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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.

I embedded an invisible gadget on my blog that allows me to see who is looking at my page, where they are from, how long they looked at it, how they found my page, how they left my page, what internet service provider, operating system and browser they were using, what resolution they looked with, what search engine best highlights my blog, and gives me a world map with the location of each view. A glorified hit counter.
All through the beauty of IP addresses. I think there is a website that shows you how to block your IP address, if you are creeped out that I am watching you. I actually can’t see who is looking, but I can see from which city, and I can make an educated guess as to whom is reading this from Brooklyn, NY. (just some lonely art student).

Most of the page views are from people using Google or Yahoo or Bing to look up things that I have jokingly posted about, like ‘The Meaning of Del Potro‘ or photos of Novak Djokovic (which I stole from someone else’s blog) or people wishing to learn about how to make ‘rice balls’. They think this blog is a credible source of any useful information, they come to it for less than five seconds and leave angry and disappointed.

For some reason I started to take this blog system a bit more serious. I have realized that a handful of people have used this medium to become famous, as with YouTube, Myspace or some nudey website, and thought that I might have a chance. With my nudes, that is. I have since withdrawn that hope, still write often, and use my blog as a hopeful home of sharing ideas, music and poor writing. I am still committed, just not expecting.

For a while I considered Monetizing my blog, which means adding content relevant advertisements that pay me every time someone browses them, or that is what I’ve understood. I considered it quite heavily. But selling out isn’t cool, just ask Green Day. My blog is pure and unadulterated.

Just thought you’d like to know how noble I am. Keep mindlessly viewing this blog. It brings up my morale and boosts self esteem. Make it your home page and force yourself to look at it daily. Then send me what your IP address is so I can make a note of it.

I bought a new winter coat today. My old one was OK, a bit small, and behind the trendy times by about five years, so I bought a crisp new one from my store for fifty percent what you would have paid for it, unless I gave you The Discount. This is the first full winter I have mentally committed to staying in Canada for, in a few years, so I decided a new addition to the winter wear family of mine was an alright idea. Plus my mom said she’d pay for it as a birthday present. Hells yeah.

I know nearly nothing about climate change. It seems to me that it was once called Global Warming until someone realized that half of the world is actually getting colder, and the climate is changing in more than one direction. I’ve heard people argue about climate change. Some people deny it’s existence, some people swear the Al Gore is God, but for this topic, I have no strong opinion. Sure I believe in climate change. Sure I make a slight conscious effort to avoid contributing to it, but I don’t talk about it everyday as if it were a pressing issue in my life, and maybe it is people like me that are killing the future by melting the polar ice caps and glaciers.

If I ever convince a girl to have kids with me, my kids are going to have a pretty ruined world to salvage, even more ruined than the one my parents gave me. But even with that baby-daddy mentality, I’m not sold. It is hard for me to believe that a blog, or 11,000 of them even could change people’s minds enough to give future people a world that isn’t frozen, or toasted, or covered in water, or whatever the apocalypse says will happen. But I guess we can try.

Today I saw a commercial, which probably cost a few million of our dollars to produce, about elder abuse. Now, I am sure that elder abuse is a real problem, and it is actually quite depressing to think about, but when was the last time you remember a federal government ad about climate change? Probably Paul Martin’s One Tonne Challenge via Rick Mercer. And to think that no one liked the Liberals. Mother Earth did. Jean Chretien and was Mother Earth’s mistress.

I joined the Blog Action Day list because there are probably millions of ineffective blogs in the world, and this list is a few people that hope theirs can make a difference.
Take the bus. Cut the lawn with scissors. Snowblow the driveway with a shovel. Walk.

Good luck. The future is just flying by the seed of my pants. Our kids are screwed.

This summer a friend was packing her things into boxes to move from her one bedroom apartment back into her parents home. She likes to read and I would consider her one of most well read people I know. She had a huge bookshelf of books and invited me to sift through a few of her extras that she didn’t think she wanted any longer. I took maybe ten books, mostly titles I’ve never heard of by some authors I have heard of. Orwell, Dostoyevsky, David Suzuki, Mowat, Tolstoy and others. I just grabbed stuff to make me look smart and studious, mostly. We sat around eating chicken fingers and blueberries talking about these books and our drunk friends in the room and next door.

I took ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ by Orwell. I read it this past month and it became my favourite piece of fiction of all time.

Tonight I picked up a book that I don’t even remember taking by an author named J. Krishnamurti, who was born in India, so he’s obviously a genius. It is called ‘Think on These Things’. Non-Fiction. It is a man answering questions from students, presumably in a university setting. His ideas on education, knowledge, intelligence, freedom, love, life, ambitions, society, are the totally different from anything I’ve ever heard. I don’t even know what to say, really, so I’ll just give you a short quote from what I’ve read. It might be ramblings of a hippie, but he’s saying what I’m thinking, and every sentence is smart.

