500 words

Lately my ten year old self has been brought to the forefront. My pumpkin demonstration borrowed from what I think to be my 10 year old design and the Christmas tree decorations remind me of that time in my life as well. An idyllic vision. Carving pumpkins on the back porch with my older brother as my guide; the time of year, the smells and the atmosphere come back to me vividly. Christmas as well, with its warm cosy indoors looking outside at the icicles lit magically by the Christmas lights hanging from the eaves. The family, all together, safe from the harshness of the outside world. The Christmas tree glowing multicolour as Mum and Dad drink Rum and eggnog and Bing Crosby crones about dreaming of a white Christmas; it was here in front of us.

1968 was the year of the Hot Wheels, a huge leap in functionality with their lightning fast wheels and Spectraflame paint, a clear reflection of the colourful times. Apollo 8 circled the moon and read a few phrases from the bible as we listened in the living room. There was no place safer than my home.

The outside world was hostile. I was skinny and weak, dumb and teased mercilessly. I was the kid about whom the others said, ‘holy shit, he doesn’t even know…’ Fill in the blank. And I didn’t. From a modern perspective I would be labelled a child with learning difficulties. To me, I was just laughed at by everyone including the teachers. I surmise now that this was not true for all teachers, but it was true for some of them. Now that I am a teacher, I obviously have much more compassion for children such as myself and find it ironic that I am now punished yet again as it has become my responsibility to us my ‘strategies’ to overcome the learning difficulties my students encounter. My compassion never wavers but my ‘strategies’ are not always adequate enough. Leading, again, to a sense of inadequacy.

Another thing I never talk about, even in my private writings, is The Stain. I will call it that. Just as the smells from the Autumn porch waft over me as I write about Halloween, and the smell of nutmeg and eggnog when I am transported back to my living room circa December 25th, the smell of stank ammonia wafts through me as I revisit the shame hanging over me until my late teens. It has affected every aspect of my being and has left me with the solid underlying assumption that I am not up to succeeding in society. Anything I would do in this life was on my own. Never playing team sports, but enjoying skiing, ski-diving, travelling, reading, philosophy and taking a bunch of drugs. Rimmer used to joke that I gave up drinking for pot, then pot for acid, then acid for sky-diving. I was proud of that reputation, although not so much these days. Or was philosophy in there somewhere? That would have been a bit more accurate as I used to sit in my little pup tent at the Drop Zone and read whatever philosophical books were in vogue – Still Life with Woodpecker by Tim Robbins, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance…even Lord of the Rings.

And I would read these in my school bus. Over ten years later, I would read Henry Miller in my School Bus, in a different country, now married with children. I loved reading. Not so much now and I’m not really sure why. Am I less curious? Too lazy? Drinking too much? The last book I read that I devoured would have been The Fatal Shore. I love history and I’m always looking for a book I’ll truly enjoy reading, but, of late, I only start the book and give up after a while. That is something I should think about really. There is joy to be had. I often complain about nothing to do when my work is done. Maybe there’s my answer.

I have always had something to prove. The song Wear Sunscreen put it succinctly with the line: Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and in the end, it’s only with yourself. This line never fails to bring a lump to my throat. It is just so perfect for me. I’m still trying to prove things to people who have long since left my life. The race is with myself and now, nearing the end of my life, I’m less concerned with it. I think I must have been quite annoying in my younger years when I would be quick to point out all my achievements. Oh yeah, I used to skydive. I’ve done sculpting, want to see my bunnies? I’ve used plastic resin. I’ve done astrophotography. Let my record prove that I am worthy. I’ve also ‘done’ philosophy and physics and even had my own crackpot theory of everything. Perhaps I can add - Oh yeah, I’ve had psychosis.

Clearing the ice from our pond in Cedar Valley one January on a brilliant blue-sky day, I gloated over my success at school. Up until the end of Year 10, I was one dumb-ass. Never knew what was going on and was just a big dummy. I don’t think we had labels like ‘learning difficulties’ or, if we did, I never heard of them. I was just basically and irretrievably dumb as dog shit. No explanation. That was just my fate. So, to suddenly find at the end of Year 10 that if I went home and memorised a bunch of stuff, my marks would suddenly rise to the top of the class. I still remember some of the erosion types from geography that I so carefully memorised – desiccation and cracking, animal impulse…um…that’s all I can remember. There were six or seven of them but that was nearly 50 years ago; I suppose the others would have been water, wind and rain. It was a revelation that memorising these facts made me look smart. More than that; be smart. I was smart. The data was undeniable, I surmised.

