Balls of Rice

Category: Uncategorized

  • 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.

  • 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


  • 47

    Forty-Seven messages translated:

    Yes, Hello, my name is _______. I’m calling about that cheap-as-dirt apartment post I saw on Kijiji(jijijiji). I am probably the only one that has called so far, so I’ll assume I can come see your apartment tonight and understand why it is the price it is. Call me back  because I can tell you have nothing better to do, my number is __________. Thanks. Goodbye.

    One day, Forty-Seven (47) calls. I answered number one at 10am yesterday, then very soon after realized that our phone was going to be barraged with hungry home-shoppers, waiting to take advantage of any basement apartment under $700. Of forty-seven callers, at least one of them has got to be comfortable/desperate enough/cool enough to want a bedroom with a caving in floor, a kitchen with holes in the wall and duct-tape holding the floor together and a need for a baseball bat in the corner of each room. Right? Because I like it here, but liking it isn’t enough for me to sign a year lease and ruin my life forever. Only one Anglophone called. I understand.

    The phone rang all day. I was trying to have an emotional conversation over a plate of potatoes with my current visitor, but there was a constant ringing in my ears and unintelligible French slurring recorded on that one 1990’s answering machine that everyone had, white with blue buttons and single red LED number flashing, possibly from the caring hands of General Electric. And because of my high businessman status (waking up at noon) I have to listen to each recording, while they are being recorded, because I’m expecting a few important business-like calls.

    But they can have the apartment, as long as I can have my wood baseball bat from 1920 and my wood desk. The government sent me a substantial payment today, I could put a serious dent in renting a nice place.

    I’d rather do something reckless.

  • Andre Agassi Flakes


    I left the fridge door open for half of an hour today. I made myself some lunch; potatoes, rice, dal and a carrot, left the kitchen to enjoy my meal on the couch, where the fridge is not visible. If something is not visible from the couch it is not my responsibility. My roommate walked into the kitchen and honked a laugh, told me that I left the door open. Again. The third time this week. I’ve had trouble in the past with properly closing doors, including those of refrigerators, because I was brought up with a fridge door properly balanced so that the door would fall closed itself. I was never weaned off this system. Fridge doors should just shut, any accountable appliance owner knows how to make that happen. I guess technically I am an appliance owner now.

    I got a job today. If I want it.
    I don’t want it. It is another call centre. Supposedly lawful this time. They called me. I would much rather stay at home reading, playing Andre Agassi Tennis, Donkey Kong, Lion King for Super Nintendo. I’m doing about the same amount of good for humanity either way. Interviewing for jobs that you don’t want is interesting. I still got the job, although I did not show any bit of interest, but I guess I showed up at an interview, unshaven however. I muttered ‘Text 3#’ that she wanted me to read, to see if my call centre voice had a high enough percentage of bullshit in it. Eighty percent, I’m guessing.

    I am worried that I might be a flaky human and not even know it. A spacey mess. I feel like I am a well balanced being, with a proper ratio of laziness, spontaneity, commitment, dependability to at least be considered alright to employ or to spend time with. But after not being able to shut the fridge door, not taking a job that was handed to me, quitting two jobs in less than two months, possibly dropping French class and rarely bathing has got me to thinking.

    Blame it on youth. Inexperience. A dependence on refrigerators and situations that take care of themselves. Blame it on fruits grown robust with chemicals. Blame sugary cereal. Balls of Rice Flakes. Flakes of Rice.

  • EST + DST =

    I’ve never traveled through time. I was in a theatrical production in my grade nine year, I was Professor Filby, and I invented the time machine. Although I look back on that production thinking that I could have put more of myself behind my acting, I did memorize an entire novel of lines, and looked good while doing it. My time machine was composed of a laptop glued to a wheel chair with a giant lever that started up the machine. I still never traveled through time. Until today. We climbed the Mont-Royal, canvas shoes and thin boots up a sixty degree incline of loose leaves and crystallized snow, following directions from a winey source, down the cross, straight from the Big O. We located the low fire just down from the main path, and arrived in a time warp. The time jumped into a new frame, and we traveled with it.

    It is Daylight Savings Time in Eastern Standard Time. I’ve never lived in a place that considered this a good idea. Saskatchewan is always the right time. India has the same time across the entire country and doesn’t ever change. That is how you know you live in the right place, when the sun shines on it at proper times at all times, and you don’t have to change an entire institution of indefinite continued progress of existence and confuse the masses.

    I woke up at 11am, but I don’t know if it was noon or not. I would expect all of my Apple products to change the time themselves, they practically type these blogs for me, I would be surprised if they couldn’t change my clock based on an internationally recognized system. I don’t wear a watch, so I don’t know what time it was. Good thing I don’t have a job to be late for. Traveling through time isn’t as amazing as you would expect it to be. The future is the same as the past, only slightly more confusing and smells like a bonfire.