Acid-Washed Jeans

Sometime between 1991 and 1994, while working as a parts driver for Norwest Automotive, I picked up a used car battery from one of our customers. I didn't think anything of it in the moment; I'd picked up used parts for disposal several times already, and this was just one more instance. 

But a couple of hours later, I noticed that my bluejeans were developing white patches in odd places, starting just below my pelvis. Over the course of the day, those white patches spread and the miscoloured denim thinned, By the time I returned home, my pants had developed huge rends, tears and gaps, disintegrating almost entirely into scraps not long after I removed my shoes. 

I figured that the battery must have cracked and leaked some mildly corrosive form of acid down my pants. Certainly my legs were quite itchy by the end of the day, and they'd taken on a slightly pinkish hue. A thorough scrubbing in the shower relieved those symptoms. 

I had occasion to tell Mom and Sean this story tonight; credit goes to Sean for coming up with the perfect title for this post. 

Blue Hand Group

Shattered Sink Shards

Sean, Sylvia, and I went to Leduc earlier today to visit Mom. While uninstalling a light fixture in the upstairs bathroom, sean managed to drop the bulb he'd been unscrewing right on top of the bulb he'd unscrewed previously, shattering both bulbs into shards that filled the sink. It was pretty spectacular. After that, though, Sean really did a championship job of installing the new fixture. I helped a little, but Sean's greater height and reach meant he wound up doing the lion's share of the work.

Countin' Bagels on the Wall

Today, at about 12:30 PM, I went to the lunchroom to retrieve my lunch from the fridge and toast a bagel. As my bagel toasted, I read a few pages of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, chatting with my colleague Stephanie about the book's themes. When my bagel halves leapt free of the toaster, I smeared generous helpings of generic herb and garlic cream cheese across their golden-brown faces.

Then, I gathered up my lunch. In my left hand were my beverage, two Mandarin oranges, my iPhone, and my plate and the bagel halves it held. I kept my right hand free, knowing that I would need it to scan my passcard to get back through the secure doors that separated the lunchroom and adjoining elevator hallway from my desk.

All seemed well as I strolled down the elevator hall. Moving with great care, I reached for the lanyard holding my security pass and moved it toward the scanner. Alas, the delicate balance of my overloaded left hand was upset, and the plate holding the bagel halves pitched forward. I watched in stunned disbelief as the bottom half of the bagel slipped off the plate and landed cream-cheese-side on the wall next to the scanner, sliding down a couple of decimetres before sticking in place, like an arcane object d'art.

"Ouuarrgghhh!" I yelled. A colleague approached, eyes wide, and said "Oh, wow." He held the door open for me as I peeled the bagel from the wall and scrambled for my desk, putting down the remains of my lunch as I searched for napkins. Finding same, I headed back to the scene of the accident, just in time to see three more colleagues gazing at the cream cheese dripping down the wall.

"I wonder what happened there," my colleague Tyler said as Monica and Ashley gazed at the mess. Fists full of napkins, I quickly explained the situation. Tyler, Monica, and Ashley chortled at my ineptitude.

Resigned, I turned to the slowly congealing mass of cream cheese and began to wipe the wall clean. With exquisite timing, the vice president of my department walked by, looking askance at me; I had to explain again as I wiped away the goo. Only later would I notice, too late, that the belly of my shirt was also coated in cream cheese.

"Oh," she said dryly. "I thought you were just being unusually diligent about upkeep."

I finished up and ate the bagel anyway in a fit of stubborn defiance. 

Ouchies for Sean

Sean didn't really hit his head, thank goodness. I'll never forget the night my cousin Carol Ann tripped and hit her head on the corner of a bedpost and gashed her scalp open, resulting in a torrent of blood. Being 5 or 6 years old, I was pretty freaked out. But she was okay.

Sean did hurt his head a few times, gashing it open on a register once while I wasn't home, once in a cement playground while my back was turned, and once, through no fault of his but every fault of mine, while we were horsing around in the living room. Luckily Sean has a very hard head. 

