This is an excerpt from our debut episode:
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Me: Hey! Welcome back to The Breakfast Club with Heidi and Mike!!
Heidi: We all bark and all bite!!
Me: We sure are, Heidi, we sure are, and I have to say, that was a fascinating interview we just did with Muffin the cat! I mean, WOW, what an interesting cat!
Heidi: Heidi want to barf.
Me: What do you mean?
Heidi: HORRIBLE interview. Heidi no care what Muffin think about immigration or Kim Kardashian getting mom-shamed for straightening daughter’s hair.
Me: Well, you have to admit, Muffin did have some pretty interesting and unique ideas about how to solve the global immigration crisis.
Heidi: You want crisis? Heidi give you crisis. Name Muffin is crisis. So stupid! Why moron cat named after food? Why after crappy food? Why not Steak?! Why not Cheeseburger! Why not Twizzler?
Me: Twizzler is a good name!
Heidi: Heidi like Twizzlers.
Me: Me, too.
Heidi: Twizzlers a uniter.
Stupid Muffin don’t deserve name Twizzler. Such a fat, lazy animal! Muffin never hunt, just lie there! Make society hunt for her! Heidi hate that!
Me: Well, Muffin is an indoor cat.
Heidi: Heidi have no time for Muffin excuses! Muffin staring at diabetes, Heidi tell you.
Me: And hey, for those of you who have to commute today, you should know that traffic along the DVP is slow, so you might want to explore some other routes…
Heidi: Look. Heidi know this controversial, but Heidi think it wrong to normalize cats. Cats evil.
Either you against evil cats or you for evil cats. Not complicated. Not nuanced. You have cat on show, you cat apologist. You part of problem.
Me: The Heidi Hot Take! I was wondering when that was going to happen, so tell us, how can you be certain that all cats are evil?
Heidi: You got to break some eggs to make omelette. Way of the world. Dog eat cat eat other dog eat it all.
Me: Okay, well, maybe now would be a good time to open up the show to callers! Anybody out there have an opinion on whether it’s wrong to normalize cats or not?
Heidi: Ha! Heidi laugh!
Me: Why?
Me: No way you have callers! Also, Muffin really stink. Heidi almost faint from stench. Heidi need danger pay! You think cats clean because always licking paw and brushing self, but just OCD. Cats mental in the head! Cat hygiene fake news!
Me: While we wait to get connected to our first caller, it’s time to provide you with a message from one of our sponsors. Support for The Breakfast Club with Heidi and Mike comes form MailChimp…
Heidi: More than 7 million businesses around the world uses MailChimp…
Me: To send newsletters, messages and deliver high fives…
Me: Heidi?
Me: Heidi, it’s your turn now.
Heidi: Oh! Heidi sorry. Licking herself. What words?
Me: You say, “MailChimp, sends better email!”
Heidi: MailChimp, sends better email!
Me: And now you bark, Heidi.
Heidi: Heidi no bark. No chance. Heidi have self-respect.
Me: Okay, still trying to connect with our caller, just be a sec.’
Heidi: Ha! Heidi marry Muffin if actual caller. No way caller. Heidi can smell your lie sweat. Heidi know.
]]>While driving along Bloor he started to talk about how much things had changed. This, a safe conversational starter for men past a certain age.
What used to be there.
What’s there now.
All the things we had known and lived.
And so we shared our wonder at the velocity of the world overtaking us, of all the businesses popping up on the blocks passing by and the real estate prices that had long since soared beyond our reach. Each aspect of this conversation revealed an unresolved bitterness in the man, a sense of having missed out, and then a car cut him off. He slammed his fist on the steering wheel, “DID YOU SEE THAT ASSHOLE?!”, he shouted as he accelerated into traffic. I tried to say something neutral yet supportive in tone, and then in an attempt to distract him from his rising fury, I asked where he’d most like to live if there were absolutely no limitations.
After some struggle, he offered up San Diego, but this only served as an entry point for a long, detailed story about being on a cruise ship with his ex-wife, getting ripped-off at the bar, and the fist fight that ensued. “They didn’t know who they were dealing with,” he said to me, his voice a cold, flat hiss.
And then we came to a red light and stopped. It felt like the barometric pressure had changed, that some destructive potential was either gathering or dispersing inside the car. And so we sat there quietly, lonely now in ways that could not be acknowledged. And beside us at the red light a beautiful young woman idled on her bicycle. When her eyes accidentally fell upon us, she quickly averted her gaze, just as we knew she would.
And then the light turned green.
She stood up on her bike and pedalled confidently away, into the future, I guess, and there was something so sad and beautiful in this, that neither the driver nor I even thought to speak for the rest of the ride.
(Photo credit to the great Lincoln Clarkes)
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I wanted to stop, too, just to see more than help I think, but obviously we’d only be getting in the way, and so we proceeded slowly past, reverently bearing witness. The tone in the car was suddenly very different, the music playing now all wrong, an insult. We drove by the other vehicle involved in the accident (the mathematics of the crash mysterious and vast) and saw a young man, just as white as the moon, wide-eyed and breathing hard. The blanket wrapped around his shoulders gave him an oddly spectral appearance, and his friends stood around him as if surrounding a miracle– frightened to either be present or to step outside of the moment.
They were all so young.
This accident was just an arbitrary swoosh, something that could have happened to anybody or nobody with equal measure. And the day itself was so vivid and beautiful— surrounding us like an indifferent God, emitting an inexhaustible palette of autumn colour and sun that so clearly, so urgently required our attention and investment. It was such an odd transit that all we could do was give quiet thanks as we passed through, grateful and lucky to have home still waiting.
