Balls of Rice

Author: Nic Olson

  • Lyrics of the Month: September 2012 – Hadron Collision

    Ride fucking free, forty below, it’s the car that kills the punk. Pedal for momentum, feel the fucking vibe, blaze through traffic, burn the red, push my luck. There’s not much I need, I ride a single speed, my toque and mitts protect me from the freeze. Hadron Collision. I’m ripping through a cloud of exhaust. A fucking conniption, in their cages on wheels they fucking rot. I might be trapped in a world going backwards but nothing’s in vain – right now I’m happy just to clog up your lane. There’s not much I need, I’ll leave you with your greed to wallow in your shit ’til you can’t breathe. A head-on collision, a species that’s lost all control. We’ll learn by extinction: we don’t need all that shit we’ve been sold. We might be headed for the brink of disaster but nothing’s in vain – right now I’m happy just to clog up your lane. If all that I can do is just stay on the move, keep a few cents from your grasp – that’s all I need to prove. I’ll see you on the bus. It’s the car that kills the punk.

    –Propagandhi, Failed States, Hadron Collision

  • Urban Camping

    For more, and better, photos of this evening, please see Life of Norm.

  • Days with Food Poisoning

    Days with food poisoning are good because they remind you how invincible you feel on the days without food poisoning. The drastic difference between my Wednesday morning—coiled in a ball, vulnerable as a newborn puppy on the basement floor, nearly unable to climb the stairs to relieve my knife-stabbing stomach—and my Thursday evening—searching for sweets in my cupboard—makes it that much easier to compare. The last time I possibly ‘called in sick’, as in, showed up to work for two hours and was sent home, was for the same reason. I was housesitting, the ingredients for cannelloni were readily available, with the exception of cottage cheese, which I figured I would do without. Just before awkwardly hand-stuffing small pasta cylinders with runny pink sauce, I found an unopened container of cottage cheese in the fridge. I mixed it in liberally, excited for my Italian masterpiece that I was to share with a friend. Early the next morning, around 4, I was awoken to the same unpleasant feeling, this time, however, the feeling came out of two different directions of my body. I sat at my housesitting house and watched Breaking Bad for a day and a half, thinking I had the flu until I read the Best Before date on the unopened container of cottage cheese, which would have still been good to use, two and a half months previous.

    But they enjoyed Disneyland, so that’s all that matters.

    This time, after a thirteen hour recovery sleep, I can’t sleep for more than five the next night. I sit on the ground at 7am in the dark without glasses, reading political articles about how invincible the government feels (they must’ve had the worst bout of food poisoning that ever did exist), closing my good eye in order to strengthen my bad eye, squinting like I’m on a motorcycle in a sandstorm. I heard a sound like an animal in my room, and after discovering a hole in the bottom of the drywall next to my bed, a hole that looks like a classic mouse hole from Pixie and Dixie‘s residential home, I have been waiting to hear this sound. I crawled on on my hands and knees in my underwear the dark, no glasses, the most pathetic predator that ever lived, trying to locate the source of the scratching and nibbling sound at one of the corners of my bedroom. Oh, the places food poisoning can take you. Days with food poisoning are good because they remind you how invincible you feel on the days without food poisoning, and this is me at my most invincible. I have failed to acheive the same level of notoriety as many of my contemporary cartoon headliners. Perhaps the idea of a man chasing non-existent mice simply isn’t novel enough for the infinite reaches of the internet.

    It turned out to be a beetle.

  • 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.

  • Common decent people and their decent common shits

    I recently decided that wasting food is worse than eating meat. Marginally worse. So for that reason, and for that reason only, I’ve eaten meat three times in the last four days. Chicken, pork, and I don’t remember. I gave meat the benefit of the doubt, and it has given me the benefit of clean and loose bowel motions, as if I were cleaning myself out with Ayurvedic medicine. I have been to the toilet at least eight times today.

    I believe in common decency. The common good of man, all that flowery shit. When someone is hitchhiking, they are likely just cheap or broke. When someone is looking for a place to stay on Couchsurfing, complete strangers, they are likely just interesting, frugal, travellers like me, not out to case the house and give me bags of laced drugs. When someone walks into the shop, they are likely just a bit of a douchebag, and not a douchebag that is clueless and soulless and trash enough to steal from a locally owned store.

    But then there are the cases when I’m wrong. When hitchhikers kill their drivers, or demand sexual favours. When Couchsurfers are ungrateful, dirty thieves, freeloading and abusing the system. When young, rich, well-dressed assholes come into the shop and steal because they would rather spend that money on cocaine or parts for the car their parents bought them.

