The sharp blade of justice

I have this strange fantasy. No, it’s not some sexually perverse bondage thing or involve the use of animals. It usually comes over me after something really bad has happened in the world: a woman is murdered by her husband, a teenage girl gang raped by a group of boys at a school dance, two toddlers stabbed to death by their father, or a crazed 20 year old – pissed off at his mom – walking into an elementary school and shooting dead 20 little kids.

My fantasy is this: I can make all the bad shit not happen. I would have the ability to foresee who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. With this ability, I would be able to “take out” the evil, perverse and wicked of the world before they had a chance to destroy, sort of like cutting the rot out of a tree so it can live and flourish. It would be like Minority Report meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or The Equalizer meets Kill Bill (all the volumes). I’d be one mean bitch with a samurai sword of justice.

I told you it was a strange fantasy.

It first came to me when I was 15-years-old. I was in the final few months of my freshman year of high school when my best friend was involved in a serious car accident. Her boyfriend was driving her to a school dance when he slammed head-on into another vehicle. He survived. She lived for about a week before she died, just a month short of her 15^th birthday. There were all kinds of rumours about the accident – her boyfriend had been drinking, he had intentionally swerved in front of the car, the usual crap. It didn’t matter to me what the circumstances were. I just wanted him dead.

I planned his demise for days, weeks and months. Stabbing, smothering, drowning, pushed in front of a car, shoved down a flight of stairs, kicked in the head, run over by a tractor (I was a rural kid), trampled by a horse, eaten by pigs, drowned in a manure pit – I considered them all.

It was like some kind of weird therapy for me. It was rather morbid and violent but it made me feel better, like I was more in control. I might not have been able to stop the bad from happening but I could punish the person who I felt was responsible. I could do what the justice system never did (no charges were ever laid in the accident, at least none that I knew of).

Lucky for my best friend’s boyfriend – and probably for me – I never saw him again. After the accident, he disappeared. I never heard about him or was in his presence again. But even after all these years, I still keep an eye out. I’m not sure what I would do. I’m older now. I’ve tried to work out my issues, my demons, mourn my losses and heal. But there’s still this strange fantasy that comes along when I feel the world is off kilter, when the dark is overpowering the light. I imagine what the handle of sharp justice would feel like in my hand. And if I would have the courage in my heart.

Making a buck

I had a rather horrific day at work yesterday that has unfortunately resulted in a night of insomnia. I've been tossing and turning in bed, replaying the day and how I could have made it different, a rather futile exercise considering the day is over and I haven't yet discovered the secret to time travel.

But as I've been lying in bed torturing myself, I've also been remembering some of my first employment experiences - cringe-worthy horror stories in themselves.

Like a lot of country kids, my first employer was my father. During the summer months and some weekends, my mother didn't always have someone available to watch me while she was at work as my older siblings all had full-time summer jobs. So I would be packed off to spend the day at my dad's office, which happened to be a manufacturing facility that built products from fibreglass and aluminum. My dad owned and ran the company with a partner and spent the day selling and managing the factory workers. I spent the day exploring the back fenced storage area for toads, frogs and wild cats, riding empty resin barrels like a horse, sorting sales brochures, playing with the adding machine and tracing routes on the large map of Ontario that was pinned to my father's office wall. I also liked to fiddle with my dad's address book, which was equipped with a metal arrow. You slid the arrow up the side of the address book to the letter you were interested in and then pressed a button at the bottom. Presto-chango, the address book would open to that page. I could play with that damn thing for hours.

After awhile, my father obviously got annoyed with me kicking around his air conditioned office. Or perhaps he was amazed by my prowess with the adding machine. Regardless, he soon found a summer job for me.

It started out with sweet corn. Although my father ran a manufacturing company, deep down under the collared shirt and tie, beat the heart of a farmer. And, as such, he had this great idea that selling fresh produce in the parking lot of his company, which was located along a very busy highway, was the perfect thing for me to do. So, he put out a table, a cash box, a lawn chair and what seemed like 100 dozen of fresh sweet corn and set me to work. At times it was an extremely hot and boring job. I'd read my Nancy Drew books and dream about that air conditioned office as I sat on the hot pavement in the direct sun, sweat dripping down the back of my shirt. I always seemed to have to use the washroom a lot. But soon I had enough truckers and harried factory workers starving for fresh sweet corn to keep me busy for hours. Huge semi trucks would pull over in front of my stand, hissing and whistling and chugging while the driver bought six cobs of corn from me (50 cents). Before the driver was back in the cab, he'd be husking a cob and eating it raw as he drove away.

The sweet corn was such a success, my dad decided to up the anty and invested in a truck load of peaches. The flats were stacked in the air conditioned office for storage and I would take a few baskets out at a time to set up my display. Soon I had truckers buying corn and baskets of peaches, juice dribbling down their chins as they drove down the highway, corn silk flying out the window. The smell of peaches soon overpowered the smell of fibreglass in the office and customers interested in fibreglass and aluminum products were soon buying baskets of peaches as well, unable to resist the aroma.

