Kyle and Callie got married.
Josh watched.
Now, a week later the three of them talk about everything that went into planning and executing the greatest wedding of all time.
(P.S. A nasty cold has been going around and Callie’s mic cable kept falling out, so please excuse all the coughs, sniffles and intermittent fuzzy audio)
Kyle wants to talk about music… Josh keeps trying to steer the conversation towards “jackin’ off”.
An epic struggle.
Apologies for the inconsistent audio quality. The middle third sounds better than anything we’ve recorded, but the beginning and end sound like we’re in a cave… underwater.
Beat the Geeks
Rock & Roll Jeopardy
1D
Burgess Meredith
Taylor Dane
Blackstreet
Pitch Perfect No Diggity
MAGIC! – Rude
Ashley MacIsaac
Great Big Sea
Informer
Joy in Small Places
Legal
Lady Marmalade
Dirrty
Memoirs of an Invisible Man
Scrambled porn
GOB
I Hear You Calling
Sam Roberts
Bedouin Soundclash
OLP
Dean Blundell
Sault Ste Marie
Joy Drop
Trebler Charger
Jonovision
Sum 41
Smirnoff Ice
Staind
Joan Osbourne
On a Day Like Today
Dishwalla
David Copperfield
The Fugees
Josie and the Pussycats
KIDS
Butt Selfies
Degrassi
Six Flags Ads
S Club Party
Agent Cody Banks 2
Sex and the City
Girls
Shiri Appleby
Pirates
Backroom Casting Couch
Beautiful Agony
We get real in this episode. It was never meant to come out so we spoke more candidly than normal. You’ll hear LOTS of bleeps to hide names of people or other possibly incriminating details and lots of interruptions midsentence because huge sections have been cut out.
So if you’re a devoted listener you probably heard Kyle, Callie and I sitting at The Duke of York for our weekly trivia night when the lights went out. The blackout last April affected a pretty substantial part of the west end of Toronto.
The subway wasn’t even working so I couldn’t get home.
I take prescription medication for anxiety and my intense, irrational, fear that the power will never come back made me take more than I should have. You’ll notice I talk super fast and you can tell by how I talk that I’m riding an intense high.
Kyle and Callie, (heretofore to be known as Kylie) being proud “Eastenders” where pretty sure their building would have power.
In Part 1 of The Blackout we walked to Kylie’s and the episode ended right before we got into one of our famous 6 hour conversations since I figured nobody would want to hear it.
I managed to chop it into just under an hour of interesting conversation.
In this episode I try to convince Kyle to watch One Direction: This is Us on Blu-Ray and since he vehemently refuses we end up talking about the poor business decisions that caused BlockBuster Video to go out of business, my rampant alcoholism, the possibility of having a child and being a good parent and all the reasons why, after taking a crazy ride on the pussy train and having a revolving door of meaningless sexual relationships, I don’t want to date…
ever again.
The intro song is Gold Rush by Ed Sheeran.
Buy his album.
A few weeks ago there was a pretty big blackout that affected some parts of downtown Toronto. I was at The Duke of York for Tuesday Night Pub Stumpers Trivia so I took out my iTelephone and began recording the shenanigans.
On this special edition Kyle, Callie and I are joined by two of our trivia team members, Eric and Rowena, as we navigate a dark pub and the apocalyptic streets of T.O.
Find out what happens when we Kill The Lights
Kyle will be gone for the next 6 weeks and so in order to pass time I’ve been listening to recordings of his voice to fill the empty void in my soul. It only worries me when I start trying to have a conversation with these recordings.
To stop myself from becoming the kind of crazy person who talks to himself, I’m gonna try to actually get some use out of the recordings we never intended to release to the public.
Also, we’re finally on the iTunes click here to subscribe and while you’re there downloading our podcast FOR FREE, buy some of David Usher’s songs. He’s my number one favourite recording artist of all time and it’s always good to support Canadian Arts.
Kill the Lights (Accoustic Ver.)
Duke of York
Toronto to Barrie
Wentworth Miller comes out
CHUD
Skittle Bru
Magic: The Gathering
Joe Flaherty
Jim Flaherty Dies
Rock Death Hoax
Ultimate Warrior Dies
John Pinette Dies
Mickey Rooney Dies
Canada Gun Ownership
Our friend Brian’s Uncle Fred
Kill the Lights
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with me will know that I often throw myself, enthusiastically, into multiple projects that we all know I’ll never follow through with.
