Late last night I received a message from a life coach, offering me the benefits of her services. I replied that I already have a life coach. His name, and this is pure coincidence, is Jim Hagarty.
I did not say the coach I already use is a very good one. At times, in fact, I have thought of suing him for malpractice. However, we’ve been working together on my life for a while now and I find it hard to break up with the old bugger.
Hagarty steers me in the wrong direction, on average, about three times a day. He’s often grouchy and on occasion has stopped speaking to me for hours on end. When things get tense, about the only useful suggestion he ever seems to offer is to go get myself another coffee and pick himself up one while I am at it. When I have questions, half the time he has no answers for me. When I could use some encouragement from him, more often than not, he offers me none. When I could use a shoulder to cry on, he’s usually missing in action. When I go to him looking for a bit of wisdom to get me through a predicament, he tries to buy me off by telling me a joke instead.
In fact, the more I think about him, the more useless he seems to me to be as a life coach and probably as any other kind of coach unless a person needs coaching on how to go for coffee. And yet, he has stuck with me through thick and thin and we have a history together that goes way, way back. He has promised, in fact, to stick with me till the end.
He may not be great, but at least he’s there for me. Twenty four hours a day. Oh, and he always promises to send me a bill. But he never does. He has cost me a lot buying him coffee though. Maybe he needs a life coach of his own to help break him of the habit.
As it turns out, even as a Canadian, I can join the U.S. Republican Party. My registration kit came in the mail today. I was excited to open it up. It is a 12-page booklet entitled, “How to Become an Asshole.” For another $150, I can send away for the gold edition, “How to Become a Total Asshole.” The kit I got helpfully leads me through the 10 steps I need to take to become a basic member.
1. Cranium Reduction Surgery. I am instructed on the procedure for removing 90 per cent of my brain. Great advances have been made. No need now to open up the skull. It can be done with an unintrusive laser procedure.
2. Anger Heightening Management. I am instructed to write down the top 10 things that make me mad. Then add 10 more things to that list. Then another 10 and so on until my lists tops out at 100. It is okay to include “list making really pisses me off” as one of the 100.
3. Hatred Quotient Testing. This is flagged as the most important of the 10 steps. There is a helpful list with checkboxes beside each of the 35 items on it. I have to deeply hate a lot of things. Muslims. Foreigners. Non-white people. Toyotas. Gays. Hollywood. Mexicans. Bankers. Michael Moore. The list is extensive. The two top items: Women. And Myself. The instructions regarding hatred helpfully spell out, “Trying to hate a lot of things without hating yourself, is like trying to take a sip of water by tipping a rain barrel up to your lips. Try as you might, you will be wet all over when you are done. Go ahead. Self-hatred is not that hard to achieve.”
4. Reality Uncheck. This section lists 100 “so-called” facts. I am to memorize them and then deny that any of them are true. Number 56: I am a human being. No, I am not.
5. Selfishness Meter. The kit includes a handy and stylish silver bracelet I can wear, the face of which turns various colours depending on how I feel towards others. The face goes ruby red when I am successfully thinking only about myself. Green shows up if I find myself caring about anything other than my own well-being. A helpful warning beep sounds if I begin to slide out of red to yellow and a horn sounds when I slip into green.
6. Violence Appreciation Scale. There are various tests to assess my acceptance of violence as a useful everyday life skill. And questions to guide me along. Such as Road Rage is: Fantastic, Wonderful, Amazing. (Check one only.) And would you be willing to shoot to death someone who keyed your new SUV. This is an easy one for me. Of course I would.
7. Lying Liar Workout. Again, a number of tests and questions to assess how well or poorly I am able to lie. I talked to someone who took this test. As it turns out, the only way to pass it is to lie when answering each and every question.
8. Religious Fanatic Puzzle. This was tricky. If you saw Jesus hugging a lesbian, would you be willing to walk up to Our Lord and tell him to knock it off. The correct answer is yes. You are also asked to rate yourself regarding how close to the front of the line you expect to be when the Rapture starts. (Easy for me. I will be number 9, right ahead of Mother Teresa.)
