Flip Flop Flying

Ouch!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ouch!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ouch!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ouch!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ouch!
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Ouch!
Wheeeeeeee!
Ouch!
Wheee!
Ouch!
Whee!
Aaaah… ooh, feel a bit dizzy.

Last night I went to the Toronto Blue Jays vs. Texas Rangers game, my 30th Jays game of the summer. The stadium was very empty. Apparently, being the day after Labour Day combined with the first day of the new school year makes this day in the calendar a bad one to be hosting a ballgame. My friends Andrew, Joe and I bought cheap upstairs tickets but snuck down in to the $50-ish seats. The SkyDome has some of the most stringent stewards I’ve ever experienced at a ballpark. Most places you can usually move around easily as long as you aren’t in somebody’s paid-for seat. But there are ways and it’s not too difficult. Andrew has an extensive guide to sneaking down to the better seats on his website, Drunk Jays Fans.

Anyway, the Jays beat the Rangers. Some home runs. Blah blah blah. We went to a bar called Wide Open, a narrow dark bar, drank more beer, shots of sambuca, Joe went home. Andrew and I looked for somewhere to carry on boozing. We discussed how gross the draught beer at a place called Java House is. One can’t be sure, but it always tastes like they have dirty pipes.

We ended up at Java House. A pitcher and wings for $13. Sweet. That’s what we had. We were sat on the patio, taking shit about baseball. At an adjacent table, I overheard two guys talking about “Love, Actually.” I asked them what they thought. They thought it was great. I agreed. Behind us, another guy chimed in. He thought it was awesome, too. A bunch of dudes all agreeing that an English romantic comedy was ace. Which was as unlikely a part of the evening as was Andrew and I spending the next hour or so chatting to a Croatian woman about baseball. But not as unlikely as the fact that, drunk as hell, I ate salad instead of junk food when I got home.

On Saturday I had lunch in a Chinese restaurant. The waitress brought over water, a napkin and chopsticks after I’d ordered what I wanted. I sheepishly asked for a fork when the meal arrived. (Insert Jerry Seinfeld bit about chopsticks and forks here. Okay, I’ll do it for you.) For whatever reason, a childhood memory barged its way to the front of my brain, pushing aside any chance I had of focussing on the page of the book I was reading (“Elliot Allagash” by Simon Rich. I’m a big fan of his two previous collections, and this, his first novel, is great: if you want something to read that is quick and very funny, I thoroughly recommend it.)

We had these forks at home that were only brought out when we had Chinese takeout. They were forks that, I assume, were designed for British people to eat rice with. Chinese takeout was a treat. Whatever my parents had, my sister and I invariably had chicken curry and chips*. Chunks of chicken in that strange MSG-laced, cloying, mucus-y curry sauce, and chips. Big fat chips. Chips that were different from chip shop chips or my Mum’s awesome homemade chips**. And there would always be a brown paper bag of prawn crackers too. It was a kid’s dream: crackers and chips in one sitting!

* How depressing must it be if you move your family halfway around the world to make a better life for yourself, you open a takeaway place and the locals order chips?

** Once, when I was a teenager, and it was my turn to wash the dishes — my sister and I took turns to wash or dry — I thought that I’d be nice and wash out the chip pan. So I poured the still-warm chip fat down the plug hole, washed the pan, and felt incredibly proud of myself. Until my Mum, rather vocally, pointed out my error.

The forks we had were kinda like spoons with a U-shaped notch cut out of the apex to create two prongs. (Actually, they were probably sporks not forks.) The memory of those forks set off a lightning-fast slideshow in my head of other childhood memories…

I lived really close to my school. I could see the sports field from my bedroom window. It was across the street. My school was on the same land as the local sports centre. So we were lucky: we had enough space for four or five soccer or rugby fields in the winter, and space for cricket and athletics in the summer. Inside the sports centre, we had access to badminton, squash, and swimming. The gymnasium was also used for roller skating on Saturday nights. I used to go there when I was around 14 or 15 years old. I only ever learned to skate anti-clockwise. So at the point in the night when the DJ announced that it was time to go the other way, I would sheepishly move to the side and take a break. It was also the place where I learned the power of perfume. There was a girl there who wore Poison by Christian Dior. It was like teenage boy catnip. I’d skate in her wake, constantly in a cloud of mind-bendingly lovely Poison. Later, in my late teens and early twenties, Calvin Klein’s Obsession had the same effect, so much so that I had one of those smelly magazine pullout adverts, (the kind with the smelly strip folded over) Blu-Tacked to my bed head. It didn’t hurt that it had a nice black and white picture of Kate Moss on it. I’d give it a wee sniff before I went to sleep on the nights that my then-girlfriend didn’t stay over, (she also wore Obsession and was fine with me liking Kate Moss). Most of all, though, was the smell of dewberry. I guess dewberry was a Body Shop thing; and to this day it makes me weak at the knees whenever I pass someone on the street and catch a whiff of it.

The nearest part of the school/sports centre to my house, though, were the tennis courts and the gravelly area that was used for five-a-side soccer, and car boot sales on Sundays. I remember one time, some friends and I entered a five-a-side competition, and we chose the team name Cosmos because we thought New York Cosmos and the other NASL team names were really cool. We never saw them on TV, of course; I guess we must’ve seen them in football magazines like Match and Shoot. And we also used to call it soccer. We really, really thought it was a cooler word than football.