I was, however, able to score higher marks in other areas that did not rely on memorisation, so many of my inabilities were just in my head and once I got a taste of success, I was able to overcome my lack of confidence. After I went to university though, I was soon put in my place. One student that was a year ahead of me told how he had received 100% in all three maths in high school and still could barely do this higher level mathematics course. It was all belittling. On the first day we all paraded into this tiny room for Mathematics 140. We were told that, if previous years were any indication, the vast majority would drop down to a lower level, leaving a core of 12 to 14 students. Of those, only 3 or 4 would pass. This sounded crazy but I felt, in my arrogance, that I would be one of those few. Then, perhaps to prove his point, the professor went on to talk about something that made absolutely no sense to me. I did drop back to Mathematics 139, the easier course which worked on much of what I already knew, but somehow, it did not make sense anymore and I finished that course with the failing grade of 39% and returned the next year to finally pass mathematics 125, mathematics for commerce or something. Quite a drop in status.

Four years earlier, as I cleared my pond of snow under blue-skies of such high hope, I plotted my future. I wanted to be another Issac Newton or Albert Einstein. The snow filled cracks in the ice, frozen solid in the quiet country air spoke to me. I, little old me, could impact this world and explain things in a way that no one else had thought of. Albert Einstein famously had learning difficulties. It was very romantic, and the moon, high in the blue sky was an extension of the frozen landscape and a distant confirmation of my dreams. I vowed to maximise my efforts. To truly see how far I could go now that I knew it was possible to succeed.

My childhood wasn’t all trying to overcome obstacles and proving myself to a hostile world. I felt safe and secure in my loving home. We went on picnics, sometimes in the winter, we went camping, stayed home and played Monopoly, ran through the sprinkler on hot summer days, had great barbeques out on the porch or the backyard, depending on where we were living. We moved a bit. We had five different addresses by the time I was 10, but wherever we were, it was home. I looked up to my big brother who was, and still is, heaps better than me with all things, especially art. We were an artistic family, always encouraged to make things. We would dream of building a dinosaur museum in the basement, with dioramas of T-Rex’s, Stegosauruses, Brontosauruses, Pterodactyls, and anything else we were keen on. We never build that, I don’t think. But we did build a Spook-house with someone dressed as a ghost and sticky web like material running across your face. That’s all I can remember but it was pretty elaborate, and we had maybe 10 or so kids from the neighbourhood all lining up in a photo. It cost 5c or maybe 10. I note that the theme of Halloween this year in 2021 was to advertise old carnivals or ‘psychiatrist’ services, all for 5c. It, of course, sounds absurdly cheap by today’s standards and speaks to a different time full of wonder and charm. I don’t think it was much money back then either. A few weeks afterwards, a kid across the street said he had his own Spook trail and talked me into going down to his basement. I think this was probably after we had negotiated the price from 5 or 10 cents down to nothing. And, there was nothing there. It was just a regular 1960’s basement with the laundry machine in the corner and a kid turning the hose on me. That was the extent of their special effects!

Around the same time, I would play my own tricks on other kids. Mum used to bake what was known as Fife cookies, which were a fudge mixture with coconut flakes. They tasted quite good and maybe even had a mint tinge to them. It was a family favourite for a while. One summer, I decided to roll two of these things up into the shape of a dog turd and place them artistically on some freshly mown lawn nearby, one on top of the other, emulating a real turd. I called over my friend nonchalantly and exchanged pleasantries. When I felt the scene was set, I drew his attention to this artificial turd and promptly picked it up and ate it. The look on his face was one of total disgust. I think even after I told him it was only chocolate, he was still disgusted.

