Wednesdays with Tom

It’s almost the end of the year and while I should be busy trying to get my shit together, I’m here writing my blog. This is my fourth year of my undergrad, and certainly not my last. For those of you, family and friends, who quip “It’s taking you long! When are you going to finish?” My answer is thus:

None of your fucking business.

With the year almost at a close I’m happy, but the happiness is bittersweet. (wow, that was cheesy and overly-dramatic, just go with it.) I’m going to miss all the friends I’ve made in the Creative Writing Program, as well as all the friends I’ve made in the other classes I’ve taken over the years. Wednesdays with Tom deserves an asterisk, though.

Who could forget The Donnas, those girls inseparable who were blogging before blogging was blog. Or Shakes, that strange character who wore black most days, a binary contrast to his pasty flesh, and who was always ready with an over-explanation of simplistic points accompanied by grossly embellished gesticulations which often elicited many rolling eyes. But above all I will personally miss the opportunity to make snippy comments and somewhat inappropriate jokes.

A few weeks ago we read the play Harlem Duets, a play, if you ever read it, that will forever change your perception of Billy Shakespeare’s Othello. It is a production that combines Jazz music and audio snippets from famous and infamous moments of Black America’s history. During tutorial I practically killed myself trying to hold laughter in at six letters I scrawled on my course kit as our TA Tom talked about OJ Simpson and Othello. The six letters I wrote were: OJELLO. A combination of Othello and OJ.

Amanda looked on, and she too was infected with the giggles. Tom still hadn't noticed. Greg is sitting perpendicular to Amanda and I, and I know Greg always enjoys a good joke. He frequently brings up the comment I made concerning our skin tones during one of the first classes last semester. I called our row, which consisted of Amanda, myself, and Greg, “The Gradation of Melanin*.” White, (Honey) Brown, Black. Har-Har-Har.

I decided, I’ll let Greg in on the Ojello joke. I turn my course kit so that he can read it and I tap it with my pencil to get his attention. He laughs that subdued, reverent chuckle he has. Tom looked at us, a common occurrence in that class, and asked, “What. What’s going on down there?” I folded my face into my hands, the laughter filling my throat as Amanda exclaimed, “OJELLO.”

Amid the laughter of the class, Tom said, “It’s okay to have fun, but you have to let me in on the joke!”

Tom tried to move on from there, but he went in a direction that sent me into a spiral of unabashed laughter. He put forth, while I was still laughing about Ojello mind you, this question: “Can anyone draw a parallel between Michael Jackson and the things we’ve learned about contemporary literature this year?”

I couldn’t help myself.

I blurted out, between sharp stabs of semi-curtailed laughter, “MICHAEL JACKSON IS PASTICHE. HE’S PUT TOGETHER FROM ALL THESE DIFFERENT PARTS.” I think a few people laughed, but I was losing it. I apologized as I sobbed with laughter, wiping my eyes periodically.

Oh, how I’ll miss Wednesdays with Tom.

*Melanin: n. Insoluble pigments that account for the color of e.g. skin. I'd mistakenly called it Melanoma, which is that shit that turns into cancer. So yea, I'm smart, but not that smart.

After that, I need a nap.

Yesterday, I joked with Regina that, "I stake all my faith in filipinos upon this interaction." We laughed. What I was talking about was this filipino dude named Sean* from Scarghetto who was supposed to come and look at a 5 month old puppy. He called me and said, “Oh, man. I’m sorry, I can’t come today. I got in an accident.” I thought, “yea yea, bullshit. You just don’t want to come.” Then he said, “Maybe I can come on Saturday?” And I was all, “Sure, just call me when you’re on your way.”

I get a call this morning around 9 am. “Hello, it’s Sean. Can I come today?” My brain goes through the checklist:

• Do I have other more pressing shit to do today? No.
• Is the dog ready? No, needs to have a delousing bath.
• Do I have the energy to do it? For 500 bucks I do.

I quickly tell Sean to come on up, and I give him the directions.

After I get off the phone I rush to the barn and grab the puppy. I've been calling the puppy Rascal for the past couple of weeks because he always seems to get my hopes up of selling him. He's cute, mostly black, beautiful dog. He's also BIG. Bathing him was a joke. He splashed a lot and I think I got some Malathion in my eye. (Malathion is used for delousing sheep, but it’s all good for dogs too.) When he’s clean, I start drying him.

4 towels and 20 minutes of blow drying later, he’s ready to be sold. Sean still hasn’t arrived, but "he’s coming from Scarborough," I tell myself, "and it’s snowing a little." I decide to clean the tub while I wait. Finished the tub, Sean still hasn’t arrived. "Must be taking his time, I’ll do the dishes." I say. Dishes are done and Sean still isn’t at the gate. "Well, he’s Filipino," I think, "he’s on Filipino time." Which we all know means 1 hour late for everything. "I’ll start putting together the news papers for recycling next week." I tell myself. After I'm done and the bundle of reincarnation-anxious newspapers are sitting in the basement I check the gate. No car. I decide, "Well, I’ll get the papers together, all the forms for selling a dog, as well as all the food if he decides to take the dog." After all that, no sign of Sean.

