Writer's Block, Vol. SOMETHING.

It’s 2012.  People.  It’s time to learn that at the traffic light, when the light is red, ADVANCE ALL THE WAY TO THE FUCKING LINE.  Rule of thumb: If I can parallel park a regular sized sedan between your front bumper and the stop line, you’re a fucking asshole.

Is there a driving instructor somewhere teaching people to do this?  Or is it just passed down generation to generation from one shitty driver to the fruit of that shitty driver’s loin?

“Woah, hold up a second!  Don’t get too close to that there line Billy!  This traffic light might be on one of them sensors, and wouldn’t you rather just wait here forever?”

“Sure would Pa’, sure would.”

“Now, check all your mirrors, Son.”

“Gee, there’s an angry man in my rear view mirror, oh wait, never mind, he just exploded.  From rage.”

Do they originate from a town somewhere where elephants or really fat people often and randomly cross the street in front of them and need the extra wiggle room?  Are they hoping for a parade? Is there a ghost car in front of them that only they can see?

All of these questions whiz through my head as I sit wondering if my car has enough power to push their SUV up to the line.  Or into oncoming traffic, whichever.

That’s it, I’m leaving the car here, I can walk the rest of the way.

Writer's Block, Vol. VI.

I recently took a huge dump at Barnes & Noble.  Anyone who knows me, or has read enough of the things that I write will know that browsing leads to photo finishes in the restroom.  Bookstores are the worst for this, especially since I usually end up with a coffee in my hand, which is yet another of my favorite and most effective laxatives.  So there I was, racing from the bargain bin to the lavatories, desperately hoping that my usual stall was free.

Yeah, I have a usual stall.

Yeah, I am worried that the Barnes & Noble people refer to me as “The Shit Guy” or “Mr. Poo Dude” or “Maybe we should just stop serving him coffee”.

So I did my business.  I won’t get into graphic details, but let’s just say I lost about five pounds.  As I was pressing the little flush handle (by the way, I love that they haven't switched to those automatic flushers yet, because it allows me to better control courtesy flushing, as well as the timing of everything as I stand up to wipe), someone who must have recently entered the bathroom (like a ninja, I must say, since I didn’t even hear the door open) shouted something out to me. 

"CAREFUL WITH THE FLUSH IN THAT FIRST STALL."  

It was too late, I had already flushed, but everything seemed to go down correctly.  When I exited the stall I saw a guy, probably in his twenties, holding a wrench, and wearing some sort of tool belt.  He looked at me and said, "Sorry for yelling, I wasn't sure it would flush right, I'm here to fix that one" as he walks past me and heads directly into the stall I just annihilated with a few days’ worth of bad eating (Chinese food, pizza, brie… some kind of onion soup… many eggs).

I turned around to advise him against immediate entry into the danger zone, but I was too late.  So I say to him, "Well, in that case, let me apologize for the air quality in there."  I was tempted to add in a “That skid mark on the bottom was totally already there when I arrived.”  Also worried that he might lift up the seat, I could have potentially added “Any below the seat markings were probably not from me.”

Anyways, before I could add anything else onto my apology (for what had to be a brutal scene), without skipping a beat, this is what the guy says to me, from his KNEES in the stall, FACING a toilet that I had just destroyed. 

"Welcome to my office."

It sounded so HARD and so wise.  The dude was twenty-something, but clearly, as my brother said, "When you work a shitty job like that, you grow up real fast."  I don't think my brother actually said 'SHITTY' job, but I felt the pun worked rather well.  Sorry big brother, if I misquoted you.

I realize that the holidays are over, and many of us are bummed that we have to wake up early again, go to the office, and pretend to work for eight hours.  Well, the next time you go to the washroom, any washroom really, and are face to face with a clogged poopy toilet, just remember, THAT could be your office.  

Suddenly the cubicle seems pretty nice, doesn’t it?

That's it.  I need to go look at books, I’m pretty backed up from all that holiday eating.

Writer's Block, Vol. V.

