Author: Nic Olson

They say that your sneeze moisture travels as fast as Mario Lemieux’s slapshot. That is what they said when I was a kid anyway. Now Lemieux is a multi-millionaire owner of a successful sports franchise, and has great hair, and my sneeze residue is found on the sleeve of my sweater and the walls of rooms in southeast Montreal. Who wins? You be the judge.

They’ve done sneeze studies: how far, how fast, if your eyes pop out of your head if you keep them open during the act, if your soul escapes until someone says, ‘Bless You’ or ‘À tes souhaits’ or ‘Gesundheit’, or if it is indeed 1/14th of an orgasm. No conclusive evidence has been found that your soul escapes when you sneeze. Or that you even have one. Conclusive evidence has shown that 14 sneezes in a row is not actually equal to 1Sneeze x 14. We tried in high school.

These days they condition us to sneeze into our armpits or elbow-pits instead of into our hands, contrary to what we had been taught in youth. Evening news teaches us new techniques and NyQuil commercials condition it in us without us even noticing. New 21st century super diseases will inspire such innovations. The vampire sneeze is the new closed fist sneeze. What would a mime look like if he coughed? That joke may not last much longer. What would a vampire look like if he forgot to pull his cape over his face and held in a sneeze with his eyes open? Probably like a mime giving a blow job. I didn’t write the joke.

My brothers used to sneeze directly in my face, spraying sneeze mist in my eyes and mouth. Scientifically it was like getting a vaccination, build up those antibodies against the diseases of the season. In the realm of manners and respect it is maybe the rudest thing one can do to you. I thank them all the same.

As a common courtesy one day we will sneeze on pieces of toast and share them with friends. Immunity cheaper than no-name peanut butter. Hopefully someday our toasters will have speed radars on them so that we know for sure if our sneezes travel as fast as Mario Lemieux’s slap shot, and we will only use the vampire cover to avoid users of hand sanitizer and those with souls to recapture by scaring with blessings. The future relies heavily on our sneeze techniques. Our sneeze residue is the cure for everything. Spread it on toast.

Please see my Music Page to check out two albums I have been anticipating for a long time.

My newest great idea: cook rice with the rice cooker in the bedroom to maximize heat production without using a heater. My room warmed up one full metric degree.
Tip #1: Point the hole in the rice cooker lid to aim in your bed’s general direction.
Tip #2: Eat with your hands. It tastes better and warms up icy cold fingers in minutes.

Real life tips from a real life loser.

I enjoy reading, watching films, sleeping, sitting, listening to music, eating, and constantly picking my nose, just like most people, but I usually find myself performing these activities whilst on the floor. It is no secret that I sleep like most would consider a hobo to sleep, but I’ve just found comfort in the apparently uncomfortable. And now I can watch my rice cook/heat my room just inches off the floor, while I sit on piles of blankets on my bed/floor. The best places to sit in schools are on the floor. The best places to sit in the metro stations are on the ground between billboards. The best places to eat-out have no chairs. The best places to be are those closest to the floor.

While holidaying in Saskatchewan, the world’s greatest December/January holiday location, the wealthy, recession proof, oil-soaked locals who read my blog and believe the exaggerations I spout, took pity on me. I was given free breakfasts, beers, suppers, arcade hours, more suppers, drivers licenses, etc, until the last day when I somewhat held my dignity and paid for my breakfast and half of another. I have been redeemed.

The richer you get, the higher you are. You crawl as a beggar. You walk as a peasant. You ride a bicycle as a student becoming rich. You drive a car as a person well-off. You ride a horse as a stable owner. You cruise a huge truck when you can afford rivers of gasoline. You fly a plane when you have too much money to care about anything else. The evolution of travel is the same as the evolution of staying put. The further up the chain you get, the higher your couch is.

Everyone loves a good bunk bed. I had one and for whatever reason I slept on the top bunk although I didn’t have anyone to sleep in the bottom. One night, because my neglectful parents forgot to put the guard rail up, I rolled off the top shelf and landed on the dark brown unvacuumed carpet. I crawled in the bottom bed and continued sleeping. I appreciate a good couch, and beds are great too, but I hope that I sleep on or very near the ground for the rest of my life. The closer to the ground that you live your life, the shorter the distance you have to fall, because you inevitably will. I sleep on the ground. You can’t fall much lower than that.

