I have decided to post once a month one of my favourite photos that I’ve taken, and maybe others as well. Every month until I die. These will be without a theme, but they will probably end up being places I wish I was at.
This month: Delhi Dhaba, the best food I’ve eaten in my life, the best people I’ve met in my life, plastic chairs.
It is alarming when your brain is empty. The alarm seems louder when there is nothing to absorb its sound. I now know how the majority of the public feels. I now know how an inanimate object feels. I curl up in a ball sitting on the only soft chair for miles, head between my knees because I have nothing to do and my head can’t come up with anything to think about. It is blank. Like an empty sheet of paper, but less a dimension.
If you take a blank piece of paper and a black marker, and write every word in the dictionary on that paper, the page will become black. Blank again, but black. Maybe there is too much rotating, swirling, bubbling, marinating, stewing in my mind that it has turned a white page black. Maybe I need a shelving system for my brain, and that system is an education, or a job, or a less apathetic outlook. These mixing words could be stored neatly like an archive of all the thoughts ever thought if only they had an archivist. I need to find said archivist. I’ll post an ad on CraigsList in the Erotic section:
‘Twenty-two year old seeks Aged and Wrinkly to deal with a room full of disorganization. Must have experience in the Dewey Decimal system. Must have size 34D.’
So I root through a waist-high pile of black scribbled words on a while slab to bring you the latest version of this. And I hope, at least not for five years or so, that I don’t come off as completely crazy, but just confused, and in need of an archivist.
Accepting resumes now.
Things are looking bright…
My arm has been twitching for over 24 hours. I can’t tell if it is my muscles deteriorating to nothing, my dehydration, a nervous tick, the beginning of my mental breakdown or just my brain is sending signals to my right bicep instead of the creative part of my brain. All of them seem serious. None of them seem quite true.
When the body starts involuntarily moving in ways it never has before, it is like a coup d’etat of the body. First my arm decides it doesn’t want to follow my way, then it convinces the other arm, and they will eventually fully revolt and hold me in my room for good. Shortly after this they will meet up with my feet and convince them that my brain isn’t worth listening to anymore. Eventually my entire body will fight against my brain and overthrow it, so a new, fresh, ‘Yes We Can’ without the evil, leader/brain can lead this nation-body in a way it needs to be led. It all starts with an arm twitch.
A classmate, quarante-cinq year old Soo Ying, sat me down during afternoon break to tell me that she thinks I should drop out of French class and travel the world. She told me this in English of course. She made serious eye contact, used exaggerated hand motions, held my arm to show that she was speaking earnestly. She is conspiring with my twitching right bicep and my aching left heel. She knows.
What do most people do when certain upheavals arrive in their physicality? Prozac? Parenthood? Beer? I refuse to silence the twitch within, I acknowledge its presence and will defeat it by letting it defeat me. Twitches lead to riches.
For my birthday my Grandma and Grandpa sent me $100 of iTunes cards, and you likely knew that already. I contacted most people I know, or at least those whose music opinion I respect, asking for recommendations as to what I should buy. Check my music page to see if your recommendation has made my playlist yet. I still have some music to buy, but don’t want to rush it. I hear the new Rihanna is great though…
Along with a birthday card and the iTunes cards they sent me this note. I received similar notes from sister and mother so my first birthday away from home wasn’t as pathetic as I assumed it would be. There would be no point to be sad or miss home, because I moved here by choice. I’m not imprisoned or living oppressed, although French school feels like hell sometimes. But notes like this are pretty sweet when I daily question my purpose in being here, at least I’ve got a few people back home, who although know I’m wasting my life on hockey games and writing poetry, don’t mind and still send messages.
I’ve had an empty apartment for a week. Just me, shirtless, my computer, the neighbour Gilles every now and then, and twenty-four bagels. There are only eleven bagels left. I have done little to no writing, aside from this, and another bad poem about the neighbourhood. I’ve done little to nothing productive, besides studying my French for a total of two hours, because a friend is going to be taking up all my study time next weekend as we watch Habs games, ride roller coasters, eat too much, go to concerts and Hindi films. It is good to know that even at my most pathetic, shirtless at 4pm eating plain bagels with no intention of productivity, playing air guitar to Continuance, my Grandma and Grandpa still like me even when I don’t like myself. I can hope anyway.