In the winter, I guess it was in the month or so before Christmas, they put an artificial ice rink on top of the nearest three tennis courts to my house. I never skated there, though. I would have done, but the first year they did it (1983) I fell ill. I was thirteen years old. One day I had a cystitis-like pain when urinating. It was either later that day or the next day, I don’t remember that clearly. I’d been into town and got the bus home. There were two buses that serviced my suburb of Lincoln: the 24 and the 27. The 27 stopped outside the school, but the 24 went another direction that meant a fifteen minute walk home. On this particular day, I got the 24. Shortly after getting off the bus, I felt like I’d need a poo quite soon. But, y’know, I was only fifteen minutes from home: no biggie. I broke wind. I broke wind with extras. I had a fifteen minute walk home with sludge in my pants. I was a 13 year old boy who had shat his pants, who had a fifteen minute walk home. It wasn’t fun, I don’t recommend it. The next morning my alarm went off as normal. At that age, I was very much a get-up-and-go kid (at least, that’s how I remember it). I got up, and fell over. My legs were useless. Couldn’t move them. My parents were both at work. My sister must have already gone to school (not entirely sure why that would’ve been the case, but my memory is of being alone in the house). I don’t remember much of what happened next. I was taken to see the family doctor, and whatever happened there, I had this horrible chalky medicine to drink. For the next few days my sister and I switched bedrooms. It’s likely that that happened because her room was closer to the bathroom. From her bedroom, I could see the ice rink. From my room — which was slightly set back from the rest of the house — I wouldn’t have had a good view of it. I saw kids skating, I could hear the music, but I couldn’t skate myself. In fact, to this day, I’ve only ever ice skated once in my life, a couple of years previously in Weston-super-Mare, a seaside town with an awesome name in the southwest of England. That time was on artificial ice and I remember being very bad at ice skating. Christopher Dean’s professional relationship with Jayne Torvill was entirely safe.

Some time later — I have no idea how long it took; a few days maybe — an ambulance came and I was taken to St. George’s Hospital. I had this weird thing, and I would have to have it seen to in a hospital. Thankfully, I was thirteen years old and thus was admitted to an adult ward. (A school friend subsequently spent some time in the hospital for diabetes, but he was twelve and had to stay on the children’s ward with the wailing six year olds.) I basically had an arthritic problem, and my legs were Velco-ed into these plaster bandage splints. I only took them off when I needed to use the commode. My memories of my teenage years are kinda hit and miss. I don’t remember much about certain things; a lot about other things. Unfortunately, my memories of my time in hospital aren’t very full. Mostly just bits and pieces. I remember having a crush on a nurse. I remember that I was terrified of injections. I remember enjoying ticking the boxes and choosing the food off the menu that was brought around at the start of the day. I remember my parents would go to a record shop and buy 7″ singles for me with my pocket money. I remember my iron deficiency meant having to drink iron medicine daily, and it being the foulest tasting thing (even typing the words brings back a sensory memory of the taste). I remember the guy in the bed next to me was an engineer with the Red Arrows, which was very very cool. And I remember after several weeks of not seeing Tessa, the family dog, my parents and nurses organised for my bed to be wheeled into the day room, up to the edge of the doors that opened up to a garden, where my parents were waiting with Tessa. I was so happy to see her. And I remember when I was on the mend, and ready to leave, the doctor and nurses helping me stand up. Six weeks in bed wastes away your muscles. I couldn’t support my own weight. When I returned home, I distinctly remember the lounge was hot. All the bars on the gas fire were on. And I arrived home in time for “Diff’rent Strokes.” And, I don’t know if this is true or not, but it’s very easy to convince my memory that we had Chinese food for tea that night.

Back at school, I had special treatment. I was allowed to spend breaks indoors, out of the cold. My mate Tim — the kid with diabetes — was allowed to spend his breaks inside too, to keep me company. For some reason, I used to have a Khmer Rouge-esque relationship with things from my own past. It’s always Year Zero. When I went to art school, I threw out all of my school-era artwork. When I got to university, I did the same with my art school stuff. When I got a job in London working in the music business, I threw out all of the university stuff. I really really wish I had all of that stuff now. Thankfully, I’ve kept everything since the mid-Nineties. But, if I had the stuff I was doing back in those indoor school breaks, I’d have a diary of an invented Craig Robinson. A Craig Robinson that was a pop star. Every year we were given diaries at school. I guess they thought — rather optimistically — we’d use them to keep track of our homework assignments or tests. I used mine to record the day-to-day events of my life as a pop star. I’d record an album in two days, and it would be released a week later. I’d be on the cover of Smash Hits soon afterwards. And every Monday — the pop charts were revealed on a Monday lunchtime back then — my single’s progress up the charts would be recorded. I would have several singles in the charts at the same time for most of the year. I would go on tour quite a lot, too. I’d play in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo all in the same week. I was BIG NEWS! I was bigger than Nik Kershaw.

Tim and I… Well, as school went on we became more casual friends. I remember we had an argument about something and it was never the same again. Our music tastes changed (we were both into Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Huey Lewis at one point) but when he got a girlfriend (who, I believe, became his wife) and I got into the Mission and the Sisters of Mercy, our separate lives were complete.

But back in the early to mid-eighties, as well as the pop star diary, I made miniature record sleeves. I’d take graph paper and make a record sleeve about two inches square. I’d also make an inner sleeve, and I’d use a pair of compasses to draw a circle and carefully cut it out. I’d draw the front and back cover with felt tip pens. I’d do the same for the inner sleeve (mostly thin horizontal lines to recreate the printed lyrics) and I’d colour the circles black on both sides, with an appropriate coloured centre to make a tiny paper record to slip into the sleeves. I made quite a few of them. I’m not sure how many, but I distincly remember doing “Thriller,” Wham!’s “Fantastic,” and Duran Duran’s self-titled debut and “Rio.” I really wish I still had them. It’s funny that I made miniature record sleeves as a kid, and ended up with a website based around miniature portraits of pop stars.

