Balls of Rice

Author: Nic Olson

  • Keeping Warm/Beating My Head Against The Wall

    I just bought a new jacket and I’ve never felt worse. I feel great physically. My upper body is dry and warm and two-tones of blue. As I tried the jacket on, debating whether or not it was worth it or really something I needed, Black Flag’s ‘My War’ played in the background. When I finally gave in, the track switched over, and as the long debate between Large or Medium, the song ‘Can’t Decide’ played.

    It is not my body that feels ill, it is my brain. I have, through years of frugality birthed into more recent years of hating consumerism, especially of new products, conditioned myself to be disgusted by retail purchases. Perfect, it could be said, for a man working retail. Handy, some may think, when you are in a record store on Record Store Day and can’t justify buying a record because it is just another twelve inches of plastic in your parent’s basement. And the debate between my frugality and my supporting a good cause begins: But it is Record Store Day, man. Do you even like music, or are you just one of those record collecting, long-haired posers? Support your local record store, you dickhead. Instead of spending my money on a circular piece of music-generating vinyl, I will pay a crooked Air Canada to fly me to a city of whimsy and loose-walleted people. Instead, I ended up buying a jacket that was on the border of necessity, that is, not a current necessity but is a potential necessity, depending on several things that may happen in my future. I could justify any purchase with that logic, from a carrot-juice maker, to an automatic machine gun, to a tube of toothpaste, to a jetpack with oxygen tank. These, based on my predictions of the next fifty years, will be essential to life. These, and a decent rain coat. It might rain next week.
    The only thing that suggested that it may be a good idea was a gift certificate that I found on the ground to the store that I work at, the store at which I already get handsome discounts. The fact that I got a jacket at the price I did, makes me feel guilty in another entirely different way. But in an attempt to justify, the debate continues: The rare, necessary and well-thought-out purchase isn’t a bad thing, is it? Yes. It is. Buying something when I know not if it is sustainable made or ethically made. It is perpetuating the mindset that I claim to be at war against.
    When I finally made the purchase, credit card inserted in the terminal, my heart convulsed, I got panicky. Too late: Approved. Pay me later at 11% interest. Queue the next track on the album, Black Flag’s ‘Beat My Head Against the Wall’.

  • Three Years of Life (Lyric of the Month: April 2012)

    It is my three-year near-death birthday. Three years since enlightenment. My enlightenment included little more than an awareness that haircuts are unnecessary, and therefore this three years has only yielded two haircuts.
    The first signified the start of my second life, done hours after my near-death, done with vegetable scissors. We buried the hair in the garden.
    The second was done inside of Primetime Bar directly after a Habs third-round loss. The hair was buried in post-lost beers.
    Maybe I will wait until another significant life moment to rid myself of this ponytail mess. Maybe my graduation from a prestigious university, the birth of my first child, or legitimately publishing something deemed acceptable. But more likely, it will be here to stay until I get run over by a train riding my bicycle and paramedics cut it off in order to sew my face back on.


    I sleep best with the rain upon this shed
    Still counting miles but I’m not sure how many good ones I’ve got left
    In some ways I know that I should settle down
    But it ain’t in me right now
    So I’ll keep it slow
    And keep looking all around.

    A mind don’t turn
    With feet nailed to the floor
    Keep a pounding heart full of love for all
    Turn no one away but keep close what’s yours.
    Man, life ain’t half bad here, but it sure as hell ain’t ideal.
    Can’t sort what’s been gained, to what’s been stole
    And how hours can add up to all these years.

    Morning’s best when health’s leaning on my side,
    Have some coffee, get on a walk for some air
    Just to clear my mind
    Come afternoon, although I’m tired and drained,
    I get my work done without a sound and wonder if it’s even worth the pain
    By nightfall when I’m alone and can’t hardly move,
    I can’t call it common sense, but I fight to not drink, I fight to play my next move
    I shouldn’t be this tired yet, I shouldn’t put so much into not knowing
    If I should’ve stayed or gone
    Or who I could’ve let down
    Or what I did right
    Or what I did wrong

    Carry me on, let me get some rest
    I know I said that I’d be alright when you left.
    But carry me on, let me get some help.
    It’s hard to admit now, but I can’t do this by myself.

