Category Archives: Uncategorized

Happy belated Canada Day

Happy belated Canada Day! I’m so sorry I forgot. I feel like such an idiot. And it’s not even like I have a good excuse. Sure, I was busy over the weekend, but I wasn’t up to anything at all yesterday. I just hung around the house and watched TV. And then right before I went to bed I was messing around on the Internet and I saw something about Canada Day and I was like, shit, I forgot. I forgot about Canada Day.

And like I said, it’s my own fault, all right, I’m taking full responsibility here. But there’s plenty of full responsibility to go around. Like why isn’t this stuff on TV here? I mean, yeah, we don’t live in Canada. But it’s so close. I’m closer to Canada than I am to Florida, and I have to hear about it on TV every time somebody does something crazy in the sunshine state.

Last year I wrote a piece about Canada Day (it was actually on Canada Day, I had my shit together last year) about how much I love Canada, and Canada Day. And some guy wrote me a message back saying how he’s so sick of Americans thinking Canada is a joke. I was offended, and so I ran a search of his IP address, it was from St. Louis, Missouri. Last time I checked, St. Louis is totally not in Canada.

Canada had a big year with their Olympic gold in men’s hockey. Unfortunately, they didn’t make it to the World Cup. So that was kind of disappointing. I remember when the World Cup started, I looked through all of the qualifying countries, totally surprised at Canada’s absence. Is soccer popular in Canada? Do they call it soccer or football? Or something else entirely?

I hope they make it to the World Cup someday. I hope that they make it all the way to the finals. And the other team to make it to the finals will be the USA. That would be the coolest World Cup final of all time. USA vs. Canada. A World Cup entirely dominated by two North American countries that don’t even call it football.

And the best part would be, both teams would refuse to play. They’d go out on the field, sure, but they wouldn’t touch the ball. The clock would run and extra time would be given and finally they’d get to the penalty kicks. But nobody would budge.

It’s a win-win. I’m not sure what the FIFA rules say regarding a stalemate, but maybe they’d just continue the game indefinitely, refusing to call it a match until somebody scored a point. And so it would be like an armistice, a perpetual state of America and Canada being indefinitely in the World Cup finals.

Or, they’d call it a tie and we’d both get to win. Maybe it would foster a greater sense of brotherhood and camaraderie across the US/Canadian border. Maybe our elected officials would say something like, why do we have this border anyway? Don’t the many things we have in common outweigh our differences?

And we’d form one country, a North American superpower. And we’d probably have to get rid of Canada Day, sorry, but don’t worry, we’ll get rid of the Fourth of July also. We’ll start a new national holiday, for a new nation. (Americanada? Is that too easy? We’ll think of something.) We’ll put it somewhere in the middle, like July 2^nd, or 3^rd. I don’t know how we’ll decide which one, neither is perfectly in the middle.

Maybe some sort of an exhibition soccer match? No, that would only drive us further apart. Maybe we’d just make it a two-day holiday. And if Americanada Day happened to fall on a Wednesday, meaning a Wednesday/Thursday holiday, most bosses would probably just make it a five-day weekend, because what would be the point of making everybody come in only for one day?

Flying sucks

I was on an airplane this weekend for the first time in over a year. Flying sucks, but what are you going to do? Instead of letting your insane fears dictate the course of your days, slowly making you too scared even of leaving the house, you’ve got to deal with unpleasant stuff now and then if you want to get to experience other aspects of life which are slightly more pleasant than your regular routine at home.

But yeah, flying really does suck. Getting to the airport several hours early, everybody complains about that. And TSA, I can’t believe that all of those security measures are necessary. The taking off of the belt and shoes, the placing my computer in its own separate plastic bin apart from everything else. As if the giant, full-body X-Ray machine wasn’t serious enough, every once in a while you get some blue-shirted not-quite cop pull you aside for some extra interrogation. You’re going to check me? For what? I don’t have anything worth checking out. You’re wasting everyone’s time giving me, or anybody else here a pat down, all right, I feel stupid, and I hope that you feel stupid running your hands up my legs, because it’s not necessary.

I’m getting carried away. The seats. I get it, airplane travel is expensive, but it’s not nearly as expensive as it would be if the entire industry weren’t super subsidized by the government. So you can’t really say anything, those seats are totally selling themselves. Still, I have a huge issue with companies that, as a matter of business, as a matter of making money, constantly look for ways to take more money out of your pocket, to charge you for services that used to be free.