    And then I get upset. Because I am branded as naive. As too trusting and too innocent. I automatically revert into my natural self, cynical and distrustful. It has taken time to grow into that person, the one that gives the benefit of the doubt.

    None of this has happened. I haven’t been killed by a hitchhiker. I haven’t been ripped off by a Couchsurfer. I have, however, been stolen from at the shop before. The nature of retail, they say. The nature of man, I say. When common decency takes a common shit. And ruins it for us all.

    The man camping across from me, also alone, invited me over for a meal. I was sitting in front of my barbecue fire, eating raw carrots and beets, breathing in the loneliness that I have grown accustomed to. He fed me homemade sausage, the pork I spoke of, and corn on the cob. He left me with five cobs of corn for the following day, two huge potatoes from his garden, and a handshake. I didn’t trust him, then I likely trusted him too much. Then I went to sleep, woke up, and eventually cooked a massive meal of corn and potatoes.

    This was supposed to be one of the few uplifting posts that Balls of Rice produces. About how no matter what, there is a common good in all people. But dammit, I’m not so sure.

    I have given the benefit of the doubt, and I’m just waiting for that doubt to come running out of bowels. To shank me and take my wallet.

  • Lyrics of the Month: August 2012 – Lucinda Williams

    Some think a fancy funeral
    Would be worth every cent
    For every dime and nickel
    There’s money better spent

    Better spent on groceries
    And covering the bills
    Instead of little luxuries
    And unnecessary frills

    Lovely yellow daffodils
    And lacy filigree
    Pretty little angels
    For everyone to see

    Lilly of the valley
    Long black limousines
    It’s three or four months’ salary
    Just to pay for all those things

    So don’t buy a fancy funeral
    It’s not worth it in the end
    Goodbyes can still be beautiful
    With all the money that you’ll spend

    ‘Cause no amount of riches
    Can bring back what you’ve lost
    To satisfy your wishes
    You’ll never justify the cost

    -Lucinda Williams, Fancy Funeral, West

  • 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.

  • Things that hang from my ceiling

    The things that hang from my ceiling are plentiful. They are colourful. They are trash. The heralded lattice ceiling that I have often mentioned has never let me down. Besides the time that a glass of water was spilt in the living room upstairs and it directly poured through the floorboards into my room. But I am uncertain how I lived without it before. Spackled ceiling has had me befuddled since childhood. Such a useless, aesthetically questionable detail of a home, whereas latticed ceiling knows exactly what it is: ugly and useful, two things I would be glad to consider myself. The following is a comprehensive list of the things hanging from my ceiling:

    • thirty-feet of yellow rope, used as a clothesline
    • the rainbow horse/donkey head of a piñata that I drunkenly wore home on my head from a recent wedding. The ears of the donkey fit perfectly into the holes of the lattice for an adhesive-free hang job
    • my button-up shirts on hangers. The walls of room are unpainted, patchy and smeared, I hang my shirts there to cover the wall and to keep the shirts wrinkle free
    • a bare lightbulb, now burnt out, hanging from a piece of thread over my desk, my source of inspiration, or object to blame when ideas do not surface, undecided thus far

    Things hanging from my wall very near the ceiling include a pizza box from Vancouver (Fatih’s!), a plastic bag from India (found blowing down the street in Regina), a feel-good Christian pamphlet called ‘Nick’s Discovery’ about a man in a wheelchair who found God (the premise and title for my new book), a plastic Montreal Canadiens mini hockey stick (a gift), this poster (my brother always swore it was a lady in the photo) and more garbage. Actual garbage, yes.

    Throughout the summer I have been toiling over an old wooden chair I found in the dumpster. The refurbishing of chairs has become a bit of a hobby for my grandparents in their massive wood shop in North Weyburn. And as I walked through the house, this time with a new appreciation for old chairs, they told me exactly when and where they found the furniture, what they did to repair it, where it had been poorly repaired before, how much it cost, and the history they knew of it from before they owned it. Not once did they reach a desk and say, “This desk is made of glue and sawdust from a million shaved 2x4s from the boreal forest. Oh, and this lovely table we bought from the Wal-Mart when it first opened in 2001, it was made by a Vietnamese woman about our age in a factory of aluminum pipes and plastic pieces used as tops. Great workmanship, that table really means a lot.” The story of the things we own should include more than the place we bought it and the vehicle we used to drive it home, just as the story of ourselves should include more than a list of the place we were born, and the places we have worked, and the place we sit while people more powerful than us use us as something to sit on.