Here’s yet another!
Bored Games.
A chronicle of the insane (and/or inane) conversations that spring up when playing board games with my friends. We’ve already recorded 4 of these so it’ll be a true testament to my laziness if this is the only one that ever comes out.
On today’s installment: Lord of The Rings Risk!!! The game of global domination with a Middle Earth twist.
“Six sided dice are for PUSSIES!”- Gary Gygax, 1979
Join my friends Kyle, Callie and me as we discuss every bodily function in sweet, intimate detail as well as pop culture, the acceptability of slur words and all the matters of the heart.
If we make more I’ll put ’em on iTunes. For now click here to download or use the built in player above to stream
I have a friend at work who has some medical training. He’s a smart guy and he could be a doctor if he wanted to finish his studies. For now, though, he’s content to pal around with me and talk about girls and video games on slow days when we try to get away with doing as little work as possible.
People are always bugging him with their aches and pains, asking him if their boils are actually tumors and that sort of nonsense. Me, I never exploited him for medical advice but, astute observer that he is, he started to notice within days of my pledge to stop drinking, that I was exhibiting symptoms of withdrawal.
Much in the same way that a toddler who trips and falls doesn’t cry unless the grown ups around her make a fuss about it, I wasn’t really bothered by the headaches and sweats until he pointed them out. I started to feel uncomfortably aware of the symptoms and started feeling really sick.
The good news is, just as he predicted, I got my appetite back. It turns out that since I’ve been consuming a shit ton (medical term) of liquid calories from all the booze it didn’t leave a whole lot of room for food. That’s why I wasn’t eating.
Now I’ve started to feel hungry again for the first time in months. Like seriously hungry. Katniss Everdeen hungry, but the odds never seem to be in my favour.
Bitch don’t look that hungry to me!
Where’s my whiskey…
So now that the discomfort has mostly dissipated I’m just settling in to a new routine of… not drinking and I’m looking for other things, besides binge eating, to occupy myself.
I bought Flashpoint on Blu-ray and watched it 4 times in a row.
If you’ve never heard of it, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox is an animated movie that tells the butterfly effect-esque story of what happens when Barry Allen, The Flash, travels back in time to prevent his mother from dying when he was a little boy.
He creates a whole alternate timeline where he’s gay, there is no Superman, Aquaman King of Atlantis and Wonder Woman Queen of the Amazons have started World War III and Gotham City is a debauched, neon drenched casino town patrolled by a bloodthirsty, gun wielding “Batman” who unlike the real Batman, kills crooks and street thugs without giving it a second thought.
It’s an animated movie but it’s definitely not for kids. There’s blood and guts, dismemberment, sex between superheroes and swearing!!! At one point Hal Jordan says “ASSHOLE“.
It’s a DC fanboy’s wet dream!
The final scene between Batman and The Flash is just beautiful. It’s like Field of Dreams, it’ll make you want to call up your dad and, unless you’re a heartless son of a bitch, it’ll make you cry like a baby.
Those little drops of water?
Yeah they’re tears, so what!
For all its complexity the moral of the story is easy enough to figure out.
We have to learn to accept the tragedies in our past and just move on. As better as you think your life might have been if things had happened differently, we can’t dwell on the desire to change the past.
For all you know things could’ve been a million times worse.
So any time you look back at the moments in your life that you regret and say to yourself “If only I could go back and change things” remember that your life may not have played out for the better.
I’m an atheist. A devout atheist, ironically enough, and so the hardest thing about going out and formally seeking help to quit drinking is how much these programs are tied to religion. It’s a simple thought, but my childish mind needed a bunch of superheroes in tights to fully understand the concept.
Grandma Allen was TOTALLY an alcoholic.
I’m going to try to live without any regrets.
Try living without obsessing over painful memories.
If you only take away one thing from this movie it should be this: Be happy with the life you have.
On the other hand your time traveling adventure could end up making you gay and that could be pretty interesting.
I had to download special software to make these crappy collages so you better damn appreciate it!
I broke up with my girlfriend.
I was a difficult decision.
She cried. I felt terrible.
