No Time...

I’ve learned to live in a timeless world.

I removed the clock from my taskbar. I did that not long after I started working here. I did that because I was sitting there looking at the time all day. Not good.

I didn’t know you could do that – remove it from the task bar I mean. I knew you could stare at it. But a guy I work with, let’s call him Lawrence, though I’m not sure why we have to call him anything given that his role here is done, I sat with him at his desk and noticed that his PC screen didn’t show the time. That’s what gave me the idea – that plus the fact that I was staring at it all day.

My watch strap broke, that’s another thing. I took it to the kiosk where I always get watch batteries. I can’t fix that! He said. That’s a Timex! It has a special strap! I don’t sell those! I thought about buying some exclamation points. So I tried a different kiosk, at a different shopping plaza. I can’t fix that! He said. And on we went. So I popped into Zeller’s and picked up a Timex strap. Here I said. Put this on. Wrong kind! He said. Sure it’s Timex! He said. But it’s not the right kind!

So I’ve stopping looking at the time. That’s not to say that I never know what time it is. I’ve got an alarm clock that rings in the morning – well it doesn’t “ring” exactly, it’s a clock radio – and it’s set to one time for Sunday and another for Monday – Friday. No alarm on Saturday, except this discarded strapless digital watch that sits on my night table and beeps every morning just after 6:30. It’s losing time, that one, slowly, and eventually it’ll be 7:00 for sure. But I hear it (beep beep beep) unless the fan is on, because the fan is louder than the beep, though usually I’m up already. Yes I’m up at 6:30 Saturday morning.

Beyond that I have reminders that Outlook pops up all day long.
· 8:00 AM – start working
· 8:30 AM – you’ve been sitting at your desk for 30 minutes; time to really start working [sic]
· 9:30 AM – get coffee
· 10:00 AM – Have some water
· 12:00 PM – Have more water
· 12:30 PM – have lunch
· 1:30 PM – Lunch is over
· 2:00 PM – Aren’t you thirsty again?
· 3:30 PM – go grab some fruit from the kitchen
· 4:00 PM – it’s 4:00 PM
· 4:55 PM – Think about leaving
· 5:00 PM – bye

And places that I’m in have clocks, and if I look at them well then I look at them, that’s not my fault, I didn’t put them up there. And sometimes I have to be somewhere at a specific time, and I can’t be late so I have to figure out what time it is, and sometimes the bus only comes once every 40 minutes or so so I have to know whether to wait or find another bus or walk, and if I arrange to meet someone at 7 then I need to know when it’s 7, I even need to know when it’s before 7 so I don’t make him wait, and if I put something in the oven then I must keep track of the time to know when it’s ready, and if I want to get enough sleep then I have to set a time to go to bed, and I have to know when that time comes around...

Man I’m obsessed with the time...

The People On The Bus

The people on the bus go up and down. So goes the song we sang to our kids. I never understood it. It’s the people on the elevator that go up and down. People on the bus, they just sit there. Some read, many listen to music, or something, I assume it’s music, I can’t prove it. A healthy minority of passengers yap on their cell phones. But most just sit there. They don’t even open the window.

I take what I call a commuter bus. That’s a bus that runs to an outlying area, has limited service, and on which one sees the same passengers every day.

And what a bunch of interesting people. There’s Lenin. I call him that because he’s a dead ringer for the guy that led the Russian Revolution. Same beard, same eyes. He wears small round metal glasses, reminiscent more of Beatle John, so perhaps I should call him Lennon. From his dress I’d guess that he’s a blue collar worker. The problem, though, is that I haven’t seen Lenin in months. So I worry about old Lenin. I hope he’s ok. Maybe he’s in Zurich.

Now Betty Bigbum, she’s interesting. Blonde, totally a bimbo, not quite up on how best to dress to flatter her rather idiosyncratic figure. Usually she’ll sit and stare straight ahead, but occasionally she will be engrossed in a phone conversation throughout the entire 30 minute ride, and it’s an even bet whether she’ll be talking in English or French, for bimbo though she may be, she sounds equally adept at either language. Perhaps I should call her Bilingual Betty Bigbum.

Bilingual Betty Bigbum the Bimbo.

Then there’s Pineapple Head. Now PH, she’s a young dark–haired woman, maybe early 20s, with an air of jaunty self-confidence like I’ve rarely seen. It takes a certain self-assurance to wear your hair in a pony tail coming straight out of the top of your head, every single day. Somehow, PH seemed to get away with it. Then I didn’t see her for a while, mostly because I changed my schedule. But after a bit, there she was, on the home ride this time, and hey, guess what. No more pony tail. And that’s ok, only I had to take a second look to be sure it was her. Not that I stare or anything. Honest, I’ve developed people watching techniques that’d be the envy of the best PI.

