Balls of Rice

Author: Nic Olson

  • City Review: Oklahoma, where All Is Well

    In my brief travels since quitting life I have had the chance to rate many cities based on the foolproof and completely shallow system that allows any onlooker to understand the basics of a new city, with the same amount of knowledge and research as a Lonely Planet or Fodor’s Travel Guide. It has never failed me.

    Food- The first meal, Guatemalan breakfast. The second meal, Big Truck burritos. The first grocer, a massive Indian market. 7-11, terrible Slurpees called icy drinks. Easter Potluck at Tyler’s, my Indian food, veg chili, carrot puff, sweet potato casserole. Nic’s (spelt the same way!) Grill, top five best burgers of my life. Chick-fil-A, the most amazing fast food experience of my life, and the food was alright too. 4.5/5

    Girls- It seems like in my new found position I should void this category, but in the spirit of a well-rounded system, and for a fair representation of this new city, I think I’ll stick with it. Easter Sunday mega-church, at least mega to me and church to some, all the college girls, save a few, were robed in lustfully inspired spring dresses and resurrection inspired curls in their hair. Southern Belles are not for me. XXX/Easter Bunny

    Intangibles- Horse in the backyard. Smoking pipes. Talks about Health Care, economics, politics. Slip ‘n’ Slide. Hindi movie where Karina Kapoor actually kisses Amir Khan. Lack of public transportation. Easter Eggs hidden with peanut butter, Doritos, Vitamin C, dryer sheets and sticky men inside. People. 4/5

    Overall- Passable. Liveable. As I’ve said before, a city is only as great as it’s sleaziest man, and the people here seem to be alright. People are the grout of a city built with red bricks on top of a bed of red soil.

  • Day One. Successful.

  • YUL – JFK

    Apparently the US border guards don’t like unemployed Canadians traveling to the US with no return flight, no address of arrival, not wearing a suit. Even air travel bullies citizens into careers and family, but  that is what you get for traveling by airplane; I have been indirectly placed into my class. Customs sent me to level two security. Questions were asked, truths were shared. He thought I did drugs because a head cold and a few sniffles. He checked my bank account, to verify I had the amount I said I did (that can’t be legal). He informed me that it is illegal to work for free, selling an American band’s t-shirts in America. Could be deported. Borders are the definition of fear.

    Western world air travel is the best explanation of where we are. Fear and protection from the institutions we’ve created ourselves. Borders, beliefs, religions, of which there is no real danger, nor is there any real necessity. If anything, we need protection from the process of human civilization and advancement, which causes us to tense up (like anyone would with a stick up the ass) in order to progress towards a completely backwards paradise. If this is civilization or any sort of advancing higher society, leave me under the rubble.

    I hope the recession pans out and eats us alive. We deserve nothing less.

    I love the border.

  • Tomorrow. Fly to Oklahoma. Be with friends. Drive to Tulsa. Meet with more friends. Drive the approximate blue path. Live at the gas stations. Love life and love it good.

  • Lyric of the Month: April 2010

    I am alive, I am here I am now. I acknowlege the fact of my life.
    I am alive breathing walking and smiling, acknowledge the fact of my life.
    There’s a big big world out there, time that I stepped in ’cause I’m getting tired of pretending that I don’t really give a shit.
    There was guilt and shame, there was fear and hate but now it’s finally time to appreciate the perfection of all life, all the times and places and time I’d waste.
    I learned the hard way and ever since when I look forward or back I just gotta laugh ’cause it hit like a ton of bricks.
    I laid down on the ground and I looked around and I saw a miracle I appreciate the simple beauty of the world it came to me like a bullet to the heart but it was there in front of me all along so obvious the only meaning of life is life itself.
    I’m not controlled by anybody else, I must get out of my way, get out of my own way.

    -Screeching Weasel, Acknowledge, Emo

  • Loathing

    The Sugar Shack, a French Canadian staple. The maple syrup tins tacked to the trees, with the lids of the tins shining at different heights, suspended from the thick maple trees, like a fairy tale. The buckets sucked the blood from the trees to make a sweet glue-like condiment. The ultimate comfort food. The ultimate heart attack. The ultimate freedom from fear.

    From the 37th floor the city looked sharp. With legal documents waiting to be signed on a thousand dollar conference table, the city looked scared. Maybe the city looked scared through the eyes of the scared. The view was impeccable. The lawyers answers to my questions were just as much so, clean cut and sharp, like the lawyer himself. I am an accessory. The mafia will find me out. I’ll tell you more about this all when you are a bit older. There is a slight degree of fear for all.

    We went to the Basilica de Notre Dame for the light and sound show. Through a few pieces of sorry acting, with our remote control headsets to translate into the mother tongue, this show highlighted the history of the massive ‘house of God’ and a few times, through the sorry acting, brought up the fact that the church had the spiritual privilege to teach the gospel to the uneducated North American Indians. Cringeworthy. The fear that can be known through subjugation is expansive. And a different kind of fear that is known by the suppressors hundreds of years later is evident.

    My mind is in no single place right now. Too much thought about the past, the present, and the future. I like to do, but thought eats me alive when I don’t want it to. So much going on, too much thought, and a possibly regulated fear.

    Krishnamurti:

    Fear is the product of time.
    Thought is nothing more than time.
    Fear is produced through thought.