“Surely, education has no meaning unless it helps you to understand the vast expanse of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys. You may earn degrees, you may have a series of letters after your name and land a very good job; but then what? What is the point of it all if in the process your mind becomes dull, weary, stupid? So, while you are young, must you not seek to find what life is all about? And is it not the true function of education to cultivate in you the intelligence which will try to find the answer to all these problems? Do you know what intelligence is? It is the capacity, surely, to think freely, without fear, without a formula, so that you begin to discover for yourself what is real, what is true, but if you are frightened you will never be intelligent. Any form of ambition, spiritual or mundane, breeds anxiety, fear; therefore ambition does not help to bring about a mind that is clear, simple, direct and hence intelligent.”

So, thanks Anna. Best night of chicken fingers in my life.

This is my last week’s To Do list written on the ‘Notes’ application on my iPod.

– Corb Tix
– Library
– Write
– Character Outlines
– Find a boy who will kiss me, I am still trying to find who I am.

Now, I didn’t write the last one. At least, I didn’t write it in my right mind. I might have been really tired one day when the honesty came seeping out of me. But I don’t think that happened. For some reason, when I read this I read it in the voice of Ricky Tiefenbach, because it reads like something he would say to me. But whomever wrote it, has got me pegged. The latter part anyways…

It has been snowing recently. When the snow first appeared, I let a large smile slip as I pretended to curse the early winter like everyone else. While I do think that it is off when the yellow leaves fall onto already frozen earth and already whitened grass, I enjoy the winter, possibly because I missed four months of it last year ‘trying to find who I am’ in a foreign country. I recently found out a part of who I am, the fact that I do indeed like winter. I’m finding.
In the past year I found out that I am briefs and not boxers. I have been slowly finding out that I can listen to the music I want without worrying about getting hassled by anyone. I found out that I can make decisions if I am making decisions about things I want to. I am finding out more of what I dislike more than what I like, so eventually that’s got to leave me somewhere.
But there are still a few major things that I am yet to find out, or still finding out. And I guess that is why I am here. And I guess that is why I am doing what I am doing.

Oh, and keep an eye out for a boy that will kiss me, that ought to help things.

I haven’t purchased used clothing in a while. Maybe my style has somewhat matured since my days of only wearing ripped up blue work pants and light jackets of many colours. I also work at a clothing store where new clothes cost very little for employees. I had a bag of old jeans and tees I once wore often but where none the more, and I took this bag to the Salvation Army. I decided to take a closer look at the products in the old store and saw little of real value. Old work jackets with the names Hank and Gerry on them. Suit coats of heavy and dusty tweed sulking over the black plastic hangers, the same hangers that uphold the overpriced brandname non-musty clothing of my store. I found a pair of jeans that looked worn enough to be cheap but new enough to be worn by me. I tried them on as I do with every $5.99 pair of jeans that I like. They fit well; not too tight, nor too long, nor very expensive. I purchased them from an exuberant cashier and thereafter drove to soccer practice.

I tried the jeans on later that night, to wear them in and get my own personal leg musk woven into their threads. I was sitting on the couch reading when my inner thigh felt a burning. I repositioned my crossed legs off of the ottoman and spread them apart, feet on the ground. The burning persisted. I stripped down and finished the chapter in my bikini briefs. I tried to wear them to work the next day but the burning continued and while standing near the door, a draft caught me off guard when I noticed two large worn spots in the crotch area. I hope the jeans previous owner did not have issues with rashes so strong that they burned out the crotches of pants faster than freshman chlamydia. I have opted to wash these jeans before further use.

Not always, but often, I worry about catching a disease from a toilet seat. When I have a persistent itch, I hope that taking that restroom break at Walkers in Saskatoon didn’t permanently give me an itch. That is worrisome business. I was never worried about getting a worm or parasite as much as I was worried getting VD from the soap dispenser at the public swimming pool, and although acquiring a parasite from drinking straight pond water in a city village in India might be more dangerous than having my junk an inch away from stained mildewed porcelain.

I have also discovered a new body wide itch I get when I am performing some sort of physical activity. After I wash my face and skateboard to work, I get an uncomfortable itch of my face and body, and especially head of hair. It feels like what I’d think an allergy would be like, although I don’t believe allergies exist I think allergies are just an overactive Complaining Gland. The irritation subsides quickly after I stop complaining and think about something else.

The itches have subsided, the burning has stopped. The life of a bachelor.

The only thing that Canada has that I need, began today. This is the first winter in three years that I am planning on being in Canada for an entire NHL season. Here it is.

Canadiens:
– the new guys under 6feet are truly exciting to watch. I was skeptical, but it looks promising.
– a super hungover Carey Price could probably skate a lap around the rink in his full gear faster than Hal Gill could on his best day. And Price’s hands are better too.
– Carey Price is going to prove the entire hockey media wrong with a GAA of .999%.
– Spacek really looks like Dan Ackroyd.

NHL:
– after the Penguins won the Cup, on that same day I said that I thought Washington was going to win it this year, that is, if Montreal somehow doesn’t.
– Sundin retired. Good news. Until he pulls a Forsberg and decides to play for New York in March.
– Calgary’s retro jerseys are perfect.
– TSN has only gotten worse. Laviolette and McTavish? Just keep picking up the garbage I guess. Their analysts can analyze my hate for their segments and stolen music.
– Bettman is the death of hockey.
– Komisarek has no soul.

I had to let that all out. No one cares what I think about anything hockey, but it is pretty much all I’ve got going for me right now.