By this point I'm fucking exhausted. I plop down on my chair and start reading the flyers.

Finally, Sean arrives. He’s shorter than I imagined. He’s 28 and already has a partial denture. His teeth are slanted and he drives a slammed Dodge Neon.

At first he seemed cool. Talked to me about the Philippines, talked to me about the dogs, talked to me about how he should go about caring for the dogs, asks me about myself, what I do, do I work, yada-yada, and all that other jazz. Then he gets serious on me.

“You do drugs?”
“I used to, but not any more.”
“what did you used to do?”
“Just smoked a little weed.”
“Ahh… I never liked weed. I used to do crack a lot.”
“…”
“Yah, this one time I spent 400 dollars on crack for one night. I had to stop that though, I couldn’t save any money.”
“Yea, cracks bad shit, y0.”
“Yea, and it makes you skinny.”
“Yea, I heard that.”
“Stopped it like… two years ago. It got too expensive. I started smoking shaboo.”

For those of you who don’t know, Shaboo is what Filipinos call crystal meth.

“I heard of that stuff too.”
"That's how I quit crack. I started smoking Shaboo."
"..."
“Yea, it was cheaper and like it… how do you say… ummm... fuck, it like… I can still do stuff while on it. I can go to work and have lots of energy! If I smoke crack here, I’d be in this room all day. ALL NIGHT! Maybe 2 DAYS! I wouldn’t be able to do shit!” At this point the car crash excuse started to hold more weight. He started laughing, really, really hard. I laughed with him. Didn’t want to rock the crystal meth boat.

“Yah, but I stopped smoking shaboo too. Like.. 2.. no… 1 month ago?”

Keep in mind that he told me he has a 7 year old boy and 2 year old girl. Do the math. He was probably playing with his kids while he was on crack and meth. DADDY IS SO MUCH FUN!

Then he started telling me how he went to jail for stabbing a guy in the head. That’s when I started looking around the room for shit to hit him with if wanted to get all froggy on me. I think I talked to that guy for two hours straight. And the worst part was, he didn’t buy the dog. He said, “I have to talk to my wife.” I didn’t argue. I was glad to see him go. Said he'd call me to let me know though.

Man, and I thought I’d be safe putting my ad in the Toronto Star. Imagine the kinds of people I’d meet if I put my shit in the Sun? Shiver.

*Name changed

Spite Fucking & Karen Connelly.

I just picked up the much anticipated Orson Scott Card (of Ender’s Game fame) reworking of the iconic marvel classic, Iron Man. At first I was blown away by the concepts introduced by OSC, but then I took a step back, reassessed, and came to another conclusion:

This is fucking ludicrous.

A good comic book, as a rule for many true believers (thank you Stan Lee), has to walk that tight rope between fantasy and reality, reality and fiction. Ultimate Iron Man #1 had me going, until I saw there were strings attached. OSC, if you don’t know who he is, is this famous sci-fi writer. You’d expect him to come in here with some respect for the readers of this genre, but what he does instead is come in here, all swagger and panache, and shits right on your palette expects you, the reader, to swallow it.

Here’s the plot of Ultimate Iron Man #1:

Howard Stark, Tony Stark's father, is brilliant man who works in the biotech development field for the government. He is married to an inexplicably greedy woman who married him for his money. She is this way for absolutely no reason other than "she is". Anyways, Howard has just invented this blue kinda organism that one can paint on their skin which will render them invulnerable to all forms of hand-to-hand combat. That means you can hit one of those blue men with a baseball bat and they won't feel a thing. Really. I'm serious. You can. They won't feel shit.* The problem with the blue paint is that if one were to keep it on their skin for more than 15 minutes the organism would eat through all the levels of dermis. Sexy.

To solve the “eats your flesh” problem Howard enlists the help of a famous bio-chemist. During the less than amicable divorce between Howard and his gold-digger first wife, Howard and the bio-chemist fall in love. She also, by the way, solves the flesh eating problem by attempting to create a virus that enables the human body to regenerate skin many times faster than usual. I see serious dandruff issues with this, but I wouldn’t have minded having that virus shit when Karen Connelly came into my Prose workshop to look at the stories from those of us who had the great misfortune to have signed up for that week. I could’ve used the extra layers of dead, calloused skin since she was vicious and loved every minute of it. I could’ve also really have gone for a few rounds of spite fucking with her. I would've made her booty go da-da da-da. (Sisqo's Thong Song, if you didn't know.)

BACK TO ULTIMATE IRON MAN.

