Marcel

How many people have spit in your mouth?

I can only think of one person who spat in mine.

I was in the back seat of his car when he did it.

It was Good Friday, 1983 and we were driving out towards Brucefield to check out a new bush.

He was in the process of telling us that there was always a freak change in the weather marking the exact time that Jesus rose from the tomb or something like that.

Being a faithless skeptic, I laughed at this. I laughed long and loud.

“Give me a break! You don’t really believe that.”

“Go ahead and laugh” he said. “You’ll see.”

Then he horked out the window.

It wasn’t a statement against me, it was just one of those juicy early spring horks. Maybe a little bit of punctuation to his certainty.

His hork was heavy on that day, and it struggled to get out the window, where physics took over and stopped it dead in the slipstream blowing past the car as we flew down the sideroad.

Then, amazingly, in a kind of slow motion, it turned ninety degrees as the wind caught it and threw it directly into the back seat of the car where it splattered onto my front teeth as I laughed.

Truly, the Lord works in mysterious ways.

I probably should have puked, but I don’t do that. All I could do was laugh and try to keep my mouth open and my lips curled as far away from my teeth as possible.

Of course I also horked his hork back out the window where it belonged.

Sadly, thanks to the slipstream, it blew back onto the window beside me, where I could watch it slide around on the glass.

It was horrible of course, but I couldn’t stop laughing.

“There aren’t too many people I’d let hork in mouth,” I said. “Looks like you’re number one on the list.”

He couldn’t answer because he was laughing so hard he had to pull over.

His name was Marcel Laporte and yesterday he died.

When I was a kid people used to say when somebody had a heart attack that he died of old age, and that made sense to me. Nobody lives forever, I would think, and maybe those same people would say about the dead man, “He had a good inning.”

But Marcel was 42 and I don’t think that was enough.

However, as we all know, that doesn’t matter.

Most of us don’t choose when we go and all anybody has to do is pick up the closest newspaper to find out about all kinds of people who never got a chance to make it to 42. I guess we should be grateful every day when we wake up and find out we made it as far as we have.

It’s a strange thing, but when I think of the good friends I grew up with, my old days friends, I see them the way they were. It’s like they still have their high school face, and their adult face is an overlay, more transparent than not.

No matter how rarely I see those people, and no matter how deeply life has carved the years into them, I don’t see the effects of those years. They can get fat, get thin, go bald, get glasses, lose an ear in a knife fight, whatever.

Living here, I can’t go to Marcel’s funeral, but a part of me is relieved.

I wouldn’t want to test it, to challenge that way I see my old friends by looking down at one of the best of them lying in a coffin.

 

 

Instead I will keep him forever seventeen, hunched over his steering wheel and crying with laughter as I wipe my teeth on his coat

Update: Marcel died, not from a heart attack, but as the result of a condition called “dilated cardiomyopathy”. It is a natural disease progression which causes a weakening of the heart muscle over time. My apologies for any confusion from prior information.

 

What’s Wrong With Me? #4

I have no faith.

I wish I did. I really do.

I would love to have that kind of confidence.

This isn’t just some kind of anti-religion thing, either. This is an every thing.

When I say that I have no faith, I don’t specifically mean that I have no faith in God. What I mean is that I have so little faith in anything that I don’t even have enough faith to have no faith. I can’t even commit to being an atheist.

It could be that some part of my embryonic brain never developed correctly when I was a fetus, or some crucial gene expressed AAGG when it should have gone CCGG, or who knows what got screwed up, but the end result is me, and that can be a real pain in the ass at times.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of faith. Two aspects.

One aspect could be described as an overriding belief or trust in the validity of anything. Of course, I have to be able to muster up a reasonable amount of this first kind of faith. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to masquerade as a functioning adult in our society.

I have faith, I believe, that if I go to work at my job and do it reasonably well, I can expect to be paid for that work with a piece of paper, call it a “pay stub” which in turn suggests that a certain number of other, different pieces of paper, which we can call “money”, or at least an agreed upon electronic representation of this “money”, will be electronically placed into my bank account, which is in itself an electronic and imaginary thing until such time as I go to the bank and demand some of that paper money. I will then have faith that I can take that paper money or perhaps a piece of plastic that represents the possibility of that paper money, and exchange an ink impression of that plastic card or a few select pieces of paper money for foods that I assume I will be alive to eat in a few days time.

It’s mind-boggling how many intangible agreements and rank assumptions are being made in that convoluted series of behaviours.

And maybe assumption is a better word for that kind of faith. We assume that everything will more or less be the way everything generally appears to be most of the time, and so we are able to carry on with the activities that we assume will get us through it all.

And most of the time, we are correct enough in our assumptions to keep it all going.

The kind of faith that I find much harder to understand, the kind of faith I can’t find in myself is another, more meaningful kind. The kind that runs in tandem with that first kind, but goes much deeper.

That second aspect of faith looks from the outside like an underlying sense of cosmic certainty, a belief in some unwavering dependability at work in the universe that some people find second nature to rely on at a gut level. Some get that feeling from religion, others from science, others still from the mystical energies of shiny rocks or telepathic aliens with rectal probes.

I don’t get it from anything.

I look at the people who have that feeling and I think about what they must think. .

