of the scrubbers cleaning for you, pee and poo don’t stand a chance!

What would your mouth be today without yesterday’s multiracial platoon of CREST ARMY protecting your teeth from the Cavity Creeps? (NEW CREST GE-el! NEW CREST GE-el!)  Thank God they’ve bent the spout for the toilet spray or I’d never be able to get at that grime myself! “Attack, cleaning molecules, ATTAAAACK!” Often I’ll forget to go back and wipe the can down after blasting a cursory spray under the rim of the bowl ’cause, you know, I’m on to other things. Hm. I’m past the 10 minute mark.Guess I’ll give it another blast and wait another 10 minutes. I AM CREATING TIME. When cooking a meal, after heating and stirring we’re often told to ‘let it sit’ if it happens to be a particularly rich or creamy sauce. My love for pasta is borne of that interim phase where I stir the noodles in and I can let the pot sit on its own, the boil doing the work for me. I once drew a diagram of a self-stirring spaghetti pot. It had a cover with louvers and ball bearings around the rim with a main axle that spun and swirled the noodles. It died on the drawing board. Lazy, yes, but the gumption to draw it! I like that time when you let whatever it is sit and you can do something else. So do most. There is a chain of events that you have set in motion and now it is time to sit back and let whatever do its thing.

8. Repeat step 5 forever

There is no letting anything sit mowing the lawn. You can stop halfway but the only thing actually happening is the grass you haven’t cut yet is growing, so it behooves a person to speed the plow. You go until its done. Washing the car? Nope. Keep wiping and scrubbing and buffing and vacuuming until its done. Pimple on the end of your dink? It will not take care of itself. I mean it might just… Oh forget it. One of my favorite bits by a comic is Larry Miller’s relationship advice, where he likens a bad relationship to spoiled milk. ‘Snif-snif… This milk’s sour!. Shrug. Maybe it’ll be better tomorrow…” Certain things you just can’t leave sit. Others, however…

I happened upon a yoga site not long ago. Part of the meditation instructions were, “Let yourself sit upright with the quiet dignity of a king or a queen.” Well you can’t fuck with that. Its ZEN! It makes things better. I’ll try to appeal to the meat and potatoes set. Any instructions on cooking a steak suggest that after removing the slab of cow from the heat source, do not immediately tear into it you fool. It is said that you should rest it. Plate it. Let the juices roil and blood course through the beef. Mmm. Sure. I’ve got time to take care of other things, like doing nothing or changing the channel or looking for the controller. Let it sit. Not your bag? Paul McCartney sang ‘Let It Be’. Did he mean let it happen or did he mean leave it alone? After listening to the song for 40 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that he means both.

We’re told letting things sit is an important part of getting things done as long as there is some magic catalyst doing work while you sit back and let it all happen. That tingling sensation on half of your scalp when one part has Head & Shoulders, the other part is the LEADING BRAND. Hopefully your hangover is being eroded by Gatorade’s pixelated electrolytes. If you were forced into the unjust duty/punishment of dishes like my brothers and I were when we were kids, often you’d come to a particularly gunky pot or casserole dish. Cheese baked on to the porcelain. Never a clearer bell was rung than my mother saying “Let that sit”. A peal that rang through the house and sent us scattering and diving into a pile of LEGOs in front of the TV. A bell that said I can forget about this dish and dishes for the rest of my entire life. Until casserole night that is, when the whole sordid scene would play itself out all over again. What a living hell my childhood was. Such pain. It’ll probably take care of itself.

I have to pick and choose what I’ll let sit. If you’ve warm blood coursing through your veins right now, it’s likely you are letting something fester. *downloads another productivity app he’ll never use* Is it your taxes? Your relationship? Is it finding another job? Maybe you can make a change right now. Maybe not. Maybe its something as simple as letting the dog out or doing the vacuuming. Hate vacuuming? Hey, have I got the tool for you!

Are You Ready for Kids?

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Its early. The kid and I are in our PJs. Quiet wood surrounds us both in the kitchen while morning sun blazes through the window on to her face. “Are you making a mess?”, I inquire. A mouthful of yogurt and all is silent save for The Cowboy Junkies Sweet Jane on the radio. She answers, “Yep” and I start to cry because of a beauty that would render an atheist silent on the subject of angels. That, and the gnawing, heartsick suggestion that I would ever be without her. Friend, nobody is ready for that.Image

High Rumble

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Test results. The doctor will see me now. I wait in the room with my back to the door, gazing out the window like they do in the movies. A high rumble outside as two skaters wend through the cars in the parking lot below. Muffled conversation and shuffling papers in the hallway outside, the footsteps at the door. My hands are behind my back. Clickety-clack outside and yaaawn goes the door behind me. I turn. “Hey Doc”, I say, just like they do in the movies.
“I’ve got to tell you,” he says, before we sit. “My two sons were pretty impressed when we left the restaurant that day and they saw you skateboarding in the parking lot.” He was probably concerned about my mental health that day, months ago, when he’d seen me standing stone-faced staring down the barrel of a 6 foot gap. His car horn had awoken me from my dream, wherein I’d attempted the leap. “You don’t see many forty year olds skating…”, he continued. I know,” I say, “I’ve looked.” We laugh and joke and wear the conversation down. Chips and ribbons of talk fall away. They litter the floor until all that is left are the test results. A tale lain in form beneath that wood since before I was born.