It was a very educational summer that taught me an important life lesson - how to add, subtract and make change in my head. My father checked that cash box every night and if the daily sales total did not match up with my sold inventory, I received a lecture on the importance of adding and subtracting money PROPERLY. I was soon a pro, counting back change from $20s without batting an eye.

The summer after that, I worked for my dad on our farm doing field work in the vegetable patch and picking up piles of potatoes by hand. I swear those potato rows were two miles long. He would harvest the tubers with a special machine that dug them up and dumped them on the ground behind. We had to grab the greenery and shake off any spuds still attached and then pick up all the potatoes and put them into bushel baskets we dragged behind us. It was back breaking work and I can remember laying on the front lawn trying to crack my back into place as the potatoes were being washed with the garden hose.

The summer I was 13, I dressed in my best T-shirt and shorts, tied my hair back in a ponytail, shoved it up under my black and white Flamboro Downs hat and mustered up the courage to pedal my bike down our concession road, just over into the next county, to ask Doug Arthur for a job. And for some strange, mysterious reason (I think it was the hat) he gave me one. The Arthur's bred, trained and raced Standardbred horses. And I LOVED horses. I decided that summer the best job in the whole wide world would be to shovel horse shit and clean water buckets while surrounded by huge animals that liked to bite and kick you. I had experience with horses but not horses like these - pampered, spoiled, tempermental divas who were coddled and had zero stable manners. My first day I had to be rescued from a rearing stallion who had managed to pin me in the back corner of the stall I was cleaning. I loved every minute of it.

Unfortunately the barn manager didn't love me. I was fired after one week and told to come back when I was older - and faster at shovelling shit. I cried all the way home. But in my pocket I had about $300 in cash, the most money I had ever earned in a week. And I learned another important life lesson - sometimes it's hard to make a buck in this world. But it's really easy to spend it.

Random thoughts

Sorry I've been tardy with the blog.

I've been away on a trip for work (see previous posting) and have just settled back into the routine at home. Traveling takes a lot out of me although it is fun to sit in a hotel room and have a big screen TV to myself and not have to listen to Futurama or Family Guy episodes all night (fucking Netflix!). Sure the episodes can be funny but I get tired of that crap after awhile. Sometimes I just want to reach into the TV and throttle Peter Griffin (although I do wish I had a friend like Bender I could hang out with).

Despite the much coveted solitude and (sometimes) amazing bathtubs, hotel rooms really aren't my favorite place to be. Invariably, they all end up being the same - despite the price.

The wi-fi is always too slow and unpredictable - even when you're paying $10 per day for the access - and the marble-looking counters in the bathroom are always flecked with specks of stone that if you stare at long enough turn into small dancing elves and gnomes. (Try it) Of course, the same thing happens in the cheesey fake wood panelled elevators, except the imagined figures in the wood grain look a lot like Munch's The Scream.

The carpets smell like steam cleaning detergent, the toilet paper chafes (do they make 0.5 ply?) and the TVs just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger but there's still nothing worth watching on them.

I usually spend half the night wrestling with my Sleep Number bed and, like Goldilocks,  trying to distinguish which is the hard pillow, which is the soft pillow and which is the just-right pillow. Invariably, I end up so thirsty and exhausted I stagger down the hall in my PJs to get a Coke from the vending machine that promptly eats my change and delivers nothing. Suddenly that $5 bottle of room temperature water is looking really good.

Out of boredom, I usually end up searching through the room trying to find the Bible that is usually stashed in one of the bedside table drawers. (It's kind of like that game in kindergarten where you have to find where the teacher hid the blue bug statue.) I've always wondered why there are Bibles in hotel rooms. Personally, I don't think the Good Book makes for light bedtime reading. Why not Goodnight Moon or Green Eggs and Ham? I mean - the Bible - REALLY!? Do only heathens or people in need of "saving" stay in hotels? Maybe we're all cheating on our spouses and a glimpse of the Bible will lead us down the right path. Or maybe everyone staying at a hotel is really lonely and unbalanced and finding that Bible (rather than a rope, gun or knife) in that drawer is going to make all the difference.

RIGHT!

I guess what freaks me out most about hotels is the other people staying there. I can hear them all around me. That flush of water in the night, the slamming doors, the blaring of TVs or bursts of laughter or yelling through the walls, the pounding footsteps up above. I wonder why they're there. It can't be for the same reason as me (no one else could be that lame). Are they running away, visiting family, vacationing, enjoying a dirty weekend or weekday?

In the end, I usually fall asleep out of exhaustion around 2 a.m. Inevitably, I wake up in the morning in a fog, not having a fucking clue where I am. The Sleep Number bed has usually deflated in the night, trapping me like some brain addled turtle in the middle of the bed. I manage to swim my way out of the king-sized pit only to be inundated with about 50 different images of my half asleep, scare wig self - because hotel rooms also have WAY TOO MANY mirrors!