Beer glass is empty. That’ll do for now.

I typed the above words into my iPod, sat in my local, sat at the bar, over the course of three pints of Stratford Pilsner. The guy who sat down at the empty stool next to mine while I was outside have a smoke, was drinking whiskey and had a really strong smell of feta cheese. Like, really strong. Anyway, what I wrote about, and what I wanted to write about here are two different things. I guess if I’m drunk and in the mood to type, I’ll get around to writing more about what I wanted to write about.

Close to where I live is a nice wee area called Kensington Market. Lots of grocery stores, cafes, bars. It is quite, for want of a less heinous word, vibrant. There’s a park there called Bellevue Square Park. Within that park is a statue stood between two benches. It’s a statue of Al Waxman. Al Waxman! The lieutenant off “Cagney and Lacey” has a statue! Made me laugh loads when I first saw it. And it made me happy, too, because I’ve long had a desire to have framed photographs of TV and movie lieutenants all along a corridor wall. Apparently, though, Waxman — who died in 2001 — was very famous in Canada. He was in a sitcom called 1970s “King of Kensington” (YouTube clip of title sequence) in which he owned a convenience store in Kensington Market. Al Waxman had a happy face, as the clip linked above shows. And I remember him as having a happy face in “Cagney and Lacey,” too. So it’s kinda weird that the statue looks Aphex Twin-ishly creepy. Especially when you take two photographs and make an animated gif out of them.

For the first time since I arrive in Toronto in May, I am wearing a sweater in the day time. I’ve only worn a sweater or hooded top four times in total since arriving. It’s been hot. Earlier this week, even, the people who warn about these things within local government issues a heat advisory warning, saying there was a heat wave. But it’s sweater weather today, and it’s nice.

I went to McDonald’s yesterday because — obviously — I wanted a healthy nutritious snack. I had a hamburger. I absolutely cannot ever remember having a McDonald’s hamburger before. I felt like J. Wellington Wimpy. Sadly, though, I had to pay them immediately.

While I was there I took one of the little paper cups that you can pump ketchup into. They are lovely little creations. Something I didn’t realise until I played with it this morning is that there’s no adhesives involved, it’s all origami. Look:

I also took a sachet of pepper. It’s called pepper on one side of the sachet and, being Canada, it’s called poivre on the other side. It’s a good job I didn’t actually want any pepper, cos, well, there’s not much pepper in there: forty one grains to be precise.

Saturday morning, watching a movie from my teenage years: WarGames. 1983. Starring Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy. It’s a very strange feeling to look back on Cold War nuclear armageddon scenarios with a sense of wistful nostalgia. Things weren’t really simpler back then, it’s just that I was simpler, I guess. Ally Sheedy … she really is incredibly pretty.

It’s possible I’m losing my mind — probable — but when I was walking home last night, from across the street — a wide street — there were two people chatting. I wasn’t paying attention, just aware that they were there, as one tends to be late at night on semi-deserted streets. Thinking about other stuff, I heard my name. My given name and surname. “Craig Robinson.” I looked over the street at the people. They were paying no attention to me whatsoever. And I heard the mention of John Cusack, and it was obvious they were talking about the other Craig Robinson, and the film he was in recently. And my ego wept.

It’s nice when you notice something new or interesting when you’re walking down a street you’ve been down plenty of times before. A couple of weeks ago I noticed this green garage. It’s on the way from where I live to the bar where I drink. Yesterday, it was way too hot* to waste precious in-front-of-the-fan time to go down there to take photos, so Google Street View will have to do. All looks kinda normal from the first angle…

There’s a sloped wall visible from the front…

But from this side, it gets awesome and slopes downwards towards the back too.

* It was 33°C (91°F) with a “feels like” temperature of 41°C (106°F). I think we need a new name for the “feels like” temperature. It’s kinda clunky-sounding and makes it sound a bit too wishy-washy when, for the non-meterologists of us, the people who look at the weather forecast to determine our clothing for the day, what the temperature feels like is all that matters. Why would I care if it’s actually 33°C if when I walk out of the house it feels like it’s 41°C?

A man in a tight cords wore a T-shirt
Keep on truckin’ written on the front.

I took his advice
And I kept on truckin’
I kept on truckin’
All night long.

I kept on truckin’
I kept on truckin’
I kept on truckin’
All day long.

I kept on truckin’
I kept on truckin’
And I kept on truckin’
The next day, too.

I kept on truckin’
All the next week
I kept on truckin’
The week after that.

I kept on truckin’
I kept on truckin’
I kept on truckin’
The whole next month.

I kept on truckin’
All through spring
I kept on truckin’
Through summer, too.

I kept on truckin’
Through autumn and winter
I kept on truckin’
And the year after that.

And the year after that
And the year after that
And the year after that
And the year after that.

I kept on truckin’
I kept on truckin’
I kept on truckin’
For twenty five years.

Twenty five years and
Sixteen weeks and
Three days and
Two and a half hours.

Then I stopped truckin’
And I heard on the radio
Another guy was still truckin’
So he won the truckin’ endurance competition.

Pet Sounds. The Beach Boys’ 1966 album. You all know what most people think of this record, and as someone who’s website takes its name from the lyrics of a Beach Boys song, I’m sure you can guess how I feel about the record. I was lying in bed trying to sleep last night, and got to wondering if I could find cover versions of each of the album’s songs on YouTube. Well, of course I could. It’s YouTube. So, embedded for your enjoyment, Pet Sounds as covered by YouTubers. (I picked them at random if there were several versions of the same song. I’m making no comment about the quality of the cover version, either pro or anti. They are, though, all interesting in their own way.)