    Like our attitude towards food, we have grown so disconnected with the objects that we own that owning a billion things seems to matter none, and throwing them out seems to matter even less. Our wallets, our environment and our identity will suffer if we continue down such a road. My burnt-out-lightbulb of an idea, inspired by this damned bulb hovering above me, is that as long as we have an understanding of the process of our food, of our household items, of the trash that we hang from our ceilings and the stories behind them, we might become wise enough to own less, to consume less and to have a story of our own that is different than one taken from the gentrified pages of a home improvement magazine.

  • Human Progress is a Sasquatch

    Sections of the few naturally-occurring trees in southern Saskatchewan have been cleared to make roads and paths. These lead to lakes and rivers and adjacent to these lakes and rivers more trees have been cleared for what is known as the commercial campsite. Commercial because you pay for it. Campsite only because that is what they call it. Very rarely is it used for actual camping. I discovered that my idea of camping differs greatly from that of some people, even those I am close to. This past week at Greenwater Provincial Park, each time I walked by a trailer that was nestled nicely beside a seadoo trailer, a boat trailer, a mosquito zapper, a belching generator and a satellite dish, I thanked God that we knocked trees down for these goofballs. But they might ask, as believers in the advancement and intellectual supremacy of the human species, why not bask in our dominance over nature? I would answer that camping is connecting with how humans are supposed to live, reliant on and connected to nature, without distraction, where time doesn’t matter and phones are useless, entranced by the natural and primal thought-nurturing wisps of a late-night fire. But for our neighbours across the way, camping means watching the Olympics on a slightly smaller flat-screen television, slightly closer to a seaweed-ripe body of water, distracted by the shallow and personless characters on a screen. Our campsite of four tents and eight people, a fire and several chairs, a hatchet and a flashlight, compared to their campsite (listed above) shows how much we have advanced technologically as humans, but shows how as humans we remain the exact same.

    Human progress. The idea that we as humans can advance through technology, science, industrial efficiency, or mass production to become greater than the previous level attained, whether that means mentally, spiritually and even anatomically. That the advancements in how we do things, as if a catalyzed form of evolution, will propel us into a sort of utopia.

    Some may consider our ability to live in absolute comfort anywhere we want Human Progress. Who needs fires and tents and knives when we have generators, fifth-wheel trailers with two bathrooms, and slap-chops? The progression of our systems does not ensure the progression of humans. Our innovations are not making us better humans that are approaching perfection, they are taking us downwards, into an ignorant, illiterate, unaware cell that is not greater than the fire pits, the nomadic life, the simplicity from whence we came.

    Progress not only failed to preserve life but it deprived millions of their lives more effectively than had ever been possible before.

    –Bruno Bettelheim via Chris Hedges’ TruthDig Column

    Almost seventy years ago this week, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bombed. World War II and the few years after, epitomized by the final acts in Japan, are what Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout calls ‘The Finale Rack of so-called Human Progress.” A Finale Rack, the set of fireworks wired together by a pyrotechnician to light as the ‘grand finale’ for the gazing patriots and children. The nuclear bombs were dropped and we have been making them ever since. “It was science, industry and technology that made possible the 20th century’s industrial killing,” Hedges says. It was our ‘Human Progress’ that made possible the destruction of hundreds of thousands of humans.

    Apparently, Human Progress is an odd looking creature, like what we can imagine a Sasquatch might look like: floppy ears, hairy face. Non-existent. But if it does exist, what better place to find it than the tree-cleared campgrounds of Southern Saskatchewan. It is probably cozied up in its trailer watching the Rider game with the firepit dead and cold ten-feet away.

    “What a relief it was, somehow, to have somebody else confirm what I had come to suspect toward the end of the Vietnam War, and particularly after I saw the head of a human being pillowed in the spilled guts of a water buffalo on the edge of a Cambodian village, that Humanity is going somewhere really nice was a myth for children under 6 years old, like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

    -Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus, Chapter 26, p204

    The myth of Human Progress, characterized perfectly in contrasting campsites, is eating away at our world. It is tearing apart the environment, making mass-murder more and more accessible, and at the same time we remain the same clueless, occasionally barbaric human beings, only now with larger tools to highlight our cluelessness and barbarism. Instead of whittled willow twigs we have the sturdiness of a bent piece of wire. To complement those, we have wire racks to hold them over the embers. If we get lucky we can use a grill instead of a wire, and if we really show our advancements, we would just use a propane range. Our hotdogs and marshmallows have advanced in the way we cook them, but in the end we are still eating the same damn thing.