Oh, excuse me, I’ve got to go take a nap for three hours before I stream the football game and eat expiring food that isn’t mine, I can’t possibly come up with a proper ending to this post. Until next time.
It falls from the sky. It washes our pimply armpits. It saves people from burning to death. It satisfies thirst. It is the universal solvent. It is what astronauts search for on other planets because it is the only thing we know that is necessary for life. We’ve reached a point where it is not available to everyone on the planet. Water is wealth. The majority of wealth in the world is distributed among a select few. The majority of clean water in the world is distributed to the same select few, those who can afford to pay for it.
It is Blog Action Day. I believe I partook in this event last year and that obviously changed the world a great deal when it comes to climate change. This year the topic is water. I feel it is important to use this tool of evil, Balls of Rice, for good every now and then. Like most people I feel it is adequate to devote only a tiny and selfish portion of my time to the benefit of others*, one day a year to writing about more than my feelings and try to have a positive impact on the world. Because that is the western way.
*I saw a bag of Starbucks coffee, (Red.) brand. $1 of each $20 bag of coffee gets donated back to Africa, where the coffee came from. The coffee was not fair trade. Makes about as much sense as using child labour to build an orphanage. Or drowning a person who is dying of thirst.
Here is my advice as to how to avoid water waste:
1. Shower less! Showering everyday is absurd. Showering twice a day makes me vomit. It is possible to smell good for several days without showering, people have done it for thousands of years. If you bathe because it feels good or it wakes you up in the morning, you need better reasons. It would be like eating human meat because you like the taste, or killing your neighbour because he eats his supper with his hands. Over-showering is cannibalism and racism.
2. Don’t drink bottled water. Ever. Yeah, it is possible to go without it no matter how thirsty you think you are. The fact that there are even places in the world that it is recommended that people drink bottled water could be taken care of if wealth was distributed properly. If you don’t already know that the water in the Evian (spell this company’s name backwards) bottle is the exact same water as what comes from your tap, you should at least be smart enough to realize that paying $2 for a litre of water is mathematically worse than paying $1 for a litre of gas, and just as bad for the environment. No matter how cool their bottles look, or how many ‘environmentally friendly’ seals and certificates it gets, it is about as trustworthy as the government. Don’t be a moron.
3. Leave your house. The sooner you travel somewhere that isn’t your own bed and doesn’t have heated flooring, the sooner you will see what the real world looks like, and the sooner you’ll understand your water consumption compared to the large portion of the world, and how much less you could use.
4. Don’t flush the toilet more than twice a day. Don’t abuse your privilege to having a toilet.
‘More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet. Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to toilets. This means that sewage spills into rivers and streams, contaminating drinking water and causing disease.’
Just because you have access to a cell phone and a toilet doesn’t mean you should abuse both. The only place in the world that has more shit than a toilet, is your text inbox.
5. Put a brick in your toilet tank. Save some water.
6. Read. Think. Make a change in your lifestyle. Don’t be a consume-only moron.
‘Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week.’
The pessimist in me says that this post won’t change anything, and that soon enough we will run out of water and it will be sold like gasoline or diamonds. The optimist in me, yes there is one, says that in five years it would be possible to give every person in the world access to good water, if that is something we want to happen. Step one, I feel, is to realize that we can’t waste what other people don’t have. Stop showering.
Stats were supplied by Blog Action Day.
I gave to Water.org under the name ‘The Honorable Nicholas Olson’. It is endorsed by Matt Damon, so you know it is cool…
When I was driving to the airport the sun’s rays bounced perfectly off of the rearview mirror. The second reflection that a rearview is intended to make, for night driving purposes, was lined up perfectly with my primary reflection so that my second reflection’s eyebrows lined up just above my primary reflection’s lip. With a slight tilt of my head I had a moustache as good as one of my eyebrows. If my moustache were as good as either of my eyebrows, I’d be a regular Stalin.
On the drive back from the airport, I was alone, so I could verbally express my brilliant ideas, and I wasn’t listening to music because the car I drove only had pop punk CDs and I wasn’t occupied because my nose was clear. I quickly invented a game involving short poetry and license plates. These were some my favourites. I laughed myself home.