I’d sleep and dream. How to flip, lean, bend and land. I would see skate tricks in my sleep. Its like anything else, I’m sure. The solution to any niggling problem can come to a young engineering student in his sleep. I would wake, alert and armed with fuzzy memories of things I’d seen myself doing in a nocturnal sesh. I learned there, that it’s not just your feet. The board is not the variable, you are. The board is static. It is going to be there whether you are or not. It will sit in your garage or hang on your wall unless acted upon by you, the unstoppable force. So I was saying, it’s not just how your feet work with the board, but your back. Your balls. Your knees, shoulders and your arms and your elbows and your wrists and your fingers and your fucking tongue. Your body is a whip that needs to lash just right and make this piece of wood with wheels and steel come back to you. You’ve got to get it to agree with you (the leap of faith that the ollie is). Make suggestions and get the wood to say, ‘yeah, I could see myself coming back your way…’ and then convince it to do just that in the air above wet stairs under sodium lights in the middle of the night. STOMP. Cheers. God DAMN. They may have thrown the winning touchdown or finger-blasted the prom queen but we, after eleven (yes) hours of skate sweat and a miles of road rash from innumerable spots and that handrail we could not conquer… When we finally stomp that gap by the Dairy Queen, son, we go home and we’re dirty and we sleep like champions ought to. Remember that?

Guys
In the summer of the year of our Lord nineteen eighty-five I wake up. Bolt upright and all that. I stretch but I don’t need to. I’m a young man. Blessed and dressed in whatever. I don’t even have to eat anything if I don’t want to. I head to the garage and  get on my skateboard. I feel it’s shape accepting me. My shoes find their groove. I rock it back and forth to get my legs while the grommets complain. God but I’m up early. Its cool but I’ll warm up. It smells like tools in here, oiled and shiny. The garage door slides up, a rhombus of morning light yawns across a cement floor that is so clean it looks soft. I wait to press the button again and do the Indiana Jones. That first jump on the deck. Drag the tail for two or three stutter-steps. The lean of a lean body in space. Wheels touch pavement and the sound is a SHOUT.
May I have your attention please?
Water from a hose wavers as a neighbor turns to see where the gunshot came from.
Two dogs on either side of the street swivel their heads in my direction, primed.
A child cries (Oh now its ‘The Untouchables” — I’ll dial it back ).
Okay, a child doesn’t cry but a driver honks at me ’cause I’m on a skateboard and clearly a bad person. I spill out onto the street.

For me it was the speed. The longest, biggest stride on the smoothest asphalt. A teenaged Vitruvian. One foot on this platform, arm forward and back leg out I am the perfect specimen. Fast. Inside the houses I surf by, the families, my sound is like steel-on-steel going nine-oh in the AY EM. An ungodly aural attack, levied on them by what must be a drool-caked, drugged-out punk rock hooligan fucking with the status-quo! Here, heartless retrospect sneers, looks down it’s nose at me and tells me that I was probably the worst dressed skater, nay, teenager in the world. No style. Shorts that were too short. Ankle socks w/yellow Chuck Taylors and probably still wearing whatever shirt my mother had left out. An untamed Afro, and glasses like Chief Brody. But I felt like Batman.

VS

This does not matter. My heart sings and I get it all. That whole of the meat of that Kick/Push. At speed, on deck, prairie winds whip at me and my t-shirt sounds like a flag. I am the captain of some small  flying machine screaming low in restricted airspace and NO CLEARANCE. I sound like a TIE Fighter. That’s what I hear. I’m skating and I’m Superman and Spider-Man and Steve Caballero and the kink my neck when I howl by. I am a pilot. The weight and balance I commit ensures that, for now, a curb or tiny rock can’t end this flight and I’m alone two and one-half inches above the planet and I’m reborn every time I get on this thing…

The sun is up and out. I Kick/Push and ollie a curb. Carve the inclined driveway, if I’m so inclined. Pop over (through) the fledgling bush separating two other driveways and ollie, BAM! on back down. Rough asphalt here for a half block stretch where the empty lot opens up… No driveways just kTAK kTAK kTAK picking up speed and ’round the bend past Gibson’s place and now I’m warm. The sun I’ve got a lifetime to be under wobbles like a spinning dime and I slide around that corner and there are no phones and geez I hope my friend is home and Kick/Push into a rock grind and at any other time in my life on my back in the street is a bad thing. Here, it is the cost of doing business. I lay there laughing at the wanna be scar on my skin. My elastic, electric skin. (“JESUS!, Mother would say. “What happened to your legs?” I’d have to look to see what she was talking about, because I have a scar, but I don’t remember getting hurt — because it didn’t hurt). Get up/Stand up and keep rolling and I turn up your driveway, pop my board and I’m at  your parent’s door ’cause let’s go skate, MacDonald.