    –Tim Barry, Shed Song, 40 Miler

  • Into The Abyss

    On Saturday nights—when you are drinking weekend beers with your friends, when you are snuggled up close to your loved one, when you are deep in your weekend sleep—I mop up vomit. I mop up vomit at a place that describes itself as a lounge. A lounge that is pure, and one that is ultra. I have not yet discovered any of these to be true. As I mop, I think of my resumé. I think about stacking my resume with these marketable skills, as if it were my education, as if learning to spread coffee grounds over semi-digested foods on dancefloors was a highlightable skill for the future. I think of what is ahead while I mop up vomit, while rich undergrads smash bottles and spill glasses on purpose. I think of my three levels of savings accounts.

    I have recently discovered a fear of death, sort of like how someone discovers they have a taste for wine, through gradual exposure, trying it out with different foods in different settings. My fear is not one that causes me to stay at home where I am safe, nor one that will bring me to the altar on my knees. More of a fearful interest. For several reasons, it has been an evident theme lately.

    Through the first few chapters, the book ‘The Warden’ by Anthony Trollope includes men fighting over the will of a rich clergyman. On Easter Sunday my family and I lightly discussed our last wishes. My possibly hyperbolized wishes included selling my ten dirty t-shirts, putting all of my money in a chest and burying it in a field somewhere. They also included burning my body in a field, on the Ganges, or in some other sort of humble effigy. My parents mentioned the necessity of lawyers and I cringed. They told stories, similar to that in ‘The Warden’, of people feeling entitled and therefore hiring lawyers and fighting family members. You can fucking have it, I figured. Smiling, Dad told me that I can have the money, as long as I have the house, the cars, the investments, and keep them. I’ll opt for the the tent and Indian spices. A will is a glorified, end-of-life resumé. Where we gather our experience of investments and property and distribute it among our family, those references that are ‘available upon request’.

    Watching the documentary ‘Into the Abyss’ by Werner Herzog did not help my fear of death. A dark study on the themes of death, violence, capital punishment, and time, it forced me to essentially witness three murders and the ten years that followed them. It forced me to watch as death was handed out like Metro newspapers in downtown Regina. Speaking of the man who was about to receive a lethal injection, the woman who had her mother and brother murdered said that some people just don’t deserve to live. The former executioner says that no one has the right to take a life. Schoolyard law still rules sometimes, schoolyard disagreements always will. And so it goes.

    My fear of death could have to do with all this. With the savings accounts. Vomit is the physical incarnation of regret. And I am its janitor. Other than that, I will not begin to speculate as to the the reason of this new found fear.

    And like death, the unanswerable phenomenon, I will end this blog abruptly. Without conclusion. Surprising and empty.

  • Always Support the Bottom

    Always support the bottom. -Aluminum Baking Tray

    I’ll get all poetic later.

    I was washing dishes at Carmichael in Regina. If you don’t know about this place and you live in Regina, then you best become aware. Oh, how noble of you, Nic—helping the poor and publicizing it on your blog like a self-righteous asshole. That’s right, I am.
    When I was washing dishes I came across multiple clever coffee mugs in the Coffee Mug Graveyard that is the Carmichael Outreach. Here are the greatest of the great:

    • Don’t borrow off Peter to pay Paul on your birthday, Because no one likes a sore Peter.
    • The Older I Get, The Better I Get
    • Merry Christmas MOM, You’re Special
    • Neighbours by Chance, Friends by Choice
    • Pepe Tours, South American Travel Agency
    • Age-appropriate Dora ceramic coffee mugs
    • #1 Hair Stylist
    • I’m no sex addict, but we haven’t had bunnies in days.

    These all seem to date back to a similar time period when giving coffee mugs was as common as texting. A warm era of camaraderie where you would give a mug for absolutely any occasion, even if the mug made no sense, and especially if it had heavy sexual undertones. Like a reusable, practical, breakable gift card.

