Living First Person

[Crossposted from Full Glass Empty Clip] It’s 1977. I’m 12 years old. It’s a gorgeous Northern BC summer day, one of those glorious fleeting perfect days that are all the sweeter in the frozen north, because the memories of mud and slush barely fade before the leaves have already begun to turn again. Utterly pure blue sky, sun warm on the skin, grass a deep impatient green, a light breeze off the lake that is so invigoratingly packed with oxygen and piney perfume it might as well be aerosolized cocaine. I’m playing third base, it’s what we’d call little league if we called it that in Canada back then, I’m just beginning to feel the awkwardness of adolescence, but the sheer pleasure of being alive and standing on that dirt under that gigantic bowl of sky on that day is more than enough to let me ignore my self-consciousness. I’m a big, strong kid, and even if I’m more bookworm than jock, I enjoy sports.

One of the kids on the other team strikes out, and our gang begins to jog back to the chickenwire fence behind home plate for our time at bat, where there are a few parents hanging out, maybe drinking a beer or three in the sun. I get about three or four loping steps along the baseline before my left leg folds up, with no warning whatsoever, and I go down into the dirt. I try like hell to get up, but my leg just doesn’t seem to want to bend correctly. I don’t remember it hurting as much as I remember being confused, trying to figure out why my leg suddenly didn’t do what I told it to do any more, and then horrified and embarrassed, when my stepdad came out onto the diamond, picked me up, and carried me off.

Turns out that I had Osgood-Schlatter syndrome. I was just growing too damned fast, apparently, and bits and pieces of me couldn’t keep up. The dumbass semicompetent smalltown doctor told us that I’d have to have the left leg put in an ankle to hip cast for six months, and then the other leg — once again, ankle to hip — for another six months after that.

That was pretty much the end of sports for me, at least team sports. That was the beginning — after that long, itchy year, when my first my left and then my right leg emerged, atrophied, pale, and, to my horror, looking like a limb grafted on from a much smaller, sicklier young man — of my lifelong habit of riding bikes with my headphones on down empty highways. And that summer, when the doorway to baseball and swimming and many other things I loved closed, at least temporarily, that the door into computers and the games you can play on them opened. When I learned that it was possible to go places without actually going anywhere. That was the summer my parents bought me my first computer, a TRS-80 Model III.

Bowie In An Elevator

One of my few brushes-with-famous-people was with David Bowie.

It was the second week of September, 1983, and he was playing at the Coliseum in Vancouver. I’d just started at UBC, and was drinking rather a lot, as was my wont. One night there was a mixer at Place Vanier with free booze, and me and a friend of mine who I’d graduated with and who was also a freshman at UBC took great advantage of the freebies (white wine, for some bizarre reason, as I recall, something I’d never really gotten inebriated on before).

It was pouring rain that evening, as usual, and when the mixer shut down, I was, in young wonderchicken style, just getting geared up. But being underage, finding more booze was going to be a challenge, so we decided to make the trek across campus to Gage Towers to find her older brother, the theory being that he could hook us up with some more grog.

As we passed in front of the computer science buildings, I got it into my head to do the Gene Kelly routine from Singing in the Rain, and sing and splash and swoop around the light poles a bit. Predictably, my blood-alcohol content rendered my swooping a little less graceful than it should have been, and I ended up breaking my ankle.

Next morning, I woke up in my dorm room in my clothes with a monumental wine hangover and a somewhat hazy recollection of the night before. Reeking, disoriented, with a throbbing right ankle that felt about the size of my head. My mother, who was visiting Vancouver to see I’d settled in, and her sister, who’d come to visit with my mom, were knocking on the door. I can’t say they were all that surprised. At least Mitzi — yes, my friend’s name was Mitzi — wasn’t there in the bed with me, too.

We went to the campus hospital, I got strapped up and given a pair of crutches, and we went to the Bayshore Hotel, where they were staying, for breakfast. I was feeling about as physically bad as an 18-year-old can.