Sudden (Near) Impact

Had the timing changed by a bare second last night, I might not be writing this today. 

Shortly after midnight, I was driving south on 178th, heading across the bridge over the Yellowhead. My driver-side window was rolled down so I could enjoy the warm summer night; I was listening to one of the many variations of the Mission: Impossible theme on my phone. 

I was moving at the speed limit, 60 kph, on a very fresh green light. I took note of a semi heading north, the only other traffic in my immediate vicinity; he moved into the opposite left-turn lane. 

Since I had the right-of-way, I naturally assumed he would stop to let me proceed. Instead, he moved into the intersection like he hadn't seen me at all. 

Earlier in the evening, the guys were explaining to Colin's son Avery that I cursed only under very specific conditions, and rarely. Last night gave me a new reason to bark a profane oath. 

"HOLLLYYYYY SHIIIIIITTTTTTTTTTTTT," I cried as I threw the car out of gear and stomped on the brake pedal harder than I've ever done before. The car's nose pitched downward so steeply that I thought my bumper was going to touch asphalt. There was a scream of protesting rubber, and I think that's what finally alerted the semi driver, who also slammed on his brakes. His cab bucked up and down violently. 

We came to rest in perfect time with the final two notes of the Mission: Impossible theme. I'd applied my brakes perhaps two or three metres before the stop line; my car came to a halt perhaps a quarter of the way into the intersection. The semi was about halfway through. My left front corner was about two metres away from his right front corner. That sounds like a long way, but had our reactions been delayed by even an instant, the outcome would have been very different. 

In silence, three or four seconds passed. The semi driver gave me a sheepish wave of apology; I waved back that I was okay. The light was still green; there was nothing more to do but proceed. 

It was the closest call I've experienced in many years. I feel grateful to be alive today, and particularly grateful to my Kia's brakes, which performed with spectacular, life-saving aplomb. 

Everything you are and everyone and everything you love can be taken away in an instant. Last night reminded me to relish every second. 

Prairie Valley of Death

Felt marker on post-it note, 2015. 

Thy Fearful Symmetry

A couple of weeks ago the protective cover fell off our bedroom fan. Being somewhat cavalier about home repair, I figured the fix could wait a while; after all, I wasn't going to walk into a running fan like some fool, was I?

This morning I did, and the fan gleefully sliced into my thumb as seen above. At least the lines are roughly parallel, which makes for nice symmetry.

"I knew that was going to happen," Sylvia said.

I'll fix the fan tonight. 

Toe-talled

TOE STUBBER STRIKES AGAIN!

Today's life lesson: don't rush up the stairs when someone knocks at the door. If it's important, they'll knock again. At first the pain was so intense I thought I'd broken my toe, but it looks like I've merely cracked the nail in half. OUCH! And now it can be revealed that I have hairy-knucked Hobbit feet. 

Spaghetti Lattice

Sylvia and I tried to cram ourselves into the pantry at the same time a few minutes ago (I was putting away a vase, she was looking for something for the food bank) and as a result our spaghetti flew out of the box to land in this quasi-artistic three-dimensional lattice. It was prettier in real life than this mobile phone photo suggests.

Campground Portrait

If it weren't missing a boat, this photo would cover pretty much everything that encapsulated our life in Leaf Rapids: the camper, Dad's Acklands hat, a library book, Sean's stuffed rabbit, a fishing pole, the axe and cords of wood, the grill, the pine needles and of course the endless woods that stretched for thousands of kilometres. During our time in Leaf Rapids we must have visited the Suwanee River Campground dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

I usually slept near the ceiling, in a cupboard that converted into a fold-out bed. One night I rolled out of bed and fell two and half metres to the camper floor. I woke up utterly unharmed, but startled, still nestled in my sleeping bag.