    Several weeks ago while at Carmichael, two local television celebrities came by to volunteer their time. I was greasy, wearing a ponytail and my trademark stained hoodie, slanging leftovers from juvenile delinquent centres into old yogurt containers. They were wearing classy female-tailored suits. They helped package and deliver food. Being television extroverts, asking questions seemed natural to them, and since I am always able to answer the questions of beautiful, young successful local women, we had a nice conversation about the city, about their early morning television schedules, and about Montreal. They asked me why I came to Carmichael on a regular basis, and I was unable to give a decent answer. I have spare time, I said. I like what they do here.

    This week, I slapped together likely fifty or more double burgers on white bakery buns with a splash of mustard and an explosion of ketchup. When I reached the bottom of the tray, through a layer of greyish-yellow fatty beef juice, I came up with the reason why I do my best to volunteer on regularly. On the aluminum tray, one that was once filled with frozen burger patties, oven-cooked to perfection, I read the above quote and title of this post. And although this one was staring at me in the face, and although lately I have been going really far, shitty-preacher far, to make connections between regular life crap and philosophical nonsense, this one I just couldn’t pass up.

    I do not use the term ‘the bottom’ as if those financially unlucky are somehow lower than those of us who can live comfortably in our wealth. I use the term ‘the bottom’ as in, those who are neglected by the rest, including government funding and policy. Supporting ‘the bottom’ means more than using a thrift store as a garage sale for our conscience, it means more than parting ways with our novelty ceramic mugs, it means more than a financial gift that we will be refunded 15% by the compassionate Canadian government. It means changing the the system in a way so that the bottom is supported by the top, and the top is supported by the bottom. A system where they are both on the same level. Where ‘the bottom’ doesn’t exist. This is possible starting with a change in mindset, change in priorities, change in spending. But if you’ve got any hilarious ceramic mugs for me to wash, we can always just start there.

    If you have an excess of food items, large plastic yogurt containers, plastic bags, clothes, money, or time please consider donating it to the Carmichael Outreach on 1925 Osler Street.

  • Plaza

  • The Golden Rules

    One hundred years ago the Titanic sank in the Atlantic. Undoubtedly amazing stories have come from the wreck from the few survivors and from imaginative writers; several movies have been made about it since, several books have been written describing the pain and wreckage of such a catastrophe. The wreck still lays on the ocean floor, decaying and eroding, somewhat preserved by the saline water that surrounds it. When the 1997 blockbuster movie came out I was nine years of age, and as all the girls of grade four and five swooned over a young Leo, I, without seeing the movie, decided of my dislike for it solely because of how the girls spent more time talking of a fictional girlish-looking boy that drowned in the ocean instead of spending time talking about me. I likely, as I did with the Backstreet Boys, claimed that Leo secretly came out to the newspapers to affirm that he was actually a woman. Most kids talked about the boob scene, or about the small orchestral group that played their instruments all the way into the freezing water and the drama of it all. In grade four or five, one of our class units was about the Titanic. Mrs. Buchanan fashioned the bottom of a ship out of paper that stuck out from the ceiling and the students all made different sea creatures that hung beside the boat. We were underwater. One project with this unit was to write a journal-style short story as if you were a passenger of the Titanic. Indirectly everyone had to make the choice as to whether their character would be one of the few survivors, or if their character would drown in a painful fit, gargling salt water in their lungs. My character was named Wayne Fleming, Second Captain or First Mate or something along those lines. Like Leo, he fell in love, but tragically, if I remember correctly, he jumped off of the rising stern of the boat to save his lover, reaching terminal velocity once he hit the water, dying on impact. In grade four I was sadistic bastard.

    Twenty years ago the movie Aladdin was released. Of equal significance to the crashing of the unsinkable boat, at least in movie production quality. Aladdin taught me that even if you are a homely, poor kid, you can trick a princess into liking you, a lesson I have taken seriously. It taught me that if you steal loaves of bread from the rich, the Sultan will reward you. That if you get tricked by an old man to go into the Cave of Wonders, that a genie will give you three wishes and become your best friend. It also taught me Jafar‘s Golden Rule:

    “You’ve heard of the golden rule, haven’t you? Whoever has the gold makes the rules.”

