Moving Along

This blog has concluded.

If you like the way I've blogged, follow the blogging over to my fresh blog, which will have somewhat more of a focus on fiction and storytelling, though diary posts won't stop altogether.

Please update your bookmarks, RSS feeds, memory, et al.

The new blog will really get going with Night Flight Mike, a serial novella told in twenty posts. Stay tuned to http://cheeseburgerbrown.com/blog for the imminent launch.

Thank you for your attention.

I Am My Own Stunt Double

Holidays in the sun. Smashem-crashem. How not to waterski. Gaytastic thirtysomething moments. Half a moose. My three-toothed Doppelganger. How they pronounce it in France. Cheeseburger 2.0.


My holiday will turn out to be a little longer than anticipated, because I tried to waterski. The weather's great.

I report to you from the back seat of my Volvo, parked by the side of a dirt road in the shade of a copse of something wild overlooking rolling fields where several large robots are rumbling around picking vegetables. The robots have little Mexicans inside of them, and when they come out to smoke they tie their flannel shirts around their waists like grunge rockers.

A turtle is crossing the road. I'm rooting for him. So far so good.

It can be challenging to find the space and time to write, and it can also be challenging to find the space and time to be married. This is why I didn't take my laptop away to the cottage: I booked wall to wall wife time. We had dispersed both children to secure facilities for the duration, so it was a unique opportunity to give Littlestar maximum attention.

Now that we're back in our neck of the woods, however, my fingers itch to knit. I tried cutting myself off mentally from the exterior environment to create a bubble of writing space, but I got in dutch for being too inered so that's why I'm out here. I'm watching the timer tick down on my battery's life expectancy, writing under the lithium ion gun.

(The turtle is making excellent progress. No sign of traffic.)

In an ideal world I'd lean forward into the front seats and turn up the radio a bit, but doing so would result in spasms of pain ricocheting up my spine and radiating across the left side of my body. So I'll live with quiet music. And remind me about this next time I try to waterski.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to physio instead of work. Word on the street is they have a dented garbage can there that can work wonders if you fall over it backward. I'll do whatever they say. Anything is better than spending your days walking like C-3P0.

(A motorcycle gang just chortled by, but they all deftly steered around the turtle. Bless their little heroin-dealing hearts.)

Where was I? Oh yes. Cottage holidays. Our drive up north couldn't have been more delightful. Littlestar and I were giddy with the weightlessness of being child-free. We played loud music and took off our shoes. We kissed and teased. We stopped for chips and gravy and watched Ontario go by as a mottled green smear with sunshine on top.

The cottage wasn't our cottage, so when we got to the landing we were obliged to wait for our hosts. Through the magick of digital cellular telephony we learned that just behind us the highway had been shut down for seven hours by a messy accident. Our hosts were just ten cars behind the accident site itself. They were chatting with the off-duty nurse who had held the hand of the smooshed up girl as she died in the grass. A motorcycle, a Mack truck and an outcropping of jagged rock were also involved, though nobody seemed to know quite how or in what sequence.

Littlestar and I cracked open some drinks and settled in to wait. We moved the car to a shady place and fooled around.

Our hosts were the Scotch Museologist and his wife, whom I have previously called Mistress Bengal but whom I shall now call Sunshine Anderson in homage to a particularly creative mangling of her proper name that was left on her voicemail at work. When they managed to arrive after a long and looping detour we motored across the west arm of Lake Nippising and husband-freighted our kipple to the house on quaint and shady Something Island.

(When the Scotch Museologist's cousin and his cousin's wife-like yin-unit arrived later that same night they told us about how they had waited on the closed highway chatting with folks, watching kids play ball. When the highway opened again they surged through and immediately came up against a second accident: someone overzealous after being set free to drive had struck a moose, restricting the highway to a single lane.

(When the Scotch Museologist's colleague and friend arrived the next day, she reported that someone had cut the moose in half, and dragged away the rear-quarters for a barbecue.

(When Littlestar and I drove home the moose was gone, but we did see a dead baby bear.)))