Suspicious Sean

In early April 1976 Mom came home from the Leaf Rapids hospital with my little brother in tow. Witness my stunned expression at this sudden turn of events, and the suspicious look my new little brother is giving me. While it's true I would allow Sean to eat a cigarette and trick him into eating peppercorns some years in the future, I had as yet done nothing to warrant Sean's youthful wariness. Indeed, in the beginning Sean tricked me more often than not. Once, while I lay reading on the very couch pictured here, Sean climbed onto the backrest and leaped feet-first onto my ribcage, driving the wind from my lungs!

In the extreme foreground of this photo you can see the central component of a set of three matching glass-topped coffee tables. Sean's love of climbing onto things and jumping down very nearly had tragic consequences, for not long after jumping on my chest he decided to dive from the couch onto one of the glass side tables. The impact shattered the table, and Sean landed in a heap of jagged shards of dark green glass. Fortunately he was unharmed, and Mom evicted the tables immediately.

The couch lasted much longer than the tables. It moved to Leduc with us and resided in the family basement for decades. Eventually we had to recruit a bunch of my largest friends to remove the couch, for it contained a ludicrously heavy hide-a-bed. (Actually, my memories are mixed up - we actually hauled it away as detailed in this post. I must have been thinking of another piece of furniture.) I'm sure that couch would have stopped bullets.

The Pitcher Plant

One fine, sunny afternoon in the summer of 1991 Sean Woods came home in search of refreshment and instead drank deep the sour draught of betrayal.

His teenage frame slick with sweat, muscles aching from the exertions of a hard-fought game of sandlot baseball, Sean anticipated with relish the sweet, cold iced tea that awaited him in its simple but comforting old pitcher of green plastic, the one with the ounces marked off in neat embossed type along the side of the container. As the youth hopped up the back stairs, flinging open a screen door whose mosquito netting bore the gashes of his cat's playful assaults, Sean imagined how the cold, wet chill of delicious lemony sugar water would erupt upon his tongue, sending a shivery rush of invigorating flavour through his weary bones.

Metaphorically licking his lips, Sean bounded into the kitchen and flung wide the refrigerator door. The green pitcher sat there like a silent emerald siren, beckoning him, and the lad could do naught but claim his prize. Triumphantly he grasped the pitcher, lifting it high and tilting it backward, the dark liquid within flowing into his waiting mouth.

So parched was the young shortstop that he greedily chugged down his repast, every cell starving for the expected burst of refreshment. But that burst never came. Instead, Sean recoiled in horror, his esophagus rebelling, gagging, spewing up dark brown froth over lips twisted in sudden, shocked disgust.

"MALLGGHHH!" yelled Sean, slamming the pitcher down on the counter, coughing and spitting - for the innocent-looking yet duplicitous pitcher contained not delicious iced tea, but plain water befouled with dish soap! Sean eyed the rank concoction with disbelief. Who would do such a thing - and why?

Enraged, Sean confronted his older brother, who having heard the commotion while reading in the basement rushed upstairs to see what was going on.

"Why would you put a pitcher full of water and dish soap in the fridge?" Sean demanded. "I drank it - I nearly puked!"

But Earl couldn't answer, doubled over with laughter, trying to protest his innocence between guffaws, tears pouring down his pink cheeks.

"I - ha ha - what? D-dish soap? Ha ha - oh dear - I swear I didn't - oh no - hee hee -" And so on.

Fuming, Sean later asked his mother if she had, for some reason, laid the trap, but she seemed entirely puzzled:

"Why would I do that?"

Father, too, professed ignorance. And so, to this day, the Mystery of the Tainted Tea remains among the greatest unsolved enigmas of the Woods family lore.

Today, in his mid-30s, Sean remembers the incident well. When asked how he washed the taste out of his mouth, Sean answers:

"I didn't. It lingers to this day. No one confessed."

The case remains unsolved.

