Writing samples

 When I googled Glass of Port, here is what I got: " Port glasses traditionally hold a smaller amount of liquid than wine glasses , because Port has a much richer flavour and a higher percentage of alcohol . Port is normally between 19% and 22% compared to wine which is normally between 12% and 14%." This tells me that I would get drunk after drinking one teaspoon full of port. - I haven't taken a drink in nearly 10 years. I used to be a social drinker. Sometimes you could find me drinking a Black Stripe beer while watching the hockey game at Sue Magoos, a local watering hole that burned down one night while I was in Quebec. Later, I developed a taste for cognac. Since I rarely drink and am of small stature, I never drove if I had taken even one shot.  But I have since sworn off booze and I know I will never touch it again. I guess that means I don't have much to say about Port. - But maybe I have something to say about mead. Isn't it cool that you can make an al...

For me, it's no contest. Star Wars wins hands down. That's just because I was born in 1973 so I am old enough to remember a time when Star Wars was king. Star Wars may even be responsible for one of my life's most enduring friendships. My late best friend, Jason, and I were huge Star Wars fans. One Christmas, I got the Death Star and he got the Millennium Falcon. You best believe we put our Star Wars stuff together and had a major playtime. But Star Trek? No, never did anything for me. I can dig the mythos of Spock because I'm fascinated by the same thing he is - humanity's tendency to elevate emotion over logic and why this is necessary if we want to live meaningful lives. But try as I might, I just couldn't get into Kirk and Scotty getting beamed up from alien planets. My Star Wars love affair didn't last long.* My dad likes to tell about how I was so excited to see the first movie that I ran ahead of him to the theatre, certain that the movie would start ...

The surgeon general warns you that this note will probably mention Prince. Several times. I'm sorry, but if you give me "soul music" as a title, where do you think the muse is going to take me? That's right. Straight into Erotic City. But actually, the muse wants to talk about the Blues Brothers first. Does anyone even remember them anymore? The Blues Brothers is the best movie ever to be inspired by characters from Saturday Night Live (yes, it even beats Wayne's World.) Dan Aykroyd and the late John Belushi play a couple of blues musicians who "get the old band together" so they can mount a charity concert that will enable them to pay the taxes for the Catholic orphanage where they were raised.  Later, the Vatican newspaper "L'Osservatore Romano" called the film "a Catholic classic" and even recommended it as suitable viewing for Catholics. I dunno... I seem to recall a bit of profanity, some blasphemy, and a lot of reckless dri...

Because I can live vicariously through the hockey players, man. Hey, like most Canadian kids, I once nursed dreams of being an NHL superstar. I played minor hockey for three years and scored exactly one goal in all that time. I was a terrible athlete, I had zero competitive drive, and I didn't understand the rules, or even the concept, of the game. I also wasn't teachable. I bet the coaches were relieved when they learned I wasn't signing up to play next year. My dad was the very first play-by-play announcer for the Calgary Flames. I should have been a Flames fan because it was the Flames who, indirectly, paid the bills. But I wasn't. I was a Bruins fan, then a Penguins fan, and only became a Flames fan around the turn of 21st century. I was in a bar on December 16, 2000, and I was watching the Maple Leafs playing the Flames. Calgary was up 5-3 at the end of the second period. I hadn't gone into the bar to watch the game, but I wound up staying there; I was transfix...

The mythos behind the Van Morrison song Brown Eyed Girl is legendary. The way I heard it, Van signed a contract saying that he wouldn't get paid royalties for the songs he wrote when he first embarked on a solo career. The way I heard it, at the time, he was so impoverished that he signed that proposal, reluctantly, for some fast cash. How was he to know that Brown Eyed Girl, a song he considered a "throwaway" would go on to be a monster hit. Since its release in the late 60s, Brown Eyed Girl has clocked up more than 10 million radio plays in the US alone. When you consider that an artist should get paid everytime his or song is played on the air, that adds up to a lot of moolah.  But hey, if there's one thing that no artist knows, it's how the general public will react to anything they create. I mean, heck, the American director, Barry Sonnenfeld, turned down an opportunity to direct Forrest Gump so he could work on - wait for it, Addams Family Values. That's...

