HUMAN WRECKAGE

Doctor, My Ears

Sunday afternoon I telephoned Stats Guy. I held the handset to my wrong ear with my awkward arm. He was watching the Padres-Phillies game, fighting couch fatigue. Sure, the Dodgers had been eliminated, but at least there was still baseball being played. I hate the Dodgers, mainly because of that “Blue Monday” playoff game in Montreal back in 1981. Stats Guy loves the Dodgers, but he grew up in greater Los Angeles and was born before the Angels; sports catechism is drilled in at an early age.

“We haven’t done a Tuesday night in three weeks,” I said. “Provided we can get a round or square table and I can sit to your right and provided there aren’t too many hard surfaces and too much background noise, I have the wherewithal to go out provided you have the patience.”

I went to silent running very early on October fifth, a couple of hours before I usually wake up to make a sandwich and peruse The Economist: I lay in bed forcing myself to breathe slowly and rhythmically through the severely restricted capacity of my one working nostril. Ann had migrated to the spare room where she practices her violin; there’s a single bed in there for nights like this. I was on a heady mix of standard drugstore stuff, spray, syrup and pills, praying to alleviate the congestion butterflied behind my face; we had a lunchtime flight to Montreal booked. Somehow Moses got up my nose and my nasal passages parted. A miracle! As I drew that first blessed clear breath I swear I felt every single pathogen in my head drop into my aural passages.

The inside of my head became a funhouse echo chamber. I heard a muted roar that sounded a lot like big band jazz, Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Outside sounds were filtered through a transistor radio on low battery at low volume, the red needle revving up and down the dial, always between stations. I yelled at Ann; she yelled at me: an inaccurate portrait of our relationship. I’ve avoided innocuous conversations about nothing with neighbours. I’ve not missed anything on television. Reading and writing have been easy breezes; the Crooked 9 is as silent as a library. I miss music. I can do without the Harlem swing in my cranium, but those chords that vibrate the air through a decent set of speakers are acutely absent.  

The trip home was supposed to be fun, a family visit combined with the beers and lies of my forty-fifth anniversary high school reunion. The jet’s descent to Montreal’s Trudeau International Airport was an angry portent and an excruciating reminder that flight cancellation insurance isn’t just another airline chisel to be skipped. I’ve been bruised, scraped, cut and punctured. I’ve ached in more places than Leonard Cohen ever imagined. I’ve been nauseous with broken bones. When I tell myself “I’ve never felt anything quite like this” I want the subjects to be love and happiness. If I was an infant and not just childish, I’d have wailed until the rivets in the fuselage popped. For the first time in my life I contemplated an air sickness bag without amused detachment. Upon the touchdown bump I was already dreading the return flight. I made plans to buy a pair of those silly walking poles the old ladies in my neighbourhood favour, and a pair of sensible shoes. Ann could stretch out across the empty companion seat. I’ll be home in three months.

Doctors and pharmacists and dentists and lawyers for that matter, are good people to know, but, ideally, you know, just socially. This precious soft machine is now exhibiting signs of wear and tear in its sixty-third year. Maybe I cheaped out on the lifetime warranty. I’ve seen my general practitioner twice already and he wants to see me again. I’ve seen a skull doc, ear, nose and throat, not psychiatric. My pharmacy is an independent shop, new to the area. Its proprietor is an earnest young man, caring and knowledgeable. I like him. I don’t want him to get to know me too well. I’ve no wish to become his steady customer. Alas, I’ve a hunch from hereon in, during this clockless final quarter of what has been to date a relatively carefree though absolutely absurd existence, there must now always be something, some physical complaint demanding expert attention.

My pub supper with Stats Guy went fairly well. Both of us were pleased the Yankees had been swept by the Astros. He was mildly perturbed by the LA’s fate, their runaway regular season, all those wins: POOF! Gone, baby, gone, it’s all over now Dodger blue. Unlike my high school reunion I didn’t just smile and nod my agreement to everything I couldn’t hear. The big test will come early next month when Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Canada’s finest working roots band, perform downtown at Winspear Centre, Edmonton’s premier acoustical venue. Ann and I have seen them a couple of times; I believe we own all of their albums. Their latest is O Glory, not sure that it rates with South, but I’d only time to spin it once for us before my ears went AWOL. I hope to be able to hear the new songs live, digest them that way; we shall see.     