“Why would you do it?” you might ask. “If you feel so terrible about it, what was the point? Why not just keep the relationship going?”
It’s because even before the break up I was feeling terrible.
It was becoming increasingly difficult spending time with someone who was always so happy to see me, so happy to just be around me, when I was physiologically incapable of matching her level of enthusiasm.
I feel like a broken record constantly talking about how unhappy I’ve been recently. I worry that people will eventually lose their patience with me. After a while most people’s response is “Get the hell over yourself! You think you’re the only one out there with problems?”
I know that’s how I feel. I lost patience with myself a long time ago. I can’t tolerate what a miserable piece of crap I’ve become and so I can’t imagine how infuriating I must be to the people around me.
A really good friend of mine recently told me that he thought I drink too much. It was sort of funny because I was doing my typical rant about how shitty I was feeling and he flat out asked “Well, how much have you been drinking?” and before I could respond he interrupted me and qualified the question with “And answer honestly!”
I had to stop and take inventory of how much alcohol I consume in any given week and when I told him he sort of slapped me in the head and said “Well there’s your problem, genius! Alcohol is a depressant!”
He went on to tell me a story about how years ago he went through an extended period of serious drinking and realized, gradually, that it was taking a heavy toll on his emotional sate.
I drink a ton of whiskey. Whenever I buy a 6 pack of beer or cider it’s done before the night is. I also, over the last year have been smoking a ton of pot.
I usually sleep 2-4 hours each night unless I take a couple of over-the-counter sleeping pills which I know I shouldn’t be taking because they can react dangerously with my antidepressants and anti anxiety medication.
Add to that an addiction to Pizza Pizza, potato chips, pop tarts and McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches and you have a brain that is being bombarded by a whole slew of biochemical triggers that have been making me feel and act like a crazy person.
I think that in the past few months I’ve overloaded myself in some way because recently I’ve been unable to feel anything.
I have not been able to enjoy any of the things that usually make me happy.
Not only does food not make me feel that rush of satisfaction that it used to, but I haven’t felt genuinely hungry in almost 3 months. I eat because intellectually I know that my body needs its gasoline. I eat when social situations require me to and I eat when I smoke pot, but even those effects have started to peter out.
Before 2012 I would never do any drugs but since last summer I’ve smoked so damn much, and not just pot either. I recently pulled a Miley Cyrus and started smoking Salvia. I went online and found a website that sells what they, very cloak and daggerly, call “herbal incense” which are basically lab grown, mutant plants that they can sell legally in the US and Canada because they are artificially created and their genus classification (which is made up by the creators) doesn’t fall within any of the DEA’s lists of banned or controlled substances.
Now after a year of overindulgence when I do smoke it doesn’t make me feel good at all. It doesn’t make me feel anything. And just like I’ve said in many of my past entires I feel like I’ve become immune to whiskey.
I feel nothing.
And it’s not just substances. All the things that used to bring me joy have become insipid and boring.
Video games and comic books, YouTube videos and podcasts. All the myriad forms of distraction that I used to use to trick myself into not dealing with my problems no longer hold my attention. I feel like if I’m not doing 3 or more things at once then I can’t get any enjoyment out of anything.
I have to be watching a movie while simultaneously listening to a podcast and playing a video game in order to get any kind of joy out of it.
Even sex was unsatisfying. I found myself playing the role of an accommodating participant rather than enthusiastic instigator when it came to doin’ it.
There are exactly 3 things in the world right now that have been able to break through the numbness and actually make me feel some joy:
1) Watching new episodes of The Newsroom on Sunday nights.
2) Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim
3) Recording Long Distance Bromance with Jaron Francis
Other than that, the only emotions I feel are negative.
So taking the advice that I’ve been ignoring for so long I decided to cut out all the bullshit. I’ve decided to make the following changes:
1) No more drugs and alcohol
2) No more eating shitty fast food
3) Actually sleeping at least 6 hours each night WITHOUT any sleep aids.
4) Jogging every day. I usually walk home from work but my pace is too leisurely. I’m gonna bring a change of clothes and start doing time trials.
5) Focusing my attention on one thing at a time. No more of this sick entertainment multitasking.
6) Forcing myself up and out of bed on all those days where it would be so much easier to just curl into a ball and pray for death.
7) Be happy.
