The Universal Parent

Most of us become parents someday, and we're happy about that. What we don't expect is to turn into our parents. But we do, because all parents are essentially the same. The quirks of parenthood are universal. Despite the many variations, we all had basically the same upbringing. Nothing will ever break the horrifying cycle.

All mothers are obsessed with the state of your room when you're a kid. It's all she thinks about all day. I'm sure Charles Manson's mom thought he was as good as gold as long as his bed was made. And she'll always say the same thing when she comes in. "This room is a pigsty!" Mothers are fixated on pigsties. I'm not even sure what a 'sty' is, exactly. I know it's something that isn't good in your eye. Mom sure kept her eye on my room. "How can you live like this?" she'd say. "In my room, you can eat off my floors." I'd say, "Well, you can eat off mine, too, Mom. There's a sandwich over there...some pizza over here..." Needless to say, she was not amused.

Parents are also obsessed with the roof. Every aspect of your behaviour is ultimately about the roof. "As long as you are living under my roof, you will abide by my rules," they will intone like a mantra until the nano-second you leave home. I always wondered whether, if I slept on the roof, they'd be okay with my drinking whiskey and smoking cigars and having hookers up there.

You aren't allowed to touch the thermostat. That's the big sacred taboo device in your life. Even when you grow up, you can't go near it. You might be old enough to drink and drive and vote and get drafted into the Air Force to fly stealth bombers, but your parents feel you are not qualified to operate the thermostat. I used to wait till they went out and touch it with a long stick and a trembling hand. But somehow they always knew. A parent's sixth sense is spooky, that's what it is.

And they can never agree on a setting for the thermostat. Your mother likes the comfort of the Antarctic and your father prefers the surface of the sun. With all that hot air going back and forth, it's no wonder your room "looks like a tornado went through it".

Also strictly off-limits is your mother's 'good scissors'. You never hear her calling for the crappy scissors. She always has a job that requires the good scissors, presumably cutting the ribbon for newly-built city halls or something, and you'll never, as long as you live, be allowed to use them. And your dad has his special sharp knife that's only for neurosurgery, apparently. Which you use for cutting cardboard boxes when he isn't around. In my neighbourhood, there were children who mysteriously disappeared one day for doing that. Never saw them again. Their folks claimed they ran away and joined the circus, but there were mysterious fresh mounds of earth in the flowerbed that they could never quite explain.

If you hold the fridge door open long enough for the light rays to reach your eyes so you can see what's in there, they lose it completely and shriek at you like horrified banshees. That's a capital offense to most parents. This is why Superboy was forced to develop x-ray vision.

Taking a slice of bread from the middle of the loaf is another heinous crime. To a kid, the slice that's on the end is deadly poison. You want a nice, fresh, soft piece from the forbidden middle. But try taking one and they'll feel perfectly justified lopping off your fingers with the good scissors.

What sick compulsion is it that drives your dad to come pounding on the door of the bathroom demanding to know what you're doing in there? Sky-diving, he figures, perhaps? Bull-fighting? It's weird, and it's really creepy. Mind you, I never knew what he did in there, either, other than that, whatever it was, it rendered the place uninhabitable by human beings for at least a full day afterward.

And what mental disease convinces your mother that your friends, and even worse, your dates, want to see your baby pictures? Is this just some cruel retribution for the pain of childbirth or does she feel abject mortification builds character somehow? The French Foreign Legion is full of children who signed up to flee the embarrassment.

One day we'll come to the stunned realization, all of us, that we do every one of these things. And then we'll face the sickening reality that we have somehow morphed into the one entity we vowed most vehemently we'd never be - our parents. I'd kill myself now, before that day comes, but I have more important things to do. I have to go check on my sons' rooms.

It looks like a bomb went off in there.

Warning: This Comedy May Be Funny (Use Eyes To Read)

Warnings are standard on all sorts of products. Surely we could thin the human herd by getting rid of the ninnies for whom some are intended. Here are some real ones I saw on a list of ludicrous warning labels and directions, along with some I encountered myself. What's scary is that these warnings wouldn't be on there if somebody hadn't sued and the legal department deemed it prudent to put these caveats right on the package. Each one must have such a bone-headed story behind it.

This was on a jar of peanuts:
PEANUTS
WARNING: CONTAINS NUTS
Remember, when buying a jar of nuts, always make sure to check that there aren't any nuts in it.

And this was a packet of airline peanuts' opening instructions:
1. OPEN PACKET
2. EAT NUTS
I felt so dumb. I'd been eating the nuts and then trying to open the packet with my esophagus.

Lots of salad dressings say SHAKE BEFORE OPENING. I sure wish I'd read the fine print before I spent all those years wiping dressing off the ceiling.

On an iron:
WARNING: DO NOT IRON CLOTHES ON BODY
You'd have to be in a very big hurry indeed to put your clothes on in the morning and then iron them. Talk about being pressed for time. (I'm going to buy a drum just so I can do my own rimshots.)

On Christmas lights:
FOR INDOOR AND OUTDOOR USE ONLY
What, only those two places? Nowhere else? Seems unduly proscriptive to me.