The end of a vacation is always so bitter sweet.  Sure, I’m glad that my cat’s not dead and seems to remember that I’m the guy that feeds him.  It’s also nice to be back in my own bed, where my pillow smells like my old gym socks and my wife and I know exactly how to angle the fan for a refreshingly pure and blissful sleep.  But that last day of vacation, when I’m back home and unpacking has that awful feeling that Sundays always had when I was a kid.

How can I enjoy today when there’s school tomorrow?

Whenever I get to work after a vacation everyone just seems so content in their office cocoon.  I feel like I’m missing out.  What do they know that I don’t?

It’s kind of like how growing up, all the other kids seemed to like ‘Winnie the Pooh’, but I found the entire ‘Pooh’ world to be thoroughly depressing.  Seriously, 'Eeyore' makes me want to kill myself.  I have vivid recollections of watching the cartoons and feeling sad inside.  James Taylor has the same effect on me.  Some people sit there finding his music toe-tappin’ and smooth, I find it pants-shittin’ and moldy.

And all the 'back-to-school' paraphernalia out there this time of year isn't helping.  On top of my current vacation withdrawal, my brain is flashing back to the dismal feeling of wonderful summers coming to a close and returning back to school, where I can get in trouble for speaking English in the halls.

Still, complaining about having a job definitely qualifies as complaining with my mouth full.  So I’ll shut up now, as it is rather impolite to talk with my mouth full, even if I’m still not sure whether or not I like the taste, or whether or not this particular mouthful will give me a heart-attack someday.  Or make me choke, right now.

I’m still hopeful that in the long run it makes me poop gold.

That’s it. My cubicle calls.

Writer's Block, Vol. IV.

There I am behind a bumper with a bumper sticker on it that reads “HONK if you like musicals”. I have already declared a hatred for anything stupid to do with automobiles (see: Stupid is as Stupid Drives), but there’s just something even more special about this one. Now, no matter the massive amount of honks and cries coming from fellow road travelers, this person gets to drive like an asshole, and carry on ignorant and happy, like a child who just shit his pants during brunch at Applebee's. Did I honk at them when they cut me off? 

Absolutely, I did. 

Do I worry that instead of thinking “Oh curse my awful driving, I may have just pulled some asshole-ish maneuver just now, here in mine vehicle, at the expense of this fine specimen of wonderful driving”, he actually thought, “Oh man, I wonder which is his favorite. Me? Oh I’m an Andrew Lloyd Webber man, as far as I am concerned it just don’t get no better than Phantom, except maybe Grease”? 

Even more absolutely, I do.

If Lloyd Webber fan is so damn passionate about musicals, then they need to get a bumper sticker that will make it a little bit easier to distinguish who is honking at them because of their elderly-blind-person driving abilities versus who is honking because they've seen ‘Cats’ forty times and touches themselves to visions of Mister Mistoffelees shoving his tail up their ass. I suggest changing it to something like “Give three brief honks, followed by one long honk, if you like musicals”. Also, depending on the rhythm and panache with which the person carries out this specialty honk, Captain Bumper Sticker can even measure just how musical this other driver is.

Maybe if there is a good enough honk, they can both pull over and break into song together. And that will give me the opportunity to run my car into their heads and/or brains.

Once I passed by the driver, I gave them the obligatory evil glare, and to my delight, it was not an old Asian lady like we all generally assume it to be when we notice someone driving like a four-year-old on the bumper cars at Canobie Lake Park, but a young student eating a breakfast burrito with his big fucking sunglasses on. Hooray world, for proving me wrong.

While I was glancing at Studious Burrito I ran my car into the back of a Ford Focus, being driven by an old Asian lady. Hooray world, for your delicious irony.

No, not really. But these are the exciting scenarios that run through my brain when I should be either focusing on the road, or on the work that I am supposed to be doing this very moment. 