I’m on day four of this new regime. I feel sick and have been suffering from the worst throbbing headaches I’ve ever experienced but with the exception of not being happy and still playing video games and watching TV at the same time I’ve managed to stick with all the other goals.
Part of me wants to fail. Part of me wants to give up on this plan halfway through. Because if I actually stick to it and I make all these changes and I still feel this way then there will be nothing left to blame my problems on. It will confirm my worst fear that there is something fundamentally wrong with me as a person.
I don’t know what to do if that’s the case.
I’m gonna stop it before it even starts. Josh is a verb, it means to engage in banter or to tease good naturedly. Maybe it doesn’t fit my regular scheme, at least not in this particular context, but I wanted to spend more time writing this entry than choosing the title so let’s just chalk this up to my ineptitude with double entendres and move on.
I find it has become more and more difficult to deny the claims of friends and family that I may be drinking too much.
My father has always had issues with alcohol and as a child I remember thinking to myself that I wouldn’t be like that when I grew up.
Somewhere along the way that ambition, like most for me, just fizzled out. I don’t even remember how or when but I became, I wouldn’t say a heavy drinker, but a drinker nonetheless.
Right now I’m drinking straight Jägermeister, and not out of a shot glass. I’ve got an 8 ounce High Ball of teeth staining, anise flavoured, godawfullness and I’m wincing as I pound it back. Earlier this afternoon I was mixing it with Pineapple juice, making “Chuck Yeagers” as they are called, but I found the 7-1 juice to alcohol ratio just wasn’t cutting it for me. At least not for what I had had in mind.
That’s when I realized just exactly what I had in mind.
I was intentionally trying to get drunk.
I never did any underage drinking. I didn’t have a drink until well after my 19th birthday. Prior to that I just had no interest in alcohol. Because it was never a “forbidden fruit” type situation I never overdid it, I never got blackout drunk. What I’m trying to say is that for me drinking was never the “thing to do” it was always just what I would do while I was doing whatever I was doing.
I would have a few beers while watching the hockey game, have wine with dinner. I never sat in a parking lot just getting wasted, and I never drank alone.
Over the last 4 or 5 years I’ve been doing a lot of recreational drinking. I was doing it for the same reason I do most things. I always get obsessed in the minutiae of whatever hobby I stumble upon and when it came to drinking I wanted to become an expert. I wanted to know everything about wine and spirits, I wanted to be able take a blindfolded taste from any random cup and tell you if it was a Cabernet or a Malbec and what country it came from. With a single sip I can, and will even if you repeatedly ask me not to, correctly tell the difference between Bourbon, Scotch, Whisky, Whiskey and Rye.
Since the beginning of this year I’ve been interested in more than just connoisseurship. I’ve been trying to get drunk.
There are even more empties under my sink that wouldn’t fit on the stove. It’s like a liquor bottle grave yard and I killed each and every one of them!
It’s become evidently clear when I started creating my own terrible, terrible cocktails.
I’ve mixed iced tea with cinnamon flavoured vodka, I call it an IV Drip (IV for iced tea and vodka, and drip ’cause I’m trying to be clever) it was gross.
I mixed tequila and Strongbow. I called it a Juan-y Appleseed… it was gross.
I was gonna call Pineapple Juice and Jägermeister a Pacific Rim until I discovered some genius had already called it the Chuck Yeager. It was gross
I routinely mix vanilla vodka with orange crush. It tastes just like a creamscicle but I’ve been calling it Riot Punch because it gets me drunk as dicks and makes me want to run in the streets and take my clothes off while punchin’ stuff. It tastes like a dream.
I took caramel sauce that is meant to be drizzled over sundaes, stirred it into a glass of milk and then poured in 3 fingers of Glenfiddich.
I called it Butter Scotch.
It was so, so fucking gross.
I don’t know what, if anything, I’m trying to say with this post.
I feel like I’m straddling the line of alcoholism. I’m not yet at the point where I feel like I’m in any danger. I do drink when I’m feeling sad but I don’t ever get strong cravings or feel desperate for a drink. I don’t blow all my money away on booze, I don’t ever drink to give myself more confidence or exhibit any of the other lame ass self diagnostic traits you’ll find on the dozens of online self assessments.
