Author: Nic Olson

Brendan Morrison scored with two minutes and thirty two seconds remaining in the third.
I heard the door open. I was about three feet away from the television, so the angle I was at only permitted me to see the foot of the person who entered, and it was not a familiar shoe.

A man stumbled in with a phone, headphones and a bottle of orange juice. I sat him down on the ledge. He thought I was Alex, or at other times someone else. I paused the game, so I could finish it later. We talked about the Habs, the South end. A few times he said he wanted to stab me in the shoulder, or punch me twenty times in the face. He was disjointed had abused a few substances. He was sure he knew who I was, as he listed off people that he beat up earlier, people that he thought I should know. We talked for twenty minutes or so, when he decided that he needed to take a piss, so I showed him outside. He pissed on the house, I gathered his things, and grabbed a coat. We were going to walk to his house, which was apparently nearby. He didn’t make it much further than the front lawn. Then he decided that it was a better idea to make it to his girlfriend’s house, also nearby, but a driving distance.

I drove him to where he thought he wanted to go, and he wouldn’t show where the apartment was, and assured that he was going to be fine, and told me to call him in thirty minutes. I’ve called him a few times and he has declined the call each time.

When I was talking to him I was shaking a lot. I stopped when I realized that I had no reason to be nervous, until he kept bringing up the fact that he wanted to fight. He told me I could punch him in the face and knock him out. I considered it for a while, thinking that it might be my best option, but I waited it out. I thought that he might be a significant moment in my life. I thought that he might have showed up to say something that might be of worth. But nothing happened. It was just another situation to further confuse me and dishearten me as to the condition of mankind.

I think he’s ok.
The Habs won.

I have been having lots of sports talks with people lately.
Most of the sports talks have been about actual sports. How bad the Leafs are, how well Durant played last week, who is going to win the championship, who’s hotter Carrie Underwood, Hillary Duff or Elisha Cuthbert, all of whom are dating hockey players. I’ve been talking with people who think they know everything about every team and player because they played every sport for at least two years in their life, and the guy next to them is completely clueless because he doesn’t know passion. I have talked about sports with these people.

I have also been having sports conversations with people that don’t like sports and think they are mere distractions. People that believe that passion for a sports team is little more than a high school crush, a hindrance from what should actually be happening, the studies of a student. People who insult sports and people who like sports because they weren’t good enough to participate in elementary school and too good to participate in high school.

I like sports. I stray away from talking about them because I know that opinions in sports are so far from what people want to hear, at least, so far from what I want to hear. Sports writers and analysts get paid six figures to talk about things that everyone knows, and then everyone loves to talk about it further anyways.

But walking home from work last week I had a vision. It was of the Grey Cup. I looked at an SUV and noticed something sticking up from its windows. One was a Riders flag, while I thought the other one was the Grey Cup. It turned out to be another flag. But I’m not taking this vision lightly. I’m taking all of the money I have ($30?) and placing it on Green on November 29th. Let’s see what happens.

I found a few cookies in a styrofoam container at work yesterday. I ate four of them, assuming I was only stealing from Travis, or that Joni did some baking, or that Toby’s mom stopped by with some baking again. They were good, decidedly bakery purchased cookies, and I thought nothing of it.
Travis came in later and told me that they were found in a change room on Saturday, the busiest day we’ve had in a few months. I would’ve eaten them regardless.
It hit me later. They were laced with something. Something pungent enough to require me three or four excruciating porcelain roller coasters, a feeling I haven’t experienced since the times of India. I ate two more today. There are three more left for tomorrow. I have eaten laxative chocolate before; we did it in the dorms because we were bored once, and these cookies easily could have been interweaved with such poisons. Here’s props to the proprietor of pranks.

After a long while of contemplation, both my body and my mind have decided to quit. I’m not sure what I’m quitting, not my job, nor my life, but I’m quitting something. I’m over it. I’ve lost a large degree of hope and it isn’t going to come sprinting back any time soon. A long series of events and decisions has led me to the point where I feel that trying at life is barely worth it, that all humans are inherently selfish and that there is nothing I can do about it.

As a kid, I always heard scary real life stories. One recurring one was that people had placed needles/syringes around cities of the world, hidden in movie theatres, vending machines, buses, grocery stores. Needles that carried HIV. When you reached your arm in the dispenser of the vending machine, you would feel a slight prick, see a small amount of blood, and a small business card like note would fall from the machine saying that you had just been infected with HIV and that you were going to die. I believed it as true, and now we are in a world where it could be true. But they use laxatives and cookies instead, I guess.

