Canada.
It’s the wild, sprawling, underpopulated, metric system-loving Garden of Eden to America’s north. If you’re American, as I am, and you’re looking to dodge a draft, or escape the law after robbing a bank, or see a loon, Canada’s got your back on all three fronts. (more…)
Vancouver, British Columbia. Saturday morning in September 2016. Low clouds. No rain yet, but it’s coming. Cloud cover so low and dark this morning that the city feels boxed in and claustrophobic. As soon as I step out the front door of my building, rain begins to fall, raindrops as big as Canadian nickels. I fish the umbrella out of my backpack and press the button on the handle. FWAP! The unfolding nylon sounds like an oversized bat taking flight.
The rain is merciless and cruel. It threatens to shred my umbrella, to reduce it to a nylon pulp. It’s pounding everything, myself included, down, down, down.
This is how it rains on the West Coast of Canada.
I lope towards the Rogers Arena across town. Vancouver is small enough to walk. Rogers is where the Canucks play their home games. Rogers is where I gave a Tedx talk in 2015, so the Arena and I have some personal history.
I’m attending a media event this morning. A media event is a high-strung phoney party that’s designed to introduce members of the media to a product. Media events usually contain the following ingredients: artisanal sandwiches, soft drinks, giveaways/freebies, awkward moments, sometimes sublime moments, too, and interview opportunities with celebrity and pseudo-celebrity guests.
I’ve been going to these dreaded gatherings—dreaded because they are designed to be fun and rarely are—for more than a decade.
This morning’s high strung, phoney party at the Rogers Arena is to celebrate the release of a video game called NBA 2K17.
I worked there for six months, maybe a year. It wasn’t the worst job I’ve ever have (note: I’d find the worst job soon after this). People were pleasant to me, if a little distant and condescending. I wasn’t a New Yorker and they obviously knew this; I felt like they enjoyed knowing this. The investment bankers who stalked around the office like werewolves enjoyed knowing it; the secretaries, which was the group that I was technically a part of, enjoyed knowing it, too.
I answered telephones, directed calls, set up appointments, signed for packages, and ran an old, knucklehead computer. And I operated the velobinder. The velobinder was the office equivalent of a medieval torture device. It was a large, blank-faced machine with a long, thin slot on the front of it. Within seconds of switching it on, the machine would give off a hot, burning smell. I’d carefully feed stacks of paper into the velobinder’s dark slot. The slot heated up to a high enough temperature to melt plastic. The velobinder’s job was to fasten stacks of paper together, to bind them, with the melted plastic. I had to hold the papers very still for maybe five or 10 seconds in the slot when operating the machine. If I moved at all, even the slightest bit, the velobinder would throw a fit and not do what I wanted it to do.
The day of the office Christmas party I put in more of a workday than I’d expected to put in. I sat at my desk and went through the motions, trying to look busy, trying to distract myself. I had a tough time concentrating. I felt restless and impatient. What I was feeling was genuine excitement. I hadn’t been this excited since I was a kid.
It was 1997. I was living in New York City. It was the holiday season. The office Christmas party was coming. To say that I was looking forward to the party would be an understatement. I was excited about it, excited like a kid about to walk into an amusement park. I wanted to experience the whole thing: drinking too much, eating too much, kissing a woman in the copy room who hopefully looked like Shirley Maclaine in The Apartment, etc.
I wanted to experience the gamut of joyous, ribald activities that I’d seen in office parties on TV shows and in TV movies for decades. I wanted to be the old drunk, tired of it all, getting drunk alone in his dark office. I wanted to be the sales guy wearing a tiara for some bizarre reason and doing a strange dance to Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” on top of the conference room table.
At office Christmas parties, you were a grown-up—a tax-paying, job-having adult. Yet these parties were rare occasions when you were allowed, even encouraged, to act like a child again. It was OK to let yourself backslide a little at office Christmas parties. It was OK to regress.
Thanks to some timely string-pulling on the part of Dr. Ali, I was moved out of the bustling community cardiac recovery room and relocated to a standard-issue two-person room further down the hall.
Instead of five roommates—the constant chatter, the beeping machines, and the public attempts to defecate into portable space toilets—I would now have just one person to concern myself with.
This person was an older man. His hair was a dull, militaristic grey, shorn close to his pumpkin-shaped skull. He wore heavy eyeglass frames that made him appear curious and frustrated at once. He looked like an unemployed owl.
The unemployed owl would not have been out of place—not at all—in the background of one of my grandmother’s fading Moose Club Polaroids from the 70’s.
When I initially walked into the room I found him sitting in the chair next to his bed, eating his dinner. He was hunched in a primal position over his tray, elbows planted firmly on the portable table. He held his face about six inches above the tray. This strange intimacy with the tray was presumably done to maximize his tray-to-mouth eating speed. The man ate so fast that his plastic fork clacked against the plastic tray like a cuckoo clock: tock, tock, tock.
He introduced himself as Donald. Or Harry. Or Bernard. It was something like that. What his real name was didn’t matter to me.
I would come to know him only as Wombat.
It’s winter here, albeit a mercifully mild winter so far. I put on a jacket yesterday, then walked out of the house—right out the front door—without realizing that I’d left a pot of soup simmering on the stove.