    If you frequent a church or have a knowledge of the Bible, you may have heard of a different version of the Golden Rule–to love others more than yourself. This rule is not solely a Christian tenet, but a human one. To claim it as Christian is like claiming gravity as a Canadian phenomenon and that all others are just borrowing it, or to claim water as a drink for only those who can afford it. Whether it is from living in a city where people aren’t as friendly as they should be, or whether my cynicisms just blind me from human decency, it seems that Jafar’s Golden Rule is taking over from the natural human action of the original Golden Rule. His Golden Rule seems to ring true with my vision of politicians, especially the ones in power where I currently live. This is not to say that I believe all human decency is gone, my cynicisms have receded slightly since I believed that, but as is evident in the economic breakdowns of the recent past, which I have just recently accepted as true, the system of capitalism has not worked, and will not work. It embraces Jafar’s Golden Rule and ignores the other. If we laud this system as unbreakable, good for all, unsinkable, we shift the Golden Rule’s focus from people to money. We are doomed to crack in half, sink, fall and begin to decay and rust at the bottom of a salty ocean, preserved for generations to see how foolish we were. Pieces of our money-loving present will be held in museums and travel around the world for people to gawk at, astonished that we could be so short-sighted to the health of our planet and the people that live on it. We will be underwater. We will be spectacles.

    It has become common place that the wealthy become the lawmakers, either directly, as in Mitt Romney, or indirectly, as politicians jump from the private sector to the government using their newly found power to help out their buddies making investments. It has become so common that wealth has been deified. That our Golden Rule, the rule that overrides all others, and the one that we use to gauge ourselves as human beings, is in the process of changing.

    If someday the only way to save our loved ones from this sinking ship is to jump off of the high and rising stern to prove our absolute love and devotion to them, and to enforce to the real Golden Rule, then I hope someday I will be able to act on this. But until then I can demonstrate that my love for others is greater than my love for wealth, this is easy. What may be difficult is to demonstrate that my love for others is greater my love for self. I’m working on it.

  • To Call Them To Wander Book Review

    Thanks to Global Regina and Devin Pacholik, To Call Them To Wander was reviewed on the morning news. Check the links below for a flattering video and separate written review.

    To Call Them To Wander Review Video

    To Call Them To Wander Pages and Patches Book Review

  • Time Travel

    Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified.
    -H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, Chapter 11, p131

    We can walk through walls. When I was in grade seven my friend told me that his older brother learned this in university. Physics class told him that it was technically possible for us to walk through walls if we lined up our particles perfectly with the gaps of the particles of the wall or door or window. Physics is mysticism. I would maybe ask a different question. Why bother walking through walls when we can teleport anywhere we want? To take our physical being, the particles that make us up, and come up with some wavelength that could capture them, and send them far away to the destination they wish. But does such an extraction of physical being also carry with it the soul of a person, or does that get sucked up in the mass of all the rest of the souls swirling in the atmosphere? Science fiction becomes real, just ask the inventors of Skype. ‘The Jetsons’ are science fiction.

    Then you may ask, if you were discussing such topics with people with scientific minds, unlike my rotting philosophical mind, if you would rather be teleported to be able to see who you want when you want, or if you would rather travel through time. The moral implications of time travel are different than the business implications of teleportation. Undoubtedly institutions such as the Canadian Government would quickly shut down open discussion about things such as teleportation because dialogue with educated professionals is apparently unhealthy, and teleportation would make obsolete Canada’s fastest growing source of income, also known as ‘The Tar Sands of Our World’s Demise.’ As titled by me. But I’m sure in the vast expanses of the Canadian North, the oil companies and Harper would be able to find some rare mineral that a teleportation device would require to run, market that and start to ban discussion on time travel, which most level-headed people would want to use to escape the natural-resource raped present in which we find ourselves.