Wouldn’t It Be Nice by Burro1231

You Still Believe in Me by simonbarget

That’s Not Me by jimfusco

Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder) by troubleclef

I’m Waiting for the Day by JDrevolver66

Let’s Go Away for Awhile by mandobanjoguitar

Sloop John B by bubtulip48

God Only Knows by alpet07

I Know There’s an Answer by posturex1

Here Today by michaelthorner

I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times by ChrisDodgen

Pet Sounds by kobifox

Caroline, No by podonline66

And for the extra track completists out there:

Hang On to Your Ego by sydbarrett5

Since moving over to WordPress, this blog receives between 25 and 50 spam comment a day. It’s as tedious as all spam tends to be. Here’s what some of them have to say:

Helene Humann says: I would really urge people to buy fondue sets, I have possessed a set for quite a while. I purchased it when I was on holiday in Zurich and have got it out ever since. It usually surfaces at parties for chocolate fondue with strawberries. Sometimes we have cheese fondue at dinners as well. Make sure you wash out them after you use them though, otherwise they can be very difficult to washout!
Thanks for the tip, Helene. I don’t own a fondue set, mostly, I think, because I rarely have dinner parties. It’s all I can do to make something warm to eat never mind filling a thing full of molten cheese. and really, it’s a slippery slope if one starts making fondue to eat when one is alone.

Car Antenna says: Where can I find a good car antenna?
I’m pretty much the worst person to ask for a couple of reasons, Car Antenna. Firstly, I’ve never owned a car, and therefore never had any need to buy one. Secondly, you IP address indicates that you are in Phoenix, Arizona, and I’ve only spent about an hour there in my life. As far as I noticed, they didn’t sell them in the airport. I hope you manage to find one. It would be somewhat odd if someone called Car Antenna was unable to buy one. Hang on in there, champ!

Good Abs Workout says: Glenn Beck was the gross kid everybody picked on in school now using his nasty talk to try and get level the score with them. I can’t consider anybody trusts any of the crap that come out of the mouth of this right winged racist.
I agree wholeheartedly, Good Abs.

cash for junk cars says: What will you now do tomorrow because of what you did today?
Well, because I did quite a lot of editing of my book, it means that I can take it easy tomorrow, and go to the Blue Jays-Tigers game, have a few beers, and enjoy myself.

Bryon Toda says: Shakira’s a beautiful person.
Oh Bryon, how right you are, she is dreamy.

Lexus GS says: There’s too much blood in my caffeine system.
Funny man!

Shirley Manners says: The sun and the rain playing a deceiving game.
Shirley, you just blew my mind a little bit. I’m gonna have to think about that some more.

Boston Market Coupon says: I’m a fan of Beck, O’Reilly and others, but Sean hannity is definitely my favorite.
You should have a fight with Good Abs Workout. He’s got good abs; you’re a coupon. He’d kick your fuckin’ ass!

lose weight naturally says: What is the most important thing that happened to you today?
As I was saying to cash for junk cars: editing.

Dario Internet Marketing says: Ahhh the Yanks. Good stuff here. Shame they are this injured this season.
Well, I’m hoping Pettitte and A-Rod will be back soon, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a wee bit worried.

The Network Marketing Guy says: Ahhh the Old Sox. Great stuff here. So sad they are so hurt this season.
As a Yankees fan, I don’t really care about the injured Red Sox players.

Mrs. Anti-Virus says: I bet you wish george bush was still president now
Not really.

Cast iron outdoor fireplace says: i absolutely like your world-wide-web web site. Its really informative. Goodbye!…
Thank you kindly. Goodbye.

Now let’s see how much comment spam this post will produce.

Went for a haircut this morning. I tend to think of haircuts as a chore rather than as a part of my beauty regime, so going to a trendy place to pay $60 is not something I’m gonna do. Instead, I went to a barbershop with nice faded sign-writing above the windows. The bell jangled when I opened the door, and I could see the white-coated back of big, old, balding guy in the doorway to a back room. He was talking loudly in Italian. He turned round, acknowledged my presence, and finished up his phone call. Looking around the room, there were lots of dusty bottles of lotions, faded pictures of footballers, faded topless calendars (July 1983 was particularly busty), an old Zorro poster, and a bunch of photos that looked like family photos.

The barber came out, showed me to the chair, asked what I wanted, and the festivities began. Firstly, he spoke like a caricature of an Italian, so when I quote him later, feel free to read it out loud like-a dat. I asked him how his week had been. He stopped snipping, and began chatting with me in the mirror. For the majority of my time in the chair, it felt like the haircut was incidental to the monologue. The inspector is breaking his balls because a customer complained that he cut him, drew blood. Thanks for telling me that, makes me feel quite confident sat here with you behind me holding some scissors. It was the first of at least ten times he said someone was breaking his balls. Although one time he amended it, and said the government was breaking his ass. On a complete tangent, he asked if I knew Errol Flynn.

“That’s the guy who played Robin Hood, right?” I said.
“The original Robin ‘Ood, not like Kevin Costerner (sic) or Russell Crowe: they make Robin ‘Ood look like a fuckin’ idiot!”

He’d been on vacation to Hollywood. He’d seen the graves of Flynn, Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett. “Look!” He pointed to a photograph of his round pink head in front of the Hollywood sign. Then he pointed to an old black and white photograph of him as a young man; full head of black hair. Then he warned me that hair was like grass; that I should take care of it and cut it more in the summer because “you don’t want to end up like me!”

He reached over to a jar of alcohol, and pulled out a straight razor, and began removing the hair on the back of my neck. He returned to his original point about the inspector, and the customer who’d complained. Turns out the customer was Jewish. So now I wonder: what is the correct way to handle a situation when an old Italian anti-Semite has a cut-throat razor at your neck? Should one take a stand? Or should one, like I did, sheepishly and quietly mutter “uh-huh” to everything he said, and wait for the slightest pause to change the subject? I jumped in and asked him where abouts in Italy he was from.