Are you one of those people who require the shampoo instructions that say WET HAIR? What would you do if, like, your boss missed those directions and showed up every day at work with a blob of shampoo in his dry hair? Would you mention it? Or be more discreet? Maybe lure him out in the rain a lot.

I can't recall what the product was for this warning, but it said NOT TO BE USED FOR THE OTHER USE. Kind of makes the other use superfluous, doesn't it? One wonders what the point is of having another use if it can't be used for it.

Do we need the caution on sideview mirrors that OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR? Were drivers getting in accidents while watching smugly for tiny transports on the horizon?

I saw this on a TV dinner foil tray: PRODUCT WILL BE HOT WHEN HEATED. I'm sure glad they told me. How could I possibly have anticipated that something will be hot when heated? I'm suing the city for putting up that metal lamppost I licked this winter. It didn't have a sign alerting me that it would be cold when frozen.

A chainsaw actually had a warning saying DO NOT ATTEMPT TO STOP CHAINSAW WITH YOUR HANDS. As I say, the frightening thing is that somebody must've tried to do this or the lawyers wouldn't have advised that such a warning be added. I'm sure somebody has sued when he tried to stop one with his feet, too. But he wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

On a bottle of children's cough syrup it said DO NOT INGEST AND DRIVE OR OPERATE HEAVY MACHINERY. This is for the protection of the public against crazed tykes all hopped up on syrup, roaring maniacally down the highway in combine harvesters.

Here's my favourite, on a bottle of sleep medication: MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS. Are you serious? Sleep medication may cause drowsiness? I'm shocked. I only take it when I'm out of amphetamines and I want to stay up for a few days.

I should wrap this up, lest this blog require the warning CAUTION: FURTHER CHEESE AHEAD. But this is the end.

STOP READING NOW.

Life's A Beach And Then You Fry

Yesterday was a momentous day, and one I look forward to with such keen anticipation every year that I am compelled to vent my eagerness by running around, for hours in advance of the great event, in little tight circles of glee until I get dizzy and smack my face into a wall and rupture a sinus. It's the first day I get to the beach.

The beach is by far my favourite place on earth. When I die, I don't want to go to heaven. I just want to go to the beach.

Settle down, the multitudes implore me. It's only the Burlington beach, they chant. Sure, but you have to understand that I'm from Sudbury. The beach up there is made of rock, without any water. Comparatively speaking, this is paradise. (Mind you, compared to my hometown, so is a sucking bog.)

I love everything about the beach strip here in Burlington. The promenade by Spencer Smith Park is beautiful and growing nicer every year as new playgrounds and lookout places, etc., spring up. (I'm enchanted by the tornado machine in the Discovery Landing pavillion next to Spencer's restaurant. I like sticking my hand in it like a seven-year-old because that's about where my maturity levelled off early in life.) People walk slow and smile at each other like they have all the time in the world. When I stroll along that lakefront every day in summer, I'm not a teacher. I'm just a guy with no earthly responsibilities. It's all I can do not to break into frolic every few steps, like a springtime lamb of joy on valium.

I've been walking the beach here for twenty-one years. I like to saunter all the way to the 'lighthouse' and try to time it so a ship is passing through the canal as I get there. It's an awesome and almost eerie experience to watch a big ship go by a few feet away. I always wave at the people onboard. Sometimes they don't wave back and I'm depressed for days.

They're working on an amazing new pedestrian pier that looks futuristic and breath-taking in the drawings they've posted on the big walls that keep the pedestrians out. The sign says it's scheduled for completion in Spring of 2008, which, in that it has already passed, seems unlikely now. But then, nobody believed that deadline anyway. Everyone knows that all construction projects' completion predictions are a big, fat, odious tissue of lies. But it had better jolly well be finished soon, or I'm going to grow very bitter and go down there daily and hurl abuse at the workmen until they cement me into one of the support pillars like my will stipulates anyway.

The water's polluted. That truly sucks. It's surreal, that's what it is. Idiots. Did you know they used to pour raw sewage merrily into the lake? To this day, mystery beach mucous collects at the edge of the water sometimes, in vast, vile quantities, and then is gone mysteriously the next day. I don't want to know what it is and I don't want to know where it goes. There's a whole separate level of hell for the numbskulls who allowed the lake to become so polluted it was forever bespoiled, along with the savages who insist on playing rap 'music' from big ghetto blasters on the beach when I'm trying to lie on it.

But still. That beach, somehow, regardless, sure is nice. Again, compared to Sudbury. At least the water isn't orange like in the 'stream' that ran around the park by the highschool I attended up there.

I have far too much work to do at the moment to go beach-walking as often as I'd like, but if you see me in a few weeks, ambling blissfully along at the water's edge, iPod playing cheery tunes, soaking up the rays, take note. You are seeing that rare thing, a completely present-moment-centered, entirely happy man. I'll be grooving to the waves, and I'll wave back if you do as I nurture a tan that never did seem to dry my skin to sandpaper consistency and cause giant tumours to sprout from my pores like the 'experts' said it would. You'll see a human being for whom all is well in his world. And that's something you can tell your grandchildren you glimpsed with your very own eyes.