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of health and wellness since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

NONSENSE VERSE

Hey, Skechers!

Adidas done say sayonara

No dead presidents tomorra

Big implants Kardashian

I be her insane ATM

Me and Trump

We fist bump

You got Ringo

Ain’t got no bingo

C’mon, lemme sell your shoes

To everyone ‘cept them Jews

Take a call from Ye

I endorse me

Ain’t no Jay-Z

Plain to see

Just me

Ye

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of rap and hip-hop since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Well, That Didn’t Take Long

Following the Thanksgiving Day long weekend, a new era of Alberta politics got off on the wrong foot a week ago today, a right one in the mouth.

Newly selected United Conservative Party (UCP) leader Danielle Smith was sworn in as the province’s 19th (and unelected) premier. Smith is a populist, historically a political opportunist, and reckoned to be something less than an intellectual force by seasoned pundits. During her inaugural press conference Premier Smith announced her intention to keelhaul Alberta’s Human Rights Act to ensure that her grassroots supporters, anti-vaxxers, will no longer be subject to the tyranny of public health and safety measures. In Smith’s world, it’s a God given right to be an infected asshole.

“They have been the most discriminated-against group that I have ever witnessed in my lifetime. That’s a pretty extreme level of discrimination that we’ve seen.” Really? Readers may also wish to note that Premier Smith was born in 1971 and not 2021.

This blog post is five working days behind schedule because I’ve not been able to summon the energy to “refudiate” (God bless you, Sarah Palin! Have you met your long-lost sister?) any of Smith’s moronic claims and potential plans. This is a person who publicly trumpeted a bovine laxative as a cure for covid. Perhaps rooms for rational debate and discussion may only be found in Shambala or Xanadu. Book in advance. In the meantime, the opium den lure of languid resignation so seductive to anybody possessed of more than half a wit must be fended off at all costs. It’s so much easier to pour two or three fingers of Irish, put on a Van Morrison album and hope it all goes away sometime during the night.

You search in your bag/Light up fag/Think it’s a drag/But you’re so glad to be alive, honey/And when this is all over…

This, this Smith person isn’t just the under-qualified “Mayor of Simpleton.” Despite what the governing UCP tells its cadre, Alberta is one of Canada’s wealthiest and most powerful provinces. The problem here has always been the allocation of elastic abundance. The busts always seem to last and the booms never do. The primary domestic product of a chronically mismanaged cyclical economy is blame. Alberta looks outward only to complain about the meanies in the rest of Canada and the world at large. For a province never noted for its tolerance of unionized labour, grievance (sometimes real, but best imagined) is a reliable legislative assembly seat winner.

I’ve been paying attention to Alberta’s politics since I moved here, gratefully, 32 years ago; I’ve no clue as to how it has all shaken down to… this. Smith’s personal path to power was paved with the petulant premise of her proposed and yet to be passed Alberta Sovereignty Act. While its contents remain mysterious, it’s thought to be a sort of pre-assembled DIY platform for future blame and complaint because Smith is nothing if not progressive. Alberta political climate indicators are forecasting high whinge.

Aw, man, I’m too tired and fed up to go on. I’ve had enough, I need a drink. I need a break from this blog. See you next Tuesday.             

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of insight into the Albertosaurus body politic since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

A FAN’S NOTES

The Rise and Fall of Hockey Canada

The National Hockey League launched another endless season this week. The Montreal Canadiens appear to be a team somewhere south of terrible. These two related sports stories interest me because at least they’re about the game. It’s the other kind of sports stories that revolt me, the ones in the news section of my paper.

If you’re a Canadian reading this post, you know what I’m writing about. Two alleged incidents of sexual assault by a multiple of junior players who wore Canadian colours in 2003 and 2018. Hockey Canada has settled one lawsuit using hush-hush money from a secret fund financed by misappropriated player registration fees. This suggests sanctioned gang rape or at least business as usual, boys will be boys, and there’s no need to involve the courts or the insurance company. The existence of a second such fund came to light last week. This is not petty cash; this is a calculated cost of doing business with teenage boys. Two pools of dirty money suggest there are enough anticipated sex scandals lurking in dressing rooms to rival the Catholic Church. 

Hockey Canada was established in 1968; its purpose was to assemble Canadian national teams to compete in international tournaments nobody cared about. In 1994 it merged with the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (founded 1914) thus becoming the sport’s national governing body whose remit now included growing and promoting the game at all levels for all participants.

