Author: Nic Olson

Tonsillitis. Laryngitis. Gingivitis. Streptococcus.

Which of these doesn’t belong?

Trick question, none of them belong, because this I’m not an otolaryngologist and this isn’t a thesis. But the more correct answer would be ‘Streptococcal’ because it doesn’t end in ‘-itis’… Or Gingivitis, because it is the only one based on fairy tales.

Last weekend, in the middle of the French part of the woods, I vomited over ten times in half of a day. Afterwards the barmaid I was camping with stated that I had released more stomach fluids than anyone she’d ever seen. Food poison, or a parasite, or an esophagus that wanted to be inside out. But afterwards, through the streams of fiery demons, my throat swelled in protest, making even the smoothest strawberry quiver at the sight of the picketing tonsils. And a week later, inexplicably, after settlements were made and papers were signed, the tonsils went back to the picket lines, and swallowing has become an affair of the scabs.

The throat’s arch enemy is the choke. Some people are successful from the choke. Like Henry Heimlich, inventor of the Heimlich Maneuver. Or the ghosts of chickens and fish, causing slightly obese humans to accidentally swallow their bodily remains. But a damaged throat, is a damaged soul. And I am wounded.

We’ve had the last episode of Lost, now let’s start a new series, called Win.

-Ron Maclean, Game One

Aside: Let’s hope that Chicago doesn’t choke as did New Jersey, Boston and Montreal. Philly is only successful on the choke.

The things I’ll do for money aren’t anything to be proud of. I have applied at over forty jobs, primarily found on the glorious layout that is CraigsList. Mostly dishwashing, general labour, busboy, babysitting jobs, or anything that a Governor General Medal can get you. But I applied for the odd Gay Nightclub Doorman (I think it is the nightclub that is gay, not the doorman. Or either way), or Mystery Shopper as well. While friends of mine get to have days off because of the rain, or get paid to drink and eat cheese, or only have to work three hours a day, or get to live in San Francisco.

Today I woke up at 5:30am (05h30 en français) and took the metro to the furthest possible station from my house. I met eleven other unhireables, foreigners, coke addicts and morning strollers who wanted to make $50 extra dollars hanging 1000 fancy flyers on the handles of doors in residential Montreal. At 07h10 I headed down Rue Barré with four-hundred of my thousand doorknob decorations. Watching retirees wash the helicopter seeds from their gutters, talking with retirees as they sit and shake their lonely fists at you and tell you in French that you shouldn’t be living in Quebec if you can’t speak French well, seeing children off to school, wishing you could take them by the shoulders and warn them with violent shaking of where they will end up if they drop out of school; delivering flyers at 06h00 wearing the same clothes as you did the past week. At 13h00 I hung the final flyer for Play-It-Again Sports, a south Indian realtor, and cheap sushi on the door of the home of a person that could care less, and I could feel the difference I was making in the world in my searing feet, my bent-over back, my papercut hands and my parched esophagus. I can’t wait to shake my angry fists at the next generation when I retire and waste the last twenty years of my life. My next day of work at this job is June 27th. Really paying the bills.

So I applied at a few more jobs today. Like these:

Maid
Masseuse
Champagne Salesman

Hope one of them works out.

The only thing I feel like doing right now is absolutely nothing. And that’s good, because that’s all I’ve done today. My only hobby of finding new and more pathetic lucky items, lucky orders and lucky methods has been taken away from me with too much ease by a team of orange dirtbags and goons and new aged Bobby Clarks. The year of absolute sports catastrophes continues. But the positives must be cherished, and the good times must be remembered. I saw some things I have never before and shared in the absolute euphoria of thousands and thousands of fans. It was a good run.

Now, if we are all lucky, I’ll talk/think/write about more than hockey, get a job with no fear of missing games, and rise from this deplorable state of self-loathing and rise to the place of only slight family embarrassment and casual burning hunger. Maybe my brain will start, and my posts will be more than just extended updates about the food I eat, the sports depression I suffer from and the haircuts I get. I think I might be smarter than this. Might be.

Lucky Socks.

Camping with Tony the Tiger

River coffees.

Fires.

12 noon. The McGill Psychology Department requires that you drink 240mL of pure alcohol in fifteen minutes and do a series of mind stimulating tests in a 4’x6′ 1964 lavender office.  Once finished, knock on the door, get electrocuted for ten minutes and politely talk to the testers. Breathalyze every ten minutes. Chew on cotton, test cortisol. Constantly monitor heart rate. Repeat what you hear in the right earphone, but not the left. Slightly slur. Focus. Click the left mouse button. Watch numbers on a screen. Zone out, keep clicking. Think about zatars, slices, hockey, a real job. Click some more. Breathalyze.

0.08%
0.08%
0.08%
0.079%
Eat pretzels, watch Lost, read, pee, sit.
0.06%
0.05%
More snacks, another episode.
0.035%
0.035%
0.03%
Yeah, sure, you’re fine.

Metro to the Library. Still smiling.

I was a test subject for eight very much needed dollars an hour. Eight hours. Strong drinks, stimuli, snacks and Lost. Could be the perfect job. One more shift and the contract is up. How much longer until the novelty of being poor wears off? How much longer until my 4 hours a week call centre job isn’t cute anymore? How much longer until I’m back at 0.00%? On a scale from 1-10, 10 being the most, 1 being the least, how energetic do you feel? Do you want to go sky diving? Did your mother love you as a child?

I could answer these questions all day long. Thank you higher education. You just got me buzzed and paid my rent. I will forever promote further education.