I’m talking about everything, the two bags that you used to be able to check suddenly subtracted to one, the in flight entertainment that now costs something like two bucks a program. It’s bullshit, all of it. Imagine if a restaurant tried to pull a stunt like that? Extra ice? Certainly. I can offer you five cubes for thirty-five cents, and I only take credit or debit. That place would be out of business in a heartbeat.

I’m talking about the exit rows. At a pretty-tall six-foot-five, I used to have it down to a science: getting to the airport early, talking with an airline agent, them happily giving me the emergency row, and those sweet, precious, three or four extra inches of leg room that come along with the understanding that you’re willing to assist in the unlikely event of an emergency.

But that’s gone too. Some d-bag executive probably got wind of the whole emergency row agreement between tall people and gate agents and said to himself, you know what? That’s definitely an area in which more money could be going to the airline, to the shareholders. Fuck the customers. Exploit, exploit, exploit. And so now you have to pony up for “Delta Plus,” or whatever they want to call the same shitty coach seats that would have at the very least made me feel like a little more of a human being for the duration of the flight.

And you know why it really sucks? Because of course I’m not going to pay for that emergency row. Because I’m only flying once every other year or so. Because I have no money. So what you wind up with is some not-so-tall guy letting out a nice, audible, “Ahhh!” sound as he extends his perfectly regular-sized limbs as far as they’ll stretch, all while I’m a few rows back, the guy in front of me could barely wait to reach cruising altitude before clicking his seat as far back as it’ll go. Click! He’s trying, he pressed the button and the back started to sway. But what’s that? Some sort of resistance, it’s as if there’s something behind him making it impossible to recline all the way. He fusses a little more and kind of turns around. Oh, it’s just some guy. That’s just some guy’s legs I’m crashing into. Better push back harder. And so it’s that two-or-three minute push and pull, to the point where eventually my knees hurt and I give up.

Why do you even give the option to recline? For real, what is anybody getting out of that equation? Come on airlines, this is the area that you need to monetize. You’d like to recline your seat back? Certainly, that’ll be a dollar seventy-five, and I’m sorry, but we don’t accept cash, just debit or credit. Think of the shareholders! They must be satisfied! Give them more money! It would eliminate at least this little morsel of my in-flight suffering.

Yes, I hate flying, blah, blah, blah, this is all recycled nonsense, complaints about plane travel, I’m practically falling asleep at my keyboard writing all of this garbage. Seriously, I should have been born like ten thousand years ago. Talk about complaining. I probably wouldn’t even have the proper linguistic skills to even formulate my thoughts into a coherent whiny diatribe.

But you know what really kills me? It’s that moment while you’re taxiing down the runway, just as the engines kick in for what you know from experience is going to be a jarring takeoff. The plane lifts off the ground and you get that visceral sensation like it’s going to bounce right back down. But it doesn’t. And now everything below is getting really small. And in your mind you can just imagine exactly what it’s going to look and sound and feel like when the engines suddenly die and the plane plummets straight to a certain doom.

It’s probably not going to happen. But it might. It happens every now and then. And what if you’re on one of those unlucky flights? What if the people on previous doomed voyages had those same thoughts that you’re having right now? It’ll be OK, they tell themselves, trying to quiet the ever-present feeling of dread, unsuccessfully doing whatever they can to stay out of their imaginations, and then something does happen. Because it happens, right?

You’re just trying to go on vacation here, you’re sitting in a seat that’s not big enough to hold your entire body and you’re suddenly hit in the face with the cold fact that your life is finite and, even if this plane delivers you safely to wherever it is you’ve decided to give your money to get away from wherever it is that you happen to be making your money, you’re still going down, someway, eventually, nothing’s going to last.

And then you get pulled out of your nightmare daydream for a second because the flight attendant is telling you that, unfortunately, your carry-on is jostling around too much in the overhead compartment, and some of the passengers are complaining, and, well, you have to put it on the floor in front of you, even though there’s no room, you can’t feel the tips or your feet, you try to protest, politely, but you get some non-answer line about “FAA regulation states that …” Yeah, OK, thanks.

Man, I can’t wait until we have self-driving cars. I can’t wait until we have the Hyperloop. Because, yes, it’s unreal that we have an industry devoted to flying us to wherever we can afford to go on the planet. But flying on a plane sucks. It just sucks. There’s got to be a better way.

Originally published at Thought Catalog.

This one time I swam out to a buoy

There was this one summer where we kept going to the same beach every other week or so. It was a little cove tucked away from the majority of the beachgoing population, vendors would follow us there, selling us cold beer and letting us rent their giant parasols. The water was clear and warm, and all of the negative stuff I usually associate with going to the beach simply wasn’t an issue here.