So if you don’t see me much these days, I’m sitting in my basement on the floor of my room, on my new laptop, watching episodes of Friday Night Lights and waiting for the new year to whisk me away into adventure and newness.

I have been pricked and infected with the antidote to hope. I reached my hand into a styrofoam container of laxative  cookies and came out a quitter.

I think I have had every eye disease known to man. I was blind for a day. I have an astigmatism in one or both of my eyes, I forget. I had pink eye last year. Now I have a giant growth on my eyelid, scientifically known as a sty(e). If I knew what cataracts were, I probably had those once. And I think glaucoma is just a disease they use at Optometrist offices to scare kids into eating more carrots.

My friend from highschool, King, had a stye, but we all thought it was a huge pimple growing on his eyelid, and it was terrible, and it was there for two weeks. He is legendary for that, whether he knows it or not, and now that is almost me, minus the giant whitehead. My body is a war-zone right now.

It is twenty three minutes before midnight, this Friday the 13th. This weekend is the last weekend that the local Rainbow Cinemas of the Goldenmile Mall will be showing midnight movies. Some people just don’t see the importance in this. I do, so I’m going to ‘The Informant’ in ten minutes, to pay my respects to one of the last non-bar late night options of leisure in this fair city. I was there yesterday, and said to a friend that I hadn’t been to a movie alone, in this country. So, tonight is the night. I’m saying goodbye, Matt Damon style.

And because of this great loss, I think I am going to move. January 10, 2010, I am going to move to a new city. Because if I can’t watch a movie at midnight for four dollars flat, then this city just doesn’t want me around any more.

Thank you Rainbow Cinemas Midnight Movies for your hours of innocent good times, watching terrible cheesy horrors, terrible romantic comedies, terrible animated cartoons, as the first thing I do at the crack of the new day. I owe you one.

Working at a mall, with ample amounts of window space to survey the outside world, in a store that is never busy enough to require more than 1.5 people working/ playing mini golf, offers hours of observation time. There is a yellow Chevy Cobalt parked in the same parking spot everyday, a young lady that works in the bank. There is a 1986 Ford Taurus that parks illegally every day, an older Indian man that shows up, slides his sandy coloured Taurus just in front of the parking lot lights, and just beside the car that parked in the last non-handicap parking stall. He is there everyday, he sits on the bench in front of Wal-Mart, legs crossed in his winter coat that matches the tones of his Taurus. There is the lady from the eighties. Skinny, frizzy, big plastic glasses, and horse riding boots, every other day walks with a Wal-Mart bag in hand across to the other side of the parking lot, in front of my store, always walking with more calf strength than most.

Then there is my man. A man of old age, but mobile, walks past my windows at 10am daily, even on Thanksgiving and other holidays. He usually leaves at 5pm. His head always sports the Grey Cup Champions 2007 hat, as he braves the wind in his black polyester coat, lately with a poppy pinned to the lapel and otherwise well dressed. You can see him going from parking lot garbage can to garbage can, checking out the contents and ensuring that they haven’t begun to overflow. On one of my garbage runs, I met him in the mall trash compactor room, with a black polyethylene bag about half full. He smiled and said, ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it!’ I cordially replied and asked him where he got the bag of garbage from. He tried his best to come up with a coherent answer, but I had to help him out, and discovered his garbage came from the food court. He proceeded to grab the garbage bag from my hand and take it up the four steps to the trash compactor opening. We shared pleasantries as I headed back to my very pressing workplace. I saw him again the other day at mall close, helping two young ladies of a shoe store place a tarp over their mall sidewalk sale stand. He exclaimed, ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ as we watched the girls parachute the tarp over the pyramid of shoes. We shared more pleasantries as I worked the big blue trolley of cardboard past him and into the garbage room.

I see him more times in an average day than I can count. He makes me contemplate more about life, age, work, war, family, money; more than any book I would ever read, any preacher I would ever hear, or any song I would ever listen to. While listening to the classical hits of CBC Radio 2, my store empty and stained, I have had many fictitious conversations with him, talking about his son that lives in Saskatoon and doesn’t want to talk to him. About his wife who passed away three years ago. About his time in the war. About his daily routine. About growing old. His current life is the mall, and he is an extraordinary man without even knowing it, and only by living an ordinary life.

The mall is deep. I want to be this man.

