Being generous and broad of heart, Rachelle has given access to our account to members of her family so that they can piggyback on our subscription and not have to pay to use the service.

What follows are the texts I received from my wife when I brought up the subject last week:

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Rachelle: Oh, if it says the account is already in use when you try to watch, it means that someone in my family is probably watching.

Rachelle: We gave them access to our Netflix, remember?

Rachelle: Look, they do a MILLION things for us, you can just wait half an hour before you watch Arrow, okay?

Rachelle: I know you relate to the lead in Arrow. I know.

Rachelle: Yes, you got an arrow in your foot when you were a boy and ever since things have “changed.”

Rachelle: Of course, of course, it was certainly life-defining when you encountered a practice arrow that bounced harmlessly off your foot!

Rachelle: Must have been like meeting Bigfoot or seeing an angel!

Rachelle: Look, I’m not diminishing the arrow-harmlessly-bouncing-off-your-foot experience.

Rachelle: I know it doesn’t have to draw blood to hurt, or to alter the course of a young boy’s life.

Rachelle: I’m not mocking you.

Rachelle: Okay, yes, of course I’m mocking you!

Rachelle: Lordy, you can really be difficult, you know?

Rachelle: I know you REALLY love the show.

Rachelle: But honey, you’re unemployed and can watch it anytime you like.

Rachelle: Okay, I guess you can’t watch it when somebody else is using our account.

Rachelle: Yes, sure, game, set and match to Michael “Destiny’s Arrow” Murray.

Rachelle: And yes, I know that your fantasy baseball team is named “Destiny’s Arrow” to honour this pivotal moment in your life.

Rachelle: Leeches???

Rachelle: Are you really calling my family, the family that does so many kind and thoughtful things for us, leeches?

Rachelle: Un-fucking-believable.

Rachelle: Remember when my dad drove all the way down to Toronto from Alliston because you couldn’t open the patio table parasol?

Rachelle: Or when my mother typed out 150 pages of your Fantasy novel—Destiny’s Arrow–because you thought you might have a variation of carpal tunnel syndrome?

Rachelle: No, I don’t think autocorrect changed Peaches to leeches.

Rachelle: I simply do not believe you.

Rachelle: I think that you’re lying to me.

Rachelle: Yes, I think you lie all of the time.

Rachelle: Really?

Rachelle: Well, when we met and you said you didn’t have any “emotional baggage.”

Rachelle: When you said you were 5’9, that was another lie.

Rachelle: That you were good at sports.

Rachelle: Do you want me to go on?

Rachelle: Look, if you send my parent’s a bill for $3.50 each month, “so that they can carry their own weight,” I will kill you in your loud, nauseating, snoring sleep.

Rachelle: Be back from work around 7:30, please be dressed this time.

Middle-aged men, guys getting off work and who are still in their FedEx or Hydro uniforms go there. Each night, as part of a promotion, the bar host’s a card came which takes place at the back on one of those poker tables you can buy at Canadian Tire. The other night it was Texas Hold ‘Em they were playing, and although it’s a cashless game, since it’s poker, people felt heavily invested.

As I was sitting at the bar drifting through the sports section, a fight erupted at the back of the bar. It was extraordinary how quickly rage, explosive rage, swept in and over the table. Men, something now ignited within, had pushed back their chairs and were standing. Screaming and swearing, they waved their arms about and stiffened into fighting posture, fists clenched. A woman, who seemed to be at the centre of it all, had a voice that was a black, untranslatable hiss, more the unearthly vocalizations of possession than language. She threw a glass against the wall, her long hair waving in fury, as the men shouted. It seemed the very manifestation of mental illness, that from the collective interiors of these people, a dark, stormy cloud of violence had been summoned.

But the thing that struck me the most was how quickly it all passed, and how everybody seemed to enjoy it. It had been fun for them. What, I wonder, does that say about us? On a frigid, lonely night in February a group of strangers go out looking for something. They find one another at a card table in a bar, and what they needed was this, to wake up and experience that jolt of electricity spiking through their bodies, so that for a moment each one of them was alive in the streaming arteries,  heroes on a battlefield, the lion’s roar that answered back to the night.