We had a lot of freedom back then. We went up to the school park unattended. Explored the local ravines, one of which was known as Clay Country. It was on the opposite side of a busy road and followed the Don River as it made its way to Lake Ontario. I only every went half a kilometre or so into this ‘wilderness,’ just enough to know that it went on forever and was a magical place. We got to see the city grow. One area nearby was still a farm with a barn and barn smells. I remember hanging out there one Halloween exchanging ghostly stories as dusk approached. The next year it was gone and is now a very well-established suburban area. I even had a tangle with an electric fence from a farm that was very much still in operation. The electric shock caused my fist to clamp shut to my surprise and my brother had to pry me loose. That farm too disappeared a few years later. Now you would have to drive for quite some distance to reach a farm. I can still smell the hay and manure.

Dunlace Drive Public School featured large in my world. We had a hockey rink on the oval. The scraping of skates on the ice and the clapping of pucks on the boards was a feature of night-times lit by flood lights. I never really played hockey, but I did learn to skate. We must have spent some time out there after dark as I have many memories. Oddly, some would be of myself and a friend having an in-depth discussion about life on other planets, aliens visiting Earth or even the extent of the universe. I was not philosophical in my early years but would listen to my friends as they explored their own philosophical thinking. One crisp winter evening, streetlights on, dinner over but not yet bedtime, a friend and I wandered up to the school along the well-trodden paved pathway between some houses that led to our school and the hockey rink. The rink was empty, everyone had gone home, but my friend and I, no more than 11 or 12, were allowed the freedom to leisurely stroll alone and discuss whatever it was that puzzled us. I was the listener in this exchange. It was like Plato’s dialogues. We were not discussing the hockey scores. My friend posed this question: how far would you have to go out into the universe until you finally came to a wall, and then, what would be on the other side? I’m not sure if he mentioned that this wall was made of bricks, but that is certainly how I interpreted it. I really didn’t get it. Why would there be a brick wall? This really made mote his next question of what was on the other side? I listened and tried to understand. The conversation ended and I suppose we both just made our 1960’s way back to our homes, arriving after dark, unharmed and safe in our innocent world.

Fast forward twenty years. I had finished school, philosophy had been a key aspect of my thinking and I was now trying to make my humble way in a non-philosophical world. My close friend and fellow arm-chair philosopher told me a humorous story about a cringe-worthy conversation he’d heard on a cross country bus. It was the same brick wall theory, although, perhaps I again am the one to assume it was made of bricks. The idea, however, was the same. What was on the other side? To me it had always been as puzzling as asking how far would you need to go until you finally came across a bald sheep smoking a pipe and wearing a t-shirt spruiking the re-election of Jimmy Carter?

Seeing as this conversation had taken place on at least two occasions, I felt it needed revisiting. I finally realised we were talking metaphorically. It’s kind of impressive that this 1960’s eleven year old had this thought that I would take twenty years to catch up to. So, yeah, how far would you need to go until our universe stopped being itself? It can’t go on forever. And then, what is on the other side? I think I had already been given the answer some ten years before this with curved space’s three dimensions expanding into four dimensions, so, just like the balloon, there is no metaphorical wall and nothing on the other side. There would have been no point in me trying to think about that back in 1969 or 8 or whenever it was. It was more than enough that we had the luxury and the freedom to imagine such wonders out there in the night, blocks from our homes, and miles and miles from this imaginary wall.

Eventually we moved away to a satellite city of Toronto at around age 13. Grade 9 was my first year in high school and my first year in Newmarket. I think we all handled it well as we had moved quite often up to that point. Our new house was 9 miles west and in the country. We had to take the school bus in every day. It would arrive at 8:10, all being well. Our bus driver, known for his closing remark, ‘please and thank you,’ was just a regular guy. I don’t think there was ever any discipline issues. I suppose he did get mad at us from time to time for stupid stuff like jumping from seat to seat or yelling or whatever, but I remember him most for being reasonable. I got my first taste of shatterproof glass one sunny autumn afternoon at about 3:10 in the afternoon when I attempted to open my window and it shattered into bead sized pieces in a dramatic crescendo of a crash. Before I even had time to process what had happened, he was there reassuring me that everything was ok and he’d get it fixed later as he swept up the debris with his dustpan. You wouldn’t think the bus could be the focus for reflection of an era, but it was. It mapped the topography of the times brilliantly; the snow days, the teacher’s strike and the transition from school to home and vice versa.