A friend of mine had a day calculator. It was on her cell phone, and it could calculate how many days you’ve been alive, assuming you’ve actually been alive all of those days, and not in some sort of coma or TV trance or at work for all but two weekends of it. It was interesting to know how many days old you were, as opposed to years, which shouldn’t matter anyways. Obviously since you can do such a thing on your phone, you can do it on the internet.

I am 7697 days old as of November 5th. Or approximately,

• 664,934,400 seconds
• 11,082,240 minutes
• 184,704 hours
• 1099 weeks 

I’m nearly 7700 days old. The day I turn 10000 will be much more impressive than any birthday I’ve had.

This is my 300th blog post. That ain’t bad if I started only 1165 days ago. That is about one every four days, which slays the records of most of my friends that do this. I’ve got that going for me.

Carey Price is 8118 days old as of November 5th. He and I are quite similar, not in age, nor in goalie skill, nor in anything really, except that fact that we’ve both met Taylor Procyshen, who is 7793 days old. Carey has got a lot of heat from the media since he has become the starting goaltender in the city that puts more pressure on the starting goaltender for wins than they do on mafia men for murder. I didn’t watch much of last season to see how it panned out, but with Komisarek bobbling the puck like a two-year old pushing a Fisher Price Corn-Popper, Price didn’t have much of a chance.

He and I have been hit hard for not living up to what we were expected. He and I, only 421 days difference in age, were thrust into the worlds’ eye and judged too harshly by onlookers. He and I have done nothing wrong. It is just an overly critical world judging the young based on previous successes, like Patrick Roy and my father, Wilf. No one can live up to them, ever. Carey and I know that, and we live with it daily.

Maybe I read into it too much, but when I tell people that I work at a discount clothing store, and no I’m not furthering my education through a university, I lose a sliver of respect. Because only the ones contributing to society through manual labour with journeyman in sight, or through higher education are truly making the world a better place. And that sucks.

Not everyone can be the Patrick Wilf of the world. Although we can all try.

He preached at me with the knowledge of a seasoned pastor.
He told me not to open the fridge when you are sweating, or you’ll get the Swine.
He got angry with any nice farm that didn’t have a Canadian flag flying outside of their home. He was the most patriotic person I’ve ever met and wasn’t even born here.
He slept in the woods the night before I found him.
He was from Spain, but spoke half English and half French with a little Italian thrown in there for good measure.
He was over fifty-five years old.
He sold me a Saskatchewan flag for $20.
He told me he wanted to listen to hard rock music, something like Sum41 or Avril Lavigne, he said. But he hated Bryan Adams and Nickelback because they sold out to the USA.
He kept nodding and saying ‘Yeah’ or ‘Oui’ when the car was silent.

I picked up this man while driving to Calgary alone.  I think I remember his name as Luc. He was under six feet tall, stocky with layers of warm clothes on. He had gray and black stubble dotting his red face, graying long hair and aged spotted hands. I don’t think we made eye contact once but I think he had a lazy eye.  I was tired and about to pull over for a nap just outside of Medicine Hat at about 9am, and saw him on the road with his Canada flag bandana. I figured he’d keep me awake and alive for a few hours. When he first got in the car he didn’t say a word of English except for ‘Ed-min-tone’ when I asked him where he wanted to go. He spoke a few paragraphs in French and I laughed, assuming that it would be a long quiet trip. But it wasn’t.  I think he was a professional traveler. He had been everywhere in Canada, pretty much, and most of Europe. He bought or stole things, like flags, to sell on his journeys so he could buy himself food. He slept in his sleeping bag, snow pants, boots, and Canadian Goose-down jacket, in barns and forests near the highway. He was heading to Fernie to get a seasonal job at a hotel. He easily could have been a wanted man, because when I started driving, seconds after he got in the car, he told me not to drive faster than 110km/h because there were lots of mounties on the roads and we shouldn’t get pulled over.

He was the most interesting man I’ve ever met. And I’ll never see him again. But at least I’ve got a Saskatchewan flag. And the relief that I’m not the most mentally deranged man in western Canada. Thanks, Luc.

I watched Twilight last night. If you don’t know what Twilight is, ask any girl aged 10-16 and they’d probably tell you that it is the greatest vampire love story of our time. Or of all time, I can’t recall many great vampire love stories. If you don’t know what Twilight is, you could also ask any person aged 26-31 and they’d tell you that The Lost Boys is way better. And that part maybe true.