The Scotch's Museologist's cottage is an acme of conscientious upkeep, standing in some contrast to our own. It's a self-built A-frame with a long tongue of floating dock, decks front and rear, trees all around, benches and sunbrellas galore, a decent stereo and a non-nature raping toilet system. (It isn't winterproofed but neither am I.)

Like all good cottages there is a refrigerator dedicated to beer, and we worked hard to empty it. The girls had their beers with limes in them and boys had their beers with unpronouncible names. We played bacchi ball and horseshoes and swam and smoked prodigious amounts of marijuana, hashish and tobacco. We barbecued a positively retarded amount of beef, and speculated about Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease becoming a new national sport.

Somebody had left up at the cottage a bushel of trashy celebrity gossip magazines about who was thinner than whom, but these were poor competition for the first-hand celebrity stories from Sunshine Anderson (who, as mentioned previously, works for a Monstrously Large Media Concern). Equally colourful but considerably less ludicrous anecdotes were shared by Lady Showboat (again, an appellation derived from a mangling of her proper name), a sort of real-life Laura Croft character tempered by charm and humility -- born in Africa, growing up in a five hundred year old English mansion, falling victim to bizarre and horrifying parasites while going on archaeological digs around the world...that sort of thing.

(The best thing about Lady Showboat was that she was the polar opposite of a woman Littlestar and I met several months ago who tried so very hard to make herself sound like a truly sophisticated citizen of the world. She exploited every opportunity to inject into any conversation mention of Madrid or Cape Town or Paris, mad to impress upon anyone and everyone who cool she was. In our subsequent social debrief Littlestar and I wondered whether that particular tit had rubbed us the wrong way because we were jealous of her cosmopolitan lifestyle, but I argued that someone who truly was as cool as the idiot had been pretending to be wouldn't have worked so hard to impress us. Lady Showboat was just that -- grounded, affable, attentive. People who genuinely lead fascinating lives don't feel the need to advertise.)

We also got to enjoy one of those classically gaytastic thirtysomething moments when a group of diverse friends sits down to table together over fine meat and plentiful wine. These are the moments banks and auto manufacturers and vintners attempt to simulate in their television commercials. Lots of spontaneous laughter, stimulating conversation, a warm glow of unmuddied togetherness...that sort of thing.

I was introduced to waterskiing, and I introduced waterskiing to my particular concentration of deftlessness. By synergizing our offerings we were able to produce an impressive back injury in fairly short order.

This was on my second attempt to become upright while being dragged behind a speeding motorboat. I realized things were incorrect in my body even before I splashed down. The most fun part was swimming back to the boat with only my right side responding predictably to locomotive command. I was wearing a life-jacket, however, so I didn't drown.

Back on land it was established that a dizzying array of different kinds of motion made me feel plenty bad, but that once propped up in place somewhere I could drink and smoke and sass on with only minor assistance.

(The big upshot, of course, is that I didn't have to help make the beds before we left.)

My back felt considerably better after Littlestar gave me a massage, and then considerably worse after we had sex. Littlestar felt guilty for not having been more sensible considering my injury, but I had no complaints. Sensible people have blue balls.

Fifty percent of the women felt too fat. The boys compared beer guts, where applicable. The brown made fun of the white for turning red. We played a game of charades in which we wrote our own person/place/thing/phrase on scraps of paper in two hats, which degenerated over a course of hours into toilet humour and sexual themes. I performed my charades sitting in an easy-chair, making affirmative and negative beeping noises like Captain Christopher Pike.

"Cunnilingus!"

"Does this look like cunnilingus to you?"

"Shush -- you can't talk!"

"Cheeseburger keeps making grunting noises like Charlie Brown's teacher! I call foul!"

"Charlie Brown's teacher getting cunnilingus?"

"Foul!"

In the mornings I stood on the end of the dock, eating an apple and thinking about stories. I am considering new strategies for deploying my writing output. We stand at the cusp of CheeseburgerBrown 2.0, almost ready to roll. I just need the bank to issue me my new credit card so I can buy a fresh domain.