The way that the cove was set up for some reason protected our little spot from any serious waves. And so I could go out and swim, fill my lungs up with air and bob up and down, relax, look up at the endless sky and forget that I was in the ocean.

Way out in the distance there was this one buoy, and whenever I went for a dip, it called out to me. Could I make it out there? I’m not a bad swimmer, but there’s no way I could justify labeling myself anything above amateur. Aside from the swimming lessons when I was a little kid, there was little in the way of any formal aquatic education. Still, I could maintain a doggy paddle for a long time. I’d hang out in the deep section, just past where my feet could reach the sand, and I never felt like I was in any particular danger.

Every time I went in, I had the urge to swim all the way out to that buoy. And it was this huge mental game. I thought I could do it, but I’d never really attempted anything so big. And sure, it’s just a swim, but there’s no room for any error at all. If something unexpected were to happen, a cramp, a shark, a missile strike, I’d be gone, that would be it.

And I always think about people flocking to the beach. You look at the earth from above, those eternal oceans comprising the vast majority of the planet. And here we are, these little ants doing our best every day just not to get annihilated on dry land. Let’s take a swim in the water. Let’s dip our feet in the very beginnings of a vast body of water that could at any time extinguish us from existence.

Still, the call to this particular buoy simultaneously terrified me yet pulled me out. Each trip to the beach I’d wade out just a little bit, trying to get myself just to make a decision, trapped in the space in between heading out or falling back.

One day I decided to go for it. Nice and easy, I used my elementary breaststroke to keep my head down and swim straight out. I didn’t want to freak myself out, so I decided not to look for a while, just to concentrate on doing what I was doing. After what I assumed had to have been at least ten or fifteen minutes, I raised my head to the horizon, hoping that my destination wouldn’t be that much further away.

But as I wiped the water away from my eyes, it looked like I hadn’t made any progress at all. Worse, when I turned around to look back, the shore looked ever farther away than what I had originally estimated the distance would have been from beach to buoy. I started freaking out a little, realizing that maybe I had bitten off a little more of the ocean than I was prepared to swallow.

My body was doing OK, I mean, I was tired, but not on the verge of collapse or anything. Still, my mind imagined what that collapse would feel like, and how much longer I’d have until that fatigue became an inevitability. My breathing picked up, I was starting to panic. Not really sure if it would have been shorter to the buoy or back, I wound up settling on the buoy. I calmed myself down as best I could and concentrated on my stroke, slowly, steadily.

And yeah, I finally got there. The buoy was huge, which I think gave me the impression that it was a lot closer to land. There wasn’t really anything to grab onto, and the whole surface was covered in this thick layer of barnacle or whatever that stuff is that accumulates on objects that spend their lives floating in the ocean. I rested. I bobbed up and down with the buoy. I waved to everybody back on the sand, not even sure if they could see me, or if they’d been paying attention to my swim at all.

I was reluctant to let go, seeing as how I’d definitely be more tired going back, and the prospect of another mini panic attack was still a very fresh fear. But I floated on my back and only moved my arms enough to propel me in the general direction of the back. It took longer than it did to come out, but when I finally got to the point where I could reach my feet to the ocean floor while at the same time keeping my head above water, I finally let my muscles relax, and yeah, I was pretty beat. I have no idea how much longer I could have remained moving, but it takes work to keep yourself afloat.

I think about when I started freaking out, how I got a very real feeling that I was in some serious trouble, and body’s response to that danger served as the one thing I couldn’t afford to do to keep myself from sinking. Looking back, it’s a cool story, but only to me. I try to tell people whenever I’m at the beach about this one time that I swam to a buoy. But I can never really capture the excitement. Swimming out and swimming back I guess isn’t that big of a deal.

Coffee MacGyver

I’m staying at a hotel on vacation and the room here has a coffee machine. So I bought some coffee . And when morning came I woke up and opened my eyes content in the immediate knowledge that I wouldn’t have to wait to figure out what we’d all be doing for breakfast before I could get some coffee in my system.

And even when it happens, it’s always too little, too late. Because it’s never the same drinking coffee when you’re on the road. At home I like to, before taking care of any other morning tasks, make a huge pot of coffee and start drinking the whole thing. When you’re on vacation, by the time you get up and wait for everyone else to get ready, after you make plans and decide where you’ll eat for breakfast, you finally sit down and the waiter or waitress goes, “Would you like some coffee?”