The elevator stopped on our way up to my mom and aunt’s room. I could smell myself, and it wasn’t pretty. I was staring at the carpet, swaying, sweating, and trying desperately not to throw up, but noticed more or less in my peripheral vision two very large black-suited men and one much smaller blond man get on.

We got off on my mom’s floor, and as we did, I realized that the little fellow was David Bowie. The realization took long enough to percolate through my hungover brain that all I had time for was a double-take, wobbling on my crutches, enough to turn and meet his eyes and smile, and get a smile back.

I believe that he was a nice fellow because of that smile, ’cause man, if I’d had to stand in an elevator with my sodden, reeking self that morning, I’d have been rejoicing the moment I got off.

This first, memorable experience of my university career turned out to be emblematic of the next 5 years. UBC was a lot of fun.

Making Do

I was tightly wound when I was a teenager. I’d been a fat kid, which kind of ruined my self-confidence back in the days when that wasn’t as common as it is these days, and I had a step-dad who had his own problems and wasn’t really a subscriber to the self-image boosting regimen. And I had acne that literally scared people, I think, at least until years later, when the docs put me on accutane and damn near killed me with the stuff.

I was big and strong and well-put-together, smart and funny and creative, sociable and athletic and geeky all at once. I really should have gotten laid a lot more than I did, looking back on it.

But, like most teenagers, I had a crippling case of self-consciousness and a brain that worked overtime, and that self-reinforcing combination conspired at least part of the time to auger me into the dirt. Still, I came through OK, more or less, and look back on that time with much fondness.

One of the ways that being constantly stressed manifested itself, other than the facial irruptions, was nearly-constant low-level stomach pain. I think, though I can’t recall exactly, that the small-town doctors in the small-town hospital in my small town diagnosed me with stress-induced ulcers, at least incipient ones. After flipping a coin, which was the usual way of doing those things, unless there was a freshly killed chicken available. And not taking into account that they’d destroyed my digestive system with tetracycline for something like 4 years straight. This was also back in the stone age before there were any of the preventatives, palliatives, and treatments for proto-ulcers so easily found these days.

I think they sent me home with a hearty, bluff, South African ‘relax, you’ll get over it, son’ or something equally useless. And another scrip for antibiotics. You may get the impression I have some bitterness towards the medical profession. I think that would be a fair assessment.

So I self medicated. What I’d found was that Eno Fruit Salts, the Alka-seltzer-esque powder that people tended to take for indigestion or hangover queasiness, cooled the fires in my belly, at least temporarily. A tablespoonful in a tall glass of cold well water, wait until the fierce bubbling had reached its peak and then down it, breathing deeply through my nose to get that crisp waft of salty CO2, and I had a few hours of sweet surcease.

Of course, this was also back in the day when nobody really knew that salt was bad for you, or worried that each dose of this stuff carried a couple of grams of sodium with it as well.

I inevitably developed a taste for the stuff. Everyone else I knew hated the taste, drank it only in the deepest hungover despair in hopes of relief. I loved it. I started drinking it just because I liked the taste, even once I started to grow out of the awkwardness of my mid-teens, get lean, lose some of the worst of the rococo facial carbuncles, gain confidence, and leave behind the constant stomach pain. And by my late teens, I’d started boozing, and a nice tall glass of delicious Eno in the morning cut the worst of the cobwebs. I’d seen the old-timey ads that called it a ‘liver-tonic’, too, so I figured why not.

But like any addict eventually does, I started amping things up. My version of the speedball was Eno added to Club Soda. That glass would positively erupt with bubbles, and drinking it down was thrilling. Sweet, salty monkey on my back.

In later years, when I started travelling, I stopped drinking it except as a rare treat, wisely I suppose, because all that sodium just can’t be good for you. But in the last 10 years or so here in Korea, I’ve missed it, mostly because like anyone else, I miss most the things that I can’t get. And there ain’t no Eno in Korea.

A year or so ago, though, it was finally possible to buy soda water — sparkling mineral water is what people call it these days, I guess — here in Korea. A domestic brand, the first, I think, and the big Home Plus store they built a few years ago not far from our house stocked it. I was thrilled, because I don’t drink Coke or any of the other sugar waters, but I do love me some bubbles. But something was missing.