I currently bank with RBC. I was recommended this bank because they had the shortest lines at their downtown branch in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and Yellowknife at rush hour is a real doozy. Over the past few years I have read about the irresponsible investments that RBC has been a part of for hundreds of years and that they were a large part of Alberta’s glorious tar sands project. Since finding this out it has taken me nearly a year to get my ass in gear and finally change banks. This morning I went to a local credit union to open a new account. This evening I read this article. Super timing.

Side note: The world’s greatest newspaper, The Leader Post, said that nearly thirty percent of Saskatchewanites support tar sands development. Like dropping the Atomic Bomb once wasn’t enough to make you realize it was a bad idea. There is also a motion to change the name of Fort MacMurray to Hiroshima. Saskatchewan wants to tear apart its true north strong and free so that Brad Wall has a few extra billion dollars to spend on football stadiums that we don’t need. But there are twenty-five percent who oppose, and they are the ones with post-secondary educations. Thank god for them and their educations.

I still plan to leave RBC because big banks are about as trustworthy and transparent as a raging bout of chlamydia, and although they have slowed their investments in the tar sands they have probably found a new investment in the beheading of homosexuals in an nuclear weapons factory or skinning orphans to make wallets. Switching banks is like switching the brand of poison you want to gulp to end your life. There may be a few that kill you painlessly and leave you a dead beauty, while others may leave you dead and wrinkly. Either way you end up dead. I guess I will find out which is which.

I inquired into ‘ethical funds’ during my ‘investment portfolio’ ‘meeting’ with ‘Gerald’. He basically, indirectly explained to me that investing is never ethical and that ethical funds are for suckers who think they are changing the world but are actually still investing in oil and Wal-Mart. He essentially told me that there is no point in caring anymore. There goes my last hope.

Last week I was advised to watch a program titled ‘Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura‘. That would be Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura, former governor, wrestler, and Navy member. He reinforced ideas I had already heard or decided myself, such as global warming being fake, the fact that twelve rich men run the planet, and the knowledge that we are being tracked by governments and companies through our credit cards and online identities. These are things he highlighted that I already knew to be true. I believe mostly every conspiracy I hear, and I’ve woven a few of my own in my day mostly related to gingivitis, bottled water, and Wal-Mart. Through watching this show I even conspired that the show was produced by the government to scare viewers even more, even though the show was about how the government was doing things to try to scare the public. I have learned that more than half of the time the absolute worst situations that you could possibly think of are what are currently happening in the world. This makes my conspiracy spinning so much easier. It is never as it seems, it is always worse.

The first conspiracy theory I remember hearing was from a Simpsons episode or something, where flu shots were used to control the brain and send people into a frenzy of unnecessary shopping around Christmas. For some types of people, after hearing their first conspiracy theory it is hard to live a normal life again. I have reached a point where I accept all theories because there is likely more truth in them than in what is fed as reality. The days when conspiracy theories are truth and what they feed us as ‘truth’ was written by the same people that write General Hospital are dark days. These are dark days.

There is not much to remedy this situation of being a slave to these theories of defeatism, and I will likely never outgrow them, but I will learn to live with them, with a 2% interest rate on my ethical equity and a 5% return on my bullshit bonds. My meeting taught me further that banks, even local and responsible ones, are more than deserving of your assumptions of malpractice, and that even your slightest attempts at being a decent human being will be crushed by a divorced man named Gerald.

Not much you can do about anything, but angry music always helps.

Eye health is not necessary for life. This is why it is not free to go to the optometrist. This does not, however, explain why it costs so damn much to let some kid a year older than yourself look at your eyes for five minutes, diagnosing what I could have without his fifty year old lens equipment and multimillion dollar OptiPhoto technology which takes a 200degree shot of the back of your eye. Blind people live incredibly fulfilling lives, thanks to braille, great radio announcers and recorded music.