Sicily. It’s wonderful, apparently. Go in the summer, they have the best fruit you will ever taste.

Dear Canada,

I’ve not seen a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman. Where the hell are they? Where are you hiding them? I’ve been here for three months and I’ve not seen hide nor hair of ‘em. I’ve had some maple syrup, I’ve had poutine, I’ve hummed along to “O Canada,” I’ve heard people say “eh” and “aboot,” I’ve watched hockey on TV, I’ve admired Don Cherry’s suits, but I’ve not seen a Mountie. Please send one round to stand outside the house tomorrow morning.

Yours sincerely,

Craig Robinson

PS. If I could think of something funny to write, this is where I’d do it.

I went downstairs to make a cup of tea. Came back up, sat down, looked out of the window, and FUCKING HELL-

Anybody a) know what type of bird that is? and b) want to share that information?

The woman who served me in Starbucks this morning asked me how I was doing. I tried to say something, and in those microseconds where your brain is thinking of what it is you want to say, all that came out was a few stutter-y noises. She looked at me, and offered a suggestion for a word I was looking for: “Meh?”
“Sorry?” I said, because I hadn’t quite heard her properly.
“Meh,” she said. “Er, that’s how you say it right?”
She had such a sheepish look on her face, almost like it was the first time she’d used the word out loud and in public. This woman was young – in her twenties – but I have a feeling, though, that that sort of stuff is awaiting all of us. I’ll find myself talking to someone about that great new band Arcade Five or something. And the youngsters will laugh and I will feel old.

I had a wee laugh to myself, though, on the way back from Starbucks. I’ve walked that route from home to Starbucks and back again virtually every morning since I’ve been in Toronto, and I’d never noticed it before. It’s not original or particularly interesting to point out sign writing mistakes, but at 8.50am on a rainy Sunday, it made me chuckle. And if you ever need some contaracting doing, you now know where to come.

You never hear much about acid rain these days. Does it still exist?

Last night, half-asleep, I leant over the edge of the bed and scribbled some words on a scrap of paper. Took me a while to decode the scrawl this morning, but it said “transcribe Alpha Wave Plastikman mix.” It must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time cos that song (“Alpha Wave (Plastikman Acid House Mix)” by System 7) is nineteen minutes and thirty nine seconds long. Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um …

(go make a cup of tea, come back in eighteen minutes)

… Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um Na-wooh-um weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw weeeh-wahw. There we go. Another successful blog post.

On the way home from a bar last night, I stopped off for one last drink at a place I’ve often walked by, often enjoyed the brief moment of music I’ve heard as I passed, and often wondered what sort of place it was. It was rammed in there, and I found out why. Pole dancers. No cover charge, decent priced drinks. Awesome. Sadly I arrived just a little too late, just in time for last orders, so I had a quick rum and Coke, watched a lass do her thing for a few minutes and left. As I stumbled home, I heard some screeching in an alley. I went to have a look what it was. I have no idea what sort of create it was. At first I thought it might be racoons, but as I got closer I noticed the branches of a tree shaking. Do racoons climb trees? They seem a bit big for that. So I’m thinking it was likely squirrels. But they were at it hammer and tongs. Couldn’t see the fight going on; it was dark and the tree had lots of leaves.

I saw a skunk, too. But that was last week. I’m not gonna pretend it was last night. I could do that, I could lie to you and you’d be the none the wiser. A couple of night ago, though, I smelled a skunk. It was in the early hours of the morning, and at first I thought my one of my neighbours was smoking weed on the balcony. But they weren’t. It was obviously a skunk. Either that or it was a skunk smoking weed, deliberately trying to fry my brain.

Lazy, lazy morning lying in bed watching Weezer and Beach Boys videos on YouTube. Took me until around 2pm to drag my carcass out of bed to go to the shops. At the moment I’m going through all the pages of the copyedited manuscript of my Flip Flop Fly Ball book. I’ve been instructed to make notes on the print outs in a different colour. Makes sense. So I had to go and buy a green biro today. I was a wee bit shocked at how difficult it was to buy one biro. Just one. Not a pack of three of five. One. One pen. If I’d needed a black pen, I could’ve justified buying three cos they would come in handy at some point, but three green pens? I could live to be one hundred and thirty nine years old and I’d still not have used up three pens worth of green ink. In the end, I had to go to an art supplies store, where I found a Pilot pen, one of their B2P range, which are apparently made from recycled water bottles.

While I was out of my green pen hunt, I saw a man taking a photo of a billboard poster with his cellphone. I can’t remember what the poster was advertising, but it had a man and a woman hugging on it. The man on the poster was the same man who was taking the photograph. It was kinda nice to see someone so handsome being a wee bit excited about his face being on a poster. Either that or he was sexting someone, like, “Yeah baby, I’m hot as shit.” Perhaps that’s what the screeching squirrels were doing, too, though, shouting filthy sex talk at each other and fucking in the trees. Where’s David Attenborough when you need him?