I know that cocaine comes from the coca plant. I know this mostly because of a crappy private eye novel I wrote back in 1990. The protagonist had busted into a secret underground laboratory in Florida where coca plants were being grown in a massive greenhouse. I doubt that could happen in real life. - Here in Glengarry, botanists warn us to stay away from something called poison parsnip, which is pretty much everywhere. If you get the sap from this plant in your eyes, it can cause blindness. I'm happy they told me this because I was in the habit of collecting sap from random plants and rubbing it in my eyeballs. No more, I tell you. No more. - Seriously though, as a reporter, I've learned a few things about plants. F'rinstance, there's this invasive species called phragmites (pronounced FRAG-MY-TEEZ) that are pretty much everywhere. They are a tall reed grass that spreads like wildfire and out-competes native plants for water and nutrients. A conservation officer once t...

 Normally, I disallow Christmas-themed titles for note-a-day. The reason for this is that I have written about it, exhaustively, in the past and am hoping for new territory to explore. But I have to be pragmatic. I've been doing this project, off and on, for seven years now. When I ask people for titles, it's not uncommon to get something that I've already done before. So I guess I should keep my complaints to a minimum, especially since my constant request for titles has started to become irritating (a few of my contacts tell me they're fatigued with the project and would rather not participate anymore.) So my dad asks me to write about a grandparent's view of Christmas. And since his day fell on December 25, I'm not going to deny him. That's serendipity, after all. Unfortunately, I'm not a grandparent. I am a parent though and I get immense joy giving stuff to B-Man and Kelsey. Sometime in adolescence, most of us figure out that it's better to give...

Earlier this year, when I asked my son to give me a title for note-a-day, he said this: "Pig." Yesterday, when I asked him to give me a title for note-a-day, he said this: "Bacon." So, I'm kind of writing about the same thing. - My kid loves bacon. Loves it. Adores it. It's his favourite thing. This I discovered a couple weeks ago when he and I got breakfast at a local drive-thru. I got him a plate of sausage and I got myself a plate of bacon and eggs. As soon as I lifted the top off my container, my kid grabbed the bacon and wolfed it down. He's autistic, doesn't completely grasp social norms, and, besides, he's been conditioned to think that he's entitled to do anything he wants with anything I own. (For example, he believes that my shoulders are a diving board.) See that picture up there? That's basically my kid's favourite thing. I bought him a box the other day (bye bye $7) and he was delighted. I thought he might eat a couple sl...

I don't know why I remember Rosebud so fondly. I doubt that the people I met there remember me that way.  Rosebud billed itself as a Christian theatre school way back in the early 1990s. I was a freshman there in September of 1991. I was 18, just out of high school, and very conscious that so many of my fellow Bishop Granding alumni were spending their first week in college getting drunk and getting laid. I spent mine at a Christian camp somewhere where we prayed, read the Bible, sang, and prayed some more. The camp was probably near Drumheller somewhere. On the way there, we stopped at a restaurant for supper and wound up staying longer than intended after learning that the Canada Cup was showing on TV and Team Canada was playing someone. A guy named Lorenzo found out that, in that same restaurant, some cat named Bishop Washington Ngede of the Power of Jesus Around the World Church was doing a speech there. To his credit, Lorenzo went to hear the bishop speak instead of watch the ...

Back in the 80s (or early 90s), there was a TV special called Before They Were Famous, which showed footage of celebrities in bit roles or commercials before they were picked by the Fame Monster. There was a Chiquita banana commercial starring John Travolta (wow, there was a time when fruit had commercials) and an old Burger King ad starring Debra Winger. Later, those two starred in Urban Cowboy. There were no scenes of the two dining at Burger King or eating Chiquita bananas. - Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of David Mamet, the American playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1984 play, Glengarry Glen Ross. Because of my affinity for all things Mamet, I have known of William H. Macy long before he became a household name. Macy was nominated for an Oscar for Fargo but he’s also appeared in big screen classics like Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and The Cooler.  No one knew who he was when he made a couple episodes of Law & Order in the early 90s. I did and I was ec...

