Category: Blog
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A mild day at the car wash
It was 7 degrees out on Saturday, and the do-it-yourself car wash at Dupont and Bathurst was packed. A mist of fine debris and water blew out from the station, giving one the feeling of being near the ocean. Smoking cigarettes or chewing gum, pimped out gangsters cleaned their Audis and Mercedes. Dumping their empty…
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Edgar Winter at the Berkley Church
Looking around the Berkley Church on Thursday night, Steve looked at me and said, “Jesus, mate, I feel like I’m standing in the middle of a soup kitchen.” We’d been given tickets to see an Edgar Winter concert and really didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, the place was full of a…
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The Jesus Cobras
On Wednesday night, The Jesus Cobras lost by a score of 8 to 7, to The Enforcers, a team full of guys who buy celebrity sex tapes and listen to Nickleback. This was the second game of our floor hockey season, and it was a bitter disappointment to me that our team lost. First of…
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Neighbours
Rachelle and I moved into our apartment in the Annex nearly two years ago. At the time, an older couple that were downsizing, were moving out of their beautiful house directly to the South. When I introduced myself to the husband, he snarled at me, “what do you want me to do about, write a…
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Badri
On Thursday, our Bell satellite dish stopped working. This happens from time to time, and as usual, I decided not to do anything other than compulsively turn the TV set on and off, hoping that the reception would return. My problem solving skills are pretty much limited to magical thinking. However, by, Friday, when the…
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Prison Correspondence Part II
As some of you may know, I’ve been involved in a national program that facilitates corresponds with an inmate. Last week I posted a letter I received from “MotherTrucker,” who is currently incarcerated for an unnamed vehicular violation. Today, I am posing my response to that letter. One note, the Christian organization that shepherds this…
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Super Bowl Prediction
Today, my column in The Ottawa Citizen was on the Super Bowl, (http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Entertainment/Shock+Bowl/1238844/story.html) or more truthfully, why I’ve never been much of a fan of Football. The gist of it is that it was never any fun to play as a kid, as you spent more time policing the game than actually playing it. I…
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Walking into a vision born from the Dream Machine
This is kind of hard to explain, but for a variety of reasons, I was invited down to the Much Music building on Queen Street to experience the Dream Machine. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine) This device was invented by some surrealist beatnik, and through stroboscopic visual stimuli– whatever the hell that means—was supposed to inspire mystical visions in…
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At the time, buying a pair of Vuarnet sunglasses would have been like me buying a house.
Vuarnet sunglasses remind me of the unattainable and effortlessly beautiful girls of high school. They came from Rockliffe Park, these girls, and they could all stroke a backhand with confidence and ease. They’d been to Europe and never seemed to need braces. They applied Aveda moisturizing lotion to their skin instead of Clearasil and Acnomel,…