Those faithful people appear to have a deep-seated certainty that they’re making progress towards some meaningful end, aiming at something much greater and more valuable than just robotically responding to stimuli, acting out the behaviours necessary to fulfill the needs of all those basic assumptions I was talking about. They feel like they are part of a Plan, like there’s more going on here than meets the eye, like things are being taken care of at a very macro level.

Call it God, the fundamental laws of the universe, Fate, Destiny, whatever. It ends up in the same place, but where does that all come from? How do those people who have that kind of faith do it?

How can they believe that there is some skein of meaning holding everything together when so much of life is random and confusing?

Why do they see order and pattern and hidden infrastructure where I see formless, meaningless chaos roiling just out of view?

Why do they experience a universe that makes sense while I live in one where the only way to make any sense at all is to dig it out for yourself?

The problem has to be in me.

I’m not able to see Karma at work. I don’t see nice people being rewarded and kindnesses being amplified through the world.

I see people being born into hopelessness and strapping themselves with explosives to try and find in their deaths the meaning that has escaped them in life.

I see vicious old men who have lived hidden for decades as pedophiles and predators while many more good hearted people get sick and die young.

They see a God Hand reaching out and pointing The Way where I see fingers pointing in every direction and no direction and all of the fingers I see are on the hands of men.

It looks to me like we are born into a world that people have made for us, where we are raised to see only what they want us to see, and then, if we’re lucky enough and smart enough to tear it all down, we find out that there is no reality. There never was. If we’re clever enough to ask the right questions and at least try to find the answers, we learn the truth:

Reality, life, everything you will ever see or hear, the past, the present and the future, it’s all something that we have to build for ourselves. We have to wake up every day and fight to scratch some kind of pattern into the random formlessness that explodes around us every millisecond of every day of our lives in order for us to have any reality at all.

That’s what I sense to be the truth.

But I don’t believe it.

I can’t.

Because I don’t have any faith.

 

Auslanders: Dusseldorf Story Goes off The Rails

I started this story originally as another in what I intend to be a series about the odd things I have been finding on our travels. You may remember the strange note I found in York…

The next item I was going to write about was this:

Clearly, it is some kind of tool. Snips of some sort.

You may well imagine the jolly tale of how I found these snips in the middle of the city of Dusseldorf, how I was walking along the median on Immermanstrasse waiting for the light to change so we could cross and go back to a Korean restaurant that turned out to serve the absolute worst food I have ever imagined when I looked down as I so often do and saw this foot-long tool sitting in the grass.

Just sitting there all rusty and ignored.

Who would leave these here in the middle of the road?

Why did they look so old and unused?

What use would some German serial killer put them to?

I had to have them of course, so I snapped them up and they sit beside me even now as a talisman of great power. Also, they are handy for pulling out enormous metal slivers, should I get any.

However, the story that I intended to write never materialized.

I was going to write something short, some joky, smarty pants thing that would hopefully generate a quick snicker and you could move on with your day, perhaps enjoy for yourself some tasty bon bons and whatnot.

But it didn’t work.

Instead, I wrote this story, which runs off on a tangent and never comes back.

I have included it here because I find it incredibly revealing.

Dusseldorf

It’s a freaky name, and I have no idea what it means. Or if it means anything at all.

I’m sure that, at some point, it held some kind of powerful, evocative meaning for the ancient German peoples who coined the name. Kind of like how the name Sarnia conjures up powerful and evocative feelings in the citizens of Ontario.  

The first time I rolled into The Deuce (The Deuce, D-Dorf, The Dorf, Dorfian Raider, whatever), I was riding on my bike. I hadn’t planned on going directly into the city, but while I was cruising the bike paths out of Strump, widening out from the town to get a gut-level feel for the area, I saw the bridge over the Rhein not too far away.

“I can get there,” I thought.

So I did.

And once I was there, I couldn’t imagine that the city itself could be all that much further. I could see the Rhein something tower, and what looked like city buildings. Maybe just a little further and I’d be right in the thick of it.

It turned out I was right. About half an hour later, I was wheeling into the city center on Heinrich Heine Alle.

As far as I can make out, this is a key street, perhaps mostly because it separates two of the most commonly visited areas of the city.

On the Rhein side is the Aldtstadt, which means old town.

The Aldtstadt is, in most ways, exactly what you would imagine.

It has cobbled streets, a market on one end, a square with a statue of a guy on a horse, some old buildings, and a lot of shops aimed squarely at the tourist trade.

It also has something that you could never imagine.

I was born and raised in Clinton, a small town in Ontario, which is a big province in Canada, which itself is a pretty fricking huge country.

In Clinton, there are three or four thousand people, Ontario has twelve million, and all of Canada has around thirty million people.

When you grow up in rural Canada, you get used to a certain amount of personal space and freedom. You get used to driving through town at your own pace, parking right in front of the place you’re going to, going straight through the cash register at the store. When the Fair’s on, and people line the streets to watch the parade, you think, “Man, where did all these people come from?” and you shake your head in amazement. Look, there’s your Grade One teacher. There’s the big sister of your first crush. Wild.