But stare or not, there was good old Pineapple Head sitting next to me the other day, on the same bench with an empty seat between us. And Pineapple Head was in meal mode. She had some kind of take-out, and was eating with relish. Not relish, but relish. You know what I mean. Relish. So me, being the impetuous type, I pulled out a bottle of water from which I had not drank, tapped old Pineapple Head on the shoulder, and offered her the water. She’ll be thirsty, I reasoned. OH no! She said, smiling, I have, she said, in a heavy French accent (“I ‘ave”), pointing to her big white purse. And sure enough, a minute or two later, she pulled out a water bottle identical to the one I’d offered and I looked at her and I said Perfect! And she responded Ya!

And so I ride the bus, and continue to interact with the world in all manner of odd ways, and I may continue to report my adventures, if I don’t get arrested…

Westward Ho...

I work on the west island. Funny that they call it the west island, because it’s exactly the same island as the east island. What they mean when they say “the west island” is “the west part of the island.” Too many words, so it’s the west island, and that’s that.

It doesn’t matter that I work there, except that it’s mostly English, the west island. The east island, which, as I said, is the east end of the island, is French. Wanna learn French? they say, go to the East Island and get lost. You’ll learn French fast. That’s what they say. I’ve never done it. I’ve not much been to the east island at all. The Olympic Stadium, around there. I’ve not been much beyond that. St. Leonard (pronounced Lee-o-nard). I don’t know if that counts. I never know around here.

Anyway, the west island. The street is called Des Sources, which means springs. Spring water is eau de source. The Des is just to confuse you, like Des O’Connor. It takes me a while to get there. There is no direct route. I have to take a bus to the Metro station, and that’s east, more or less (less, it’s really northeast). Then the Metro goes north (north west on a map) and another bus takes me west, which is southwest. You see? It’s confusing.

That last bus, it takes the autoroute. That’s another French word, “autoroute.” It means freeway, but nobody here says “freeway.” Ever. It’s an autoroute. Period. Anyway, it gets on the autoroute until Sources, then takes a right. But there’s this one driver, he keeps missing the turnoff. Then everyone starts yelling at him. “Everyone” in this case means one person. And no, it’s not me. But he comes back round, and he doesn’t miss any stops, and it only takes an extra 4 minutes or so, so we all forgive him.

I’d like to tell you more about the west island, where I work, but I hide inside because it’s winter and I don’t feel like going out in the cold. So far I’ve discovered the pharmacy across the street (kind of pathetic for its franchise) and the bank, because I use the ATM. And there is a service station next door, and I get coffee there sometimes, and glossette raisins. Down Sources and to the right there is a kind of mall that I’ve been to, and not far from there is a place where I got my hair cut a while back. There are parks in the area that are waiting to be discovered, and who knows what else.

Inside, though, is where I usually find myself, and when I’m not actually working, then I’m in the kitchen, which, believe me, isn’t too exciting. My employers, they are nice, and they supply us with fruit – apples, oranges, grapes, midget pairs, bananas. So there is fruit on the table, and a newspaper, The Globe And Mail, and that’s where I spend my lunch hour.

So, to sum up, the VSL Poltroon is back, and he will be giving seminars on how to write about absolutely nothing…

High School - Dancing With Kelly Osborne

To the reader: I know that this rambles. Forgive me. However, it is, more or less, deliberate. 100 years after Joyce I am single handedly trying to take stream of consciousness to the next level. I call it “stream of randomness…”

I wrote an article for an underground paper. That was in grade 10, or maybe grade 11. The guys were going to do an underground paper. So I wrote about the last school dance. It wasn’t straight, you know, what I wrote. Even then. I can’t remember what I wrote, well it was a long time ago. But I remember that it was clever. I gave it to Joel Beard. He gave it back. He wasn’t mean about it or anything, but it didn’t meet the standards of “seriousness” that they were trying to meet. School dance? I think they wanted to write about student revolution. Anyway the paper never saw the light of day. Too bad.

Not.

They should have accepted my article. The paper would have been a runaway best-seller.

I have been living my entire adult denying the reality of my adolescence. The main way I do that is by watching TV shows about adolescence. I don’t know how that works exactly. Perhaps I live the TV characters’ life vicariously. I started this process when I was actually in high school; I watched Room 222 every week.

As an adult I’ve watched Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi High, and Degrassi The Next Generation. I’ve watched Heartbreak High (an Australian show), and Life As We Know It, a short lived hour long weekly that featured a young, rather chubby, and artlessly charming Kelly Osborne as Deb. That was the best teen angst show ever.