I’ve long admired Hockey Canada’s logo. The concept, a pale player silhouette framed by contrasting colours, though unoriginal it is immediately recognizable; it pops. The organization’s corporate sponsors signed on to incorporate it into their own advertising and marketing materials. Some sort of gold by association for Tim Hortons, Canadian Tire and Scotiabank.

Hockey Canada metastasized into Canada’s premier sports organization during the nineties. The agent was television, and that term in turn may be used as a synonym or metaphor for filthy lucre. When the International Olympic Committee and International Ice Hockey Federation (of which Hockey Canada is a member and, who knows, an NHL proxy) agreed professionals could compete at the Winter Games, Hockey Canada took a star turn. It would choose Canada’s Nagano ‘98 squad, cherry picking from the NHL’s best Canadian players. This was not the Spengler Cup, baby! Canadian hockey fans would watch a national team assembled via some sick fantasy draft by Hockey Canada. This was power, this was prestige; this was dazzle, grape Kool-Aid to corporate sponsors, and eyeballs to advertisers.

The way Canadians experienced television began to shift around this time of exciting Olympic hockey news. Cable channels had proliferated, many of them focused on sports. Leagues looking to sell broadcast rights had more potential partners at the bidding table. The television signal was transitioning from analogue to digital. Advertisers quickly realized the only “live” TV available in the spectrum was either news or sports. The IIHF world junior championship, a Hockey Canada property, became a hot commodity for a sports channel with restricted or non-existent NHL broadcast rights. Every ensuing holiday season pimply Team Canada was as scrutinized and venerated as the Second Coming of the ’72 Summit Series or ’76 Canada Cup teams of seasoned professionals; the absolute career apex for most of the kids who made the roster cut. One of the perks would be a coddled, frat house sense of entitlement. And Bauer and Nike swag.

Last week Hockey Canada’s interim board chair Andrea Skinner (she has since resigned as did subsequently Hockey Canada’s entire Board of Directors) complained to a parliamentary hearing that her organization was cast as a “scrapegoat,” a witch hunt poster boy for a larger, endemic problem pervading society. There is some truth in her petulance. Various Canadian sports authorities and institutions are mired in allegations of sexual misconduct. But really, she spoke to Hockey Canada’s deafness to its entire mission, its raison d’etre. What if the dollars in those rainy day rape funds had been directed into the women’s and sledge hockey programs?

Hockey is to Canada like apple pie and baseball are to the United States, evocative of less complicated times. And though they never really existed, when we speak of them we’re implying higher behavioural standards, proper ethics, manners, morals and values. Life can be coached. Evolving boy-men segregated from normal development by elite hockey programs would benefit from a seminar or two or 20.

That Hockey Canada elected to cover up alleged sex crimes, pay out hush money and then create a second slush fund for tamping down future sex crimes beggars belief. This isn’t just cynical rot at the top of Canada’s hockey governing body, but putrid gangrene. Because nothing, not even pus, drips or oozes uphill, there was only one way for the infection to spread.

Remember, kids, hockey builds character! Play fair, play smart and obey the rules!         

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of Shakespearean tragedy  since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Goin’ Home

Time is eternal when you look back on it, yesterday, and all that. It exists in the present as it must; unfurling continuously. The future is theoretical. There’s a good probability that it, or something like it, could happen. So, that infuriatingly trite platitude “It’s the journey and not the destination” is true although it cannot be applied to sort of, kind of post-pandemic air travel.

“Bonjour! Hi! Bienvenue a Montreal!” I’m flying way back home this week. The occasion is the forty-fifth anniversary of my high school graduation. My suitcase is open on the blanket chest at the foot of the bed. The wayfaring documents are stacking up on the dining room table. I’ve since lived a little more than the latter half of my life to date away from my hometown. But there are still a lot of yesterdays cached in that place. On the drive into the city from the airport I always see an invisible, rusting modal freight container hidden in the weeds beneath the urban ruins of the old Turcot spaghetti traffic interchange which teetered on piers above a former CNR yard; there’s a big box of me down there somewhere hard by the repurposed Imperial Tobacco cigarette factory, I swear.

