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I punched a hole in the wall today at work. But it was a good day.
Long story short, the track of lights did indeed work, and the only adequate way to express my feelings was to punch a hole in the wall. Not fuelled by anger at all, but a sort of confused inarticulate punch. I’ve said all I could say, but I haven’t punched all I could punch.

I work with two guys. Each of them have similar outlooks on life as I do, so you know things can get pretty raw. We have all worked together for literally hundreds of hours and we are at a point where we still usually appreciate each other’s company and can make fun of customers using only eye contact or a shake of the head. But when one of us is off, rattled, negative, or even more sarcastic than usual, then things go to hell.

We talked about work today at work. We were talking with an old coworker, and he told us that he was bored at his cadillac new job, working at the North Face store in Vancouver. He texted us his apparent deadly boredom, while we three sat at the front till, slowly letting the minutes roll until we could go home and live our lives that work we work for. Our lives that work allows us to have. Another friend just emailed me and said that he wanted to quit work, because his boss was a different name for a specific female genitalia. No matter the job, no matter the pay, no matter how hot your coworkers are, work is never worth it.

There is the one in fifty that actually love what they do, and then the other forty-nine that have to make that person’s food, fold that person’s clothes, teach that person’s children, account that person’s money, do that person’s paper work, build that person’s home; only so that he or she have a chance at living life. And then we start to believe that work is only a bummer when it is a job that doesn’t require post-secondary. But even if you have perfect hours, get unreal pay, and somewhat like what you do, work is still work.

So I will move to Montreal, get a job that has absolutely nothing going for it, and wonder how and why I ever left the easiest, most enjoyable, and most relaxed job that ever existed. Then, and only then, will I have a true and pure hate for the idea of working to live, because I’ll be living the real life, and not just scamming off my parents.

I hate work more than anything, but I don’t believe in retirement. So, I guess I’m screwed.

When I was nine, in 1997, and the Roughriders lost to the Argonauts in the Grey Cup, I cried. We watched the game with a few other families at a big house in Pilot Butte, because they owned a projection screen TV. There were a few faces and plays I can remember from the game, but mostly I remember crying on the drive home.

I’ve watched too many alien movies lately.

I sat in the dentist chair on the 5th Floor of SIAST in Regina, while my sister picked at calculus buildups, d-cal something, plaque issues, orthodontic cement and probably a few popcorn kernel pieces. It felt like I was in an alien spaceship, with forty other specimens being scraped and tested, all in one big room, like a mass science experiment, as the experimenters spoke in a foreign, alien-like language. The research of the cavernous depths of a pit of gingivitis and periodontitis. I wondered how often this could be done to me in my sleep, and how often experimental technology could have been transfused into my body through my gingival mouth. All I learned is that if you brush once a day or less, never floss, and eat lots of Mini Eggs, you can still have healthy teeth, despite what my sister may say.

Pulling into Yorkton last night at 6pm, each street light had festive green mood lighting above it, and the first thing that came to mind, was that it was an alien defense mechanism developed by the Yorkton Space Agency, who cover up their actual identities by telling people that they are Shriners.

Hearing about Suzuki and Gore teaming up and I instantly think they are secretly on the classified government agency that is trying to ensure that our ozone is strong so that alien forces cannot penetrate it and kill us all. That is the real threat of global warming.

If you’ve ever questioned anything before, I can tell you right now, it is highly likely that the answer involves alien interaction of some sort. It is almost too obvious.

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.