The Plymouth Bounce

I remember this white Plymouth vividly, for I was born in that bygone era when seat belt use wasn't universally mandatory; nor, it seems to me, had the education campaign regarding the benefits of seat belt use really begun. So perhaps it was inevitable that while on one trip or another (probably not the one pictured above), I was reading happily, sprawled across the big red bench seat in the back when Mom or Dad drove over a large bump. The car's rear end jumped and, acting like a catapult, flung my two or three year old body skyward. I bounced off the roof violently, then slammed back down onto the seat. I wasn't injured, merely shocked by my brief experience as a projectile. We carried on unperturbed.

These days, like most folks, I never drive or ride anywhere in a vehicle without wearing my seat belt, nor do my parents. This simple fact reminds me that society does change and people do adopt better habits; it just takes a little education and the collective goodwill of citizens and our elected officials. It only took a couple of decades for seat belts to catch on; this gives me hope that perhaps we shall, after all, take action to meet other challenges, the wealth gap and climate change chief among them.

Rocket Cycle

I believe this is the only photo ever taken of the three-speed bicycle I owned for several years in the early-to-mid 80s. This bicycle is infamous for two moments seared into my memory.

One summer day, I met with my friends Paul, Jeff and Vern to cycle around my Leduc neighbourhood. Racing through back alleys was a common enough pastime in those days, careening around blind corners without helmets or padding of any kind. Many knees were skinned, many shins filled with tiny bits of gravel, many skulls bruised. On this particular occasion, Paul, Vern and I wound up far ahead of Jeff and we loitered at the end of an alley waiting for him to catch up.When Jeff came ripping around the corner, I shoved my bicycle forward a couple of feet, directly into his path. Jeff doesn't believe me to this day when I make this claim, but I really meant to pull back in time so he wouldn't hit my bike.

Sadly, my reactions weren't fast enough. Jeff's front wheel slammed into my front wheel. And then the world slowed down. My bicycle spun 90 degrees to the left with me still straddling the seat, giving me a perfect view of Jeff's shocked features as he careened over his handlebars. My jaw dropped as I read the betrayal creeping its way across Jeff's face; he screamed "Whyyyyyyy?" as he flew through the air. Jeff corkscrewed in midair almost gracefully, but landed flat on his back on the hard-packed dirt of the alley. A cloud of dust was kicked up by the tremendous impact, and Jeff's body left an impression in the dirt road, just like a Looney Tunes character.

After we finished laughing, we hastened to make sure Jeff was okay. Fortunately Jeff's body has evolved to absorb tremendous amounts of punishment over the years; his pride was more wounded than anything.

I got my just desserts a couple of years later, showing off for my brother Sean and our next door neighbour Keith, who were outside on the front lawns of our houses. I pedalled to top speed, intending to slam on the rear brakes in the driveway and skid to a stop. But when I angled into the driveway I squeezed the front brake rather than the rear and was flung over the handlebars as the front wheel locked up. I'd begun to scream "Rocketman!" as I approached the driveway; it turned into "RocketmAAAHHHHHHH" as I slammed into the earth, the left half of my body hitting soft grass, the right half hard sidewalk.

The impact left me with a nice set of bruises and it destroyed the bike. The front wheel was bent into a V, the brake lines ripped off the handlebars, the frame twisted. Considering the damage to the bike, I counted my lucky stars that I wound up just a little sore.

I miss that bike.

Going Out With Style

I forgot to mention one thing about our trip to Mexico. During the flight, I whispered an aside to Sylvia: "I've always hoped that if I were ever in an airplane crash, I'd have the presence of mind and sense of humour to hold my hands over my head and yell 'Wheeee!' as if I were merely riding a rollercoaster."

Ideally the crash would turn out to be minor - one of those where the plane only loses its landing gear and skids to a safe halt with no injuries. I think I'd earn a lot of style points in that case, or a lot of dirty looks from the other passengers.

My Most Dangerous Job

I graduated from the University of Alberta in 1991, during the last recession. Good jobs were hard to come by. For three years, I delivered auto parts to Edmonton garages, searching for more fulfilling work the whole time. I finally quit in 1994, and I was lucky enough to stumble upon a very odd transitional job before moving on to the Western Board of Music in 1995.