Of course, you grow up and move to Toronto, and you travel a bit. You go to Disneyworld, you mash into the stands at a U2 concert, you walk through Chinatown in San Francisco or line up to get into the North Rim park at the Grand Canyon, and you soon learn what a crowd is all about. You learn how to get into the mass, line up for whatever it is going on, shuffle forward every few seconds like Zombie Number 3 from Day of the Dead, then when it’s over you shuffle back out and head for home.

That’s something that I won’t take for granted again.

For people in my area, driving back from Toronto is a distinct process, something like what happens when a deep sea diver comes up from the bottom. You do if carefully, negotiate the different strata in stages so you don’t get the bends.

You come out through the city center, jostle through metro streets to the Gardiner, gut out the heavy traffic until you get to the 427, where it’s usually thinned out as you pass through the boroughs.

You gun it a bit to the 401, and maybe the number of cars thickens up again for awhile, depending on the time of day, but soon you’re out there in the sprawling wasteland of Mississauga/Oakville/IndustriHell and you feel the crush of the city lessen, and you can loosen your belt. Everything’s lower, wider and it goes by in a hurry maybe partly because there’s nothing to see.  

Blowing past Milton is a key benchmark. The lights along the highway are gone now, and there’s more scrub and squatty treelots between squat box buildings and strip homes. You eat up a lot of ground here, and it’s always a surprise how quickly you get to the big Schneider’s sign that begins the next stage.

You don’t really pay much attention to Cambridge unless you need a last dose of Thai food at Benh Thanh (which is always possible), then you’re pulling off the 401 to tear a ragged hole through Kitchener-Waterloo before you drop into the dead zone between Waterloo and Stratford.

You’re tempted to drive like hell. I mean, it’s not a whole lot different from the 401 until New Hamburg unless you look around and realize that you’re driving through farmland and patchy bush, and if there weren’t cars coming at you all the time, it would be pretty dark. Almost nice. But New Hamburg to Stratford is the worst. It’s Single lane, always loaded with crawling locals or wheezing trucks and you haven’t shaken off the feeling that you should still be driving at least 130. So you grit your teeth and creep forward, or if you’re me, you do something else.   

I take the cut-off at Shakespeare, slip around the back end of Stratford, skipping the Timmy’s (somebody probably already made me stop in Milton anyway) and take the Hydro Line into another world.

It’s a quiet, thin strip of road with bush, fields and farms crammed up against the tiny shoulder. It’s vaguely European in a way, except that there’s nobody else on the road and no towns to slow you down.

During this stretch, and the close I get to Goderich, the slower I go.

I’m not in a hurry anymore. Maybe it’s the chat in the car, or maybe I don’t want the music to stop, or maybe, somehow I’ve slipped between the cracks of life for awhile. As long as we stay in the car, there’s nothing else out there. No crowds, no neon, no ads, no raw blast of fluorescence everywhere you look. We are for those moments alone in a bubble in the dark, sliding out of time on a thin gray ribbon.

Dusseldorf is the opposite of that.

It’s not Tokyo or Bangkok. It’s not an all out assault on the individual, a happy nightmare of alien humanity. It’s familiar enough to look normal, which makes it somehow more jarring.

On a warm Saturday, it has to be seen to be believed.

The Aldstadt is famed for “the longest bar in the world,” which I take to mean a particular block of street upon which the Uerige bar spills its clientele. The entire block is choked with people. There are a few tables, all full, standing tables, all full, steps, all full, a road, all full, people sitting crosslegged on the road, dogs, children, old people, teens, tweens, hipsters, rockers, jazzbos, bohemians, yuppies, executives, drunks, every kind of person you could jam into a crown is milling around outside this bar.

“Wow,” you think. “This place is crazy!”

You thread your way through the place, thinking back to trying to get near the stage at a 1981 Rush concert in the London Gardens, but when you get to the end of the street, there is no Geddy Lee. There is another street. And it is full of people.

All along this street, on both sides, restaurants have extended patios. Every patio is full. Like, Euro full. People you have never met are sharing your table full. Rubbing up against more men than you did even that one time you walked through a crowded gay bar with Peter, who felt you should at least go once just to see what it was like before you moved out of Toronto full. It’s a madhouse.

The street between all these patios is gridlocked with people wandering around presumably looking for tables and once they find out that they can’t get one, they line up at the restaurant of their choice, clogging it up even more.  

You wind your way through all these people with a deathgrip on your son’s hand, checking back to make sure your wife and daughter haven’t been pulled down like sickly antelopes and you make a break for a tiny cross street where you figure you can catch your breath.

But you can’t.

Even the three little restaurants running through here have set up patios, with as few as two or three tables jutting out into this narrow alley.

And then out the other side of the alley, the Starbucks is full. The bookshop is full. The bakery is full. The T-Com cell phone shop is full. H&M is full. The shoe store is full. Every café is full. The street in front of the eis shop is more than full. Every street is completely saturated with people, all kinds of people, with all their smells and sounds and parts flapping around, all walking aimlessly, like they have nothing better to do than to pile into the nearest shop, regardless of what is for sale, where they can press themselves into the crowd.

It is like this in every German city I have been to.

If there weather is nice, there must be some kind of home-release program where the citizens are cast out into the streets with a fistful of spending money and instructions not to come home without the stink of humanity all over them and no money left.