Fast forward to a month or two ago, and my wife, along with a bunch of other vitamins and supplements, ordered a container of pure, pharmaceutical grade Ascorbic acid — Vitamin C — because she hates taking pills.

I don’t know what struck me, but entirely by random one Saturday afternoon while feeling a little under the weather from my customary Friday-night-at-home beer adventure, I poured a glass of soda water and mixed in about half a teaspoon of the ascorbic acid.

Holy crap. It was like tasting home again. Thirty years since I drank the stuff daily, and a couple of years since the last of the bottle I’d brought back from my last visit to Canada had run out. It tasted almost exactly as I remembered Eno used to, right down to that certain added fierceness to the effervescence.

And the best part? No sodium, at all, so my borderline blood pressure doesn’t cross into the Old Man Danger Zone.

I am a simple man, and it takes very little to make me giddy with glee. I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you about this one thing that did.

Fuck You, Canada

I say this as a once-proud Canadian: fuck you, Canada.

Stephen Harper and his brigade of destroyers, again? A fucking majority? What could you possibly have been thinking, Canada? What the hell is wrong with you?

I know you’re not completely stupid, Canada. In the half of my 45 years that I lived there, I met lots of people who weren’t stupid. My mom, who’s mayor of my hometown: she’s one smart lady. But I’m not going to ask her if she voted Conservative. I fear her response would break my heart.

I don’t want you to apologize to me, Canada. That would be silly. But it will be heartbreaking when you come to me weeping, with fresh bruises across your face, because you believed him when he said he wouldn’t hit you any more, and you went back. Again. For the sake of the kids.

I don’t want to feel a tingle of schadenfreude when I see the smoking, cratered economic wasteland after the Great Real Estate Disaster that is coming, Canada, your people shambling and blistered, draped in scorched rags, clutching the tattered paperwork for your 40 year mortgages, or for you to learn a lesson about greed from that.

I don’t want you to be the nation I so loved when I was a boy, the country I was so proud of.

I don’t want you to wake up and realize that by emulating the worst, you become the worst. America’s so exciting, so vibrant, they have the best drugs and the shapeliest fake tits, the shiniest teeth and the porn, have you seen some of that crazy porn they make down there? And the great big servings of curly fries? Holy shit! Everybody loves America, except that Bin Laden creep, and hell, they finally took him down Rambostyle, right? So all aboard the USA train!

Those boring frigid Scandinavian countries, where they have the highest standard of living, the best education and health care, the lowest infant mortality rate, even — who needs all that? Who wants to be like them, all dour and shivering and strong and secure and beloved, when America! is just next door and has that flashy car and gold tooth?

I don’t want you to look in the mirror and realize you’ve become a disappointment, an also-ran, a minor-key sidekick to a lumbering misguided giant, a mockery of the great men and women who built you. I don’t need you to understand that the toxic Network News American Political Buzzword Culture that has colonized your media and infected your discourse has distracted your people and corrupted your leaders and is destroying you. I don’t want you to embrace the principles that made you great. I don’t want you to take a step back and think about what kind of nation you want to be, and then live up to those principles.

No, wait, what the hell am I saying?

I want all of those things.

But it looks less likely with every turn of the screw that I’ll ever be seeing them.

My Name Is Wonderchicken, And I Have A Problem

No, it’s not the booze. Been 5 months since I had a drink. Not the ponies, or the ladies, or the intoxicating, forbidden allure of naked living room dancing, though I have been known to indulge in the latter from time to time.

No, I am addicted to making ever-more-elaborate websites: the twisted desire that is killing the youth of today.

Actually, no, that’s not true. The youth of today are telling the world what they just dug out of their nose on Twitter, or Farmvilling their way to true friendship on Facebook. But more power to ‘em, I guess. I was drinking rye and falling off the tops of fences at their age — not notably nobler pursuits.

Anyway, without further old-mannery, here’s the latest Fun Internet Thing from Wonderchicken Industries™: Gamefilter.net. Share and enjoy.