Mom and Dad would have gone to work already and the three of us boys, grades 7, 9 and 10 would walk to the top of the hill that Danny had said was a better stopping place to see all the traffic. It was a gravel road. That hill, road and the entire area was the basis of many of my dreams for years to follow. It somehow represented purity or the start of some great adventure. Some 30 years later I would still be dreaming about that house, or the view from the hill overlooking the road, or the road itself as it came off the summit and descended slightly to our driveway. All in the golden light of sunset and hope. But that was in my dreams many years into the future. In the now, it was routine. And when that routine was broken with snow days, that was a welcome break from our commitments. We’d just stand there in the below freezing temperature and, after too long for the bus to be just late, we’d call it. It’s half and hour late, it’s not coming. We’d go home and spend the day by ourselves at home. We’d call one of our parents, I suppose. Perhaps someone called the school. In any case, we had the day off. We’d make something out of Lego or plasticene, go for a quick toboggan run, chase the dog around the house or just plain stare out the window at the birds and the squirrels. I don’t remember being bored, nor do I remember watching TV as we were not in the demographics of 1970’s daytime TV. We might have even read a book.

One especially noteworthy event was the extreme weather contrast that took place over a four day period centred around a weekend. Friday was cold. Minus 32 Fahrenheit. 40 Fahrenheit is where the two scales meet. According to Siri, that is equivalent to Minus 35.6 degrees Celsius, so not much different. We must have been dressed well because I don’t remember being overly cold, but I’m pretty sure we were keen to get on that bus that was never to arrive. As we waited, about 200m down the road at the bottom of the hill, a deer crossed and stopped to turn around and look at us. What was unique was the clarity of its clip-clopping footsteps which was very loud and clear, the cold air apparently assisting its transmission. The time delay of perhaps half a second was also noticeable. The bus did not come.

We had a weather change come through over the weekend, and the bus didn’t come Monday either. This time it was because the temperature was plus 32 Fahrenheit, just on freezing. It was raining, resulting in what is called freezing rain, the roads were like ice, we even slipped and slid all over the place in our boots and then went home again for another day off, this time with wet soggy clothes that I can smell now when I think about it. Both times it was a relief to get back into the house.

In grade 11, I missed a month and a half. Gloriously, the teachers went on strike and schools were left open at reduced hours with a skeleton staff. I had no idea this was coming, although most everyone else did. I was too caught up in trying to prove how smart I was and was pumped for my physics exam that day. One of the older kids wandered in ready for the next class and said something to the effect of, ‘Why you giving a test on the last day, Sir?’. That was the first I’d heard of it.

We didn’t want to stay home all this time, and neither did our parents, so we came in on the bus that operated a revised timetable. It was around 10am until 2pm, as I recall and we all headed for the gym which had all kinds of gymnastics equipment our and ready for us to use. I tried my hand at all kinds of things. The vaulting horse for some reason was an early focus, along with the parallel bars and ropes. After a fairly short period of time, my muscles got very sore and I was in dire need of recuperation. I think I mainly remember this because of the bus ride home. It was spring, and the roads were very muddy with deep tire tracks sending us bouncing and sliding all over the place. Danny kept the thing on the road but I was in agony with my ribs especially hurting with every bump.

I needed to give those pieces of equipment a rest, and basically never went back. As I healed over what probably would have been less than a week, I took to the trampoline alone with all my friends. We played this game called PIG whereby you did a move, then the next person had to do that move plus a new one and so on. The first person to fail to perform these moves got the letter ‘P’ and this continued until they spelt out PIG. We really developed our trampoline skills this way. Back then, a trampoline was a luxury. No one had them in their backyards as they do today. One of the first impressive move we all learnt was the backflip, which turns out to be much easier than the front flip because you’re looking at the trampoline when you come out of it. A front flip you have to do blind.

I ended up being able to do a move that only one other person at the school could do; a front flip with a half twist. This actually was made easier by the fact that, just like the back flip, you were not coming out of it blind like with a front flip. The other guy that could do it, did it with such grace that it was magnificent to see. Mine was less graceful, but I never got to see it. Nor anyone else doing it. I gained the nickname Swirmin’ Wormin’.

I was quite proud of this, of course. A little over a year later, while touring the grounds of the University of Toronto, I had an opportunity to try out one of the universities trampolines. It had a different matting and for whatever reason, I was unable to perform this flip. I tried and tried again, but it seemed my feet were slipping out from under me or something. I have never been able to do that flip since then, so I kind of unlearned how to do it. These days, of course, I’d be lucky to jump up and land successfully on my ass.