Twentieth century boy: I sometimes wonder why I feel such affection for the most squirmingly uncomfortable five years of my life. Confidentially, high school was difficult. The bloc of Catholic boys was diverse in a small school way: brains, jocks, stoners, nerds and politicos. Only a spider, let alone a self-loathing ordinary average guy, could keep a foot in each camp. I did make friends and if we’re not as intimate as we once were, we’ve at least kept in touch. It follows too that I made enemies and if their personalities remotely resemble my own, they’re still nursing grudges.

High school flagged my academic shortcomings early on, math and science. Oh, the grace of a report card “51” in chemistry. My “47” in geometry required summer school; I was obtuse, the square of the hypothermia was beyond me. My algebra teacher was also my football coach: “Geoff, you’re able to memorize the playbook (Veer Series, wing formation, audibles, more backfield motion than the I-formation), so why not the terms of this formula? If you can learn just one thing this year…” Thank you for the passing grade, Coach.

Unbeknownst to me, the rigours of the Jesuit education provided by Loyola High School instilled in me the capacity for critical thinking. This was done by stealth. Little did I know that this faculty would colour my engagement with the world as a post-secondary student, worker, writer, consumer and citizen. My secondary schooling was a secret gift with no expiry date.

To paraphrase a lyric fragment sung by the immortal Eddie Money, I want to go back though I’m feeling so much older. Loyola’s alumni weekend kicks off this Friday afternoon with a football game against St. Thomas. I’m tempted to attend. We always used to beat those guys. Loyola’s teams are nicknamed the Warriors; I suspect the Indian head logo has long been consigned to the dustbin. I assume the uniforms have changed and the equipment is much safer. “Geoff! Where are you!?” “Umm, on the football field?” “Geoff! What day is it!?” “Umm, game day?” “He’s fine.”

My old school was always a piece of a larger enterprise. Though the building, modern mock Gothic, is new and not the one whose halls I haunted, it still resides on the campus of the former Loyola College which has long since been incorporated into Concordia University – another Alma Mater of mine. I’ve logged tons of time in Montreal’s wild West End through the years, but not recently. I should take a stroll around the neighbourhood.

Mister Hot Dog was on Sherbrooke Street at the east corner of the campus. It was an odd shape at an odd intersection, not quite a corner – if only I could remember my geometry. It was a counter operation, stand and inhale. Everybody knew that the fat, sweaty guy with the brush cut who ran the place really, really appreciated his lunch clientele, fresh-faced high school boys. West of the campus, still on Sherbrooke but beyond West Broadway was The Golden Moon. It was one of those family-run restaurants (Greeks, always Greeks) that used to be everywhere and are nowhere now. Till at the front behind a counter displaying cheesecakes, kitchen and toilets at the rear. In between, rows of booths, some seating two, some seating four. Each booth had its own jukebox; April Wine was popular, “Fast Train” and “Bad Side of the Moon.” Loyola boys would congregate to chain smoke and swill cups of coffee or fountain Cokes. It was a more democratic environment than the structured hierarchy inside the school because different years were compelled to mingle in a space more congenial to conversation, and one more welcoming than the inside crush of rush hour mass transit.

South of the “Moon,” down a gentle incline and across the commuter tracks was Ye Olde Pub. It was a workingman’s bar whose trade resided across the street at the Sealtest factory, that dairy with the hunting lodge exterior wall of gigantic, grinning cow heads. Drinkers of any age were welcome at Ye Olde, and the rumour was a certainty: the Vice Squad could raid the joint at any time. This fearful knowledge only enhanced the buzz of guzzling three Molson Exports before attending a dance with the girls from our sister Catholic private schools. In truth, there wasn’t enough beer in the whole damn West End to detach me from the whitewashed cinderblock wall of Loyola’s primitive cafeteria. Boys this side, girls over there on the other, and didn’t the time seem to flash by between “Ballroom Blitz” and “Stairway to Heaven.”

Forty-five years. I’m acutely aware of how I misused them and used them up, but sometimes I still can’t believe they’re gone. I cannot anticipate another forty-five years of existence. Hell, my class’s fiftieth anniversary will fall in 2027. Who knows? Those next five years may prove trickier than I’d prefer. And so Friday night at Loyola I’ll be wandering around wearing a name tag and swigging from a cup of beer, a little lost in the new building, a bit wayward, and wondering just why it is exactly that I’m so happy to be back there again.        

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of mystified nostalgia since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.