That transistional job was the most bizarre and dangerous I've ever had. I was one of many workers whose task was to empty a huge warehouse and move all its odds and ends, everything from office furniture and files to industrial equipment, to another location across town. It should have been simple, but this jobsite was so dangerous I quit after three months, fearing I'd be killed or badly injured.

There must have been dozens of workers, ranging in age from twenty to sixty. We were mostly left to our own devices; imagine a horde of workers without gloves or helmets or direction hauling heavy boxes every whichway. Now imagine that many of these people knew nothing about moving safely.

Many of the items in the warehouse were stored on high shelves, shelves that consisted of rickety wooden boards laid down upon metal frames. We had no ladders or lifts; we had to clamber up the shelves, which themselves were not secured to the wall and rose to the ceiling, some twenty-five metres high. Workers near the top would pass down boxes to workers below. One of my coworkers was a nice young man from France, who was stunned when a heavy box slipped from another's grip and hit the Frenchman square atop the skull, nearly knocking him from his precarious perch down to the hard cement floor below. "Mon Dieu! Ma tete!" he shouted as the box bounced off his head and fell to the ground, bursting open to spew its contents all over the floor.

Just a couple of days later, two of the older workers were carrying a chandelier from one end of the top shelf to the other. Somehow the wooden shelf slipped halfway out of its frame, causing one worker to lose his balance. To avoid falling off the shelf, he overcompensated, careening to the right and throwing off the balance of his coworker. To this day I still don't completely understand the physics of how this happened, but in effect the first worker wound up bouncing off the shelf as if he were sprung from a diving board. The chandelier whipped around and gashed open the face of the second worker, who understandably lost his grip, blood oozing from his stunned face. The first worker wasn't strong enough to lift the chandelier himself, and so the chandelier toppled over the side, smashing into a million pieces on the floor, showering the rest of us with glass and metal shrapnel.

Not long after that, I helped load a massive industrial blueprint printer onto a forklift. This machine had to be over five metres long, and I have no idea how much it weighed; it took a dozen of us to push it the few inches needed to give the forklift access. The forklift operator lifted the forks about halfway, which seemed high to me, but what did I know? I wasn't a trained operator.

Apparently neither was he, because he took off at high speed and hit a bump on the warehouse floor. The centre of gravity shifted and the printer rolled precariously forward; the rear of the forklift rose high into the air, then crashed back down violently as the unsecured printer fell off the forks, bursting open with an ear-splitting crash and a spray of glass, oil and mechanical parts. The operator fell back into his seat so hard that the impact bounced him back into the air, and he struck his unhelmeted head on the roll cage hard enough to give him a concussion.

For some reason, the business owner had a classic muscle car stored in his garage. I don't know much about cars; all I can tell you is that it was blue and looked sort of like the car they drove on The Dukes of Hazzard. I guess the engine didn't work or there simply wasn't any fuel in the vehicle, because one worker had to steer while four or five others pushed. Unfortunately, the man steering didn't do a very good job, scraping the car's side along a support beam to create a huge dent and a long gash in the door. The business owner himself arrived on the scene just in time to witness this accident, and he wasn't happy.

Then came the last straw. I was one of a few workers asked to stay on for some additional weeks at the new warehouse, presumably because I hadn't destroyed anything or injured myself too badly to continue working. Our first job was to set up the shelving system - the same one that had already proven so dangerous at the first jobsite.

I've already mentioned that the metal shelving frames were very tall. They were also very heavy. The frames were lying on the floor, and our job was to lever them upright. Four of us were positioned at the base of the frame, and another four, many metres away, at the tip. Those at the tip walked forward, gradually lifting that end of the frame higher and higher into the air. Of course, as they walked toward those of us holding the base, more and more of the weight at the tip was unsupported. As the centre of gravity moved, we all found it harder and harder to hold onto the frame; the more the angle steepened, the harder it got. Once the frame stood perpendicular to the floor, we had to hold it in place while another team repeated the process with a second vertical frame. Only then could other workers lock the horizontal frame pieces into place, giving the structure some measure of stability.