I ring the bell and my back is to the door, just like they do in the movies and thank God you’re home, ’cause who would push me? You’ve got a piece of peanut-buttered toast in your mouth and you don’t even really look me in the eye when you come to the door. You lean out, take a manic glance at the sky behind me (it might rain today but better to be at a spot and need shelter than to never have made the trip), then at your own feet. In that time you have cleared the busy schedule that an adolescent boy has. “Cool.” you say and slam the door. I wait a moment and hear the whirr of the garage door. Open. Click. Closing. Whirr. Indiana Jones. Gravity rolls me backwards, I one-eighty then you and I meet and pick up speed down the driveway. We look west like a pair of kings with meadows of concrete to lord over.

Kick/Push.

Five  hours and a thousand laughs later we’re in a back yard across town at the top of a ramp with only a little more flat than vert. What neighbourhood is this? We don’t even know these guys. In the back alley, so, like, RIGHT THERE, a dust cloud passes and a big Pontiac slows in the noonday sun. Tires crunch on gravel. More dudes. My deck hangs out into space over a jagged canyon made of stolen wood. Dark screwheads pepper the landscape below. Bent nails drool with tetanus. Toothy slivers snarl from corners of de-laminated plywood that yawns at the seams. A wild sickness in my heart. And Abandon. Drop in.

Backyard

A ramp like this, a yard like this, everything is pretty tight, transition wise. You’ve got to think three tricks ahead. That or improv. Ramp sucks. Ramp rules. Didn’t matter. We ride this kitchen sink for 3 hours until

my eyes water from going so fast. Tilting through town on a hill that drops 2000 feet in nine kilometers and when you are done you are at the bottom of it in another town. We are already moving pretty good. Ha Ha! The Litigators are battling gravity with big, fat, buttery slides that sound like Sasquatch ululations to the townsfolk below. Eight boys bark at the moon with no lights or helmets and I’ll be damned if one of us isn’t rattling hard, handling this business in a shopping cart. Cunningham. Its a dark and wide and windy vehicle-ridden death-race moving at speeds somebody clocked once but it doesn’t matter. Seventy-something-or-other. Monster hill in the

Dark and I roll at speed towards a double-set of stairs in front of a school somewhere in Yukon Territory. I wanna lift up sooner so I’ve got enough space to brace for the ollie over the second set. You wanna just make the first set. I need enough space, I stick it and I think I’ve got enough space and it actually turns out that I actually don’t actually have enough space and my front wheels dip and I twist with the might of a man in a boy’s body and it isn’t enough, actually. My tailbone hits every one of the six steps, lovingly overbuilt by contractors, with steel edges and tread plates that help regular humans deal with going UP these things in an arctic winter. I am down in the summer. Bad back, probably forever, and a sprained ankle. I remove my sock and tie it around that bad ankle to keep the swelling down. Keep skating and end up thinking, despite the slams and being kicked out of places, what fun this is and that

half of this shit, maybe more, but at least half of this shit was just being with you, friend. Crowding into Gaffney’s house when a new skate vid came in the mail. That’s right. We sent away. Maps to the skaters homes. Together we breathed in an ionic air. Autumnal winds carried our frozen breath above plywood monolith. We chilled on well-worn curb. Dined heartily at 7-11. Joked jokes. Jumped ramps. Sped with speed. The Lit-Mob and the run that is its namesake still snakes through the trees. When I was with you the high rumble and the roar and the rolling shout of us was absolutely gorgeous. We stormed beaches of boredom, a squadron of Super Weirdo Solidarity wrapped in the flag of some teenaged country. I’ve never felt more inside than being on the outside with you, brother. You marginalized four wheeled fuckhead, thank you if you rode with me. Even if you were just a knowing rogue nodding your as we slipped by each each other, slung low, in those salty Peter Pan days before any of us were ever on TV. Those times are never far from my heart. If you are reading this, then we may have ridden a road or a ramp together. Shared long shadows stabbing the light in some loading dock. Carved the teeth of Seven-Mile Dam. I don’t know what you are doing today but I am thinking of you as I roll around this parking garage, ALL’s “She’s My Ex” blasting in my ears.

The test thing was never a big deal. I just needed a lead in to make it seem serious like they do in the movies. My doctor says I’m doing fine and I should keep exercising. He’s a good guy and we joke around. He says I’m in great shape and that my father has left me a gift. High cholesterol. It could be worse. We stand and shake hands. “You know,  you’re not fifteen anymore.”, he says with a smile.

Why wild my heart then, when I hear that high rumble?