If you watch these crowds carefully, you see something very revealing. Something that gives me a huge insight into the German people that give me an advanced understanding of things I have read about the Second World War. It explains a few things, if you give it some thought.  

Whereever there are Germans doing something, that’s where the Germans go.

I will use an example by referring to myself.

If I am in a city, looking around, and I see a store with a teeming throng of people inside, I will avoid that store. If there’s a huge lineup outside an ice cream shop, I will think, “Boy am I glad I’m not in that line.” If I am in a traffic jam, my stress level skyrockets to a point at which I feel like I might explode and soil the interior of the car with Lobb shrapnel.

I do not like to be completely surrounded with the body heat and exhalations and smells and shoulders and faces of people with all their people stuff all over me all the time.

But the Germans I have seen in these cities appear to feel quite the opposite.

If there is a line up somewhere, the Germans will come a-running to jump in.

If people are clustered into a small pool or steam bath in some hotel, Germans will immediately shuck off the gear and slide in. Right up close, if they can. Mash themselves right up against you, often without meeting your eye at all.

If there are people clustered around the stand up table in Uerige, that’s good enough for everybody else, so everybody piles on.

They seem to love it like this.

There are people all over the bike paths in huge groups, people strewn along the Rhein, soaking up the sun, people walking dogs, people jamming the aisles in Real, people loitering around the doors of the arena, people in every chair in the doctor’s office, people swarming around the bank machine.

Everywhere you go, you will see people. German people. And when there are German people, there will be German people there in no time. You know the rest of them can’t be far behind, loving to do what the rest of them are doing.

I think North Americans, or let’s say many of them at least, are individualists. That’s probably why our people went there in the first place. They couldn’t stand the social structures in Europe, the cheek by jowl living conditions, the rigid class system and the submersion of the self into the teeming masses.

They busted out of this busy place, put their lives on the line and literally cut, burned and ripped themselves a country out of the trees and rock and soil of the New World, yes, brutalizing the natives and animals and scouring it unrecognizable in the process and I feel bad about that, but I also can’t help but feel so thankful that they did it and that I came from them. Because I need to live in a place like that.

I’m not like these people over here.

When we walk through those roiling crowds, my wife gets a joyous look on her face. She loves it. She loves walking through the tight streets, weaving through the other walkers, loves the crowds and the action. I think she sees all those people and thinks, they’re here because something good must be happening, and she wants in on it.

Even on that late Friday night when we wandered the streets with our kids, on the night we saw a weird old drunk guy sic his dog on an Asian tourist, watched red-faced, beer swilling punks in lederhosen fight outside a bar, avoided tottering middle-aged men pissing against the wall, and pulled our kids through knots of chain smoking drunks, even on that night, she was grinning.

All I could feel was chaos simmering in the beery fumes hanging over the cobbles, bubbling up in barked-out German. It felt like something was waiting to happen, something that you didn’t want your family to be around for. Something bad.

And she thought it was fun.
In some ways, I’m not sure how happy she’ll be when we get back home.

What’s Wrong With Me - Part 3

I can’t just do things.

There are people out there in the world who are running all over the place doing things.

I have seen these people.

Some of them are parachuting, some are picking up strange in dirty bars and plenty more of them are just sitting there watching a stupid sitcom, which doesn’t sound like much now that I think about it.

But I am sitting here writing about those other people, which is even less involved that the sitcom viewers.

You see?

I’m not actually doing something, taking action and being involved, I’m thinking about other people who are.

This is a problem and I have had it since the earliest age.

Other kids were playing with their toys with a complete lack of self-consciousness, really getting into the game.

“You be the mom and I’ll be the baby and- “ you know the kind of play I’m talking about. It’s the kind of play all kids do. Let’s pretend stuff.

It didn’t take very long for me to realize that I had some problems fully enjoying this kind of play.

I am not suggesting that I was above it or that I withheld from it, because I wasn’t and I didn’t.

The specific problem that I had was that I was unable to really commit to it.

Let’s pretend that we are kids right now and we are sitting on the floor playing.

Our moms are in the other room at the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking about somebody having marital problems.

I am me, and you are the other kid.

You start by making a set out of an old blanket and we are supposed to drive our trucks around and pick up a load of gravel and dump it at the construction site. Not too tricky, right?

Wrong.

I am listening to the moms.

I can’t shut them out.

They aren’t loud, but I have good ears, and I can hear pretty much every word they’re saying and it’s strange. When moms get together like that and say things, there is usually something bad going on. Somebody’s husband was with another woman or got sick. People were breaking up or kids were causing trouble or money was tight.

We are sitting here on the floor with stupid blanket and two beat up little trucks with tires that don’t even turn anymore, pretending that it was a town and we are grown men, and twenty feet away in the other room there is a whole lot of actual grown man and woman stuff going on and it doesn’t sound good at all. Why the heck would we want to pretend that we were old enough to get involved in all that crap? It would make more sense if our moms were out there pretending to be kids just to get away from it.

But why I am listening to them? Why am I not driving my truck up this mountain? Why can’t I just enjoy this? Why am I asking myself these questions? I’m six!

Do you remember when you were in high school and you had to walk down the hall past those guys who were up against the lockers in that one place, and when you went through that gauntlet you felt conspicuous and self-conscious and somehow enlarged, as if you were on stage?

I never haven’t felt like that.