    Later, when I was in grade nine, I learned firsthand about time travel when I starred in the White City School production of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I was the Time Traveller. I wore Chuck Taylors, my time machine was a wheelchair with a silver-spray painted lever and a laptop. Once, at the start of a scene walking with the Eloi named Weena, my futuristic wireless microphone provided a shriek of feedback into the ears of the audience. I grimaced and pretended that nothing happened, but have always looked back upon this occasion in regret that I didn’t improvise and say something like, “There are many unsourced and unpleasant noises in this future time.” At the end of the play, my grandparents complimented me by saying, “You sure had to memorize a lot of lines,” instead of what I was hoping for: “You sure acted the hell out of that play, Nic.” I still think I could have done better. If only I had a time machine to go back and restart my acting career.

    As for the previous question, I would opt for teleportation. My curiosity as to what goes on in the future is less than my desire to see the current world as I wish. The current world, something I do not know enough about, still needs to be properly discovered before I can learn about the future. The same logic applies to my recent selection of books. We can now only hope that when teleportation is inevitably invented (this inevitability based on ‘The Jetsons’ science fiction logic) that the Government ceases to hide facts of the past and the present like climate change and the ice age, possibly coinciding phenomena, to save an industry that is killing us all. Either that or we can focus on a time machine, travel far into the future or past to escape a present that we seemingly cannot change.

    While biking home last night I encountered a train. It was a long train. I saw and heard it coming, pedalled as hard as I could with the cool air burning my lungs, but the striped reflective arm of the railroad crossing came down like the fist of God. Would it have been better for me to own a time machine to go back to leave five minutes earlier, or to have a teleportation device to leave exactly when I wanted to? A time machine suggests more of an escape route masked with scientific intentions. A teleportation device is not as pretentious in suggesting simple, expedient, clever transportation that says, “It is nice to be where you want to be.”

    Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.
    -H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, p99, Chapter 7

  • Behind the Scenes




  • Fugazi.

    I can’t believe no one ever told me about Fugazi. I mean, come on, it’s Fugazi. Fugazi, man. I remember a poster in the basement as a kid, what I remember as a Fugazi poster anyway, with a caricatured figure of a colourful man with long hair, shirtless and maybe grabbing his dong, an advertisement for a Fugazi show in the summer of 2001 that my brothers likely attended, but I did not. Since then the band has long been a familiar name but not a familiar sound; a band that no longer existed and thus I believed was not worthy of my music-loving time. Until recently.

    The bands you discover yourself are often more influential than those that are shown to you. The same goes for food, books, haircuts, shoes, contraceptives, lifestyle choices. I don’t know when, but at some point I discovered hummus. Hummus the spread, the dip. The ultimate replacement for sandwich mayonnaise, for cream cheese based dips, for ranch dressing, for anything spreadable. I am not claiming to be the first man on earth to make his own hummus, to be the inventor of a fabulous elixir of which none have seen or heard, but I discovered it, likely on my own, lonely and confused in the grocery aisle. It now means that much more to me. And since I have recently run out, I will spend the majority of my day off taking the bus to the south end to use my parents’ twenty-five-year-old food processor. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Let the man figure out how to fish for his goddamn self, he actually enjoys eating the fish and doesn’t crave beef.

    There is something to be said of personal discovery. When the TV tells you what to buy and your friends recommendations and online suggestions and reviews and software that tells you what you’d like based on your previous decisions, discovery is being drowned by expert advice. This may explain my hesitance to accept advice on bands, books, movies, restaurants from anyone. A personal discovery is more than just searching alphabetically through a library for a recommended title, a robot’s reaction. It is a mystic bond, a fatalistic event that brought you and the other together for an ultimate purpose. It is true love on the dance floor compared to a date set up by a friend.

    For some yet unknown reason, I have recently stumbled upon Fugazi, a meeting of the souls that will doubtlessly bring about a fruitful relationship of love, connection, and life-long discovery. Thanks to those who neglected to tell me about Fugazi, and I would be forever grateful if you neglected to recommend anything to me ever again.

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