Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

I’ve played guitar for 45 years but I have never owned a guitar amp. I play an acoustic guitar and when I perform, I sit on a stool and pull an instrument mic up to my guitar.

But a friend with a music store finally talked me into buying one. He gave me a good deal.

So one day I finally got up my nerve and went out into the garage and set it up. My guitar has a pickup inside it so I plugged it into my new, cool, rectangular box on wheels.

I experimented with it, turning all the buttons every which way and checking out the neat sounds it can make. After a while, I became curious about how loud it would go. So I cranked it up. All the way. I strummed my guitar strings a few times, didn’t care for the distortion at maximum volume, and shut everything off to take the dog for a walk.

I got three houses away from home and my neighbour came out of his house.

“My power just went off,” he said.

Another neighbour came out his front door, directly across the street.

“Have you got any power over there?” the first neighbour asked him.

“Nope,” was the reply.

Then a woman emerged from the house next door. She too had no power.

“Have you got any power?” the first neighbour asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “I was just playing my guitar in the garage there and my amp was plugged in …”

Oh, oh. The report arrived later that almost the whole city had been down for a while.

Oh well. I am hell bent on becoming a rock star and my neighbours are powerless to stop me.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

We built a wee house in a tree,
One summer, my daughter and me.
But she’s leaving home,
Treehouse is alone,
So I’ll climb up so it won’t be.

By Jim Hagarty

The range of subjects on which to have a boring discussion with another person is probably endless, but about the worst item l can think of is the details of our dream lives.

How, I wonder, could it possibly be of any interest to me at all what crazy images blazed across the wide-screen TV in your head while you were unconscious last night? Unless you had recurring nightmares about your stabbing me 42 times with a 12-inch-long butcher knife while I sat in my chair watching a hockey game, any other spectacle played out in your brain during your REM cycles couldn’t possibly intrigue me.

And yet, people insist on describing to me, in vivid detail, every weird – and sometimes macabre – twist and turn and change of scenery and characters in the drama that was the dream they had last night. I am not denying that dreams can be very interesting, but only, I believe, to the person who experiences them.

As it happens, I dream like mad all night long, it seems, and if woken during the night, can’t wait to get back to sleep to see what’s up next in the lineup. It’s almost, ahem, a dream come true: channel-flipping all night long without the need to run a remote control and risk contracting carpal tunnel syndrome. Of course, what is truly frustrating is how dreams end just when they’re getting really good like having your favourite show interrupted for a major news bulletin and how you can never get that dream back again.

But if having people relate details of their dreams to you is tiresome, having someone interpret the meaning of your dreams is downright annoying. And there seems to be no shortage of people willing to take on, what would seem to me to be, such an arduous and unnecessary task. Now and then, I will make the terrible mistake of sharing one of my more memorable overnight movies with someone, only to have the meaning of each scene explained to me. I think it is the complete authority with which dream interpreters weave their magic that is so infuriating.

Years ago, I was told that if you dream you are free falling (like off a cliff) but you wake before you hit the ground, it means you are having a heart attack. Using this guide, l have probably had four or five hundred heart attacks so far in my life. (What I think might be really useful is if someone could tell me for certain why I keep getting shoved off this cliff.)

If, in your dreams, you discover yourself stark naked in public, it means you have been concealing some fact and need to reveal it. So there I occasionally am, in a mall or on main street, sauntering along stark raving nude.

If, in a dream, you hear someone knocking on your door three times, a family member has just died or is about to die, I can’t remember which. But when I hear it, I dig out my funeral suit and lay it out on the bed.

If you’re the bad guy in most of your dreams, it’s a sign of unresolved conflicts with others that need to be fixed. And, of course, there I am, Bad Bad Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole damn town.

If you want a punch in the head, insult someone’s religion, make fun of their kids, deride their politics or career of choice. But if you really want a fight to the death, try telling a dream believer that dreams are nothing more than a nightly fireworks of the brain which occur because the subconscious mind gets a chance to run the show for a few hours while the conscious mind takes a breather.

My guess is, talk trash about dreams to a dream interpreter, and your tumble off the cliff might be more than just imaginary. Some people take these things very seriously. Having figured out who they are, don’t even dream about describing your dreams to them.

That can be a nightmare.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

There once was a President Bill,
Who spoke of this candidate Hill.
He battled the hate
To make her seem great.
But some voters have their doubts still.

By Jim Hagarty
2006

Insanity has been defined as doing the same things over and over and expecting different results each time.

This can be the only explanation as to why I once again found myself on Sunday climbing up the many steps to the platform from where crazy people were willingly placing their bodies in long, twisted plastic tubes filled with rushing water which promised to hurtle them at (literally) breakneck speeds to a little pool of water hundreds of feet away.

Two years ago, I allowed myself to be talked into plunging feet-first down a similar tube of torture, except that one was not fully enclosed and it did not curve, but was designed instead to get it over with quickly, for those who want their horror served straight up with no twists and turns. Sort of like bungee jumping without the bungee. During that nightmare, I found myself screaming for the first time in many years as I dropped out of the sky to the thimbleful of water that was below. Incapable, in the midst of the near-death experience, of remembering to keep my legs raised in the air when l hit the thimble, the water, instead, hit me with all the force of a sledgehammer to the groin. As a former sports reporter was in the habit of saying (sarcastically) on several occasions every day: “Good times.”

So, how could l possibly find myself ascending those dreaded steps again with a heart almost as heavy as those poor French citizens who climbed the stairs to the guillotine so long ago? It happened on Sunday the way it happened two years ago: pressure from my progeny who, as with most kids these days, are not in the habit of being disappointed. What a man won’t do to solidify his reputation as a great dad…

When my son and I had made it almost to the front of the line at the top of the steps, some poor schmoe had realized the serious error he had made a few feet into his watery plunge and this unfortunate soul, who would have fit right in at the Reign of Terror, let out a prolonged blood-curdling howl that would have put a smile on Alfred Hitchcock’s puffy face. This was not a confidence builder.

To be honest, I still can’t believe I did this.

Again.

I wanted to back out at the last minute, but once you’re in the tube, your fate is sealed. Any idea I had that a curved tube would deliver a slower ride than my straight-down plunge of two years back, was quickly squashed. Now I know why the tube was fully enclosed. Had it not been, I would still be in orbit somewhere over the city. l can’t describe the feeling except to report that the screaming l did two years ago resembled a soft whisper compared to my yells of fear and despair on Sunday.

Along the way, my left arm decided to try to get away from the rest of my body and thus it was that I hit the puddle below in a pitiful, contorted form. The pool, it seems, was deeper than I thought and so disoriented was I that I could not find my way to the surface.

“This is it,” was all I could think. Suicide by water slide.

Eventually, I did re-emerge and, waiting for me there were three family members who apparently had inhaled copious quantities of laughing gas while I was water slide fodder as they seemed incapable of restraining their joy at the sight of my suffering.

“But Dad,” said one of them. “You’ve got to admit it was fun.”

“No I don’t.” I don’t have to admit that at all. And if I live to be 110 (unlikely if more waterslides are in my future), I never will.