Sometime in my forties, I got really pissed off because when I’d put a t-shirt on, it would not slide down my front effortlessly as it had always done. I would even walk around the house refusing to help it, convinced that it would surely sort itself out. Me being a little slow on the uptake in some areas, it took perhaps a decade to figure this out. We change slowly, but change we do. At least I can pinpoint the exact moment that I could no longer do a front-brawny. When did I lose the ability to do a cartwheel or a handstand? When did shirts stop effortlessly sliding down my torso?

I’ve moved around so much that perhaps my baseline is gone. I think of events as pre and post such and such an address or job. I’ve had a lot of them as well. When I had been in Australia about six months, I started to freak out at the enormity of it all. I painstakingly listed the all the jobs that I’d had in Canada and it was something stupid like 32 jobs. How was I supposed to fit in? My wife and I had bought our first house but I did not feel worthy. I recall opening the pantry and seeing it chock-full of stuff and recoiling at the prospect of justifying this bounty. I did not deserve this. I wrote out a list of all the things that were bugging me and it was hilariously long; get a proper job, fix both cars…and a bunch of other petty shit like the record player running at the wrong speed, the eaves leaking, the need for a lawnmower, get my taxes done, paint the walls, redo the kitchen, stop being a nerd. That sort of thing. When I thought about this list a year later, they’d all evaporated into thin air (except for the bit about being a nerd) and were replaced with even thornier problems. Such is life.

I’ve really bounced around a lot. To me this was normal. I’ve been in very sparse contact with people from my past, but with social media, did communicate with someone from my high school days who had been there all along, as had other members of our year. That seemed impossible. To still be there in Newmarket, after all these years. I’ve learnt to see a new era as a reset button where you can move to a new place and a new job. Start all over again. I suppose my many failures made this a more attractive option. Staying in one place, however, seemed to cheat you out of time. If you move around, start again with the newness and the unknown, you get these little pockets of experience that easily date anything and seem to increase experienced time. When I stay in one place, such as at my school in Western Sydney, that is ten years that went by pretty quick. I suppose none of this really makes sense. Time is time and moving all the time is tiring. But that is what I have done and am still doing.

I am now teaching in Lightning Ridge, 600km north-west of Sydney, and the reasons are quite complex. I think probably, the main one is that I felt the walls closing in on me and feared for my career. It all sounds so romantic to teach out here but It’s all more of the same. I feel really great at the moment because I’ve done everything. All I have to do is prepare for my class. You would think this was all I’d ever have to do but they make it so difficult with an arm’s length list of things to do from programming, to reports to courses to data entry. It is a tale told by a mad man who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. I don’t mean me, although that too is true, I mean the latest fad. Like shark’s teeth that revolve and constantly replace the old ones, we have constantly got new stuff to do.

This is not to say that I’d be a great teacher just left to my own devices. I’m just saying that it doesn’t add anything to my teaching. It all gets in the way. I just want to do as good a job as I can in my twilight years. I have to teach as long as I can and this is really for two reasons. One – I need the money and two – what on earth would I do in ‘retirement?’

I make my paper models. I enjoy the challenge of deciphering completely incomprehensible instruction that are in Polish. OCR to Polish, translate in Google and spend forever figuring out what it means. I impress myself, but then, lose interest after I prove I can do it. I always thought teaching would be like this. Like astronomy or astrophotography. Even like wrestling from Year 7 where I followed the instructions and managed to triumph over others less aware of the technique.

Teaching didn’t turn out like that. I was much more nuanced and took years for a style to develop that I could count as a success. If you count my prac, it has been 19 years of teaching and I still don’t necessarily know what I’m doing. This whole merit-based selection has conked us on the head and made us all focus on how fabulous we all are. That’s dysfunctional.

In the summer of 1980, when I was skydiving, I got myself a job with the department of education doing odd jobs around the place. This was back in the day when government jobs were truly cushy. I was some sort of rover that covered different positions as needed. My main role was with the sports department; the lads that set up equipment for sports days all over the city. We carried around, and set up, all this you-beaut equipment for their special day. It was all a big deal as we brought in equipment that was far superior to their own. I suppose we only needed half an hour or so to set it all up, then we had to just sit back and monitor it all.