I didn’t know what time my appointment was, so I sat on the leather couch outside the unlit office at 8am, waiting for the doors to open at 8:30. It is important to know what time your appointment is, so you aren’t late, but also so you don’t show up thirty minutes early. Saskatchewan’s token old people mall-walked to bargain bin gospel Christmas music a week overripe, clucking about Norwegian cruise ships. Old people are not the only ones with bad vision. I have been addicted to glasses since first grade. How do you trust a six year old when he says his vision is bad? I think that wearing glasses for over half of my life has been a cause of my deteriorating vision, and every time they give me a stronger prescription, my eyes will just get worse. I have come to believe that perfect vision is a luxury beyond all other bodily functions.

Dental health is not necessary for life, although many Colgate touters will tell you that some absurd percentage of deaths in the middle ages were due to poor oral hygiene. This is why it is not a free service. This does not, however, explain why it costs so damn much for some other rich man to insult you and dig and scrape your off-white canines for gold. The toothless lead regular lives just like you, thanks to Jello, dentures and Black & Decker blenders.

When I live in Montreal I live a life of risk. I walk to school on icy streets. I freeze my ass in icy apartments. I don’t have a health card because in Quebec you more or less have to prove that you are committed to living there for the rest of your life and denounce your family heritage before they’ll give one to you. I am the definition of ‘living on the edge’.

It is not only the blind that cannot see, nor the toothless that cannot chew, nor the old that cannot walk. It is also the diseased. I am not the only one who feels out of place everywhere I go. The neurotic lead regular lives also, thanks to complete series on DVD, living through friends who travel, and heavy medication. I have two of these.

The lottery question. The most dominant rhetorical question of a culture reflects what that culture is based on. Ours is, ‘What would you do if you won the lottery?‘
I avoid being a part of this specific question because it always involves the same inane answers and money hungry dreaming, nor does it encourage healthy, rational, purposeful thought. When I do find myself indulging I usually answer, ‘Half savings, half travel.’ We watched Fargo the other day and wondered together about who found the suitcase of money under the snow covered in Buscemi’s blood, which inevitably led to the culture’s general rhetoric. Laundering was the answer.

Wishing for lottery wins is fine and nice. Playing the lottery once a week is an investment, a time-pass, a necessity, a habit which is great. The desire for the security that money brings is based on falsities, because money doesn’t bring security, because security doesn’t actually exist. I can’t say that I wouldn’t love to win last week’s LottoMax, but not for financial security and not to mark things of my ‘to buy’ list. Dreaming in nonexistent money is a huge cause for hating your life.

I have come into contact with a real life version of our culture’s rhetoric. A brilliant and beautiful friend offered me an interest-free loan of $2000 to travel to South America with her and some friends. I would leave in a week, I would love every minute of it, and I would see things I might not otherwise have the chance to see. I would be a sucker to turn it down. This offer didn’t only entail a decision about travel and finances and potential good times, but also commitments, realities, and future. I wish myself to be open and free to hit a plane with a week’s notice, but maybe I’m not quite the man I thought I was. I believe that I could take advantage of such an offer if the right circumstances existed, but now I fear what I would become with yet another decision in the realm of selfish decisions I have made in my life.

It is irresponsible to dream in the fictitious which you cannot have. It is necessary to dream for the tangible and present.

I am a sucker.

There are far better ways to keep a tally on the years than this day here. Birthdays are fairly useless but are more important than the first day of the 2011th year since someone decided to start counting days. Anniversaries are probably nice, and should be considered more important than the 2011th anniversary of the modern era we live in. Observing every year that has passed since you graduated is a good idea, at least until you get to the age of not being able to remember how many years it has been, because then you can look back and see how jaded you’ve become since your graduation speech, how naive you were, and how little you’ve accomplished as a full-fledged member of society. Celebrating the day that you bought a new hot water heater in your basement makes more sense than celebrating the start of another year. But at the end of each year we tally the things we did, the places we went, the friends we made, the parties we had, the movies we watched, the albums we jammed, the shows we saw, the amount of shampoo we used, the pounds of rice we ate and the weight we lost, like the next day it starts over like a magical board game or undeveloped piece of land.