I chewed and paced, watching ripples and mist, ruminating over what it is I am for, with respect to writing. I am close to another good guess. I can feel it.

When we got home Baby Yam had sprouted two additional teeth, now making for a grand total of three. He desperately wanted me to pick him up and I desperately wanted to oblige him, but hefting around a twenty pound sack of squirming baby meat just isn't a legal operation in my current condition. I require our Swiss au pair girl, Mademoiselle J., to hold him up so I can snuggle him.

"Bah!" says Baby Yam. "Zeeeeee!"

(Speaking of which, we have recently come to winch out of her how she'd best like her name to be pronounced -- and it's a far cry from the gum-chewed interpretation passed on from Beurre d'Arachide, who met her first. Now we have everybody practicing. By the time she leaves we'll have it just about right.)

Young Popsicle is still away at a different cottage with Aunt Xena. I very much look forward to and very much dread how she will catapult herself at me when she gets home. "Let's play rough!" she'll cheer, and then ask me to take her to the beach at the end of our street.

"Mercy, child -- have mercy!"

Okay, the turtle has now cleared the road and disappeared into the high grass. I should probably take that as a sign. My time is up. Best go home and face the music for taking off.

Whee!

Thought for Food

My hunger is deep but not wide.

That is to say I can partake with great relish when my appetite is with me, but it seldom is. Or rather it is only under a fairly fussy set of circumstances, a fact which causes me some consternation when I'm removed from my ideal element and expected to feed myself anyway.

I know it runs against the social grain on a fundamental level but the truth is that I prefer to dine alone. I don't want to talk to you, but if I have to I will, as long as I don't have to sit too nearby. I'm not one of those people too self-conscious to eat by myself in a restaurant -- it's my 'druthers. I enjoy a quiet booth with a view of the street, a good book propped open by the salt shaker while I pick over my feed.

This is why the dining room in the Old Schoolhouse is so clean: it is seldom used. It is my preference to sit on the floor. When we have company I do my best to dawdle in the kitchen so that I'm the last one to find a seat, increasing my chances of scoring a chair shoved to the periphery or even being obliged to sit apart from the guests entirely. If neither of these objectives can be attained I would rather delay eating until later.

Nothing is worse than being seated early in the game and then being hemmed in by other people, elbow to elbow, communally chomping like pigs at their trough. In such cases I sometimes have to sit beside somebody who's gross, which compounds the problem geometrically. That's people who chew loudly or with a high level of in-mouth food visibility, people who breathe funny when they drink, or people who just sit too close. When this happens I find excuses to jump up to fetch things or re-fill somebody's something in order to pass the time while the others maw.

I enjoy many different kinds of food, but only when the weather's right. This causes my wife some frustration. "Would you like some yogurt?"

"No thank you."

"But yesterday you couldn't get enough yogurt."

"Yeah, but that was Tuesday. Today is Wednesday. I can't abide yogurt today. I'd barf."

So, naturally, the most vexing part of my new full-time job is getting lunch into me. I eat at my desk rather than in any of the kitchens, which makes things easier, but deciding in the morning what I might be willing to eat five or six hours in the future is a game of divination suitable for Nostradamus. I'm as often wrong as I am right when I guess that I might enjoy a really tasty sandwich or some flavour of soup or a chunk of re-heated yesterday's dinner. Results are no better than random.

I tend to fall back on fruit. I can almost always eat fruit. Yesterday, for example, my lunch consisted of a clone banana, a Grannysmith apple, a tupperware disc of mixed blueberries and green grapes, and an individual serving of peach yogurt. My granola bar -- an item I've been consuming with delight for weeks -- was left untouched as the thought of eating it made me ill.

At work I only drink water, as anything else may give me a bellyache if I'm feeling wrong about it when it goes in, even if it's tasty.