My girlfriend noticed the simmering soup. She shut it off and told me about it when I returned.
My response was this: “Really? I did that?” I was surprised, of course, and embarrassed. And I was stubbornly skeptical, too. Even though I knew she was telling me the truth.
My brain is soft and cloudy now. What parts were damaged, and what parts still work, is ambiguous—and will always be ambiguous, thanks to the limited science we have on brains. During my brain’s softest, cloudiest moments, when something vaguely dangerous happens (like leaving soup simmering on the stove), doom settles in, wraps its arms around me, whispers in my ear, This is only the beginning. This is only going to get worse.
I was in Manhattan a few years back to attend New York Comic-Con at the consistently underwhelming convention center out on the Hudson River. (Does NYC deserve a better convention center than Javits? It does.) I was there to work a gauntlet of red carpets. My cameraman and I would interview all the SyFy Channel bottom-feeders, cut-rate VOD horror movie “stars,” and without fail, Kevin Smith.
The director of Clerks is positively ubiquitous at New York Comic-Con. He’s on every red carpet, even if he has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever it is that’s being promoted.
He simply shows up and starts talking about himself. Or Superman. Or both. (Usually both.) Smith always wears his hockey jersey, always sweats profusely and talks fast, and always, always finds a way to squeeze his swollen ego into every damn camera lens in the godforsaken vicinity.
Moving is exhausting, especially when you’re older, as I am now.
You have more tangible things to carry as you age—more crap, more junk, more history—and more intangible things, too.
I’m in the habit of getting rid of things now, instead of moving them. “Junking” is an exhilarating, soul-cleansing exercise. I put something in the dumpster and I think, That’s gone from my life now. Gone forever! Why the hell did I carry that around for all those years? What a damn fool I am!
But, like a soldier who loses a limb in battle, even when I throw things out or sell them on Craigslist, the ghosts of those things haunt me for awhile. I feel a tingle where the junked items used to be.
This morning, with 98-percent of my life in boxes, I found a magnet on my refrigerator—a magnet that I’d somehow been looking at without seeing for years.
It has the words of a Susan Polis Schutz poem written on it. Do you know Susan Polis Schutz? You might not know her consciously, but trust me, you know her words. The same way scientists claim that there is a spider within three feet of us at all times, a Susan Polis Schutz poem is within three feet of you—yes, you—at this very moment.
Schutz is a successful, ubiquitous greeting card-caliber poet. She does not skimp on the sentiment. She’s built a career out of saying the obvious.
My mother sent me the magnet.
Schutz’s poem on the magnet is titled TO MY AMAZING SON. It goes like this:
TO MY AMAZING SON
To see you happy
is what I always wished for you
Today I thought about your handsome face
and felt your excitement for life
and your genuine happiness
and I, as your mother burst with pride
as I realized that my dreams for you have come true
What an extraordinary person you have become
In the background is a body of water, an open sky at dawn, a couple of brown mountains. I popped the magnet off the refrigerator. The magnet itself was disappointingly weak, barely strong enough to hold it in place on the metal door.
I thought about my mother. She’s almost 70 now. Lives in Florida in a tiny apartment. I considered the sentiment on display. How bland, I thought. How completely anonymous, I thought. I felt the weight of the weak magnet in my hands. I looked at the brown mountains, the open sky at dawn. I tried to figure out what to do with this damn thing.
This girl I liked wanted to tell me about an encounter she once had with a B-level celebrity.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I was in line at the airport in Montreal and Celebrity X was in front of me?” she asked.
(It was Russell Brand. It’s always Russell Brand. Everyone I know has been in line in an airport behind Russell Brand at some point.)
“No, you didn’t tell me that one…” I said, wincing.
“Well, it’s an incredible story,” the girl said.
She rubbed her hands together excitedly, in anticipation of her own story. Then she began telling it.
I did not want to listen. Hearing about Celebrity X/Russell Brand would make me like the girl less. How much less? Who knew.
But ballpark? Let’s say that it would not be an insignificant amount.
Like a crazed, slobbering madman, I grabbed the wheel of the conversation and steered it in an entirely new direction. I thought I did this clumsily and obnoxiously, that I’d obviously botched it. To my surprise, the conversation thread drifted naturally in this new direction.
The girl forgot about Russell Brand entirely.
She didn’t bring him up again.
But the ghost of that conversation? It’s still out there. It’s still lurking about in the nether conversation world. One day that conversation will find me, mark my words…
Pop Quiz, Hotshot: What used video game is worth less than a penny?
Answer: Find out in today’s episode of “Brief Conversations with Interesting People” when I very gently ambush the unsuspecting staff at the game store in Metrotown Mall in Burnaby.
So who did I find behind the counter? And why are there only three-degrees of separation here in Vancouver as opposed to the usual six-degrees? Click that triangle shaped-doohickey below and you shall receive all answers via this virtual cornucopia/horn of plenty. (P.S. Happy Thanksgiving, Canada.)
[Note: After further review from my audio producer’s girlfriend, my audio producer felt, well, inspired to revise the podcast. So here’s V. 2. -Scott]