My biggest problem is, as with all things, moderation. I’ve said before that I’m a binary creature. I live in a world of mutually exclusive blacks and whites. So when it comes to alcohol I either have none or get completely wasted.
So I’ve decided that after I’ve finished this bottle I’m working on, I’m going to go through an extended period of abstinence. A month ought to do it. Maybe longer.
It won’t be hard. Like I said I don’t need to drink.
The only tragedy is I’ll have to deny the world of all of my amazing cocktails.
He’s back ladies and gentleman. After almost 2 whole months of depressed, motivationless wallowing, the prodigal son has returned.
I feel I owe it to you all to preface this post by admitting that I’m drunk as dicks right now.
Try to picture that. A bunch of disembodied penises all crowding the bartender, getting all up in his grill shouting things like “I’ll tell YOU when I’ve had enough”.
That’s how I feel right this very now.
Maybe it’s the 375 ml of vodka flowing through my veins or the fact that a piece I wrote about online dating has just been published on the far more interesting Steph not Stephanie but whatever it is, I’m back.
Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen.
I’m a self delusional sociopath.
I started this blog as a way to be honest with myself, just to organize my thoughts and get my jumbled up feelings out in the open. Then a couple dozen people started reading it, then over a hundred subscribed and then I sort of lost track of what I had originally intended.
As much as I want to be entertaining when I write, this blog is really, at it’s core, about an emotionally stunted, chronically immature man-child and his struggle with mental illness.
It should come as no surprise then, that the extended sabbatical I took from blogging was due to a relapse I had in my ongoing lightsaber battle with depression.
For almost a year I have been taking 2 different mood stabilizing medications to stop me from collapsing in the middle of the street in a fit of sobbing and to prevent me from driving my fist through the faces of the ever growing population of mouth breathers that surrounds me.
It was going well until about 10 weeks ago when I just stopped taking me meds.
It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was more like a growing apathy that started with me taking my doses much more sporadically and then eventually just reaching a point where I couldn’t be bothered to follow the routine that I had set.
The routine that was specifically set up to give my life structure and stop me from going crazy.
After 2 weeks off of my antidepressants and anti anxiety medication I started to feel sick. It was withdrawal but rather than talking to my doctor I just missed a couple of weeks of work, ignored all calls from my friends and family and started a series of 40 hour days.
The calendar meant nothing to me. I’d stay awake for 30 hours straight and then sleep for 10 only waking up to repeat the process.
It was during this time that I started having really bad nightmares.
They scared me so much that I went back to my doctor, stopped cancelling my psychotherapy appointments and started taking my meds again.
During this transitional period I suffered an extreme case of anhedonia.
Now for those of you who don’t know how to google definitions of words you don’t recognize, anhedonia is the inability to feel happiness or pleasure.
During this time I was watching all the TV and movies I wanted, playing TONS of video games, reading (and spending the majority of my disposable income on) comic books and having regular sex.
I mean regular as in “on a regular basis” not regular like “same ol’ same ol’ boring” sex.
I guess it would be more accurate to say, frequent sex.
I need another goddamn drink. It’s time to crack open the Ballantine’s, fuck this vodka! Everyone knows that clear alcohol is for rich ladies on diets.
But to get back on track, of all the “fun” activities I had engaged in, none of it made me feel anything.
All of it felt wholly unsatisfying and coming to terms with the idea that the word is giving me everything I could want and I was still unhappy, filled me with shame and made me hate myself.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I’d go to bed every night thinking that and I’d wake up in a cold sweat from a terrifying dream that I couldn’t even remember.
After a while it wasn’t dreams anymore. Just an overwhelming sensation of dread whenever I’d go to sleep. Even dozing off for a few seconds on the subway would end up with me waking up screaming.
As it stands I’m back at work, I’ve reestablished the lines of communication with my social circle and I’ve been trying to regain some semblance of normalcy in the freakshow that my life has become.
The dreams haven’t stopped though.
Even though I’m back on my meds I still can’t get a decent night’s sleep without waking up covered in sweat and tears with my heart threatening to erupt from my chest.
It’s for all these reasons and more that I’ve been ignoring this blog. Maybe I’m flattering myself in thinking that people actually missed my regular posts, but the truth is the interest of readers hasn’t brought me back.
When I first started writing I found it to be a very therapeutic experience.
It made me feel less crazy.