The last time I was traveling in Europe and fresh fruit was hard (or expensive) to come by, I opted to eat jars of baby food. You know -- fruits or vegetables or pasta mashed into a liquidy pulp. When I was feeling particularly peckish I mixed it up a bit by munching on a cracker (I prefer saltines eaten salt-side down for optimal tongue contact). In order to keep myself sufficiently fueled for fun it was necessary to feed on these tiny portions almost continuously, thus giving the Scadinavians the impression that Canadians have no teeth. The Swedes make a killer strained pear. Ask anyone.

In the Baltics I ate only bread with butter. When I tried to fly home a stern man at the airport took away my knife, so I had to gnaw on the bread dry during the flight home. I was not bitter. I appreciate the importance of stopping hot-for-Allah Irhabim from spreading the West to death as much as the next man.

"Will I get my knife back on the other end?"

"Nyet!"

When I attended my brother's wedding at an all-inclusive resort in Quintana Roo I ate only bacon. For a week. It was the only thing my body told me was edible at the buffet. I knew my body was wrong but I wasn't willing to get into a fight over it.

My body is stupid. I have a terribly unkeen sense of smell and I think this has something to do with my odd choices. It isn't that I can't smell things, I just can't identify them very well. I'll say to my wife, "What's that smell? It smells like old socks."

"That's a bakery, honey."

"Ah...yes. Now I have it. Fresh bread. Yum!"

My body is convinced that the smell of seafood -- the smell that makes people salivate and say "I want some of that!" -- is a sign of spoil. I am able to sample only small morsels of seafood dishes before my body's conviction that I'm eating something that has turned becomes overwhelming. My idiotic somatic hardware can't shake the notion that fish are rotten, even when they taste good.

I like all tomato-based products but cannot tolerate eating an actual tomato.

I love spicy Indian food, Middle Eastern mushes of various stripes, African rice, wild game, Chinese anyting that isn't seafood, Japanese anything that isn't seafood, picante Caribbean patties, all sorts of non-fish pastas, all sorts of dead animals, vegetables, fruits, beans, seeds and breads, Thai food, salty Jewish chicken and sweet wine, hot Mexican salsas, eggs, dumplings, wraps, rolls, pockets, broths, gravies and jams.

I do not, however, love any of these things with any kind of consistency. Any of them are subject to a brief but intense repulsion without warning.

During a cross-continental road-trip with friends I came to the point where my distrust of restaurants with off-putting menus and my malaise at eating elbow to elbow with my mates each day caused me to admit nothing but cheeseburgers. "What should we eat?" my friend Plaid would ask.

"Cheeseburger!" I'd cry, quickly a familiar refrain.

Though I hadn't indulged in a cheeseburger in years, cheeseburgers became lodged in my mind as the sole thing worth consuming between home and the Pacific. Frequent mention of cheeseburgers led to everyone having cheeseburgers on the mind and soon enough we were all eating cheeseburgers no matter where we went. I have partaken of cheeseburgers in nearly every province of confederation, including several places which each claimed to have originally originated the famous Banquet Burger (all of whom were lying). I even ate a Mennonite cheeseburger, which was overcooked and bundled in lettuce like baby Moses.

(In fact, my obsession came to such a head that the word itself became my Internet moniker after that trip.)

I was under no illusion that cheeseburgers are the most delicious food there is, or even that cheeseburgers are among the harder items on a typical menu to screw up, but simply bowing to the fact that the idea of cheeseburger was making me hungry.

Maybe that's part of it -- when my idea of food and the actual product diverge too dramatically, I lose my appetite. The cartoonish archetypes of various foods in my mind may be somehow badly turned out.

Food frequently annoys me. I have things I'd rather be doing than dealing with eating. I use both my hands a lot, and hate it when one of them is handicapped by sauce or sticky. I'd rather deal with feeling hungry than deal with feeling nauseated by stuffing something in against my tummy's will.

Restaurants put too much on the plate. I order appetizers instead of meals when I can. I become irritable with waitstaff who will not be dismissed with a "I haven't much appetite today" excuse and instead pester me to give up what was wrong with the dish as prepared. "It's Thursday, okay? Fuck off."