I was out of the country when this whole Twilight vampire obsession began. I wanted to watch it when I heard about it, because vampires are alright, and I think that Kristen Stewart is quite nice. Although most macho twenty-one year olds may tell you not to watch it, some male my age told me that I should. So I did. It was decent up until the baseball scene, which was probably the pivotal scene in the movie. I prefer the classic Lost Boys lines, ‘Death by stereo!’ or ‘My own brother, a goddamn shit sucking vampire. Oh wait ’til I tell mom, buddy.’

It seems that the saga that is Twilight hit pretty hard and pretty fast. A characteristic of the society we live in. Something popular, threatening, or beautiful is discovered and soon the entire world is praising, protecting or photographing it. Think of all the fads, all the trends, all the franchises over the past ten years, and you realize the dismal situation we are in. I think of all the epidemics and pandemics since I was in grade six and I could write an entire anthology of science fiction movies. We are constantly presented with these repetitive scripts and disease to-do lists and we don’t realize that we pour our money right back into them through obsession and anxiety. If you can convince the general public that something is impressive or deadly, you will get enough money to buy a tropical island and dream another one up.

A girl from work called me today, asking if I planned on getting the Swine Flu vaccine. I laughed through the telephone in her face. I thought she was joking, but apparently even people at my work are contemplating it. A staff wide vaccination. People I believed had it together mentally are even getting into it. It is making me wonder if everyone believes exactly what they hear, or if I have completely lost my mind. Neither would surprise me, nor would either delight me.

I know that Swine Flu likely exists, but the extent to which we believe it exists and how we have become to believe it exists is almost embarrassing to our species. Chances are good that I will become infected with the Swine Flu and die a slow and painful death. I would almost be happy if I did. I’d at least know that it was indeed I that had gone crazy and it wasn’t everyone else that had lost their minds. Some may consider me a skeptic or even a cynic. I would definitely agree. How can I not be skeptical or cynical when I have grown up in this generation that has gotten itself nowhere and will be known for nothing more than creating franchises of movies and scaring itself into pandemics. What other options do I have?

You’ve got to do what you love. Up until recently I thought this meant occupationally. I thought this meant that you need to find a job and learn to love it or convince yourself that you love it. I always thought that what you loved to do would pay the bills because what you loved to do was your occupation, career. Or that there were the lucky few that had the opportunity to get a salary for what they actually loved to do, like a professional athlete or sleazy film actors.
But over the past few days and over the upcoming week I have found/ will further find what I love and I didn’t decide I love it, nor did I come to love it because it offers financial stability, but it chose me. I’m on an STC bus right now and there is free WiFi. I’m somewhere between Dundurn and Davidson. The sun is rising and the enormous bus windows allow me to see for days to the East and the West.

I sat in a band’s van last night for ten minutes waiting for Tom the GPS to escort us to 2480 Eastview, Saskatoon. I listened to talented people talk about their talents and then argue about candy. It felt good. The only thing that feels right is the road. And writing.

So I found what I love. And it is not what I love because of what it can give to me or what options it offers me, but just because it is what feels right.

Find what you love to do rather than what you think you could settle with for the rest of your life. The world would suck less if we did.

Yes so saddle up your horses now and keep your powder dry
Cause the truth is you won’t be here long
Yeah soon your going to die
To the heart, to the heart there’s no time for you to waste
You wont find your precious answers now by staying in one place
Yeah by giving up the chase

-Frank Turner, The Road

I have had more than one job where ‘hauling garbage’ could be written under the ‘responsibilities’ title on my resume, but instead I would probably write ‘workplace housekeeping’ or ‘managerial duties’. For some reason hauling people’s wasted fast food cups and old pairs of shoes, or smashed drywall and trampled carpet, or stale donuts and rock-hard bagels isn’t highly respected in the world.

I am not embarrassed about any of these jobs. Nor am I particularly proud of any of it. Thinking about it doesn’t make me want to dive into school so I can avoid any kind of garbage hauling job in the future, but it doesn’t make me want to commit to a career in the garbage industry. Here’s why.

I saw one of my top three favourite bands tonight, and just arrived home. It is 3:12am. I am hauling garbage but living the life. I have been hauling garbage for three years straight but have reached a point where I am one hockey game away from achieving pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do in my life. More or less everything I’ve truly wanted to see, I’ve seen. Everything I’ve wanted to do, I’ve done. There are still things on the ‘to do’ list, but I’m only one away from ‘the imperative’. One away from the grand prize. And I can say I did it all through hauling garbage. That’s why it’s legit. That’s why I’m not self-conscious of my poor jobs, or lack of ‘ambition’. Because I’ve done what I needed to do, and didn’t even have to sell my soul.

If you want a real hall of garbage just go here.