373 REE
Read every book.
Especially ones that you think are dull.
Even the Bible.
CJR 546
Can’t forget to buy bread,
Just make it fresh
Rotten bread’s for birds with VD.
012 ZXB
…
Xylophones:
Bad ass.
420 SFO
Smoking doobies can kill.
Fat dollars,
Owed to the Hells Angels down the road. You’re dead.
I have invented the new Haiku, only more potent. Zeroes can be ten letters or zero. If you get the simple pattern I encourage you to create some of your own. The only activity more enjoyable while driving is picking your nose. And sometimes there just isn’t anything to pick.
October is always a month to be reckoned with, but this year there is statistical reasons behind this reckoning. The Tenth Day of the Tenth Month of the Tenth Year will occur in three days, which happens only every 100 years. The next day is Thanksgiving.
Thanks to the research of some bored statistician this piece of information was given to me by someone: This October has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays all in one month. It happens only once in 823 years. A month of weekends. A month of parties. Then it is Halloween.
I go to school with twenty-nine others, many of them immigrants. We went to a Job Fair today, and while dozens of them earnestly searched new jobs where they might not have to use their limited French abilities so that they could properly support their families. I wandered around, read up on a few things of interest and ducked out early. At one point in my life this might have been interesting to me, and at a point later on in my life this may interest me again. But right now, lacking education and lacking ambition, it was just a bunch of French speaking people in nice clothes in front of nice displays of nice jobs that I would very nicely deny if they were offered. A huge job interview in a language you don’t know. There can’t be much worse.
After I left I found myself sitting facing a fountain. A 50-something-year old man walked by, sifted through his pocket for a while and pulled his hand out, put it out flat and poked around to find the right coin. He threw one in the fountain, thought about it for a while, and threw in another one. I don’t know what he was wishing for, and never will. Maybe he was wishing for a job, he looked like he hadn’t worked in a while, I could have directed him to the Job Fair. Maybe he was wishing for world peace, be he seemed wiser than that. Maybe he was wishing for a future for his family. I hope to be this man someday. Old, yet hopeful, walking and wishing. I will be wishing until they stop coming true. And then I will wish twice as much.
October hasn’t given me any decent time for thought or any new ideas, but there must be months in the year where ideas stop and time for thought happens subtly and the month is just as decent as any other, if not more. So far it looks like October will be that. One month in eight hundred and twenty three.
Just like a sitcom character, I went to the laundromat today. First time. It is on the street a block away from everything one might need to live. Pizza Place, metro, mechanic, cafe, post office, drug dealer. Soap is free on Wednesdays.
I sat outside clipping my fingernails and reading poetry, peeking in the door to make sure the man with painty sweatpants wasn’t going through my delicates. The voice of a twenty year younger Oprah beat against my ear through a twenty year older television set, the shopkeeper’s time-pass. Oprah was even speaking English. A bald man in a suit came in closer to the end of my cycle. He was carrying a suitcase. He placed it on the table, leaned against a running washing machine and stroked his bald head. Hanging out at the laundromat. I couldn’t blame him, it was high times in there.
I wondered if a laundromat could get a government grant to replace their machines from my grandparent’s era, for new, low volume ones. Probably not. It is always peculiar to me that the money that the government takes from me, which you can be sure isn’t much, gets to be spent on things I disapprove of: destroying natural water habitats in Alberta, etc, etc, which are based on the opinion of a guy I haven’t met, or wouldn’t care to meet. Democracy is perfect. And then water is wasted overwashing underwear at the same time. And then water costs $2/litre, if you are too good to drink what the tap makes. I guess the government gives me money and doesn’t approve when I spend it on food and beer in Quebec, clothing for children under the age of 14, three of the least taxed things I know of. I don’t buy those often.
Growing up seems exciting until you realize that it just means dirty underwear and less friends. I leaned against the newly painted door frame, mowed on a slice of pizza and could definitely say growing up wasn’t as good as it is cracked up to be, but it still wasn’t bad. I licked clean two bowls of pumpkin pie filling yesterday and my toilet got repainted a golden pumpkin colour. Childhood meets ‘adulthood’.
Balls of Rice 