What we actually did, if you can believe it, was go and buy a case of beer and sit underneath the stadium seats and drink it. We’d get pissed. How this avoided any higher scrutiny, I’ll never know. The ‘bosses’ were all in on it too. A real bunch of tattooed yahoos of a certain class long before tattoos became popular. Some had worded at carnivals eating glass, or at least that was the focus of one conversation. I looked upon them as a bunch of baboons, but this was unjust. They were products of the times, as was I. I listened to their stories of getting too many tattoos, of the best tattoos they knew of, such as a squirrel running up the left leg empty mouthed, then running down the right leg with a nut in its mouth. And of the unique problem of getting too many tattoos, because, once you get one, the tendency is to get more until you have too many. They lamented this.

As a hierarchy, I was last man. They all stood resolutely above me and my intellectual horse shit. I’ve been looked down upon my whole life, so I was used to it. It was a system or rorts that was not to anyone’s benefit. The government paid us, but we only did half a job. This became much more noticeable as I moved from one position to another. When summer came, and sports days were over, I was assigned to the electrician’s truck, presumably because he was taking his holidays. I didn’t have to do anything, just deliver stuff. What got me was that they would just say go and wait for the beeper,but the beeper wouldn’t go off. I didn’t know what to do. I’m at work but don’t have anything to do. Looking at it now, years later, I suppose he had heaps to do, but while on annual leave, his replacement was just on battery saving mode. I ended up going home and having a sleep, but one day I got into a lot of trouble because my afternoon alarm didn’t go off and I was late for clocking off.

Clocking off was another rort. While on this electrician’s job, when I went to the depot to clock off, there would be one dude clocking off for everyone else. Rude as fuck, he would ignore me and spend ten minutes clocking off like 30 people. Not saying, oh hey, you do yours, I’m gonna be awhile. Rude as fuck. Angry at something. Probably his own stupidity.

I also worked for some very hard working individuals, such as the brick layer. He certainly put me through my paces. I had to mix up the cement and that is quite a job. I used to dread this and wish the day away. In my ultimate downcastness, I would vow to think of that moment while in the plane on a skydiving run. This never happened. The weekend would come and go and I would only remember this vow when I was back in front of the cement trough. There was also a country love song that helped me through, but I was a young romantic and susceptible to such things.

So it wasn’t all of the department, but certainly the one I was initially assigned to. Our boss was nick named Moose for his solid build and belligerent attitude. He wanted me to steal some concrete from the builder’s truck I was driving for his own personal home product. That was a line I couldn’t cross and just refused. I had to bear the brunt of his belligerence thereafter, but it was mostly bluff. What could he do? Most of my interactions with ‘Moose’ were comical.

He was the boss of the Sports Division, the group of miscreants who set up all the sports equipment. Three of us, one day, were stoned out of our fucking minds, driving down the 401 beside a tire truck laden to the roof with tires. It was a wall, and I wanted to get past it, or have it get past us, but it keep parallel to us for longer than I felt comfortable. We were stoned. It was a metre away from us and we were going 100 km and hour. I said something about a ‘wall of tires’, which broke the tension and got everyone to laugh. Somehow, after that, the danger seemed to ease.

Then it came to the end of the year where the finals were to be held. This culminated in the Ontario finals, a track and field event of the best athletes. Who knows, this could have included Ben Johnson as it was 1980, eight years before Seoul where he was ripped of his title for performance enhancing drugs. What I do know is that these were serious athletes. Although we didn’t take it seriously, the people around us did, which made our comical division all that much more laughable. These were 18 year old athletes in Year 13. We knew, in the lead up to it, that this was very different.

I was asked to sleep in the back of the truck. Not a problem, as long as we could have a few beers along the way. It was a memorable night, and different from any other night from that era. First, we were at work. The floodlights illuminated this whole stadium, and we were part of something that was obviously pretty big. And, we were allowed to drink beer. What a plus!

Somebody else set up this big scaffold to hold the giant speaker system. It was, however, still under Moose’s responsibility. It started raining. I remember retreating to the back of this truck with its roller doors and surveying the surreal view of stadium light and heavy rain. Then it started to thunder and lightning. Just putting on a better show, I thought.