It made me happy.
I’m trying to catch lightning in a bottle a second time. I’m hoping that by coming back here after so long an absence, I can recapture the peace of mind this blog had originally afforded me.
I promise my future posts will be less maudlin and self indulgent. I just needed to get this out of my head and onto the screen to stop me from going nuts.
The next post will be funny.
I promise
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Over the last 2 or 3 weeks I’ve been feeling more and more weak, tired, apathetic, depressed and angry with myself.
It’s such a radical change from how I was feeling when I last posted.
I’ve been having a hard time sleeping.
I thought I had got passed this but the insomnia that was crippling me all winter is back.
Also I feel like I’ve been drinking more than I’m comfortable admitting, but I seem to have developed an immunity to whiskey. I drank a half bottle of Johnnie Walker while I watched almost a whole season of The Sopranos this evening. It doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect.
I don’t know what’s caused this shift in my emotional state.
Actually that’s not entirely true. I know exactly what the cause is. It’s an uncontrollable compulsion to look back and remember some pretty low moments in my life. I can’t stop these negative thoughts and my mind will drift towards painful memories seemingly of its own accord. What I don’t understand is why.
Things have been going better for me than they have in a long time, so why do I feel so shitty?
I have a pretty sweet job that makes me feel like I’m actually contributing to society and making a difference by helping people. So why is it so hard for me to get out of bed and go to work in the morning?
I have a lovely new girlfriend who is such a joy to be around and I feel like she genuinely likes me in spite of all the glaringly obvious reasons not to. So why am I spending so much time and mental energy thinking about the girl who broke my heart even though, by my own admission, I didn’t even want her anymore?
I’ve made so much progress in therapy gaining valuable insight and acquiring new tools to unravel the jumbled up mess in my head. So why can’t I look in the mirror without feeling so damn angry with myself?
I need to sleep.
There’s no two ways about it.
If I don’t start getting some real rest I’m going to collapse in the middle of the street. I might punch a little old lady while waiting in line at the super market or bite the head off someone’s tiny yip-yapping accessory “purse dog”.
I just want to stop feeling this way.
I don’t want to be splayed out on my uncomfortable bed staring at my ceiling at 1AM every night. I don’t want to keep replaying past events in my head over and over, conjecturing the innumerable ways in which things could have gone differently.
I don’t want to be unhappy anymore.
It’s been a Sisyphean effort. A perpetual motion machine of negativity. I get bogged down by all these feelings and then I start feeling ashamed of myself for feeling this way so I feel even worse so it causes more shame.
I need to interrupt this cycle because it’s keeping me up all night and driving me closer and closer to a complete emotional breakdown.
Usually I go back and revise these posts. I write in free flowing streams of consciousness and I have a whole editorial process to try and make them make sense.
Not this time.
If you feel like this post has been self indulgent, whinny, repetitive and nonsensical THEN GO FUCK YOURSELF!!! You knew what you were in for when you came here so quit complaining.
I’m sorry…
That was uncalled for. I’m clearly delirious and more than a little bit stressed right now.
It’s 1:12AM on Friday May 31st 2013.
Goodnight.
Today Jaron Francis, the sexy and good looking half of Long Distance Bromance, left the big city and returned home to Saskatoon.
He came for a week and kept me company while the lovely CousCous was off globetrotting and visiting her family.
It was weird having him here. It had been so long since I had seen him and the last time he stayed with me my life was radically different from how it is now. Even though we’re constantly connected through the internet and we do the podcast every two weeks, not seeing him in person for so long sort of made me mythologize him in my mind.
I am a Golden God!
It was fun to just relax like a pair of normal dudes, have a few drinks, enjoy some of Toronto’s finest hippie cuisine and wander the city for hours.
We walked everywhere this past week. I have a pedometer and I usually top out around 6,000 steps per day, or 15,000 on days when I go for my crazy walks. We averaged 8000 steps per day.
Not bad for a couple of hungover deviants amiright?
I would’ve written a post sooner this week. So much has happened but I wanted to maximize the amount of time spent having fun rather than writing about it.
I’m going to come back and make a proper post. For now enjoy this 100% genuine and unscripted video of me seeing Jaron for the first time in years!