That's life That's what all the people say You're riding high in April, shot down in May But I will never change my tune When I'm back on top in the month of June. Frank Sinatra sang those words. For the longest time, I thought it was a David Lee Roth original. This marks the second time in this month's note-a-day where David Lee Roth appears. The dude is definitely part of my ka-tet. - I said I didn't want any buggabugga-related titles. This one kinda is. I mean, when I'm composing these things, I kind of go wherever the muse wants to take me. Note-a-day, out of necessity has to be something of an unpolished stream-of-consciousness turd. I can't afford to spend a whole lot of time on it. Work and family responsibilities take precedence. But yeah, man. Buggabugga has kicked my ass. The last time I did a paying magic show was September. When buggabugga hit in March, I thought it would be over in the fall. Just today, our Premier, Doug Ford, has announced ...

In December of 2008, I went to New York City. The reason I went was to watch the Calgary Flames play the New York Rangers. This was an era before smartphones so all the information I needed was on a folded up piece of paper in my back pocket. That paper had the contact information of a friend in New York City, the address of the hotel where I was staying, the departure time of the bus that would take me back to Canada, and all sorts of other data. As I wolfed down one of New York City's famous street corner hot dogs, I glanced at that paper and realized how important it was to me. If it got carried away by a gust of wind, I'd have been as lost as Theseus in the labyrinth. So yeah, that paper meant a lot to me. But two days later, when I was safely back in Ontario, it was useless. I threw it away. - Life is a sad dance. We waltz in and out of each other's lives. On Monday, we're one of the most important people in the world. By Wednesday, we're only semi-important. B...

Sometime in the summer of 1999, a middle-aged Greek man kissed me on the cheek while we were standing on the first green of the North Battleford Golf and Country Club in Saskatcewan. There was a reason for his behaviour. I was the sports editor of the local newspaper and I had just published a picture of the man's daughter playing soccer. Seeing her picture in the paper thrilled the girl and, thus, thrilled her papa as well. "I have something for you, Mr. Newspaper Man," the Greek guy said post-oculation and he handed me a coupon for a free medium pizza at the restaurant that he owned.* I am not sure if that qualifies as a PDA or not. - Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, once pointed out that public displays of affection are only acceptable if you're beautiful. As such they are no longer acceptable for me because I am now a middle aged ugly man. There was a time when I was kinda cute so PDAs were moderately acceptable for me. None of this explains Ron Jeremy but tha...

 Here are some of the lyrics for The Littlest Hobo, which was a Canadian TV show about a German Shepherd: There’s a voice that keeps on calling me Down the road is where I’ll always be Every stop I make, I’ll make a new friend Can’t stay for long, just turn around and I’m gone again. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want to settle down, Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on. The Littlest Hobo was unique among non-anthology television shows in that it didn't have any regular human actors. Instead, it made use of the dog, who had no owner and no home and who wandered from town to town looking for people who needed help. After the dog helped the people, he would run away. Sometimes the helped people would plead with the dog to stay. The dog never did. The dog always left. The dog is a lot like me. But yeah, watching that show, the audience was like "Oh come on, dog. Just stay put!" So each episode of Littlest Hobo was ultimately a downer. - The Littlest Hobo could almost always ...

My friend, Michael, who gave me this title, must know a lot more about the history of this time of year than I do. I know that the modern Christmas celebration was co-opted from the Pagans. I know that Jesus probably wasn't a Capricorn. That's about it. Perhaps, at one time, the 25th of December rivaled the 31st of October in terms of spooky lore. It probably did. I have never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas. I've seen A Christmas Carol though, arguably the most famous ghost story of all time. It's too bad that the big reveal of A Christmas Carol is the same as Wizard of Oz - it was all just a life changing dream. The two stories are not similar. In the former, a famously stingy miser is encouraged to open his heart (as well as his pocketbook, which is the same thing for some people.) In the latter, a teenaged girl is just trying to protect her dog. My friend, Scott McClelland, is an amazing performer. For decades now, he has run a sideshow he calls Carnival Diablo,...