  • Unemployed Day #35:

    -Ate granola and yogurt.
    -Watched an episode: Breaking Bad, a show about a high school chemistry teacher making crystal meth, highlights many of my bad trips with NyQuil as a child.
    -Read some more of the unfinishable book, The Brothers Karamazov
    -Ate a tuna sandwich. There is something about tuna that always makes it hard for me to breathe, not like an allergy, but like how it feels when you eat a BigMac too fast. I eat everything too fast though. Still.
    -Planned my April travels on Google Maps.
    -Edited even more photos from the Habs game the night previous. Click on Cammalleri below for more.
    -Longboarded to the Bank, Library, Bank again. It was -10 outside.
    -Watched an episode: The Red Green Show. Canada’s finest piece of culture. I loved the show as a youth, watching on Saturday or Sunday nights or something, with my parents slurping their hot coffees from Expo ’86 mugs or out of handcrafted grandparent pottery. They told me that they were allowed to slurp because it was coffee, but that I couldn’t slurp my chocolate milk. I took their cups from the handcrafted grandparent chess table when they were finished, and sneakily slurped the last light sips, complete with coffee grounds floating about, cold and stale. Maybe this is the reason that coffee tastes like compost and ashtrays to me.

    But the things that lasted were the Red Green memories. His home made Zamboni, his handcrafted grandparent rotating waist-high potato crisp lazy susan, that had four compartments for different fried foods while standing at a sporting event. Made out of a kiddy pool. Every episode concluded with the reminder, ‘Keep your stick on the ice.’ Advice like this is irreplaceable. Advice like this made men like Ryan Smyth and Travis Moen millionaires. I wish there was valuable advice like this thrown about on comedy programs that would benefit those in legal struggles, new relationships, financial woes, and slight acne problems. I guess I need to watch more infomercials.

    Here is some more hockey advice that can be used interchangeably with life’s woes:
    -Keep your head on a swivel. (For legal battles.)
    -Get it deep and get off. (courtesy of Pierre McGuire.)
    -Keep your head up. (For financial issues. Similar to legal battles, and often connected.)
    -If nothing else, just ice it. (For acne problems.)
    -Don’t stop moving your feet. (For traveling. Talking to an old man from India on the internet yesterday, he said, ‘Hi boy, you are like a rolling stone.’)
    -Hack the bone. (For everyday life.)


    Keep your stick on the ice.

  • For Naught.

    The trees were shielded in sleet. They chinked together like off-key wind chimes, or like a pocket of glass marbles, cat’s eyes. It rained snow, it snowed rain. It sleeted, one might say. Mostly unlike anything I’ve ever seen, weather wise. The branches were enveloped in ice and the wind jangled them together. Other iced objects: telephone booths, the road, bus stops, windshields, stairs and hand rails, squirrels. The weather put in a twelve hour shift of making dangerous and decorative everything exposed to the outdoors. And after all the hard work, the sun ruined it all. This morning, still chilled and brisk, the sun undid all the iced objects. It only rained under trees, hailed even, as the wind knocked off the bits of melting sleet from branches, smashing into parked cars like miniature crystal wine glasses. All of Weather’s work was for naught.

    I cooked supper last night, after a week or more of not eating at home. Chana, veg curry, rice. I bought dry chick peas, first time, and followed the instructions for soaking. They ended up softer, but not soft enough. I decided that while stewing in a tomato, spice, onion and water mixture, they would soften ideally and make for the perfect curry. They didn’t, and my dish was more firm than the devil at a youth rally. All my cook work was for naught.

    The television show Lost. After five seasons of games, questions and childish dialogue the final season does little more than ruin what could have been an epic. All five seasons were for naught.

    Work without ceasing produces a special feeling when the unceasing work produces something of worth, or at at the very least, something that isn’t a failure. Hard work isn’t meant to be rewarded unless the reward is the actual production of a valuable end. But when hard work is neither rewarded nor is a means to a valuable end, when the hard work is for naught, the worker must work harder or reexamine what end the work was being done for.

    I haven’t worked hard in months. So I’ve got nothing to worry about…

  • Could be worse.

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

    It could be worse. It could always be worse. Famous hopeful words of a natural pessimist. I say it often. I need to say it more. I started out saying that everything was the worst. I’ve since stepped positively towards the light, and now instead of everything being the absolute worst, everything could be worse than where it is now, because it is alright now. Maybe in a few years I’ll actually realize that everything is great, and it couldn’t get better. That’ll be the day. But then there are people I know that have the most awful of times. And when they and I think that it could get no worse, it gets significantly worse. All the while I live the easiest life of anyone in the world, and it is only going up.

    Not sure if it is an accepted fact yet, but I have recently figured out: humans exist solely to satisfy themselves. To enjoy themselves. That is the underlying aim of every single human being that has ever drawn a breath. Except a few super humans, who we won’t name. But if you dig deep enough, even them. I am no different. This has been a pretty selfish month of unemployment. I did it because my job was crooked, my friends were coming to visit, and because I wanted to enjoy myself. Which one of these carried the most weight in my decision making process, I don’t even know.

    So I’ll take my self-indulgent, hedonistic life it a step further, a month further. I will go to another Habs game this week, and I will fly to Oklahoma in April, hang with a friend, and from there go on tour with the one and only Continuance for the month. Because although things are good now, I know that with these two months of absolute immersion in pleasure, something will hit hard and real and things will get worse.

    Because everything could be worse. And it usually gets there pretty quick.

    “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.” -Dickens