It’s no secret that in today’s world of sensationalist media the stories that get all the attention aren’t the most well researched or socially relevant but rather the most exciting. This means sex and violence. Since the overall goal of this project is to get people to understand me more and like me better I don’t think we’re quite yet ready for one my sex stories.
So that leaves violence. Here we go.
I got hit by a car last week.
I’m gonna be jumping back and forth chronologically and making wild tangential asides so try to focus. Also there’s no need to point out my my unnecessary use of paragraph breaks. I write the way I speak, which is long winded, simultaneously narcissistic and self deprecating, and full of pauses for dramatic effect.
I went to a bar last weekend with people I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was a friend’s birthday party but it was meant to be a low key “non-event”. I was initially hesitant because it usually falls onto me to be the entertaining one in social situations. It’s a lot of pressure when you’re not feeling too enthusiastic about where you are or who you’re with and as natural as it may seem from the outside, most of this charm is affected. But, I heard that a person that I had wanted to see would be there so I went.
I got there exactly on time so I circled the block for a few minutes and almost froze my ears off. It was cold as dicks and I didn’t wear a winter hat because I had my hair so carefully disheveled. I wanted the illusion of messiness not the real things and so my ears paid the price. When enough time had passed where I wouldn’t appear to be too eager I walked in to find a dozen people already 3 rounds in, and having a great time despite my absence. It was pretty relaxing having that burden taken off my shoulders seeing how they were all able to have fun without me there to be the life of the party. The person I was most interested in seeing wasn’t there though and those in attendance weren’t exactly what you would call my biggest fans.
So I started drinking. Everyone was splitting pitchers but they had been there hours before the scheduled meeting time so in an effort to catch up I started ordering Scotch and Sodas. Within 20 minutes I had thrown back 3 doubles and was starting to feel uninhibited. I was wrestling with my scumbag brain to not make the situation awkward by bringing up that fact that I, not too long ago, had a bit of a romantic dalliance with a certain lady in attendance who had brought her new boyfriend to the party.
He didn’t know anyone at a table full of friends and so rather than being left out of conversations he started clutching onto topics like a drowning man in the flotsam. Inevitably I got stuck talking to him but I couldn’t pay any attention to anything he was saying. I felt bad for the guy but I didn’t care too much because I was still waiting for someone to show up so that the real fun could start.
That’s when I got a text, “I’m not coming. Tell everyone I said hi and wish her a Happy Birthday from me.” I was bummed to be sure, but I wasn’t going to let this bring me down so I just kept the party rolling and continued having a good time.
So I kept drinking and everyone kept talking, I kept making everybody laugh and the night wore one. Eventually everyone left except for the birthday girl, her boyfriend and this one other really cool guy. We stayed until last call and the birthday girl ordered me 2 more Glenfiddichs bringing my total score for the night to 8 (10 including the ones I had with dinner before going out). When it was time to go she said what she probably meant as a compliment but what made me never want to go anywhere with anyone ever again. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “It would’ve been no fun without you here!”
I left the bar feeling like a clown who gets hired to perform at kids parties. The subway had stopped running and so I needed to catch the Yonge bus to get home. I saw one starting to pull up to the stop but I was on the wrong side of the street.
I needed to make a break for it.
There were a few cars crossing, but this one must’ve been closer than I had thought because as I made my wobbly-legged sprint to the bus stop the guy in the car leans on the horn and slams on the breaks. He comes to a skidding stop just a few feet away but the snow, ice and slush on the street had him slide forward and close the gap between us. His bumper hit me in the right knee and I toppled over, my shoulder bouncing off his hood, and collapsed onto the floor. I shot up onto my feet immediately as if nothing happened because at the time my main concern was still catching the bus, but it had already passed.
I looked back as if realizing for the first time that there was a car behind me and the driver started shouting at me before speeding off. I was left standing in the middle of The World’s Longest Street at 2:30 AM completely alone. I felt like the last survivor of the apocalypse as I limped back to the bus stop.
I eventually made it home but not before getting kicked off the bus at Eglinton. I walked the rest of the way with a veggie dog in one hand while I sent multiple sexually harassing text messages with the other.
I woke up the next morning fully clothed with a pocketfull of toonies and a sore knee and shoulder but NO HANGOVER.
The moral is “Don’t waste your time. Always drink the good stuff.”
Verb the Adjective Noun 