People will come up with any excuse to party and I do not feel the need to stop them. Two-thousand and eleven years ago to the day, nothing specific happened. I’m sure a few people were born, and a few people died. A few people got married and a few more people bought hot water heaters, and somehow we’ve come to celebrate this day like it is an event more important than an ice cream cone melting in the sun.

People use this day to motivate themselves into change for the upcoming three-hundred plus days, which usually ends up being a jinx to the original goal set and a good enough reason to avoid resolving for anything. Self-improvement is always to be applauded, but if this day, which is based on no historical event and celebrated brainlessly by millions, is the reason for said improvement, then the motivation might as well be founded in a black hole of nothingness.

I resolve to never resolve again.

Intentional, conscious, deliberate.

Understand, comprehend, grasp.

Guilt, remorse, contrition.

Luxury, inessential, unnecessary.

Synonyms. It was intentional that I placed these words in this order: for reference to some important words throughout this passage, please refer to your synonymic guide above. For you to understand exactly why, I will explain why you should feel guilt for the luxuries in your life.

In describing technology’s greatest navigational tool since the night stars, the GPS, I concluded that it was an unnecessary luxury. A friend replied, ‘Aren’t all luxuries unnecessary? That’s what makes them luxuries?’ He then told me to blog about that. I felt dumb.

I lost a game of Scrabble to a nearly illiterate woman the other day and lost a lot of self-esteem. The writer should be able to manipulate letters to spell the largest words, being the natural grasper of words, a wordsmith. I played hockey with a group of friends and couldn’t even stand up most of the time. The guy who loves hockey so much should be able to stay on his feet for more than five minutes, or at least be conscious of the lack of ability. I know it isn’t necessary that I am good at such activities, but the luxury, the non-physical, non-material luxury, is tempting.

Live within your means is what some people tell me. If your means are high, live highly. If your means are low, live lowly. Buy things you don’t need because it is within your means. Don’t buy a GPS if you can barely pay rent. The logic of ‘We were lucky enough to live in a place where we can afford to buy inessential objects so we shouldn’t feel bad doing so,’ is about as sound as the logic of, ‘We live in a land where murder and rape are common so we shouldn’t feel bad to intentionally take part.’ Living overly wealthy just because you live in a society where you can do so is like deciding to piss on a dog just because he is stuck in a cage; you know better than to do it, but for your own personal selfish enjoyment, you indulge.

The more we abandon the nonessential, the closer we become to being humans, and not this social level of humans with accessories. Human beings enjoy slight comforts, which is perfectly fine and positive, but when the slight comforts become commonplace, or the only thing being searched for, or distracting, then they are just inessential, unnecessary luxuries. If it ain’t necessity, you don’t need it.

‘Tis the season to hide our love for unnecessary, inessential, luxurious indulgences behind a company created ‘Christmas Spirit’.
‘Tis the season to use a holiday of community and peace to increase the excess of our already excess craving society.
‘Tis the season to brand luxuries as ‘thinking of others’ and ‘loving your family.’
‘Tis the season, my friends. Celebrate it with electronics dipped in gold, drizzled with chocolate, wrapped in cellophane, tied with ribbons and justified because it was on sale.
‘Tis.

Several albums this year likely changed my life. This is the soundtrack to my life as a makeshift Frenchman. I have known for several months now some albums that would make this list, and you could have seen them on my Music page. Number Three was released before 2010, but was pretty influential in my year as a human. Number Five was released years ago also. Only two are rock and roll albums. I’ve gone soft. But check them out, they are likeable by all.

1. Continuance – Carry Ourselves
2. Greg MacPherson – Mr. Invitation
3. Tim Barry – 28th & Stonewall
4. The Mag Seven – Black Feathers EP
5. Eddie Vedder – Into the Wild Soundtrack
6. Johnny Cash – American VI: Ain’t No Grave
7. Crime In Stereo – I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone

Make one yourself. Do what I couldn’t and make an actual top ten. This music changed my year for the better. I hope there was a few that did the same for you.