I came to Toronto thinking that because I’d be living in a new city, hopefully having fun, enjoying working on the book, that it would mean I’d have a lot to blog about. I don’t keep a diary, so if I don’t do this, it’ll be tough to remember the sort of stuff I got up to. Obviously, I decided to have a break a couple of months ago. And it was nice to not think about it; just throw a few drawings up now and again. But I’m wanting to make notes again, and I seem not to be able to do that unless they are here. Wonder why that is. Truth be told, part of the reason that I decided on the break was because of the situation when I moved the blog from using Blogger to WordPress. Blogger decided to stop doing FTP support, I started the process of changing, decided to do it later, then found myself unable to get back into where the original stuff was. So when I finally moved to WordPress, there was no way of doing an RSS note to let people know it was moving. A very large proportion of readers used that RSS feed, so without being able to tell them that the blog was moving and they should change the RSS feed, the blog’s readership plummeted. My ego started pouting, and continued to pout until it decided to have a break. Sometimes I wish I had the nerve to turn commenting off. Then I’d not be checking every ten minutes to see if anybody has left a comment about the latest post. But my ego likes comments. My ego is a dick.

Last night I chipped a tooth. Just a tiny bit, a couple of millimetres in length, of what the Internet tells me is called my left mandibular central incisor. I’d been drinking at my local bar, Squirly’s, and was planning on getting some food on the way home. It was around 10pm, thought it’d be a civilised evening, a few beers, some Thai food or something. I walked right past the Thai place, and instead of turning around, I kept on walking to see if something else took my fancy. I kept walking and walking, and about 20 minutes later I was a fair few blocks away from home. So I decided to go have a beer somewhere else. On my way there, I was biting one of my finger nails and got a tiny piece of nail lodged between my teeth. I tried to poke it free with my tongue. I tried to suck it out, too. Then I put my thumb nail in there and tried to root it out that way. I obviously have very strong thumbnails, cos that’s how I chipped a bit of my tooth off. I sat in the bar, watching sports scores scroll across the bottom of an ESPN Classic boxing match, got slowly drunker, smiled at the pretty barmaid, and kept tonguing the sharp edge of my tooth. I drank some more. I eventually did eat something, but it was at the end of a long night’s solo drinking. And it was from McDonald’s. I rounded off the evening by falling over on the stairs when I went down to get a glass of water. I didn’t turn the light on, and thought I had reached the bottom, but there was still one stair to go. I’ve got a nice raw red mark on my knee now. When I woke up this morning, though, I remembered that I’d kept the tooth chip in my back pocket. Aquí:

I’ve been drinking too much since I’ve been here. Way exceeding those recommended limits. And it’s not really a cheap hobby, either. For one thing, buying a six-pack is a pain in the arse. The Ontario government runs things. You can’t just go to a corner store and buy a beer. You have to go to something called, rather matter-of-fact-ly, The Beer Store. If you want anything harder than beer, you’ve gotta go to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). If I, for example, wanna buy some vodka, I’ve gotta trudge over to the LCBO. You want some vodka after 9pm? Fuck you, buddy. Same deal at The Beer Store. And they just have pictures of the labels and the prices in tiny numbers on the wall. It’s like Soviet China or somefink, I tells ya.

While we’re on the topic of stuff that fucks you up, and while I know the majority of you don’t care about cigarette prices, this has been an interesting quirk. They’re not cheap here either, but that’s kinda the same everywhere in the Western World these days, I guess. But one thing that seems consistent in other countries is that cigarettes are pretty much exactly the same price in every store (unless you’re trying to buy them in central London after midnight). When I bought a pack in Berlin, they were €4.90 in every store. In the three corner stores that are within five minutes walk from where I’m living here, one store charges $9.15, another charges $9.50, and the third charges $10.50. The guy in the cheapest store always seems surprised that right behind him, there are racks of cigarettes, like he’s never heard of such a thing before or like they crept up on him. The second cheapest store has a really chirpy friendly guy, and a woman who always seems to be eating and tells me the price with her mouth full of food which makes me want to pull out a machete and chop off her head. The most expensive store has the most miserable shopkeeper I’ve ever seen. The look of disgust on his face when I asked for Camel Lights, interrupting him eating a Danish pastry, was the look I would normally reserve for seeing a dog eating human vomit off the street. (But not as bad as the look of disgust I’d have if I saw a human eating dog vomit off the street.) Without wiping the sticky off his hands, he grabbed the cigarettes and flung them across the counter at me. He wears a green waistcoat, though, which suits him. But being a complete fucking psychopath, I’ve been back in there a couple of drunken times specifically to ask for cigarettes, watch him get them, listen to him tell me they are $10.50, and then tell him that they are too expensive, and go to the cheap store like I’d planned all along. It’s a shitty game, but it’s a game that makes me grin like I’m wearing an Aphex Twin mask.

I’ve been working on my book. It’s more-or-less finished now. Still gotta do the cover, and I’m currently up to my neck changing every hyphen in the graphics to an en dash or em dash. Oh how I wish I knew the correct usage before I’d begun the book. The tentative title is “Flip Flop Fly Ball: An Infographic Baseball Adventure.” It’s been hard work, it’s driven me a wee bit insane, but it’s been a lot of fun, too. Especially because my editor Pete and I get along really well, and spend every day chatting over email about all sorts of baseball-y crap. And from my bedroom window, I can see the garages out of the back of all the houses on the street, the garages which grey and black squirrels scamper across. Late at night, there are often racoons on the roofs, too. I can face to face with a few of them last night actually. A mama and three kids were rooting through a neighbour’s bins. I wouldn’t like to get too close, but they really are cute-looking creatures.

I’m still pronouncing the name of this city with two Ts. Toronto. Everyone else says Toronno, or ever Tronno. I feel self-consciously English when I hear the word coming out of my mouth. I don’t have the same thing, though, when I say Atlanna if I’m talking about Atlanta.