If you told me I was going to have to go up on a stage in front of ten thousand people and read a specific sheet of paper and I had to read exactly what was on that paper and only what was on that paper, I would be nervous. The expectations would gnarl my guts up. I could do it, but I would feel tense.

However, if you told me I was going to have to go up on a stage in front of ten thousand people and all I had to do was kill twenty minutes doing whatever I wanted as long as I didn’t take any sheets of paper or anything with me, I would be utterly calm. Not the least bit nervous.

It wouldn’t bother me to stand up there and freeball it in front of all those people because I have been doing it since I was born.

It could be a result of being a certain kind of kid and growing up in a climate of pervasive media exposure.

Maybe growing up watching TV shows with canned laugh tracks, with actors who looked at the camera and arched an eyebrow and broke that fourth wall and let you in on the gag – we all know this is a show – maybe being the kind of kid I was and being exposed to hours and hours of post-modern self-reflection and later, ironic cynicism, maybe that makes it impossible for me to actually feel like I am taking part in the life I am living.

Maybe I have completely internalized this sense of being an actor in a show and instead of living, I am performing, even if there isn’t an audience.

Except for myself.

And I never go home. I am always here. Always watching.

Playing with those trucks and driving them around on the blanket made me feel stupid because I was too busy watching myself to get into it and have fun, to absorbed with connotations of what we were supposed to do and how it must look to somebody watching from outside and what kind of truck sounds are we making? These don’t sound real.

Thinking like that inevitably led me breaking all the unwritten rules of play.

When we played War and somebody claimed to have shot me, I would say things like, “You never shot me. I felt nothing, this is just a game, it’s not real. I am bulletproof.” knowing full well that it would buzz kill the fun but unble to stop myself.

When we played sports I didn’t care if I won or lost.

“Don’t worry about stopping the goals. It doesn’t matter if we lose, guys, we get paid the same no matter what.”

“But we aren’t getting paid!” some kid would say in confusion.

I would just nod slowly as I thought about how much he didn’t get it.

If I was being lured into a fight I would laugh about the ridiculousness of the situation.

“So you want to fight me because I called you a name? Because I mocked you and hurt your feelings? I’m sorry. I didn’t know that you were sensitive and I had no idea that you so valued my opinion. I take it all back. I promise I won’t hurt your feelings with my words anymore. You’re not a dickhead.”

When I was a kid and trying to ask a girl out, I would ask her if I could ask her out and then describe the process of asking her out as I did it.

Just ask my first girlfriend.

This is pretty much exactly what I said to her on the phone.

“Can I ask you something? It might be a bit… I don’t know, you might not like it, but… well, I’ve been wondering - If I were to call you on the phone and ask you out, which you would have to admit could be for some people kind of a difficult thing to do because, you know there’s always a risk of rejection, say within the next few days or so, how do you think you would respond to something like that? Would that be a problem? What do you think you might say? Assuming I did that.”

I’m not even going to talk about our first “date.” You’ll have to buy the book for that one.

Other kids climbed tall trees. I was consumed with the likelihood and consequences of falling.

In my head as I stand under the tree:

“How would these kids get me to safety? There’s no way they could carry me if I had a broken leg, and the ambulance couldn’t get back here. Some of them would have to go back to get help and someone would have to stay here with me, and I would be writhing in pain on the ground, so nobody would want that job. It would be gross. Then some adult would have to be convinced that it was a true story and come back here by the river and somehow rig up a kind of travois, which would take hours, and by then I would think we would have to worry about gangrene, and there goes the leg. Now I’ve got a prosthesis and do you know how much they cost? If you want a good one, it’s in the thousands I bet, and my parents wouldn’t be able to get me the best one. Sure, they’d offer to get it, but I would feel terrible guilt. They have enough to worry about. And what about my kung fu career? I haven’t even started taking kung fu, but I would have been amazing at it. It’s a huge loss. Girls might find it disturbing to date me. They find me disturbing enough already with two legs. But I don’t want a girl who’s judgmental like that. Why shouldn’t she love me just because I have one leg? How shallow is that? But if I don’t climb this tree these other guys will think I’m chicken, so I have to climb at least part way up. I will go up to a point at which, if I do fall, I will only get bruised, assuming I fall correctly. I have to make sure when I fall that I don’t have my leg tucked under me somehow. I have to fall correctly. Drop, tuck and roll. Maybe I should clear away some of the dead branches under the tree so that when I do fall, I don’t land on one of these. If I lost an eye, I could never be an Air Force Pilot. Not that I would want to, but it would be cool. And I would get headaches from reading so much if I only had one eye. Look. With one eye it’s harder to perceive depth, so I would get hit way more in kung fu fights and potentially lose the other eye…”

And now, I could be outside trimming something or carousing or feasting on the delights of European culture, dancing scantily clad in the warm sunshine, but I sit in my basement in front of this computer, still analyzing, still consumed by minutiae, still not actually doing anything.

Fun with Neck Beard

I had Pong just after it came out.

I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when I was in high school. I was a paladin.

I remember the exact moment I first saw Zork and yes, it was life changing.

I collected comics and kept them in my chest of drawers in res at York instead of clothes.

I know what “load *.*” means.