I didn’t spend a dollar in five full days. Or more, I wasn’t really keeping track, I just noted that I still had my $5 bill and my $20 bill cuddling and still intact in my wallet. It is not easy, walking by pizza places on the reg, seeing new restaurants near my new house that I want to experience. I ate what little provisions I had left over from last month, bought a green pepper and made a bag of onions go a really long way. And still going.

My new job gives me a healthy 16-hour minimum/maximum of work per week. And the older workers curse the company for hiring fresh meat, available hours are only getting less. Today my shift got cut by four hours during the shift itself. Good start.

I needed bread for sandwiches, for work, and for sustenance. I bought some from Beaubien Bagel near my house. In lieu of my cut shift, I bought the oldest loaf of bread they had, 50% off. And in a moment of splurge I bought a single seventy-cent sesame seed bagel, a luxury beyond anything I’ve seen in a while. It was the epitome of my return home in a single ring shaped, sesame sprinkled dense bread.

I have no lightbulb in my room. Lightbulbs are a luxury.

I am back into the working culture, being shipped in tubes underground, half-dazed and half depressed. Living like a king while unemployed, living like I’m homeless when I get a job. The system seems backwards. Hail the working class.

And on non-game days, it is rock bottom.

I finished this book. It only took me two tries and four months total. It was in mint condition when I took it from Anna’s book collection, and now it is shredded. It was more like a challenge to myself, than it was for pure enjoyment. I did, however, appreciate the book and the time I spent with it. The angst, great. It was a challenge to myself, to finish a book that I had no real motivation to read, other than to broaden my personal library as well as my personal vocabulary, because I am not one to finish things properly.

The book deeply described the lives of three brothers Karamazov and their affairs leading up to the murder of their father, Fyodor. The murder was apparent parricide; Dmitri, the eldest of the brothers was convicted of the murder, although there was never clear proof if it was him, or their illegitimate brother Smerdyakov. Alexei, the youngest, was studying in the monastery. Ivan, by the end of the book, had suffered so much mental anguish that he had become insane. Throughout the read, I constantly tried to connect myself to one of the brothers Karamazov; the murderer, the saint, or the one with ‘brain fever’.

I contemplated this at midnight last night, when, after laying in bed for over an hour, I got up to satisfy my hunger pangs by boiling some cabbage and drinking the broth. I sat in my underwear at the kitchen table, delicately salting each piece of floppy cabbage as though it were a high class dish for a royal family. I didn’t even buy the cabbage. It was going to be thrown out, so it was given to me. I slurped the sweet stock of the cabbage and imagined my life on the streets, because I couldn’t pay rent next month. And then I realized that I could be none of the brothers Karamazov, because no story could be written about my life. I am no saint, I am no murderer, but I am inching closer and closer to brain fever. My life has had no crest, barely any rising action. All denouement and no climax.

‘ “He doesn’t despise any one,” Alyosha went on. “Only he does not believe any one. If he doesn’t believe in people, of course, he does despise them.” ‘

‘ “No, it’s not funny; you are wrong there. There’s nothing funny in nature, however funny it may seem to man with his prejudices. If dogs could reason and criticise us they’d be sure to find just as much that would be funny to them, if not far more, in the social relations of men, their masters – far more indeed. I repeat that, because I am convinced that there is far more foolishness among us.” ‘

I will not be able to explain to you how super these ‘stitions have become.

Wallpaper on my computer, wallpaper on my iPod. Shirt, sock, underwear combinations. Lucky loonies.  Where my hands are placed in comparison to when the goal was scored. Which way my legs were crossed. How far closed my eyes were. The amount of urine in my bladder. Although I may have strayed away from the idea that such slight movements in the universe can cause such drastic failures in the outcome of life’s occasions and sports events, I do believe that every piece can help, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

In severely nervous situations I plug my ears. Many people plug their ears by sticking their fingers inside of the actual ear socket, but I have always done so by folding the ‘tragus’ back to cover canal altogether. If the ‘tragus’ is what I think it is, my ‘tragus’ seems to be enlarged, as does most of my outer ear.  I remembered all of this last night in the last one minute and twenty-seven seconds of game six after Bill Guerin scored to make it a one goal game. I slipped my hand into the pocket of my worn jeans, the one pocket without the holes, and caressed every groove and every wrinkle of the bronze plated gold coloured coin, while my index fingers bent back my ‘tragus” to block out the tempest of French curses swirling behind me.

How did such peculiarities become part of me? My parents may be strange, and my siblings are all fairly peculiar too, but I feel that I somehow the mental oddities and stress traits were funnelled to my personality while skipping those of my family. I remember playing NHL ’98 on the PC with my dad, and he had to fold because it was too intense for him. Or it was another parental excuse of weariness. My mother might be one of the most calm people I’ve met, but can get pretty rowdy when the right sporting moment arises.

My parents are a few of the only people I can watch sports with comfortably. They know my foibles, the different colours of my face based on stress level of the game.  They know not to tell me who won and who lost if I hadn’t seen the game. They know to record important events even if we are already watching them live. They just know. So there’s a more subtle reason I miss my parents. (Happy Mothers Day!)

Wednesday will be one of the most Super of the superstitious days of my life. I will do no wrong, I will sport the Lucky Reds as they support me, and I will watch in awe as my legs stay crossed properly, my trembling hands pass over my face in agony. As my hockey soul reaches ecstasy.

There’s nothing to write after that.
Except this: I officially take back my comment of writing a blog each day. I will write each day, but it will be of quality too high for this outlet. If I updated daily it would only amount to updates on my broken lightbulb, stolen internet signal, vegetable purchasing and other things that I’ll leave to your Facebook updates.
Except beard updates, and there won’t be any for a while. Slow as molasses this is.