9. Education Eradication Pledge. I am instructed to sign a pledge promising to learn absolutely nothing new for the rest of my life. I will also need to attend one of 10 Un-Education Centres (privately run) where 20 weeks of intense instruction will cause me to forget 85 per cent of everything I ever learned. This will be easy for me as I have already forgotten 75 per cent of everything I ever knew.
10. Da Do Ron Ron. Last on the list is a series of 10 prayers I will need to learn to recite. They are all directed towards the ultimate Lord and Saviour St. Ronald Reagan.
To look at me, I don’t think you would take me for the kind of person who likes to torture other people. And to be honest, I myself never thought I could enjoy that morbid activity.
But here I am, these past few weeks, driving people absolutely crazy and I have to admit, it’s putting a smile on my face.
This all came about because of an epiphany I experienced one day, after trying my best to turn right on a red light into oncoming traffic. After doing this for the last 57 years since I got my licence to drive a car, I have finally given up the practice. Now, when I approach a red light in the right lane, I just stop and wait till it turns green. This has made my life so much easier after decades of near-crashes and dozens of pedestrians I didn’t see and almost ran over and bicyclists who came out of nowhere and I almost knocked down.
But in the process of making my life easier, I have made it very, very hard for the poor, impatient schlubs who pull up behind me at the red lights. Since I saw the (red) light, I have heard more horns honking than a wedding party driving through town on a Saturday afternoon in summer.
I don’t actually intend or want to torment the drivers behind me who insist I turn right, but I can live with the results of my intransigence. A driver in the right lane at a red light CAN turn right but there is no law saying he has to.
So I don’t.
Not everyone who has sat behind my car has experienced a nervous breakdown, but the mental health of many others has been seriously degraded. Amidst all the honking coming from behind me, I sit unmoved and unmoving. I await the day when some driver inevitably exits his car and comes up to mine to bang on my window. My plan, at that point, is to turn to the irate soul and smile before blowing him a kiss.
I know I shouldn’t derive pleasure from the misery I am causing others by my traffic habits but my only regret is that I didn’t start this don’t give a damn approach to things a long time ago.
It got me wondering what else I can do to spread even more dissatisfaction among the people with whom I share this fine city of ours.
I have shot a gun before, but always a long gun, never a pistol. The dozens of times or so I pulled the trigger growing up on the farm in Canada were a complete success in the sense that I did not shoot myself in the genitals even one time. If I had, I might remember such an occurrence, but I am pretty sure I didn’t.
And yet, there are men walking (limping?) around in this world who have done exactly that. Take this middle-aged brainiac in South Dakota, for example. He stuffed a loaded pistol in his pants one recent night. I am not an expert, but to me, this would be similar to having to have a bowel movement in the woods and deciding to squat right over a bear trap.
In any case, our hero’s gun went off somehow and the bullet lodged in his penis. That is some bad luck. But what is a fine upstanding man of the community to do to explain his unfortunate accident? He could hardly go around town known as the man who shot his own penis. Now could he?
So he did the next logical thing. Naturally, he told police that he was shot by a “black guy” who tried to rob him. This made sense as black guys always make it a point to shoot men in the penis when they are robbing them. You and I have read so many stories about that.
When the injured man showed up at an emergency room to be treated, police asked him how a bullet happened to strike him in the crotch, and our gunslinger – who is white – showed that he has some talent as a storyteller and might want to pursue that when everything heals and he can sit in a chair again.
The man told police he had been putting out the trash at a dumpster outside his apartment when the robber shot him during an attempted mugging. Police went to the dumpster and found no evidence of a shooting. They started to doubt his account of an African American gunman staking out dumpsters after midnight to rob people.
However, they did find a witness who said he heard a lot of screaming coming from the man’s apartment that night. Obviously, the mugger must have broken into his apartment.
As for me, I am just glad it is almost impossible to stick a .22 calibre rifle down your pants. Or I might walk with a limp too.
I had coffee with a woman today who moved to Stratford from Toronto a few years ago for all the reasons a person would move from Toronto to Stratford. She loves it here, she told me. “You are in your territory,” I remarked. We explored that concept for a few minutes.