From Matthew 16: 13  When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” 14  They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15  “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” 16  Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” 17  Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. So draw your own conclusions.

 Is it Wednesday? Actually, it’s Tuesday. But I know what my friend, Shawn, was thinking when he gave me this title. Shawn is a professional entertainer, completely self-employed, and his whole world has been thrown into chaos since buggabugga started nine months ago. Previously, his life was a tightly scheduled series of gigs, airplane jaunts, and conferences. Now, everyday blends into the next. It’s got to be disorienting. Probably we’ve all experienced something called day dysphoria, where we’re so lackadaisical that we don’t even know what day it is. We get up for church and even drive to the building, only to discover that it’s Saturday (which is fine for Seventh Day Adventists.) This happens a lot when you take a sick day on Friday (which I did last week.) It’s funny but before buggabugga started (and before I became a dad) I had this dream of being able to support myself solely as an entertainer. I’d somehow change my life to allow myself to gig around the world and write du...

 We love true-life documentary shows because they make us feel better about our own lives. The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut said that most of us are ridiculous - especially when you look at our lives through a microscope - so maybe there’s some solace in seeing people who are more pathetic than ourselves. Turn on the TV and you’ll see middle aged moms pushing their seven-year-olds to compete in beauty contests. You’ll see California bimbos who can’t be happy - won’t be happy - unless their locker room-sized closets are updated every day with the latest fashions. We say to ourselves: “Well, I’m bad, but I’m not that bad.” Teddy Roosevelt said that comparison is the thief of joy. He meant that you shouldn’t condemn yourself because you haven’t enjoyed the same level of success as your friends and family. I could make myself downright miserable seeing as how so many of my magician friends have been on Penn & Teller’s Fool Us show. I could seethe in envy whenever my brother tells me...

I guess I have to tell this story again. Here goes.  It was the late 90s. I was in my mid-20s. Still living at home in Calgary, shifting from one dead end job to another. My little sister and bro were both blazing their individual career paths while I was washing dishes at hotel restaurants and/or driving legal documents and architectural blueprints across town. So yeah, I felt like a loser. I'd studied theatre in theatre school and then discovered that I didn't have the talent or the drive to make it as a pro. I wanted to write and I had a fledgling idea for a novel, so I decided to save up my money for a good six months and then move to a small town where I didn't know anyone so I could immerse myself in my craft. This I did in the fall of 1998, moving to a small town in the southeastern corner of Saskatchewan. Nothing came of that novel but, while in that small town, I penned a couple pieces for the local newspaper. I used those pieces to get hired at a bigger newspaper,...

The above strip, which was called the Lighter Side of and was penned by the late artist David Berg, was a regular feature for years in Mad Magazine. The common thread of the Lighter Side seemed to be the everyday challenges of navigating life in middle class white American suburbia.  The Lighter Side was different from the rest of Mad, which was often biting, acerbic, and sometimes downright nasty. The Lighter Side was gentler. It would never offend you but it would never make you bust a gut either. So it's odd that I remember The Lighter Side so fondly. It was, by far, my least favourite part of the magazine, but I always read it and I think I'd be disappointed if it was left out. Years later, I realized why it left such an indelible mark. Berg wasn't just interested in silly gags, he wanted to talk about the human condition. The Lighter Side did that. It showed human beings as greedy, selfish jerks with priorities way out of whack, yet somehow still argued that we are...

Linus always intrigued me. He's a study in contradictions. In the Peanuts world, he was the eternal philosopher, the thumb-sucking stoic, the pint sized Augustine. It was Linus who told Charlie Brown what Christmas was all about. It was Linus who was, so often, the epitome of ration and logic. But every Halloween, he did an about face and became a fierce apologist for the Great Pumpkin, who, he believed, rose from a pumpkin patch every year and brought toys to all the good little boys and girls. The Great Pumpkin was a subject of some debate among Peanuts fans. Some saw it as a parody of religious fanaticism, though Schulz simply thought it would be charming to have one of his young characters confuse the traditions of Halloween and Christmas. Others thought Schulz was pointing his finger at parents who lie to their kids about Santa Claus, saying that legend is as ridiculous as the Great Pumpkin. I concur. - All this is a lame segue to say that if the Great Pumpkin ever were to app...