We repeated this process several times, but eventually our tired muscles couldn't hold. We levered another frame into place, but we couldn't hold it perpendicular. The top swayed back and forth dizzily as we struggled to hang on, but in just a few seconds I felt the frame slipping from my grip, tipping over. We screamed at everyone to get out of the way of the falling hunk of metal, trying to hang on to give people time to escape. The frame hit the cement floor so hard that we felt the vibrations through our feet, and the clang of impact made our ears ring for several minutes. If that frame had hit anyone, they would have been killed.

That was enough for me. I walked to the foreman's office and gave notice. Six months later I had a much safer job, where the worst danger would turn out to be a possibly rabid bat...ah, but that's another story.

Burn Notice

Today I warmed up some carrot soup in the microwave for Sylvia. I cooked it for too long so the bowl was too hot to remove with my bare hands. I donned an oven mitt, but it didn't have enough grip to hold the bowl, so it dropped about a foot and a half to the counter top. Boiling soup bounced up to splash my face, arm and scalp. It hurt like the dickens, but I retained enough presence of mind to get my head and arm under ice-cold water almost instantly. I have some pretty painful red welts on my forehead and up under my receding hairline now, but I think I acted quickly enough to avoid any lasting damage to my rakish good looks.

In all seriousness, I experienced a moment of genuine alarm when that boiling soup came splashing up into my face. It made me remember that awful day when we were out camping in northern Manitoba and Sean burned himself with coffee. Dad drove like a demon to get Sean to the hospital on one of the worst, most remote roads in the world, but he got us all there successfully. Sean's burns were far worse than the mild ones I suffered today; he had to be flown down to Winnipeg with Mom for treatment, while Dad and I waited anxiously at home in Leaf Rapids. I remember how relieved I was when they came home and Sean was okay - his hair was all curly from the humidity on the flight. I remain impressed by Dad's driving skills, too.

Today's life lesson: accidents can happen anytime. I'm posting this as a reminder to myself: pay attention to what you're doing. You only get one shot at life, and you don't want to mess it up with an act of easily-avoided stupidity.

Shower Slipup

The huge walk-in shower is one of the most appealling features of our new home, but I discovered today that safety in the bathroom remains a subject of vital importantce. While luxuriating in the spray and steam, I decided that since there was enough room to lie down in the shower, I might as well give it a try. Unfortunately my feet flew out from under me as I shifted position and I cracked my skull on the unforgiving porcelain tiles of the wall. One of my flailing arms swept every single beauty and hygiene product off the shelf and across the shower floor. The tremendous "clonk" of my impact shook the foundations of our new home, and Sylvia cried out in alarm.

"I'm okay," I shouted, even though I could still see animated bluebirds circling my head, merrily chirping away.

A few moments later, Sylvia offered her sympathies. "Poor baby," she said, "Did you land really hard on your bum?"

"Fortunately, I landed on my head," I quipped. Fortunate indeed - a thick skull has saved many a showering fool over the years. Next time, I'll stay on the rubber safety mat.

The Wont of a Nail

Saturday gave me a lot to think about.

It was my brother's 33rd birthday, and I was regretting my inability to find a Black Belt Jones poster for him, hoping that the Robby the Robot bank I found would be interesting and unusual enough to amuse him.

Sylvia and I rose early so that I could load a bunch of cardboard into my car for recycling and hit an ATM for some cash for our new housekeepers, who were to arrive that morning.



I stopped the car to dispose of some garbage and found this painting. I paused, because I'm currently taking a graphic design course from Jeff Shyluk, and art history is a major component of the course. I'm scared to critique this because I can't identify it. Could someone have abandoned a master's work by the trash?



I drove to the recycling station near SuperStore and disposed of my cardboard. Then I entered SuperStore to purchase some Pepsi for Sylvia, and found, to my delight, six-packs of Coca-Cola in glass bottles. But the contents of my groceries shifted in the trunk, and when I opened the lid to retreive my booty, one six-pack of Coke fell to earth and two bottles smashed upon the asphalt.