Yes, I’d really like some coffee. So they bring me over a thimble-sized cup and fill it up. And I get it, you can’t serve coffee at a restaurant in twenty ounce glasses or cereal bowls. But come on, keep coming back, fill me up, I’m already done and I need more. Of course I’m not going to snap and beg for more coffee, so eventually I just have to accept the fact that my caffeine levels are going to be out of whack.

But this coffee machine, I thought, would solve all of these problems. Except for the fact that when I went to set everything up, I realized that I hadn’t thought to buy coffee filters. I’d figure out some way to make this work, though. I’ve boiled coffee in a pot over a stove and separated the grinds with a strainer. One time I cut open a tea bag and carefully replaced its contents with ground coffee.

I’d use toilet paper. And at first it worked. It was great. I had three cups of coffee, I felt kind of like a regular human being. But I was really just digging myself into a shallow grave of unwarranted confidence. Because I woke up the next day and thought, OK, well that half a pot I made turned out great yesterday, I might as well max this baby out today.

And yeah, I don’t know what happened, but the toilet paper today wasn’t letting any of the water through to the pot. I turned around ten minutes after I’d set the whole thing up and there was a huge messy, grindy puddle. They didn’t have coffee filters, so of course they didn’t have paper towels or anything to clean it up. It was a huge, giant mess which I still haven’t really figured out how to fully clean.

But I did manage to salvage a cup out of whatever was floating around before I dumped the machine into the sink. It wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t good either, but definitely not the worst I’ve ever had.

Where’s my buddy?

We’re going away on vacation tomorrow, and so we had to drop the dog off at the boarder earlier this afternoon. Generally I think of my dog as a pretty dumb animal, like when I call him he rarely comes over, and I’ve never been able to get him to master any sorts of tricks besides “sit” and “give me your paw.” But he’s somehow developed this doggy superpower, that whenever we’re about to actually leave the house to go anywhere, he knows it. Before we ever even have a chance to make a move like we’re going to get our stuff ready to leave, he’s going crazy.

At first I attributed it to association. Whenever we go away, we inevitably bring our suitcases and bags downstairs. And so I thought, all right, maybe he just associates the bags with leaving, with getting in the car, and he gets all excited. But it’s got to be something more nuanced. Because a few days ago I went in the basement to look for our suitcases. And there was no reaction. He knew we weren’t leaving yet, and so he was just lying there on the couch, oblivious to the world and his surroundings.

But last weekend we brought the dog with us to visit my parents. After the initial surge of energy and excitement that always comes along with seeing a bunch of new faces, he quickly died down and commandeered both doggy-beds my parents have in the kitchen for their golden retrievers.

He’s pretty mellow. He doesn’t beg for food and, aside from occasionally shifting positions, he’s content to just hang out and watch everybody. But then at some point toward the end of the night, I looked at my wife, I made a motion to my watch as if to say, it’s kind of late, we should think about maybe making an exit soon.

And the dog knew. He got up and he started getting all antsy, gnawing at his leash, whining and crying. It was the same exact reaction when he knows that we’re going somewhere. And I’d barely said anything at all. Was he just sitting there watching us? Waiting for some sort of a subtle cue to get up and start acting crazy?

And then today, I dropped him off at the border. All I had to do was take out a Zip-lock back, as in, OK, I’m going to put some food in a bag for you so you can eat your own food for the next several days. And that was all it took. He started flipping out.

What’s really weird is, the boarder, definitely one of his favorite spots, a big space where all the dogs get to hang out in a pack, it shares the same building as one of his most hated places, the vet. And I’m telling you, he can tell where we’re going. I’ll park the car and take him toward that building and, even though there’s really no way that he should be able to divine which room inside is his destination, he does. If it’s time for a checkup or a vaccination, he’s pulling away, he’s struggling. But to the Dog House? Man, he can’t get inside fast enough.

Whenever I drop him off for a few days, there’s always a little surplus time where I have to live in this house without our dog. I can’t explain it, but it just feels dead in here. I went out to run an errand and when I came back, I instinctively called out, “Where’s my buddy?” even though before I had a chance to finish my sentence, my brain was like, oh yeah, he’s not here, I’m alone.

And I don’t get it. I don’t get how people live like that, without dogs to greet you when you come home, or to hide from you after they’ve gotten into the trash and made a huge mess strewing garbage all over the living room. Even though the space in between the two couches isn’t really a good hiding spot. And if you’re in there, I already know that something’s up. And so you can figure out when we’re going on a trip, but you can’t figure out how not to stay out of the trash?