Yes, life's a beach and then you fry. That's my motto of life. It works for me and it can work for you. But don't tell anybody else, okay? It's just between you & me and the sand.

And that ampersand.

The Canadian Art Of Never Being Satisfied

I'm loving these soaring temperatures. Two of the cheeriest words I can see in a sentence are 'heat' and 'wave'. The sun could come down to within twelve feet of my head and roast me alive and I would be a very happy man. We had the most brutal, vicious, unrelenting winter ever on record. Now sky-high temperatures in the thirties are here. And yet I hear nothing but complaints from people.

I don't mean to put these people down or disrespect them in any way, but they are dumb and they should die. Have you forgotten the bone-chilling misery of this past winter, you chronic grousers? Has the fact that, for six months, your chief activity was shivering escaped your recall somehow? Short of an act of Parliament, what will it take to make you finally content? Get out of my country. Go live in Guam. You're getting on my nerves.

I realize it's the Canadian Way, a sacred Canuck tradition, to grumble about the weather no matter what. But come on. Get real. Half a year of Antarctica, followed by the wettest, chilliest non-Spring ever, FINally yields to some genuinely glorious weather and it's too hot? Give me a break. Or, better, let me give you one, in your femur. These are people who, if they were starving to death, and you came along and gave them a five-course meal, would whine that it was too salty.

But it's not the heat, they say, it's the humidity. No, it's the stupidity. Nobody's wild about humidity, I'll grant you. But everything is relative. That's why they call it the relative humidity. Compared to freezing, humidity is a gracious gift from God. Every day of the Winter Of My Dire Discontent, I prayed aloud for humidity. Please, Lord, I beseeched the ice-encrusted heavens, let it get stuffy. Let my clothes cling damply to my reeking armpits. Send, dear God, some humidity to save me. But no. I suffered frigidly on.

Those days are gone now, though, believe me, they will remain forevermore a traumatic memory. I welcome the humidity that has taken their place like occupied countries rolled out the carpet for the Soviets that liberated them from the Nazis. Neither is optimal, but one is WAY better than the other.

So put up, my country kin. And shut up. Breathe the moistened air deep into your soggy lungs, nurse your joyful sunburns and count your balmy blessings. Take your rightful place in the world of global warming. Run out into the streets and spray aerosol cans festively into the air.

Like the song says,

"I can't get no satisfaction. I must be Canadian."

A LIttle Pizza Heaven

When I think of the greatest invention in the history of the world, it isn't the wheel or fire or fibre optics. Clearly it's pizza. What, I ask you, could possibly be more wonderful? If a genie appeared and gave me three wishes, only one of them would be for world peace. The other two would be for pizza.

I remember the first time I had pizza. I was five. My parents opened the box and I was revolted. No way was I going to have any. I couldn't believe how disgusting it looked. But I was hungry, so finally I was persuaded to try a piece. When I had my first bite, my life changed. An eternal love affair sprang to life. I begged for more. I haven't stopped craving it to this day.

In my kitchen closet that I use for storage, there's always a pile of pizza boxes that I've been procrastinating throwing out. I hate to part with them. If you've had gold, you don't like to discard the jewellery box.

I'm not much of a glutton. I try to stay as slim as I can. I eat moderate quantities, generally. But I can down a large pizza in fifteen minutes flat. I turn into some sort of insatiable beast when you put a pizza in front of me. Do I feel like a pig? Nope. In fact, I'm bursting with pride.

Nobody can ever agree on toppings. People's taste in pizza toppings is as variable as fingerprints. Pizza, therefore, is a symbol of the sacred Canadian talent for compromise. Anchovies seem to be the least popular topping. I realize they're basically centipedes. But mmmm. I don't care.
You could put cockroaches on pizza and I'd gobble them up with gusto.

Pizza is like sex. Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. I have very rarely had pizza I didn't like. I admit, though, that I'm not real wild about Pizza Pizza pizza, which sucks sucks sucks. But I have been known to order super ultra jumbo-size pizza from places that aren't my favourite pizza joints, strictly on the ground that I got a deal on it. Bad pizza is still a good deal if you get a whole bunch of it for a great price. But everyone seems to agree that Pizza Hut pizza is the best. It's gourmet pizza. They have an all-you-can-eat buffet at a Pizza Hut near me. I pleaded with them to allow me to move in and actually live on the premises. They refused. It was the most heartbreaking letdown of my life.

I love that you can pick up a phone and have steaming hot pizza whisked to your door. I can't think of anything I'd rather open my door and see. The Swedish bikini team, perhaps. But if they were holding pizza, I have to admit I'd admit them a lot faster.

I'd like to go on about the many wondrous delights of pizza, but I'm getting a bit lightheaded. I ordered some a few minutes ago, and I'm holding my breath until it gets here. If I pass out, good. It'll make the wait more bearable. So bye for now.

It's been a slice.