Maybe it’s just the fact that the mornings are darker and it’s harder to wake up. The nights are brighter, so I stay up later, and that makes the mornings even darker, and even more impossible. But, regardless, please take the damn bumper stickers off of your car, or please go and drive your car off a cliff. Whether or not you are in it as it travels off of said cliff, is entirely up to you. I will trust you to do the right thing.

That’s it. I've got to go watch re-runs of ‘Glee’.

Writer's Block, Vol. III.

The month of January is really just one gigantic hangover.  I don’t mean that in that "Maxim magazine" party animal hangover kinda way like you might see in the movie of the same name (you know, The Hangover).  I’m not even trying to say that we all party so hardy on the 31st of December that the entire month that follows is just a horrible headache coupled with both diarrhea and constipation at the same time.  It’s just that the holiday season includes time off, running around visiting people, a lot of eating (in quantities that are serious health risks), and increasingly late bedtimes, which makes for a rude awakening when it is time to start setting that alarm once more for an entire new year of the grind and an imminent re-entry into the real world.  Also the entire month is just a horrible headache coupled with both diarrhea and constipation.

In the summer I run outside, almost every day.  In the winter, however, especially around mid January, I run… out of pants that fit.  Groan.  A combination of the sun being down all of the time (see: Seasonal Affective Disorder.), laziness to get my fat gut to the gym (see: What’s My Motivation?) and the overall lethargy that comes from several consecutive days of eating meat pie for breakfast makes waking up for an office job seem like an impossible feat.  It’s like a daily all you can eat buffet, all the time, every time (see: All You Can Eat.).  

To be honest, all of this makes doing anything relatively impossible.  It feels kind of like unemployment, without all of the fun and excitement of job hunting and creating new and improved sandwiches every day (Tuna fish and Doritos? Why that’s Kev’s Mexican Fish ‘n Chips Panini!).  Oh and also, you have to go to your job.  Maybe it’s not that much like unemployment, but, you know what I mean.

Jotting down a list of resolutions seems like a positive activity, but really, all you’re doing is admitting all the areas in which you failed miserably in recent memory.  The more resolutions that you come up with, the more you are declaring how hard you suck.  Hard.  But hey, admitting you suck is the first step towards recovery.

The second step is doing something about it.  And since most resolutions are mirror images of the previous year’s resolutions, I guess we’re not very good at step two.  Let’s move immediately to step three where we’re like, man, fuck resolutions, I can’t be held down by some list.  Nothing can hold me down.  Nothing! The holidays are over!

No more policemen directing traffic in the mall parking lot.  No more navigating through what seemed to be an endless array of drivers following pedestrians carrying shopping bags, in some sort of insane ritual of replacing one shopper’s car with another immediately (even though, there upon yonder horizon I see a whole row of empty spots, a whole vacant area of parking fun… presumably the extra steps were just too much distance to handle at this festive, fat, lazy and bloated time of year, for the average holly jolly consumer, that is). No more hearing that particularly grating rendition of jingle bells that plays as I make my way through a blinding fragrance section in Macy’s and get sprayed by some clown lady.  

No more eating too much. 

No more running around trying to see and please everyone. 

NO MORE!

I may have gotten a little lost in my tracks there, but I’m pretty sure that I understand most of what I think I am trying to say.  Could it really be that the end of the holiday season brings more relief than sadness?  Is the magic really gone?  In short, Chris Murphy (of the awesome band Sloan) said it best when he said that “The scariest part about my Halloween, is that November rent is due.  I’m not a kid anymore.”

Oh shit, my boss walked by the cubicle thrice, I really should stop now.

That’s it.  Time to go sit on the toilet and not poo for a little while.

Writer's Block, Vol. II.

I sprayed Pam into a frying pan and got some on the counter. Now what? How do you clean Pam off of the counter? Pledge, you say? Won’t that just make everything even more greasy and slippery? Honestly, that’s like cleaning a shit stain with a melty chocolate bar. Yes, it’s exactly like that. In all seriousness, you could accidentally mix up the labels on your Pledge and your Pam and no one would know the difference. Well, until someone starts noticing a certain lemon-bleachy zest in the fried tilapia. That and everyone’s teeth start shining extra bright like freshly stained and polished cedar.  But, I feel that Pledge's whole ad campaign should be based on its ability to turn a regular coffee table into an air hockey table.