I am a big believer in territory. We are most content when we are where we belong. We think of territory as geographical but it can be other areas of our lives too – relationships, career, interests, etc. And territories can change with time.
It is said a wolf that is blown out of its territory by a violent storm and can’t find its way back to it will lie down and die. Members of the animal kingdom invest a lot of energy, not to mention gallons of pee, in marking their territories. Those boundaries are very important to them. They will defend them to the death.
Sometimes when people get driven from their territories and can’t get back to them, they will suffer, like the wolf. Richard Nixon almost died of a blood clot after he was forced to step down as president. It was not the humiliation that almost killed him. He was driven out of his territory and couldn’t get back. He eventually made it back as an elder statesman of the Republic and served his country again before he died.
I wandered in the wilderness for a while. Moved many times. To Alberta for a few months. Worked all sorts of jobs. But then a few decades ago, I stumbled into my territory. Journalism, a little blue house. A wife, a family. Contentment. After all my wandering, I live just a few miles from the hospital where I was born. I always joke that I never got very far in life.
Only one of two things will remove me from my territory: a cannon or a court order.
Many years ago (only old people can use “many” in front of “years ago”) I worked in an office that had a brilliant maintenance man who could fix anything. His one failing, however, was that he could be easily distracted.
One day, he took on the faulty urinal in the men’s washroom on our floor. He disconnected the pipe below the porcelain fixture and, called away, left the job temporarily unfinished. He also left with the pipe for some reason. And he failed to put up a sign warning potential users of the room that the facility was out of order.
The washroom was in plain sight of my desk and I watched as digusted fellow male employee after enraged worker, left the washroom less happy than when they entered it. After seeing this parade of unhappy men leave the washroom, I suspected something was up, but no one said anything, as I recall.
But I have a very short memory and I soon paid a visit to the bathroom with its dysfunctional urinal to take care of some business. As things proceeded, I thought I heard an unusually loud sound of running water and finally looked down to see my shoes covered in moisture of some sort whereas they had been dry when I entered the room.
I left as miserable as my fellow workers had done before me. What made matters even worse, if that was possible, the washroom was carpeted for some reason so the fun never ended.
I think someone finally put up a sign. I don’t remember how this unfortunate incident was brought to a resolution, but I have a feeling the maintenance man’s projected pay raise was put on hold. Also on hold was the reason for our visits to the washroom. Instead, there was a steady stream (unfortunate word choices) of the males among us heading for a restaurant across the street. One after another, we all returned with a coffee in hand as our price for using the facilities there.
However, if I remember this right, that place didn’t have the best coffee in town and it went through us like you-know-what through a goose and so the cycle continued. Back home, I left my shoes on the front porch overnight to dry out.
I personally knew a man and his wife who were good-living farmers and strong Catholics who got down on their knees to pray every night. The man enjoyed a beer now and then but between the two of them, I doubt if they had many sins to bring to the priest in the confessional every month.
One day in the ’70s, as they were getting on in years, they made the three-hour trip to visit some relatives on their farm near Toronto. Not wanting to land in on their hosts at noon, they decided to stop at a hotel in a small town to eat some lunch before heading out to the farm. So, they found a nice table in the beverage room of a hotel and ordered up some sandwiches.
As they were waiting for their meals to arrive, a pretty young woman wandered over to a jukebox in the corner of the room and punched a few buttons. When the music started playing, she walked up onto a small platform that served as a stage, only a few feet from the visiting farmers’ table, and began dancing to the sounds. Now, the dancing was rather entertaining but what came next put a few more white hairs on the heads of the old folks.
The dancer began methodically removing articles of her clothing and it didn’t appear that she was doing this because she was too warm. It seemed as though she was intent on continuing to disrobe in an effort to entertain the mostly male clientele who had dropped into the hotel for lunch.
This was a shocking development indeed but it posed somewhat of a moral dilemma for the innocent old couple. With a meal on the way, they could hardly go running out of the place without paying. And once they paid for their food, they couldn’t leave it there and not eat it. They had lived through the Great Depression and weren’t ones to toss away their money.