I had a Black Lotus and all the moxen from the first run of Magic cards and won a tournament against a guy who wore gray sweatpants with pockets in them and left his smell in the chair after he got up to go outside and cry.

I can name all my mains from UO through to WOW.

I read fantasy and sci-fi. Only the good stuff, and not those genres exclusively, but it still counts.

I listen to Leo.

You see, in so many ways, I am a geek.

And yet, I don’t like anime.

I haven’t actually learned enough about all those computers I’ve had to actually fix them.

I don’t code. Never did. Not even HTML.

I exercise and go outside a lot.

Worst of all, I have never had a neck beard.

Until now.

Auslanders: Schule Days Part 2

We were not worried about my son.

He is an old-fashioned charm-the-pants-off-you charmer. The kind of charmer that you don’t see much in Grade Three anymore.

I know that everybody says stuff like that about their kids, but I’m the one that really means it.

I also know that everybody says they mean it, too.

Of course, parents don’t have any choice. We need to have ridiculously inflated opinions of our children. It’s crucial. Without some kind of genetically programmed delusion as to our children’s greatness, we as a species would have died after that first generation that had gave birth. “What is this wizened, helpless tyrant creature that screams and wails with no explanation?” those ancient humans would say, shortly before throwing their progeny into the river.

And without that skewed sense of pride you feel about your kids, you wouldn’t be able to bring yourself to boldly tape paintings up on your fridge that look like the work of a psychopath. The kind who eats paint and throws up on the paper.

But in my case, when I say that my son’s a charmer, I fricking mean it, He really is a charmer, in the classic, is able to bilk fortunes from lonely widows way.

He came into this world with an inherent ability to say the right thing in the right place at the right time way more often than is normal. Certainly more than I can.

When he was sick a few weeks ago with a crazy 106 degree fever and I brought him a cup of juice, he croaked out with an exhausted, raspy little whisper, “Thanks Dad, you’re really taking good care of me.”

He came home from school with Easter cards for his sister. I asked him why he made them for her and he said, “Just because she’s the best.”

He always asks how you feel, did you have a good sleep, was your trip good, was that a delicious sandwich? He always notices your new shirt or pants and he usually thinks they look great.

He compliments people, he shares even his best treats, he plays nicely with everyone, he listens when other people talk and speaks in a way that tells you he was listening, and most disturbing of all for a disciplining parent, he’s always sorry for whatever he did wrong. And then you end up apologizing to him for giving him hell.

From the minute we got off the plane from Canada he never complained, never got home sick, never got angry for being dragged away from his home for 1/8^th of his life thus far, never freaked out or gave us any indication that he wasn’t perfectly content.

How can you blame us for thinking that this kid would waltz into that German school on the first day, sit down as a desk, work his usual magic and we wouldn’t have anything to worry about?

You can’t.

My daughter, not so much.

She doesn’t work quite the same way.

She was the baby who cried for the first four months of her life.

She was the kid we thought would have trouble stepping into a new school.

She was the one who woke up on our first day in Germany and demanded that we go home. Right. Now.

I’m sure if she read this, she would mark it down as proof that I like my son better, but she would be wrong. I like my children equally. One of them just tries to make that more difficult than it needs to be now and again.

Of course she can be every bit as charming as my son in her own way. She’s plenty cute enough, unfailingly kind and polite with others, way too witty and clever for her age, but she appears to suffer from just enough anxiety to make her forget sometimes that she is, in fact, charming and polite.

And now my beautiful little ten year old girl who brought stuffed animals in her suitcase instead of clothes was going to high school. Alone. In German. With teenagers who listen to Dimmu Borgir and shave their eyebrows.

This was the child who would need extra attention on German School Day Number 1, not my son.

I wouldn’t need to use the duct tape on him to get him there without incident.

We got up that first morning, had a German breakfast (which of course looks suspiciously like a ham and cheese sandwich), packed up the schuleransen and went out to meet up with the local family that was basically adopting us. They escorted us for the short hop to the elementary school where we sent my son in with the other boy, watched him walk into the screaming horde of kids in the yard, and turned to leave without looking back.

I was focused on the challenge that was still before us.

My wife had arranged to meet up with yet another local family, this one in possession of a similarly high school bound daughter. The interaction with this family would be much more difficult than it was with the first family we met. Eveybody in that first family spoke excellent English, whereas the girl we would send my daughter into battle with had only a vague concept of English. She had heard rumours about it, but that was all.

The father was a banker, however, so he was fluent, and he was apparently thrilled by the opportunity to guide North Americans through what we were told was a very important church-based ceremony for all the kids going into Grade Five. Kind of a reverse graduation.

The new high schoolers were welcomed by the equivalent of the high school students’ council, the music teacher played his guitar and sang some unusual songs that made everyone except me laugh (don’t ask me how my wife figured out what was funny), and then I guess the kids were told that Jesus would protect them from the predations of all the eighteen year old criminals loitering in the smoking area. Or something like that.

I looked around and pretended that I wasn’t staring at all these fancified German people.

There were a lot of expensive suits worn by exceptionally smooth skinned men who kept sneaking glances at their watches. How hard did you have to shave to get that clean looking? I didn’t look that smooth when I was a baby.