Grumbling, I gathered up the surviving soldiers and went upstairs to our condo for a broom and dustpan. Our housekeepers had arrived in my absence, and were busy sterilizing our home, much to Sylvia's delight.

I swept up the shards of glass and walked over to our condo's garbage bin. On the way, a man asked me, "Are you Quentin?"

"Nope. Just a guy with a bunch of broken glass," I replied, using my best smooth talkin' grifter voice. I flung the glass into the trash and returned to the condo to hand over the cash (to the housekeepers).

When the housekeepers left, Sylvia and I gathered up Sean's presents and drove south, along the Anthony Henday, to Joey's in South Edmonton Common. My parents and brother had already arrived. Sean performed a hat trick, flipping his hat through the air to land on his head. I asked him to do it again for the camera, but the second attempt was unsuccessful and Sean was unwilling to make a third.

We ate. Sean had a chicken thing, Dad had a beef dip, Mom had hot wings, Sylvia had blackened Cajun basa, and I had some kind of chicken thing. A thing on a bun.

We left. Mom and Dad handed over some Super 8 mm film, which I plan to tranfer to DVD using the services of Cine audio visual, or perhaps London Drugs. Sean went with Mom and Dad, and Sylvia and I went to IKEA.

We purchased BOOBLI curtains. Sylvia liked the colours; I liked the Tarzan of the Jungle pattern of leaves. We purchased a DAVE laptop stand, seen here:



We purchased a clay pot and saucer, for Sylvia's transplanting plants plan. The pot and saucer fell from the cart seconds after the IKEA teller rang the purchases through. She rushed out and told us she'd see we received replacements. Minutes later, the debris was disposed of (I cut my finger) and another IKEA person brought us a new ULBGORT and BOOGINK.

We left. Hmmm, I thought to myself. Today I smashed four things: two retro Cokes, a clay pot, and a clay whatever-you-call-the-thing-you-put-under-a-clay-pot-to-catch-the-excess-water.



We drove to the City of Edmonton Eco Station on 51st avenue and 99th street, where I disposed of my old Dell and VAIO computers. The Dell caused me problems from day one; the VAIO served faithfully and well for many years, and was in fact still fully functional until I ripped out its hard drives. Shades of Dave singing "Daisy."

We returned home. I built the (other) DAVE for Sylvia. I watched last week's episodes of 24 and Heroes.

Later, I gently stubbed my left big toe. That's the toe with a slightly ingrown toenail - nothing serious or even noticeable, except the flesh is tender if disturbed.

I looked down at my toe and wondered why I perceive of the toe as "my" toe, as a possession. My toe, my fingers, my chin, my back, my arms, my spine, my stomach, even my brain, my mind. These are the things, conceptually, I own.

I wondered: what is "me?"

I thought, not for the first time, that I think of myself as the bit up inside my skull that talks, the silent voice that is thinking these words as I type them into the "new post" window.

I wondered why it is that I should exist as a consciousness mapped onto the grey matter of my brain. I understand that there's a biological reason, but what's the metaphysical reason? If there is a reason at all, which I do not presume.

I wondered if perhaps my body was just an extension of some greater being, a universal consciousness using me to sense and experience and move through our three dimensional world in the same way that my brain directs my fingers to type these words.

I wondered if each human being - or every sentient being - is perhaps just a sensory organ of some greater thing, the universe itself using bits of matter to experience this reality we struggle to understand.

I wondered if Sylvia and I and our parents and our siblings and neighbours and friends and everyone else are actually just different aspects of that same being.

A being who, a long time ago, thought to itself, "I want to experience life as a Caucasian male born in Flin Flon, Manitoba in 1969 who becomes a moderately successful professional writer and breaks four brittle things on a spring day in 2009."

Maybe those shards of glass and clay, the ones I cleaned up yesterday, were the entire reason for my existence. Who knows?

I should really take care of this ingrown toenail.