And movies: American Graffiti, The Breakfast Club, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Dazed And Confused, anything with Molly Ringwald.

In real life, though, the dances were not so much fun. I liked the music. We used to have live bands, and they were very loud. Some were cool, some weren’t. We actually had Mood Jga Jga play at our school once. They were a great band, but we didn’t know their music, and it wasn’t dance stuff. Mostly from grade 10 or so on we had music men. Some were cool. Some weren’t. They were very loud. It was ok then to smoke. It was walking into a dance, maybe I was in grade 8, that I found out who smoked. I remember seeing Paula Hair-Affair sitting against the wall, smoking. She was a brain, at school. It wasn’t the brains you expected to see smoking.

I danced sometimes. With girls. I don’t know how well I danced, but it doesn’t matter now, and it didn’t matter then. The first dance I ever danced was with a girl named Elsie. There was a rumour going around that I fancied her. We were both of us quite small. Maybe that’s why people hooked us up. But I had nothing to do with her.

That was in grade 7. I had nothing to do with the girls generally, because they were in a separate class. And I hadn’t been in any kind of social group that would have given me access to girls. The girls I’d known in grade 6 were outcasts like me mostly. But that didn’t help. It wasn’t like the outcasts wanted to hang out with other outcasts – not then anyway. Later, ok. But Elsie. It wasn’t at a dance per se. It was at a lunch hour sock hop, the first I was ever at, and probably the last they ever had. Maybe they saw me dancing with Elsie and vowed never to let it happen again. The song was Light My Fire, the José Feliciano version. Figures – it was too fast for a slow dance and too slow for a fast dance. Who picked the music, anyway.

The whole thing got away from me. I was missing stuff. I knew exactly more or less approximately what it was. I’m living with the fallout.

But I quit watching Degrassi. I got tired of it, I admit it. It got too heavy, like Ayn Rand for teenagers; the message finally overwhelmed the story. So I have to find some other way to deal.

My teachers, though, it was all their fault. I will save that, though, for another post…

My Bio - The Elementary Years

Mrs. Whistle was my grade 3 teacher. Once she said “bosh.” That’s a pretty funny word when you’re in grade 3. Trouble was, she said it to me. And she didn’t think it was funny. She was scolding me at the time, about the fact that I’d copied the questions on the math test. Not good. Don’t write the questions she’d said. But I guess I was confused, or distracted. I wrote the questions. And Mrs. Whistle wasn’t so happy. She was standing there yelling at me, and she said “… and you go and write all this bosh! which doesn’t make sense!… blah blah blah!…” And my friend DS whispered “bosh!” and started snickering. But I had to hold the laugh inside until it was safe.

She forgot me, Mrs. Whistle. I think she forgot everyone. Most teachers didn’t forget you, but once she’d done with you, you were history for Mrs. Whistle, and she had no recollection of you.

No so my grade 1 teacher, Mrs. UnreasonableRedhead. She got mad at me because I counted on my fingers. Once she sent me to the principal’s office.

The principal was Mrs. Perfume. She was very strict. Everyone was afraid of Mrs. Perfume. She was very thin. She had a sister who taught French in the high school. The sister was very unthin and her name was The Armoured Truck. But Mrs. Perfume was very thin.

She didn’t know why I’d been sent to her. That’s what I remember, anyway. I could be wrong. It was a very long time ago. Thing was, I hadn’t finished my arithmetic paper. That happened a lot. So finally Mrs.UnreasonableRedhead sent me off to the principal. I don’t know what she was trying to accomplish. Neither did Mrs. Perfume.

She didn’t forget me, Mrs. UnreasonableRedhead, not for years. She had a guilt complex about me. Good.

I was in the A class. Well, not in grade 1. In grade 1 it was all mixed up, while they sorted it out. Then I was in the A class grade 2 through grade 5. They had an A class, a B class, and a C class. It was all hush hush. It wasn’t on paper anywhere. Nobody talked about it. Nobody admitted it. But everyone knew it. The A class was the smart kids. The C class was the dumb kids, and the B class was the not so smart but not so dumb kids.

So I was in the A class notwithstanding my deficient mathematical skills. But then sometime before grade 6 I fell asleep. And so in grade 6 they put me in the B class and I wasn’t happy. I guess I was humiliated. What bothered me at the time was that I was leaving my friends behind. Looking back, it seems odd, that, because I’d had no friends – not really. I was more left out then not.

So there I was in grade 6, in the B class, and unhappy. I had a meeting with the principal. He assured me that I was not being demoted. He said it was a matter of space. They needed to move students around because there were too many students in the class. Funny, they chose me to move, no one else.