Inevitably, word came that there were electrical connection issues at the top of this rain soaked tower. My co-workers and I were all drunk. Moose was drunk. But, the show must go on and Moose climbed up the tower in a drunken testament to his own ego. It was a torrential downpour. The stadium lights illuminated him as if lightening was going off, and perhaps it was. The evening is still very foggy.

It was fixed. I had trouble believing that Moose had done it in his overbearing Moose-ness. But he had and I suppose I should think better of him for it but I was still mad at him for demanding I steal cement from the cement truck.

The event was uneventful, but the finals took place in the dark the following evening and it poured down with rain yet again. I was just there to put out the mats and the hurdles or whatever, and my base was this truck that carried some of this shit. Convention held that when we were not putting stuff up or taking stuff down, we would drink. It makes no sense, I know, but that is how it was. I suppose we were relying on it being the next morning before we had to take all that stuff down. It must have been, because I was pissed as a lark. I was also an ‘official’, which is kind of ridiculous, but, nevertheless, this allowed me access to the track and I went and stood on the finish line, say 2 or 3 metres away, and watched all these athletes bust a valve to make it across that finish line. It was dark, raining like crazy, flood lit by stadium lights and I was like on my tenth beer. A memorable moment, to be sure. The contestants were exclusively black and exhibited a level of commitment that impresses me still to this day. It was the polar opposite of me and the team I was with. Except maybe for Moose.

Rob

I met Rob in the year I was expelled from university. Not just the U of T, but all Ontarian universities. I found this out the hard way by going for a tour of the Peterborough university, whatever that was called, and suffering through a painful wait as my host, in front of my grandmother and six or seven other potential enrolees, rang to check on my acceptance. After a lot of oh yesses and hmm I sees, it was revealed that as I was banned from U of T for consistent low grades, so too was I banned from Peterborough. I didn’t get to do the tour. I would have liked to have just for the experience but this do gooder made that impossible.

I drove a school bus that year. My Mum had the idea and pointed out the ad from the newspaper. I applied, was trained, and got the job. It was only part-time but really filled a void. More work was had by doing charters on weekends and between school runs. I went everywhere. Niagara falls, the zoo, the Pickering Nuclear plant. How much is a MeV, a kid asked. A dollar fifty I quipped, much to the delight of my year 2 students, but perhaps to the chagrin of their teacher. Who would have thought that I too would one day be a year two teacher?

My uni friends were very kind and kept me as a close friend. Through this connection is where I met Rob. No chin, a pot belly, rounded shoulders; an eroded version of myself of which I would become more and more. Sex appeal was never our thing. I met him at a Super Bowl Party at his frat house where a close friend of mine also resided. I remember thinking him a modern day Matilda, the cartoon witch who would never spill her drink no matter how much of a tussle she got into. Rob did the exact same trick by grabbing someone, or someone grabbing him, and in the skirmish managed to keep his beer more or less upright.

We became friends soon after, although the details are forgotten. He became my best friend in the end and we shared a love of intellectual banter. Whether it was all bullshit, or profound as shit, it matters not. It was a hell of a lot of fun. Like oxygen really. It was what I needed. I wasn’t going to talk about how to succeed in the business world as many I knew were doing. That was as boring as batshit. Philosophy, quantum mechanics, time travel, science fiction, science truth. That’s what I cared about and I was delighted to find a kindred spirit.

Most others in that group became very successful, most if not all becoming millionaires. Even Rimmer, the hopeless drunk, would amass a 7 figure net worth. Rimmer would talk endlessly about the stock market and how his friend started out as a chalk writer on the board and rose to trader slash millionaire. I could not get into that although I tried. I was just definitely not me. I could not be something that I was not. My Mum always said I should become a teacher and she was right. It took many years to realise that. I, for now, had my ideas that needed to be explored. At uni I had spent too much time dreaming of Descartes, Kepler and Copernicus and the books I had read about them. It was my obsession. Then there was quantum mechanics which I loved to love and the new age books such as the Tau of Physics (probably complete shit but defs grist for the mill). I really wanted to figure out the world. Of late, I have discovered that a full-time career is a great remedy for that, but, I would be without that for two decades.