I'm glad to be home.

On the Road

Today was a driving day.

As part of my day job, I’m required to attend conferences and events throughout North America. This week, I’m in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a four to five hour drive from my home in Ontario, Canada.

I rented a car for the trip so I didn’t have to worry about wear and tear on my own half-dead jalopy, which has a dashboard lit up like a Christmas tree all year long. Driving a rental is usually a pleasant experience but this time I was given an Elantra – the world’s smallest car – with the baldest tires I’d ever seen. According to The Genius, it wouldn’t have passed a roadside safety check. At least there’s no snow forecast for Michigan this week – a blessing this time of year.

The trip itself was rather uneventful. It started out a sunny, beautiful day but the closer I drove to the border, the foggier it became. By the time I crossed the Blue Water Bridge between Sarnia and Port Huron, I thought I was on my way to Hogwarts or was about to pop out of the forest near Forks, Washington. Waiting in line to clear customs, I expected to hear a foghorn and really dramatic music from a 1940s war film.

Soon I was on the highway to Flint and Lansing and ultimately, Grand Rapids. Driving on Michigan roads is always a treat. The cracks and potholes in the concrete usually match up to the beat of the music on the radio. Combined with the horrible shocks in the rental I was driving, I was dancing and bopping along to the music without any effort on my part. 

I also LOVE the way Michigan records its highway mile markers. Rather than have small signs that show the miles, the state transportation authority just dumps a deer carcass along the side of the road. While this is a rather creative way of recycling, it’s a bitch to keep track of how far you’ve actually traveled because you have to keep count of the deer carcasses you pass. And after about 50, it’s easy to get confused and forget what number you were at. And sometimes, people stop and cart off the deer carcass for butchering and you’re really screwed because you’ve actually gone two miles instead of one by the time you see the next dead deer. And that just fucks with your gas mileage.

Furnace Fighting

For the past week or so, my husband - let's call him The Genius - has been spending
a lot of time in the basement banging around like some so sort of psycho tinsmith.

To call the dank, dark and damp area located under half of our house a basement is
an exaggeration - it's more like a dungeon, a monster's lair or the perfect spot for a
mad scientist's laboratory. But it's also where some of the key elements required in
the proper functioning of a house - furnace, water pump, electrical panel, sump
pump, water heater - are located.

It's like a special playroom for The Genius. He has a little workshop/laboratory set up
down there amongst the cobwebs and God-damned spiders (that's another story)
and periodically we can hear him through the hardwood floor talking to himself (it's a
genius thing - at least there's no maniacal laughter). Other noises can also be heard
from time-to-time, including hammering, power tools, and the strident wailing of
alarms (sometimes it's the smoke detector, which has been screwed onto a support
beam to give the rest of us fair warning if some creation has exploded).

Basically, we're used to strange noises coming from under our feet.

But lately, the cacophony has been unusually loud. That's because The Genius is
currently at work on his latest "project" - replacing the old, decrepit, money-burning
oil furnace with something new and shiny that hopefully costs less to heat the house.
Why he waited until the end of November/beginning of December (when
temperatures being to dip below freezing) to do this is a whole other mystery.

As part of replacing the furnace, The Genius had to disconnect our current central air
conditioner, wrestle the old furnace out of the way (it now joins the OTHER old
furnace rusting in a corner of the basement - how many old furnaces does a house
need?), put the new furnace unit in its place, construct new duct work, wire the new
furnace into the electrical panel and thermostat controls plus install the new air
source heat pump/air conditioner unit thingy outside where the old air conditioning
unit sat. For some reason, this involved A LOT of noise.

As The Genius pounded and screeched with power tools in the basement, The
Goobers - that's what I'll call the kids - bitched. They couldn't hear the TV or their
music, they couldn't hear their friends on the phone, they couldn't concentrate on
reading or their homework, and my oldest Goober started texting blow-by-blow
descriptions of the activities in the basement to her friends. As the percussion
symphony continued, the cats began slinking around and hiding under furniture while
the dog started shaking and whining.

And periodically, between blows, the sound of loud cursing could be heard from the
basement.

Lately, the noise has quieted, except for the new sound of heated air whooshing
through the duct work. The project is almost complete and The Goobers are feeling
very relieved. Once more they can hear the laugh track of SpongeBob SquarePants
on the TV and their friends giggling on the phone. The pets can once again relax on
top of the furniture rather than underneath it.

That is until the next "project" begins.

In the beginning ....

In the beginning, the Sky and the Land were created.
And Land was without form, and void; and darkness was upon its face.
A bunch of doctors, in conjunction with vast amounts of medication, decided there should light.
The light was considered good: and was to be divided from the darkness, which was considered bad.
And the light was called Sanity, and the darkness was called Crazy.
And that is how the first post of Crazy Land was created.