Academically, there was no question. I had become a hopeless screw up, daydreaming the day away and blowing all my tests, not handing things in, not doing homework etc etc.

But once I was settled, hey. I started making friends. That was new. Friends. There was Joel Beard, we were inseparable for that year. There was Jerry Hoodlum. He smoked Kools in grade 6. There was Z. A real character he was, introduced me to Hendrix and Cream. I learned cool stuff, like how to cheat on tests. The teacher’s name was Mrs. Toil. We gave her a nervous breakdown. She actually had the breakdown a few months into the next school year. But we primed her, so we get credit.

I did well in grade 6, at the beginning. The academic level was lower than what I was used to. I picked up on that right away. So I did well. Until I got involved with the aforementioned cast of characters. Then things started to slip.

There was an Israeli girl in our class. Her name was Nurit. After hearing her talk a few times I could imitate her accent exactly. So when we had a substitute I pretended that I was Israeli. Most guys around me kept a straight face while I stood up and spoke in the fake accent. But Brian KooKoo, he couldn’t stop laughing. Lucky he was facing me and not the teacher.

Mrs. Lenin was my grade 4 teacher. She said you will not remember me, or maybe you will just remember that I was the teacher who made you read. It’s true, she made us read. I read Treasure Island. Took me all year. She said “ducky.” Isn’t that just ducky, she’d say. And nix. I still say nix, and that’s why. Because my grade 4 teacher did it. The secret’s out…

My Bio - The Early Years

I was the only one of my siblings to attend nursery; I was too active for my mother, something like that – she had to get me out of the house. My siblings, let it be known, are all girls, so I have sisters, so of course they were easier. We all know that girls are easier than boys.

My older sister, though, really would have gone to nursery but for the fact that it didn’t exist then, so my mother sent her to kindergarten a year early, as a result of which she was a year older than her classmates from then on.

That, however, is not my problem.

I went to nursery, then to kindergarten, and I had the same teacher, Mrs. Z, for both years. And there was a second teacher that I vaguely recall, or a teacher’s aide maybe, Mrs. Tissue, something like that, my memory could be imperfect in regard to her actual name. I think she was older than Mrs. Z anyway, but maybe she wasn’t. I was small myself, so my perspective wasn’t perfect.

I could read, I’m not sure when I learned, but certainly in kindergarten I could read. My sister taught me, the same sister that was a year older than all the classmates, that sister, which makes sense because she is older than I am.

Let me say here that my sister is older than I am. When she taught me to read, she was 4 years my senior. Now she is just senior…

She taught me to read, and she taught me phonetically. In grade one, the teacher taught my classmates to read. She did not teach me, because I knew how already. But I observed that she did not teach reading phonetically, that is she did not teach the actual sounds of the letters, she taught holistically, by words. This says “cat,” this says “dog,” this says “holistic.” I didn’t get it. How will any one learn to read that way, I wondered. I still wonder. Some of my class mates went on the become doctors, I can’t prove that they ever learned to read.

I knew how to read in kindergarten. I was one of two such students, the other being IM. There was a difference though. IM publicized his knowledge; I did not publicize mine. I kept quiet, which I think was characteristic of me in those days. The teacher did not know that I could read. I did not tell her, nor, interestingly, did my parents.

I think that my parents knew that I could read then. I think so.

I wonder….

This is what I remember. It was the last day of kindergarten, and we went to the zoo. I remember going to Aunt Sally’s Farm, which was a kind of petting zoo wholly with the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg. Aunt Sally’s Farm disappeared years and years ago, though it may have been revived, and I say that based on the results of googling “Aunt Sally’s Farm Winnipeg.”

Well on the way to the zoo, or on the way back, we were in the car, because that’s how we got to and from the zoo, in cars, and I was reading the signs, and I was reading them out loud: “Stop,” “Yield,” “no parking,” “men with hats crossing,” etc. And the teacher, with whom I was privileged to be in the same car, noticed. VSLP can read! She said. The last day of school and we find out that VSLP can read! I remember that. I was 6.

Another thing I remember about kindergarten. IM, the reader, and his friend PR. they used to steal my hat every morning before class, and toss it back and forth, and not give it back, and I would run back and forth trying to recover my hat, though I may have given up at some point, I don’t remember. I told my father about this, and his response was tell them I said not to.

I did that, you know. My father says don’t take my hat, I said. Oh! They said. Let us give it back right away they said! No, they didn’t. They did not say that. It made no difference to them whatsoever. They continued to torment me, until one day one of them said, I think it was PR, he said let’s give back his hat. And that was the end of that episode.