I realized then that this town into which we had moved was pretty much exclusively populated by businessmen and professionals, all of whom worked in Dusseldorf. It was all about bankers, insurance executives, accountants, vice-presidents, personnel directors and the lawyers that circle them, alert for carrion. The church parking lot was choked with Audis, Mercedes and BMWs.

That was when I noticed that I was the only dad not wearing a suit. The only dad who didn’t shave. The only dad who didn’t have to hurry off to the office.

The average adult male in our little village works from eight in the morning to at least eight at night, including Saturdays and sometimes Sundays as well. When they finally do make it home, their kids have long since eaten and gone to sleep. But that’s okay, because most of these men have come home carrying briefcases full of extra work that they have to finish. It’s not for nothing that these people almost ruled the continent. They’re driven to work, to succeed.

But their wives appear to exist in a different universe.

You see them all over town during the day. They line up to drop kids off at school, line up to pick kids up after school, clog up the grocery store, fill the patios in front of the Italian eis cafe, pile into the soccer field to dump the boys off before rolling out with the girls for dance lessons. I’m sure that lots of them work, but the number of stay-at-home moms here is unbelievable.

And they do it all in black leather knee high riding boots. With tight jeans.

I watched these people throughout that entire church service, wondering how so many women could put up with their absentee husbands, then thinking about how much money I could make pimping out my male friends…

Before I had a chance to feel guilty for planning an illicit, international male prostitution ring whilst sitting in church, our German guides jumped up and told us we were supposed to accompany our newly Grade Fived children over to the high school for further portions of ham and cheese buns and coffee.

They would have to do it without me.

I had been keenly eyeing my watch during all of this, and not just because I was hoping it would help me stay awake during foreign language hymn sing hour.

I was watching my clock because I HAD to be ready to get my son when his school was over and they don’t follow the same kind of pattern we are used to in North America. There is no three o’clock thing over here.

Elementary school kids in this area go to school at about 8:15 and get out at what we would call lunch. For the day. That’s it. No more school until the next day.

But that lunch release time appears to be variable.

Sometimes kids have four periods, sometimes five, sometimes six. Then there are a bunch of kids who stay at the school because their parents both work. And I would imagine there are more kids yet who live in the school under the stairs on soiled gymnastics mats, surviving on left behind lunches. Actually, this kind of makes me sad, because maybe there are kids like this and I shouldn’t be making sport of them.

I peeled off from the mass of people heading for the high school and beelined across the soccer pitch to the elementary school.

I got there in time to see kids filing out into the yard, most of them screaming and howling with no apparent cause. Again.

It could be that they were saying something really interesting, except at maximum volume, but it was all in German of course, so it just sounded like the monkey cage at the zoo to me.

I waded through these screeching kids and stood at the gate my son and I had agreed upon for our meeting.

And stood there.

And stood there.

Nobody else was coming out.

There were no more children in the playground, at the door or standing with me at the curb, waiting for a ride. They were all at home. Long gone.

My son never came out of the school.

Okay, fine. I had to assume that he was inside, either waiting for me to come in and fish him out, or he had so utterly worked his magic on the teacher that she had taken him home for her very own.

I wandered in the main door, where a little bespectacled guy sat in a windowed room. I later learned that this was the hausmeister.

You would imagine that the hausmeister was something like the head custodian or janitor, but you would be wrong. It turns out that the students do most of the cleaning in the school. I mean all of them, not just the ones living under the stairs. Oh, those poor little scamps!

We are told that once in awhile some professional cleaners come in and take a bash at the place, but mostly it is organized work gangs of children, led by their teachers, that keep the school clean. This revelation made me feel:

a) fiendishly happy to see that these little wretches were forced to mop up their own squalor, and I wished this was the policy back home and

b)concerned and wondering if I was the only one who saw eerie parallels to a dark time in German history.

So what does the hausmeister do?

Well, as far as I could tell he just sits there in the room by the door and shrugs helplessly when you ask him if he speaks any English. Then he sends you into the office.

The head secretary spoke English very well and told me that she would page my son’s teacher and find out where he was. This teacher turned out to be a very kind woman but when she pointed at a different door and said that my son had escaped quite awhile ago, my stomach coiled into itself.

“He left? On his own?”

The secretary translated.

“Yes. He ran out. That way.”

I wheeled around and tore out of there.

There is a shortcut from the elementary school to our house, and I blazed through it and burst out into the street by our driveway to see that my son wasn’t there.

I ran back the other way, the way that we told him to walk home.

He wasn’t there.

I ran back to the school, circled it, went through it again, asked the teacher again.

He wasn’t there. He hadn’t come back. They hadn’t seen him since he ran out half an hour earlier.

Deep breath.

Clear the mind and think.

Don’t panic.

Do you have kids?

Have you ever moved with those kids to a foreign country and then kind of lost one?

It’s hard to describe this feeling.

If we were in Goderich and I couldn’t find one of my children after school, I would assume that he or she had gone to Grandma and Grandpa’s, or to a friend’s or something.

But we weren’t in Goderich.

We were in Germany, thousands of miles away from every single thing my son had every known. And the only thing I could assume here was horrible.

My son was missing.