On the other hand, they were only a couple of arms’ lengths away from a woman who was determined, it seemed, to keep peeling off her clothes till she wore nothing but a smile. Leave their food behind and be wasteful or dine in a strip joint and be sinful. Not an easy predicament.
However, it might have been predicted that the good-living, unwasteful farmers would finish their food rather than flee so that is what they did. They kept their heads down and ate while the dancer got down to the bare essentials. Still in a daze, they finally left town and drove to the farm they were to visit, relating their traumatic experience to their relatives the moment they entered the farmhouse.
I don’t know how the housewife who hosted the visitors reacted to the startling hotel news but her husband would laugh long and heartily every time he recalled the story in the years to come. And while the visiting woman related the harrowing tale with great concern, apparently her husband hadn’t looked so cheerful in a long, long time. The speculation was he had stolen a few glances at the stripper while slurping up his soup.
At least their priest wouldn’t be so bored next time they went to confession.
How did it come to this? My role in life now has been reduced to Doorman to the Cats. Hours are brutal. Pay minimal. But the rewards … Oh ya, there are no rewards!
I just let Mario into the kitchen from the garage. For his fourth time today and it isn’t even 10:30 a.m. And his brother Luigi, hearing the door close, realized he needed to go outside. He will scratch to be let back in in two minutes and 45 seconds. (He scratched while I was writing this. At more like two minutes 10 seconds.)
Cat door, some of you will suggest. An option except for our fear that cat door will become skunk, raccoon and opossum door. No sweat, you say. There are doors now that are wired in a way that you put an electronic collar on the cat and only he can open that door.
Some scientists who could have been looking for a cure for cancer were busy dreaming up this instead.
During breaks from my doorman duties, I keep occupied providing a lap for my dog to stretch out on. It’s a living.
A member of our household went to the store the other day and came home with a small item she had bought. The minute she took it out of the package, it broke. She was a little discouraged but decided to let it go.
The next day, I thought I would surprise her by going back to the store to replace it. That’s what I did. I even took the package with me to make sure I got the right one.
It occurred to me for a few seconds to throw a little fit about the poor quality of the item, but decided, what the heck, for $2.50, it was not worth the grief.
That night, I presented the new item and was thanked profusely for my thoughtfulness. Then I told her how I went to the store and told the guy the first one broke and I would like another one. “What store did you go to?” I was asked. I supplied the information. “I didn’t get it there,” she replied and told me the name of the store from where the item had come.
I am not much confused these days. Not long ago, I climbed into a family van, same model and colour as ours, to discover the key did not fit in the ignition. Taking a quick look around, I began to realize why. I got out of Dodge (it actually was a Dodge) a lot faster than I got into it.
Those who believe in conspiracy theories are just people who ask questions and isn’t that what we all should be doing?
However, maybe it is not the questions that are the problem. Maybe it’s the answers our favourite wingnuts arrive at that might make us nervous.
For example:
– The severe snow that recently hit Texas was actually “fake” and “government generated” as part of a sinister plot instigated by shadowy “elites” including Bill Gates and Joe Biden. “This goes out to our government and Bill Gates. Thank you Bill Gates for trying to f***ing trick us that this is real snow,” a woman says in one video on the Internet, a video in which she proves the snow isn’t real.
– The Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington was organized by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, not by Republicans and certainly not by former president Donald Trump.
– Joe Biden is a robot, wearing a human-like face mask.
– Donald Trump is actually still president and executions are taking place on the lawns of the White House.
– Donald Trump and Joe Biden had surgery to swap faces so when you see Joe Biden behind the desk in the Oval Office, you are actually looking at Donald Trump, and vice versa.
– Donald Trump will be inaugurated this Thursday, March 4, as the 19th president of the United States.
And as odd as some of these conclusions are, it is comforting to know that at least some people are not falling for fake news like the rest of us do every day.
Thank heavens there are the solid beliefs of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene: Democrats are a cabal of Satanist pedophiles; the Rothschild family helped former California Gov. Jerry Brown build a space laser to burn down forests; members of the 2016 Clinton campaign sacrificed chickens to the pagan deity Moloch; and multiple school shootings have been “false flag” operations which used crisis actors.
Not to mention this oldy but goody: Democrats are running a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza shop.