That’s it really. I will just share this one more bit of trivia. I got a ride to school, and I got a ride home. And we had some kind of arrangement to take other kids home. One was DK, and he would take the snow brush, because we live in Canada so our Car has an implement which on one side has a brush for snow, and on the other side has a scraper for ice, and he would take this thing, and my sister was in the car, not my older sister, because she was in school, grade 5, but my younger sister, the next younger one, because my most youngest one did not exist, and he would take this brush, and say, with glee, let’s brush her face!

And so my sister would whine and complain, she was very small, about 2 I guess, because she did not like to have her face brushed. And my father, who was driving, wasn’t crazy about it, and he’d say something like stop that. And so I guess we’d stop it. And when I say we, I mean he would stop it, because I had nothing to do with any face brushing activities. I was too busy reading the traffic signs…

Postscript: I googled IM, PR, and DK. The only one I found was IM, and he is a professor somewhere, and there is a picture of him wearing a hat.

The Walk

I got on the bus like I do every morning, but it isn’t morning, it’s 7:45 PM, 7:54 by the time I board the bus. And I didn’t get off at the Metro station, no, I got off at the stop that I used to get off at when we lived where lived 2 moves ago. Then I walked.

I walk toward the mountain, down deVimy, around some twists and turns and I come to Côte Ste Catherine, not to be confused with Ste. Catherine, which is downtown. Left one block takes me to Vincent d’Indy, named after not the most famous French composer in the world. And looking down Vincent d’Indy, one is face to face with Mount Royal. Toward the end of the road there is a steep climb up to Salle Claude Champagne, which is the university level concert hall of the U of M, where the Montreal Chamber Orchestra performs. One gets to Mont Royal Blvd, and the walk up to the hall is so steep that on performance nights there is a shuttle bus to take the concert goers up the hill, one short block.

I didn’t go up that hill. I took a sharp left and followed blvd Mont Royal, as it hugs the side of the actual Mount Royal, with its twists and turns, and trees and dark places. There are houses on the north side, which sit mostly on a downward slope; as one can imagine, they are patrician houses, priced probably in the millions should they ever go on the market. I look at them but they don’t fascinate me, they are money, that’s all, and money does not fascinate me.

The mountain, though, it fascinates me. Just where the road curves round toward the east, somewhere between leaving the U of M grounds and coming upon the cemetery, if one look to the right through the forest, one sees the a wall of rock, and that’s the Mount Royal, up close and impersonal, and maybe next time I’ll venture to explore, make my way through the trees, hope not to meet any skunks or hostile raccoons.

Further on there is a cemetery, and it slopes sharply upwards, and there were sprinklers going, and as I walked by I was accosted, if that’s the right word, and it isn’t, by the smell of newly watered grass. And there is no smell like that.

The cemetery, well, it’s quiet. But the whole walk is quiet, the very occasional pedestrian or bicycle scooting by, but almost totally bereft of cars. Quiet.

Well, would be quiet but for The Byrds blasting in my ears. The Byrds, then The Hollies. Life is too short to pass by an opportunity to listen to groovy sounds. Ok, so I actually took them out for a bit, the ear buds, to listen to the mountain. That was by the cemetery, and the mountain at that point sounded a lot like a few maintenance workers talking in Quebecois patois.

Past the cemetery is Mount Royal Park, but this is the wilderness end of the park. There are actually one or two trails that head up into the heart of the slope, and maybe next time I’ll venture off. I walked by this time though, thinking I’d never noticed those trails before. And that makes total sense, because this is the first time I’d walked by there while there was still some daylight.

As the mountain on the left slopes upward, so the road slopes downward and I could feel civilization just beyond, and after a few steps I see the traffic lights, and my streets meets up once again with Côte Ste Catherine (the streets curve every which way) and just beyond that is the great Montreal landmark street of Park Avenue (avenue du parc). And there are the people in Jeanne Mance Park, out for a picnic or a walk, or the people catching the bus, walking walking walking, biking, out to eat, to sit at outdoor cafés, to grab a beer and listen to jazz. I just missed the bus, but it’s ok, they are not far apart, and the weather is wonderful. I took the earbuds out as the Hollies album ended, and listened to the sunset, the traffic, the people. A young woman joins me at the bus stop, nods lightly in comradeship, and we commute without communicating.


Well the bus came, and I rode just up to Bernard, so I could get a cookie and coffee at Cheskie Bakery. A honkin’ big cookie it was, with what they call hazelnut cappuccino, but which is in fact just sweet coffee with flavour in it. What paradise.

Bernard Avenue is beautiful itself on a summer evening, with one outdoor café after another, and that will have to wait for another day…