Things that are in no way connected plopped into a paragraph: The electricity lines buzz a lot here. I’ve never seen as many people on motorised wheelchairs as I have in this city. Most of the beggars here have “funny” signs. They’re not funny. Yesterday, I saw a blind man with a woman. She sniffing a menu/flyer she’d been by a Chinese man on the street. Nothing spectacular about that, but it was just an interesting thing to see happening. No matter what time of day it is, the Canadian coffee/restaurant chain Tim Hortons always seems to be packed. I’ve not eaten anything from there, but should you ever be visiting Canada and want to drink some coffee, I’d recommend not going to Tim Hortons. It is quite the most horrible coffee this side of McDonald’s. I wonder what it is about the human brain that compels us to pluck a leaf from a hedge when we walk by one. While we’re on the topic of hedges, the older I get, the more I like watching old men trimming their hedges. And I mean their hedges; it’s not a pubic hair euphemism. A guy around the corner has been painting the wood columns and other bits on his porch recently. He was painting them white, he highlighted bits in a rather nice dark green. When I walked by today, he was painting the stone squares at the bottom of the columns silver. Metallic silver. A bold choice. Same journey, I was walking on the kerbside of the pavement, walking along walking along. Woman, mid-twenties, huge sunglasses, deliberately walked diagonally across the pavement so she was right in front of me. Being vaguely gentlemanly, I moved aside as she kinda started me out. I turned my head to kinda just take the weirdness in, and she’d instantly returned to the side of the pavement farthest from the kerb. On the way back from Starbucks, a guy probably late teens, surf-y shorts, mirrored shades was sauntering in a vague diagonal. Was the same thing gonna happen again? I behaved like a twat: I put my head down and walked in a completely straight line. Fuck you, mirror boy. But he’d already crossed the street before could collide. I really like potato salad. I always feel disgusted with myself after eating potato salad. I’ve considered getting a tattoo once again, and once again decided against it. Something that I liked on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast today: “If I can get to the point where I’m actually pursuing happiness as opposed to relief, that would be the next phase.” That sounds like good advice to me.

Same again, but going through my Twitter to see if anything of interest needs writing down in longer form since last we spoke: I would like to go up to employees at American Apparel and tell them, “It really is okay to enjoy life. You don’t have to look so bored. Eat an apple. Pull a silly face. There’s more to life than The XX album.” The World Cup was excellent in Toronto. I’d kind of anticipated the interest here being minimal, but the internationalism of the city made it utterly fantastic. Supporters of more or less all the teams around. I’d vowed to myself not to care about England, but damn those roots, they dragged me back in. I was kind of glad they got knocked out though (although I’d much rather it had not been done by the Germans), cos that meant I could just enjoy the rest of the football. Frank Sidebottom‘s creator Chris Sievey died which made me really really really sad. I received a spam email which said, “LOL if you see someone drowning in bacon.” The Queen came to visit Canada but didn’t drop by to say hello, sadly. I’d assumed all Britishers living abroad would get a visit when she was in town. I’ve fallen in love with the Canadian national anthem. It’s a very beautiful song. And I’ve seen a crapload of baseball: 23 Blue Jays games and a massive 73 home runs (52 by the Jays, 21 by the visitors).

Oh, something of interest did happen. Somebody alerted me to this article in the Winston-Salem Journal titled “Book, in error, got judged by its cover.” Apparently a library staff member picked up nine copies of my Atlas, Schmatlas book to give as gifts to children. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know there’s quite a liberal smattering of curse words in the book. Full article here.

Kraig my friend from Portland came to visit three weeks ago, which was nice. I’d been saving up tourist-y stuff to do. We went up the CN Tower which is very high indeed. There’s a bit with a glass floor. There were kids and adults all milling around. I took a tentative step onto the glass, took a photo, felt incredibly queasy, and walked away.

And we rented a car and took a day trip to Niagara Falls. The falls themselves are excellent. Really quite beautiful. Lots of people, not sure why I wasn’t anticipating that. I was as close to the United States as their immigration people would let me be, too. So I paid tribute to their decision-making process in the only way I could:

Once you move away from the falls, though, the town is nuts. For some reason, when people had told me that it was a bit tacky, I was envisaging “English seaside” not “low rent Vegas.” It’s all well and good, but the experience of the falls was kinda blunted by the crassness of the town’s touristy main drag. It was like drinking a really nice glass of wine and washing it down with a pint of ketchup.

Anyway, next month I will be celebrating (…?) my 40th birthday. I’m not in the market for a Harley Davidson, but I am considering something a bit life changing. I’m seriously thinking about getting contact lenses. I’ve worn glasses since I was in junior school, so I kinda fancy a change. I keep taking photos of myself without my specs on so I can try and get used to what I will look like (being short-sighted means that I can’t really see myself properly in a mirror unless I get pimple-squeezingly close). So, what do you think? Specs or contacts? (Yes, I have a lazy eye. Bone idle, in fact.)

Right, time to kick off my flip-flops, fire up Good Will Hunting (never seen it before), and eat some tamari almonds cos they are fucking delicious.

I’m gonna take a break from this for a while. It’s not much fun, really. Ever since the move over from Blogger to WordPress, it’s not felt the same. Nothing permanent, just a break for a few weeks, maybe a month, maybe six months, so I can want to do it again because at the moment there seems very little point.

Went out to a comedy club called Yuk Yuk’s last night, to see the wonderful Marc Maron. Funny man. Drank beer, got hungry, thus, had some poutine on the way home. For those of you who’ve not seen poutine before, I thought I’d take a photo for you.

The box is about 4 x 4 inches, and about 2 inches deep, packed full of chips covered in beef gravy and cheese curds. I really have no idea what a cheese curd actually is, but it kinda tastes like a more cheddar-y, squeakier version of mozzarella. It’s really really tasty, very filling, and apparently my local place, Smoke’s Poutinerie is one of the good places to buy it. As comfort food goes, I’m fairly sure this is pretty close to the top of the heap.