So yes, Howard’s new lover, Maria, creates a virus that allows the human body to regenerate skin faster than normal. Well, as you would expect, something goes horribly wrong. Maria’s face is nearly scratched off by a supposedly sedated monkey – Insert cheers by PETA supporters *here*. During the struggle Jimmy’s arm, that is the monkey’s name (there’s a dick joke here, but I’ll leave you to follow my train of thought on your own), is severed by a shard of glass. Don’t ask me how that is even physically possible, let’s just assume the monkey’s arm is made of Jell-O. Invariably someone of the monkey blood gets in Maria’s mouth. The worst part is, she’s pregnant.

Since the monkey was used as a test subject for the virus Maria created, she now has the virus. While the virus enables the monkey to grow back its arm, there is another unexpected side effect: “The brain regenerates constantly. New nerve tissues growing everywhere. His [Jimmy the monkey] brain is growing too big for his skull. And he’s in constant pain.” OH NO! What does this mean for Maria the good doctor? Well, put it this way, she’s more fucked than a woman who shows up at a porn audition and puts a check beside the boxes labelled V, A, DV, DA, DVDA**. What does this mean for the forth coming child? OSC offers this up for our consumption: “The virus affects embryonic tissue differently. The baby’s brain won’t outgrow his skull. He’ll… look normal. Undifferentiated neural tissue will grow all through his body. As if his whole body is brain. Great mental capacity. Quicker. Like no human in history… But his skin. Constant pain. Like third degree burns. Everywhere. Always.”

My first reaction was. WELL HOLY SHIT. THAT’S GOOOOOOOD. I was actually excited by this idea of a child whose whole body was brain. That came to a screeching hault when my wealth of useless facts came rushing back.

Firstly, having a whole body as brain alone would not make you smart. The density or weight of one person’s brain in contrast to another person’s brain makes no difference in terms of intelligence. People often equate, falsely of course, largeness of the brain with smarts, i.e. chickens to humans. Not true. What makes us more intelligent than your family dog Matilda (whom all of you assume is retarded) are the specialized areas of the brain, the various lobes and shit. This is first year psychology people. Geez.

Secondly, when we have headache it isn’t the brain that actually aches, it’s something on the scalp that’s irritating the skull. Even though the brain is surrounded by a membrane containing veins, and arteries which are filled with nerves, the brain itself has no feeling. So, the postulation that Maria’s child will suffer constant pain because of the “undifferentiated neural tissue” that’s growing all through his body is some truly great cop-out sci-fi bullshit.

While it always seemed a little wonky to me that Tony Stark was just so fucking smart for no apparent reason, the idea of making him inhuman, or as OSC would probably prefer, more than human, robs the character of something integral: Humanity.

Yes, he looks like a human, he will surely talk like a human, but inside he won’t be. Tony Stark, the original character, was emblematic of what the human mind to aspire to, he was also the depths to which humanity could sink. Tony Stark was a brilliant alcoholic, now he’s just an over-sensitive walking brain.

Great.

*Any physical harm that comes to the bluemen from the commercials is purely coincidental and I take no responsibility for any pain inflicted upon then by someone who has read this article.

** Do you really want to know? Okay... Vaginal, Anal, Double Vaginal, Double... You get the point.

The Year of the Longshot

Dreamers, hear this. This is the Year of the Longshot. The dreams you’ve wished for, those things immaterial that would change your life forever could happen. Set a goal this year and work towards it. Life isn’t as long as we some how convince ourselves it is.

It’s always been a goal of mine to have at the end of my life something that will out last me, my children, my very lineage. Since I write, and some have told me that I write well, and I believe them, a book is the logical anchor to tie my tether to between this life and the next. Over the years I’ve written many short stories, many-many poems, and two novellas. I even wrote a 300+ page novel, but I can’t bring myself to read it. I wrote it fresh out of high school and truthfully, I’m embarrassed of what I might’ve written in my amateur hand.

All that I’ve written before was what I call pre-writing, the writing that I write to get some where. I write a lot, but I keep very little. This is all part of my process. Now, this year, I am writing; truly, fully engaged in writing. I’m writing a book and I’m one chapter in. One step closer to my goal and that much closer to my dream.

If when I finish the book and no publisher will take it on, or worse one will take it on and no one will read it, I’ll be upset for I will have, in my eyes, failed. But it will be the type of failure that’s lighter than most. It will be a failure earned, not a failure from inaction. Just because this is the Year of the Longshot doesn’t mean that you won’t fail, too. But what would you rather? Failure light? Or Failure with all the fatty trimmings?

If you remember anything at all from this post, remember this:

Dreams do nothing for anyone tucked gently under pillows or folded away in a desk somewhere.

And wishes are just as bad. There are no stars to wish on, there are no railroad crossings to lift your feet over, there are no wispy seeds to catch, and 11:11 is just a number. You make your dreams happen, try and you might fail. Don’t, and you surely will.

This is the Year of the Longshot, start making strides people. Good luck.

Renzo's not dead

Renzo just got back from a month of fun in the sun in Peru. He looked like blog material to me. Welcome back Z0.

Renzo before Peru

Renzo after Peru