In the United States the portions are double and sometimes even triple the size. I can barely dent them even when I'm ravenous. Also, since the staff down there are given electric shocks on their nipples if they're not supernaturally cheerful! all the time they tend to be really pushy/concerned over my appetite. On these occasions I wish I could release mustard gas in twin jets from my nostrils.

I hate going over to people's houses if they're the sort who sulk if you don't lick the plate. I want to tell them I have a disease or something so they'll leave me alone.

Italian weddings represent a special kind of trial for me.

In my briefcase I keep an emergency survival pack of edibles: granola, raisins, pepperonni sticks, gelatin candies. You never know when an eating situation might turn retarded, but you need fuel anyway. Or, at least, I never know.

I wish I did not need to spend so much thought for food.

The Hot Sex Solution

Hot sex is the glue that makes marriage both fun and functional, of this I am convinced. While a shallow analysis may conclude that many problems can be dwarfed when one's lust is sated, my angle is on the hot sex more as a symptom and tool rather than an end unto itself.

Basically my thesis is that if you can talk with one another frankly about intimacy issues and keep the sex hot after years of repeated couplings, you can talk about anything. In order to keep satisfying and exciting one another and to avoid sinking into a rut, you're pretty much obliged to be in touch with one another's feelings, appetites and sources of frustration or alienation.

Seriously, how hard is it to have a candid conversation about how you treat each other in a daily basis when you've just had a chat about how to make each other come with greater zeal? It can be awkward. It can be embarrassing. It requires a hard look at what you want, what you expect, and what you give. It requires honesty and careful listening.

In short, the tools you have to bring to the table to iron out wrinkles in the lovemaking are the same tools you're supposed to bring to bear on every aspect of your relationship -- only in the other parts the immediate rewards can be less clear. Wanting to understand your partner's feelings is a prerequisite for success, and finding the motivation is easy when the carrot at the end of the stick is hot, hot porno lovin'.

While it may be possible on the short term to have a satisfying love life with someone you resent or hate or feel distant from, I don't think such grooves can usually last. Sooner or later something in somebody changes, and what they require shifts. If you're too out of touch to track those shifts, the orgasms stop or become masturbatory. Soon it becomes harder to work up the enthusiasm to begin, or harder to look one another in the eye afterward. Eventually you find yourself on altogether different missions, clinging to dark buoys, unhappy, bitter, or even sailing into foreign ports.

I know some guys married to MILFs who complain that they never get any. They have no idea where along the way they dropped the ball. At some point things just started to suck a bit, so they watched TV instead of snuggling. As time went by they become habituated to being physically alienated from one another. It wasn't something they talked about, except for the guy to sporadically mumble that he may feel under-serviced or the girl to mutter about how things just didn't feel right. Then they watched American Idol and fell asleep.

And then they're surprised to find that a decade has passed and they don't like each other's friends.

In the words of one acquaintance of mine, they have become "colleagues in a company" whose product is raising children and balancing the chequebook. Their relationships are amicable and professional, like my relationship with the Tim Horton's girl who sells me tea at the side of the highway.

That's sweet, in a way. I mean, better for the kids that their parents are friends rather than enemies. But I think the love and listening flows better when the heads of a household are also crazy about each other. Parents are, after all, the foundation blueprint upon which children base their model of what romantic relationships look and sound like.

"Mommy, is there romance in the world?"

"Yes dear, just not at our house."

I have gained more insight into what my wife wants and needs in her life by her descriptions of what she wants and needs in bed than from any other source. It is a subject impossible to discuss without candour. Those who would hint are forced to speak openly or be left unsatisfied. Those who would brood are forced to come to terms with what they'd really like to say, or risk sleeping alone. Those who would act only selfishly find themselves playing second fiddle to a battery-powered marital aid. Those who would act only selflessly in order to avoid conflict or awkward confessions find themselves resentful and bored.

Okay, I know lust is a sin.

I never claimed to be a religious man.