Last night, I made a wonderful sandwich. So wonderful, in fact, that I made it again for lunch. Some of you are going to find this a disgusting idea, but, y’know, some of you might be salivating thinking about. First, you take the bread. Then put peanut butter on one slice, and strawberry jam on the other slice.

You’ve pretty much got a PB & J going on there. But then, you make it a PB & J & J by adding… jalapeño.

Slap ‘em together, and get eatin’.

Burp. Clean plate.

I know what you’re thinking: I am as good a chef as Gordon Ramsay. Seriously, it may sound disgusting to add jalapeño, but it’s really nice having something hot in there combined with the nutty and fruity flavours.

I just Googled “PB & J jalapeño” and found this place in Seattle called The Shelter Lounge that serves – my oh my – PB & J jalapeño poppers. Drool. I wish I’d know about this place when I was there last year.

So, Toronto. Getting here began by dragging a rucksack, backpack, and big-ass suitcase from Barnet (at the northern edge of London), to Gatwick airport (south of London). A fairly harmless journey apart from the bit where I had to change from the Northern Line to the Victoria Line on the Tube. Trains came and went and were uniformly packed full of people. People who were waiting to get on the trains avoided my gaze; the gaze that was trying to say, “C’mon chaps, gimme a break, I know I’m gonna take up the space of three people but I kinda do need to get somewhere just like you do.” Eventually, I just did what the other people did: thought about myself. Positioned myself right in front of where a door would be and launched myself on there.

Here’s a piece of advice, which I wish I’d looked into before choosing to fly with Air Transat: check the baggage allowance before booking what seems like a reasonably-priced flight. My excess baggage more-or-less doubled the price of the flight. But it left on time, arrived on time, and I had an aisle seat to stretch out in.

Getting into Canada, though, was a piece of piss compared to the nation to its south. Just a couple of questions about why I was visiting and if I had any meat or vegetables with me, and I was in. A cab ride later and I’m opening the door to my friend Scott’s place, my home for the next three months. And within two hours of that, I was doing what I’d been looking forward to for quite some time: sitting, drinking a beer at a baseball game.

The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Texas Rangers 16-10, Scott, his (and my) house mate Kevin, and I went for a couple of beers in a local bar, then ate the food that has made my saliva glands overproduce ever since Scott described it to me. I’d not heard of poutine before, but it’s essentially chips and gravy with cheese curds in it. Mag. Nif. I. Cent. I’m glad I went for the small, though. It’s very, very filling.

Saturday, I was up early, out to get coffee, and for a walk. About ten minutes away is a wonderful area called Kensington Market. Good fruit and veg, grocery stores, some clothes shops, plenty of cafes and bars of many nationalities. I’ve been back there most days so far, partly because there’s a pleasant bar with a not-unattractive waitress working there and I’ve been enjoying an afternoon pint now and then, but mostly because there’s all these enticing looking places to eat that need to be tried out.

Another baseball game on Saturday afternoon (this time a 6-0 win for the Jays), followed in the evening by going to hang out with a bunch of Scott’s pals who get together now and then to draw. Essentially, it’s friends hanging out, having a beer, but with everyone doodling away at the same time. Naturally, after forgetting everyone’s name within moments of shaking their hands, I sat down and stared at a blank page for a good half hour. I’m not used to this public drawing. And even if I do draw in public, like in a cafe or something, I tend to hunch over my notebook so nobody can see what I’m doing. Mostly because I spend my time drawing giant flaming swastikas.

Sunday – oh yes, we’re going day by day – and I tag along with Kevin when he goes out to do a bit of shopping. A “quick pint” at lunch time turns into a good eight hour long crawl, which I justified quite easily: I’m getting to know Toronto. Something I repeated, mostly alone, on Tuesday. I’d been at another Blue Jays game (an 11-2 victory over the Minnesota Twins). I’d intended not to drink at all. It was a 12.30pm start, so I imagined it’d be easy to stay away from the booze. When I arrived at the Skydome (it’s current name is Rogers Centre, but that’s a horrible corporate name compared to the lovely futuristic Skydome), there was that unmistakable sound of thousands of children. Understandable, really, that on a midweek afternoon game, the Blue Jays should do some sort of deal with schools to get a ton of kids to come out and buy fizzy drinks and popcorn, but for the adult customer, well, it very literally drove me to drink. I went to the same beer stand each time I bought one, and the first time, had a little chat with the two ladies serving. They asked about my accent, I told them I’d lived in Germany, one of them told me her best friend was studying in Mönchengladbach. Very pleasant interaction. Next time I went back, they said hello in that way that acknowledges we’ve spoken before, and one of the women asks for my ID again. Each of the four times I went to buy a beer she asked to see my ID. I began to think she was stood underneath a security camera, a bit like a casino worker, constantly being watched by the Blue Jays’ Beer Police. Those four afternoon pints ended up being a good, solid twelve hours of drinking. I need to slow down a bit, really.

The last couple of days, I’ve been trying to do a bit of work on the book, but it’s not really been that easy. There’s a big, wonderful-seeming city out there to be explored. Today, though, I’m determined not to explore; to sit in front of my computer and try and have a normal day. Even typing those words, I can feel my willpower draining away.

Finally, in Tic Tac news, not only do Canadian fresh mint flavour (menthe fraîcheur, if you must) have “More Enjoyable Freshness”; they also have an interesting lid flap that I’ve not seen in Tic Tacs elsewhere. It’s got a kinda plug thing. I’m guessing that helps keep the Tic Tacs’ freshness intact.

Title of this blog post translates as “toasted flakes of corn.” It’s what’s written on the pack of Corn Flakes on the table.