This is one of those times when that rational, sensible part of your brain, the one that calculates odds and plans and deals with day to day life, has to struggle to make itself heard over the million images flashing flooding out from that primordial, deep seated fold in the limbic system that turns you into the Hulk, that makes you pick up the car that’s crushed your child, face bullets without flinching or tear grizzlies apart with your bare hands.

Your body floods with adrenaline and your lips and fingers go electric, all pins and needles.

You should think, okay, my son is mixed up and wandering around nearby, or he is with his new friend, or he is playing soccer or something innocent, but instead, you think, pedophiles! Serial killers! Kidnappers! Witches! Zombie attack!

You clench your fists.

Your heart pounds in your head and everything around you goes into slow motion.

Where is the danger?

How can you kill it?

But there is no danger there. No car, no bullets, no grizzlies.

No child.

I have, a few horrible times, seen my children in times of danger.

I watched as my one-year-old daughter fell backwards down the stairs and land on her head, leaped across the room too late to do anything but see her stunned on the hardwood floor, too hurt to cry.

I watched as the doctor tested her whether or not she had a broken arm by putting a sheet on the floor, making us stand ten feet away and watching her try to crawl towards us, falling on her face every time she put weight on her left hand and screaming in terror.

I watched my son’s pale face taut with fear as he gave a weak thumb’s up from a gurney rolling him off for six and a half hours of surgery to remove a tumour from his middle ear and sat watching him again that night as he lay swollen in the recovery room, so thin and fragile, almost transparent under a clot of blood-stained gauze, surrounded by machinery.

These things cascade through your mind even as you realize millions of parents have seen worse, done worse, survived worse, even as you know that everything will be fine.

But that’s what those other parents thought.

The ones who never found their kids, or found them beaten or broken or dead. They all went through the same process, the same icy slash of worry, the same certainty that everything would be fine.

Every horrible story I had read in the paper, every tragic new article, every vicious movie I’ve seen or book I’ve read, all those added their own weight to the fear that ripped across my brain in that moment.

Where else could I run? Where could I look?

I ran back past my house and this time I saw my son kicking at the door, crying, sobbing aloud, complete panic on his face.

Relief broke the tension in my chest, and then suddenly I felt everything he was feeling, a tidal burst that went through me in a crushing wave of nausea and fear. And then the guilt.

“I’m here. It’s okay.”

He whirled to face me, his eyes bulging with terror, streaming tears, and shrieked.

“Where were you!?”

It didn’t matter that it was his fault. It didn’t matter that I was there, right where we had agreed to meet. It didn’t matter that he had known where to go and what to do, that he knew where his house was and found it on his own. He had come out of the school and I wasn’t there and then he ran home alone and found the house locked. We had dragged him to this place, miles from his home and then we left.

He was utterly alone.

I grabbed him up in a hug but he twisted away and kicked out at the door again.

“No! Let me in!”

I back off and opened the door.

Once inside he threw down his schuleransen and yelled at me.

“I hate school! I hate Germany! I want to go back home!”

I explained where we were supposed to meet, that I had been there, that there was a mistake but that it was okay, that everything was okay now and it would never happen like this again, but he didn’t care.

He was never going to that school.

He was not going to stay here.

He would be going home. Right. Now.

I could have been the mad dad and given him hell and toughened up and told him that if he had waited for me where we had agreed to meet, none of this would have happened, but I didn’t.

It turned out that his bad day at school had started well before he ran out after last period.

And none of it was his fault.

What Really Happened In Spain?

Okay, it’s time for me to fess up.

Why couldn’t I write more posts when I was in Spain?

What the heck was stopping me from spending more time crafting quality material for you to enjoy and reread many, many times per day.

Well, here it is.

I’m not proud of what I did, but when you’re on the Inside, a man will do what it takes to survive.

I just hope we can all learn from my experience. For example, did you know that window sashing makes an excellent shank?

Does Mrs. thelabcoatguy Like Our Place in Spain?

Um, yes.

Note: she is sitting at the supper table in that shot. I know, it’s ridiculous. And for a price, I can tell you who to call to rent it.

Why No Recent Posting?

Hello.

You may remember me from such films as “I Am Your New Media Teacher” or “This Guy Writes Stories About Himself” or even my most recent movie “I Am Writing a Blog From Germany.”

Sadly, none of these films were summer blockbusters, and our special effects budgets were very low. As a result, I had to do all my own stunts, which explains my bad hips. Bad hips! Down!

You may have also wondered what the heck with regard to a recent slow down of blog-related entertainment. All I can do is tell you to relax, things will pick back up once the Easter holiday has come and gone.

You see, it turns out that I am on a mountaintop in the south of Spain, near the city of Malaga. If you want to check your Google map just to confirm, I am overlooking the Vinhuela reservoir from the west and slightly to the south. It is a very attractive azure at the moment, thanks to the sun blazing over the mountains. It’s not all that warm, so don’t go thinking I’m in some kind of tropical paradise. In fact, as of yesterday, Dusseldorf was warmer than here.

Why am I explaining this to you? Well, I don’t want you to think I have left the blogging business. I haven’t. I will be blogging it up with a vengeance when I get back to The Germ, and you will hopefully start checking back with thelabcoatguy for all your web-related entertainment needs that don’t include tasteless nude photos and hit-in-the-groin videos.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to roll over so that Juanita can apply coconut oil to my freshly shaven chest.