But I am a happily married man who not infrequently enjoys the privilege of making his wife squeal like a getaway car. It hasn't always been easy -- particularly for a spell immediately following the birth of our first child -- but we've always managed to get back on track with a dose of frank discussion, patience and a dollop of shameless experimentation.

In conclusion, hot sex is a litmus test that broadcasts the health of the intimacy between you and your partner. Being communicative about sex as a means of keeping it hot is also a way to train one another to be more sensitive to less intimate wants and needs. And hot sex is an excellent motivator for keeping in touch with your partner's feelings, because the reward for your efforts is -- well, hot sex -- and its associated rewards like feeling trusted, feeling desirable, and enjoying the metaphysical connectivity of big time sensuality.

Yes friends, I heartily and without reservation endorse hot sex and the full panoply of its itinerant benefits. And that's one to grow on.

N'Internet Pas

It rains and rains and rains. Yesterday it rained so hard the Internet broke. While it seems to me that a decentralized global network should still work while soggy, the IT dude told us there would be no packets before supper.

One of the most rapidly apparent effects this had on my colleagues and I was that we suddenly became ignorami -- answers to even the most seemingly basic questions baffled us and left us feeling sad and stupid.

"Who's that guy who was in that movie, you know, with the fireball -- with that girl?" asks someone.

Everyone turns confidently to their machines and then, a moment later, swears. Our favourite repositories of off-site cinema knowledge are not accessible.

Later on a producer asks: "How much would a new two hundred gig FireWire drive cost?"

And the multimedia guy is forced to offer a surprised and morose reply: "I...don't know."

We feel like Superman bitch-slapped by Kryptonite. None of our magical Cyber Age powers are working. We can't know the weather report or see through traffic cameras; we cannot settle arguments; we can't buy anything or even compare prices for future purchasing; we cannot retrieve client files uploaded to our off-site FTP server; we cannot drill down through trivia or follow trails of curiosity; we can't read the news or steal photographs, download television programming or albums of pop music; we can't videoconference with our babies or wives; we can't browse stock art or commercial music libraries or step through on-line tutorials; we can't ogle the Page Three girls from Britain.

Around midday the following sage advice trickles through the various departments: Don't work too hard today or they'll clue into how much more productive we are when the Internet's off.

We're bored between being busy. We wonder if we should photocopy our bums or have stapler fights. Everybody answers every question with, "Dunno -- Internet's down."

"Is Gothenburg in Sweden?"

"Dunno -- Internet's down."

"Did somebody put on a new pot of coffee?"

"Dunno -- Internet's down."

We are helpless. Bludgeoned at the yoke of HR to carry out important and/or sensitive conversations via e-mail, we cannot resolve issues. Face to face we are chicken. "Okay, I'll talk to you about this now if you insist, but I insist we CC our conversation to your boss."

"How?"

"Maybe we should yell."

"Is he in his office?"

"Dunno -- Internet's down."

Everything is so bloody local. We miss the voices of many. We are Hugh. We might as well be working in an Afghani cave. We might as well be a bazillion miles from Earth. We're cut adrift -- vapid, disempowered, disconnected, alone.

"The IT dude says something happened to a fibre line in Brampton. Do you think it's true?"

"Look it up."

"Yeah, good idea -- hey wait: fuck you. That's not funny."

"It is, actually."

"Do I seem amused?"

"Dunno, Internet's d --"

"Shut up!"

People talk more. The telephone rings a lot. We get up from our desks and walk around to other departments to see people. It's weird. It's like an indoor field trip. If foley of clacking typewriters could be added for ambiance we would have a reasonable approximation of what it may have been like to work in an office in the nineteen-seventies or -eighties. A history class come to life!

Our connection comes back up around tea time. All work stops while we cram to catch up on our e-mail and instant messages, to get up to speed on who's been blown up by terrorists and whether or not any of Hollywood's summer blockbusters are reviewed as worth paying to see. Even deleting spam is a charmed chore when bolstered by a span of deprivation.

We are used to the Internet. Yesterday's science-fiction is today's hum-drum. I wonder what grand magicks will we take for granted tomorrow.