Let’s Straighten a Few Things Out.

by Nic Olson


The first day of the rest of my life has finally arrived. Coming June 18th I’ll no longer be the owner of this monstrous Muppet nose that inhibits fresh air from being cleaned by my nose hairs and entering my lungs. No longer will I wake up with a mouth drier than a camel’s ass, caused by the ever flowing fountain that is my drooling mouth. Nose job, June 18th. If you didn’t know, someday between the age of eight and twenty, I broke my nose, at least once. There is a serious blockade in my left nostril from a large protruding piece of cartilage that has been a friend more than anything for the past ten years. I have picked at it and stroked it over ten million times in my life. 

I’m at that point where there is really nothing I can say to accurately express where I am. This isn’t a bad place, nor is it a good place. It’s a place, though. Soon to be a noseless place. A place where others don’t really understand because you can’t explain it to them. One reason that it is not possible to explain is because I don’t know where I am either. I feel like I’m in a big empty field that has a few trees in it. In this feeling I look around and see golden grass, a blue sky, then I look to my left and see someone shooting a firework at me telling me to wake up. That actually happened. My shirt was on fire.

Everything makes less and less sense to me, and my dreams become more and more obscure and unreachable. Buy things, I don’t get it (the senseless). Start a band, impossible (the obscure). Now that I’m back home, it’s great and I actually don’t want to go back (right now), I’m back in this zone. In football it’s called the Red Zone, but when the Rider’s were in their Grey Cup winning season I called it the Green Zone (they were unreal). Within 20 paces of where I want to be, but the three tries just isn’t going to be enough.