"Honey, pass me one of those coasters."

[COASTER GLIDES ACROSS TABLE AND FLIES THROUGH THE WINDOW]

"I win, I win!  One to nothin'!!"

Seriously though, when you go overly apeshit with the Pledge (or Pam for that matter) and get some on the floor by mistake, it takes years for the floor not to be slippery anymore. It's a death trap for anyone wearing socks.  Suddenly you have small zones of floor all around your house, marked off with cones, that you know to be careful around, like hardwood black ice.

“Careful over there, there’s a slippery spot. Don’t wear socks in that room. You need to put on your cleats.”

Who are these people that wear shoes in their own house?  Creepy.  Ever accidentally done the splits because of a Pledgey spot on the floor? Me neither. My mother used to clean the kitchen table with Pledge and when she would call us down for supper (in Canada, we say SUPPER), we would come running down, excited, and then go flying across the floor like some kind of linoleum Slip N’ Slide. Except instead of a refreshing pool at the end, it was an open oven. That’s actually how we lost our cat, Mr. Majestyk. In retrospect we should have called him Mr. Tender N’ Delicious. I’m kidding, we didn’t eat him. But he ruined our fucking lasagna.

Slip N’ Slide was one of those disappointing toys, wasn’t it? The commercial was full of guitar solos and people having an absolute blast. In reality, you were lucky if you even made it all the way to the end without veering to the side, touching the grass and/or pavement, and doing a horrifyingly painful backwards somersault. I guess toys like that set us up for being disappointed by a lot of things in life in general as adults. Oh shit, remember Pogo Ball? How were those asshole kids getting so much air in those commercials? Again, guitar solos, turntable sounds, jump kicks, sideways or backwards hats and flying happy ninja children. I’ll tell you, my brothers and I barely got the thing off of the ground, let alone got three or four feet of air. Picture trying to jump with THE PLANET SATURN between your ankles and you get a bit of the idea.

“Hey guys, check this out, I can jump even higher if I throw the Pogo Ball into the garbage.”

There was also a brief yoyo craze when I was growing up, but my attempts at the “Around the World” trick ended when the yoyo tagged me in the balls. What a nice surprise (see: Quelle Surprise!).  I always managed to get hit in the balls during sports growing up. I was the only kid that insisted on wearing a cup while playing hacky sack. I’d get hit in the nuts during Hide and Seek. Speaking of which, did you ever have a game of Hide and Seek that ended prematurely? You know, where everyone goes home before someone gets found, but no one bothers to tell that kid?

“Did anyone find Jeremy?”

“No, but, eventually he’ll figure it out. Let’s all go to our homes.”

Jeremy remained crouched in the garbage can seemingly forever, figuring that their cries of “come out Jeremy, come out wherever you are, we’re going home, the game's done” were just a lame ploy to lure him out prematurely. He was eventually found, hungry, shivering and holding a Pogo Ball for warmth.  He sat there, in a pile of his own poopies, victorious. He was the clear winner.

In short, sometimes it’s better to lose.

That’s it. I'm trying to use this hot Snickers bar to remove this skidmark.

Writer's Block, Vol. I.

I sat in a grey office, dimly lit. It was the middle of the afternoon, and there was little to do but reminisce about the bad lunch with my colleagues. Man, work sucks today. I knew I shouldn’t have had that extra portion of veal curry. That was going to come back to haunt me pretty soon. But then I thought, well, going to the washroom is the most enjoyable part of my work day, so that’s a good thing, which either means that I really don’t like my job, or that I like pooping a little too much. Either way, I was looking forward to veal curry’s triumphant return south of the border.