 So I’m going to feel like a hypocrite as I write this note. It’s supposed to be about the inconsiderate things people do when they’re on their phones. The surgeon general warns that I am surely guilty of everything I will likely write about here. My mom and Ash both tell me I’m on my phone too much, and I am. I hate that about me too. Since getting a Smartphone, the time I used to spend reading and writing has dipped exponentially. Many days I think I should scrap the bloody thing and get an old fashioned flip phone or, even better, just a landline. Can’t do that though. I need a cell phone for work purposes.   I guess the one thing that bugs me most is when people ignore me so they can be on their phones. Now that’s totally understandable if my presence was not expected, but if you invite me to your place to play chess or make Ovaltine, don’t spend most of your time playing bitlife or texting your crazyy Uncle Marmaduke in Saskatchewan.   Like I said, I am guilty of tha...

She was wearing a wedding dress as she danced by herself in the bar.   I was in my late 20s, had just moved to Ontario, and was treating myself to a night on the town in Toronto. I’d just gotten paid, I had no obligations, and was in an extremely good mood. So I approached the dancing bride and offered to buy drinks for her and her new husband.  She ignored me and continued to dance. She did so for the next three hours, spinning around, ad infinitum, as the DJ played cruddy dance beats from the late 90s. She left, alone, around one in the morning. Later, the bartender told me that the lady had been a regular on the city’s bar scene for years. She didn’t always wear a wedding dress, but usually she did.  I think about her now and then, wondering what she w as hoping to accomplish by dressing as a bride while visiting dance clubs. I know that it’s none of my business, that her masquerade wasn’t harming anyone. Today, if she were to tell people about her evening pa...

The quietest place on Earth is an anechoic chamber in Minneapolis. The room was engineered to eliminate echoes (anechoic is latin for without echo) and, when you measure the sound level inside, actually registers in the negative. That means that the room isn't just completely silent, it absorbs noise . Seriously, lock yourself in there for the night and you will be able to hear your own heart beating and the blood thundering in your pulse. Most people who spend any time in there can't wait for quiet time to be over. The record, apparently, is 45 minutes. When the lights are off, the room lends itself to a feeling of intense claustrophobia. Sitting in pitch blackness, all sounds muted with no reverb, makes people feel like they're in coffins. I dunno... but I suspect a deaf person could break that record. - There is also an anechoic chamber at Brigham Young University. The university's namesake probably would have regularly spent time in that room, seeing as how he had 5...

When I was 10 years old, I decided to start keeping a diary. The first line in the first entry was this: "How wonderful it is to see God's creation." The inspiration came while walking home from St. Gerard's School in southwest Calgary, where I was in Grade 4. It was late winter and there was a chinook, so I was walking home with my parka unzipped and my toque in my hand. As I walked down Hooke Road, which is where our house was, I saw a whole lot of birds flying across the sky. They were calling to each other in their birdie way and something about them made me stop and watch them for a while. When they were gone, I finished the walk home. There was something new in my spirit, like my soul had gone through a car wash. I felt like God had used those birds to smile at me. So that night, I wrote about my encounter with the birds. I'm sure there was nothing in there to rival St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, but, if anything, it might have kick started a lifelong love...

The funniest thing ever was the time Mikey peed in the bottle of shampoo. I didn't see it. I heard about it second hand. Jay and I were riding our bikes back from school. Jay was telling me that Mikey wasn't allowed in his house anymore. I asked him why and he told me that, at the party last weekend, Mikey had went into the upstairs bathroom and urinated in a half empty bottle of Head and Shoulders. God forgive me, but I found that screamingly funny. I laughed so hard that I fell off my bike and rolled around on the grass in the alley behind Jay's house for a good ten minutes. I laughed so hard that I screamed and cried. Jay did not find it funny which, of course, made it all the more funnier. - I like to tell the story about the time in the year 2000 when, as a general assignment reporter with a small community newspaper in Eastern Ontario, I found myself assigned to cover a production of The Parson's Predicament, a musical farce that was being put on by a group of com...