Rob became my sounding board. It culminated in our drives in his blue Capri. I had joked about writing a record of all this, starting with, ‘The blue Capri turned the corner.’ It was a definite exchange of honest ideas. We only know things from our senses, I would argue. Well, maybe everything only started five minutes ago, he would retort. It is a pretty basic philosophical idea; the one that would be the basis for The Matrix. But this was long before that but the idea itself was as old as the hills. It took me forever to get him to understand this basic idea, but then he took it to higher levels and started talking about the ‘mind vat’.’

As often as not, this would involve a drinking session of some sort. Perhaps starting in the morning over sausages and eggs along with a Bloody Ceasar or two. Or three. We thought we were clever, I don’t think anyone else did. It was a lot of fun and we’d drink, smoke dope, wander around downtown, look up Avenue Road towards Parliament house and declare it to be ‘The Avenue of the Pharoahs,’ much to our delight. The dope smoking certainly added another layer to this. The haze would descend upon us like a time machine and we would be transported to a time other than our own where the laws of nature revealed themselves in surprising ways. Patterns we had not noticed became stark. All these houses are the same we realised one morning as we walked to an old diner with old school charm, just their surface features had been changed to make them seem unique. The angle of the sun played a big part in separating this ‘time’ into a timeless space where entities such as us could float past. The diner was weird. Red checkered table cloths, jute boxes at every stall; real old timey shit. When we straightened up enough to eat our bacon and eggs, I think we must have played a song or two. But the real joy was walking down that street in a timeless state, noticing things and trying to act normal. It’s legal now. Not then. We were stoned.

There were a large group of us back then from university that gave us all a sense of belonging. I had my smart friends, my stoner friends my good time friends. Rob fit into all three categories and was the first to read any of my writings. I’d made (inexplicably, you may argue) cartoon bunnies out of polymer clay, and although he was a fan of such a hobby, when I tried to go ‘pro’ with this shit and demanded to know what price someone would pay for such a thing, his price of $6 injured me to the core. Six bucks? Do you know how long it takes me to make one of these? Another friend from around the same time suggested that I hire Mexicans to make them for me (even more of an insult), but the basic truths were there. I doesn’t cost much to make little cartoony figures.

He had helped me to move into the apartment that he left in around 1981 by giving me a good recommendation to the landlord. This would be where bunny central started. It was a ground floor unit of a 10 to 15 storey building, and right off the circular drive that graced it with more class than it deserved. I eroded that class even more by having my hick stoner friend drive his psychedelically painted Ford 100 up to the sliding glass windows just off this curve and hand-balm all my shit over the garden and into my new digs. Only after he left did I find out that I would need to buy my own huge curtains to cover all this glass looking out over our overly classy entrance. I ended up hanging sheets and old blankets up in a completely Beverly Hillbilly way. Some of the gags I filled whimsically with LP records. On my first night there, I took a small amount of acid and turned on my TV which was unable to receive a signal for some reason or another. It would play some stupid ass movie for a little bit then go to complete snow for 5 or 10 minutes before flashing back for a brief glimpse and then back to snow.

It wasn’t a great time in my life. The landlord, when I told him I was moving out the next spring, had to plead with me to clean the place up because there was no way he could rent it out like that. It was also the place where I did my circadian rhythm experiment where I would just go to sleep when I wanted and sleep in to whenever I wanted. I found myself on a 25 hour cycle. I would sleep in until 10am one day, but the next day until 11. And so on. Eventually I was getting up at 1am in time for Get Smart. Then I was sleeping in past Get Smart. Finally, I was getting up at 7 am again and my parents were really happy for me. But I just drifted on past that and before too long was sleeping in for Get Smart again.

I used to go for long walks. It was safe enough back then to wander the streets at all hours. If it was business hours, I think I felt more out of place than I did in the wee hours of the morning. I wander way out onto a piece of reclaimed land that is now called Tommy Thomson Park and told my friend Rob that I thought I had a restless soul. No kidding he said. We all do.

Driving a bus, separated and living by myself, this was me. One night, 2001, I got scared. What am I doing? I looked ahead and saw nothing. I literally cried. Weeped. To me, it was as if the floor beneath me had opened up and saw me fall through to the abyss. The floor seemed to be matchsticks which was more interesting than frightening. It confirmed that they were all tiny pieces with no permanent guarantee that they will stay together.