So, sometime not long after this revelation, I got the call. I entered into the washroom and saw an orange peel in the garbage can. Who is taking oranges into the washroom? More importantly, who is peeling oranges in the washroom? I needed to drop my deuce, so I ventured into one of the stalls, only to find some kind of cocoon built on and around the toilet. Don’t get me wrong, I understand covering the seat with a thin veil of rough public washroom paper in a useless attempt to protect yourself from flying herpeecrabs and liquid chlamydia, but this was just insane. I couldn’t even see the toilet seat. I couldn’t even see the water. This person actually brought paper towel from outside the stall to help build his little nest. I didn’t need to see anymore to know that this was not the stall for me. Who does this to a toilet? Hopefully it’s not the same moron who pees in the stall without putting the seat up, and manages to get it all over the seat and even hit the toilet paper dispenser and the surrounding floor, which was the story of the second stall. Who are these people? I decided that I would try and hold it in. Then this guy came in and washed his hands before peeing, but then not after. Who does that? Moreover, what was he playing with before his visit to the washroom that had him convinced he needed to wash up before handling his junk? Probably oranges. I guess the citric acid could sting a little on the ol’ peener. And why the instructions on how to wash our hands? If people haven't figured out how to wash up at this point, are we really to believe that the problem is that they haven't been properly shown? Obviously it's part of some multi-million dollar government effort to eliminate swine-cow-bird-caca-flu.

"Oooooh, you dry at the end! I was drying first, then rinsing and then putting soap all over my hands." or
"Ahhh, that man just sneezed into my open mouth, I'd better go wash my hands. Hopefully the bathroom here has instructions."

That's how it works, and we are that stupid, apparently. As I left the washroom, I noticed that the next guy walking in was wearing open toe sandals. To me, this seemed like a dangerous choice for a public washroom, especially one used by people with such shockingly bad urinary aim. He had toothpaste and a toothbrush in his hand, hopefully to brush his teeth with.

On the way back to my desk, I ran into that idiot that walks around the office real fast, in an attempt to look busy and important all the time. This is usually the same person who writes everything they've ever heard at work in a little notebook. Hey, I wonder, do they have shelves full of notebooks at home? Are they figuring that someday the CEO will walk in and say, “excuse me, but what did I say eight and one quarter years ago, at the company meeting? Oh, you know? Awesome, you get an instant super promotion…”? Not gonna happen, busy bee. Busy bee tripped over my extended leg, accidentally of course, and went flying out the window. It made a really cool sound. The whole floor cheered. I returned to my cubicle, where I sat watching the clock until quitting time. “I sure could use a muffin”, thought I. In my peripheral vision I could see someone napping. Maybe they were dead, but probably they were just sleeping. You could hear people, all around, complaining about how much work they have to do, but it is obvious that no one is doing any of said work. And then quitting time arrived. Quitting time's arrival is always kind of anti-climactic isn’t it? I wish that just once it could be like in the Flintstones. You know, with a squawking bird and I could slide down a stegosaurus?

It was raining out, so I had to dodge umbrellas. Despite my best efforts, some guy ran into me with his umbrella, top speed. In an attempt to shield himself from the rain, he had the umbrella in front of him, thus blocking his entire field of vision. The tip of the umbrella went directly into my eye. He said sorry and smirked and then, thankfully, ten seconds later, has a similar encounter with a bus. He flew through the air, umbrella still in hand, all supercalifragilistic and shit. As the paramedics took him away, he said sorry and smirked. Somewhere between then and the time that I got home, I thought of something really hilarious to write about tonight and then fell asleep on the subway. I can’t remember what it was though. I think it may have involved the fat lady busker’s monotone singing of “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman” dressed head to toe in a hot pink snowsuit, but I could be way off. They say if you retrace your steps, that the idea may come back to you. Well I just did, super accurately, not making anything up at all or changing events in history, and the idea hasn’t come back to me. And now it’s becoming increasingly annoying to type with this eye patch on. In conclusion, umbrellas are for assholes, and it’s probably best to time your poops for your at-home hours of the day. Oh yeah, and don’t bring food into the bathroom.

That’s it. I’m going to go make a grillcheese sandwich and have a good sit.