Lately, I’ve been making good on my pledge to have a glass of wine with supper and it has been giving me some real high quality nightmares.

It was negative nineteen this morning. I hate the goddamn cold and getting off of work at 6:30am. I was already chilled from inactivity in the cavernous lobby and the bus took forever to come. Forever. February is my least favorite month. I like July. Fuck February. And Frankie too. Upon awaking today at the crack of 2pm, I played the Billboard top 100 songs of 1961. I randomized it for added excitement. I’ve now got Angel Baby by Rosie and The Originals firmly rooted in my ear. Early sixties music sets off my inner Marty McFly, “George, you have to take Loraine to the Enchantment Under The Sea Dance!”. In 1961 the psychedelic wild sixties rock n roll still hadn’t permeated into the mainstream so it was mostly wholesome crooners with deep syrupy voices singing about crying for your baby, cruel Mary Lou, puppy love and big beating hearts. And they all have a trio of backup singers in white tuxedos with bow ties or pastel bridesmaid dresses going, “woo woo woo” or “dum dum dum” or “duh duh doo doo do duh duh ahhh ahhh ahh waa waa wah”. Most of it’s a lot of fun and I can’t help but getting into it.

The eight songs on the player at the top of the page are eight of my favorites from 1960. I like things with bongos and beatnik lingo. Like what’s happening daddy. It’s Hipsville Dobie. Copasetic kitty man. I’ve actually chosen my favorite 10 or so tracks of pop from each year 1976-2002. Most are more upbeat tracks because each time I workout I do it to a different year. On Monday night it was 1997. The Jock Jam Mega Mix from that year is perhaps my guiltiest musical pleasure. Anyway, I had class at three so I got some of my free pizza (from a pizzaboy friend) out of the freezer and heated it up in the oven. Then put barbeque sauce on it. I defy you to come up with a better breakfast than pizza covered in BBQ sauce. Yum.

I have some pictures of my place of employment that my technophile friend took with his miraculous phone-camera-gaming system-tricorder. I think they are using the garbage chutes to move floor to floor. I’m sixty percent sure I saw one standing still, looking at me through the partially opened lid of the trash compactor Sunday morning. It never runs at night cause the chutes are closed but I’m going to start it up unexpectedly one night and see if I can catch one in it.

2025 me here: Links to missing pictures lost to time again.

The Manor house
The Main building/complex
Special bonus: spaced out xmas morning me

A power generator broke on the University today. I live in an on-campus ninth floor apartment. At the time the power blew I was laying face down on my little turquoise loveseat for no good reason, still in my pajamas and lazily thinking about how I should make a coffee. I am an extremely slothful creature on Sundays and I was comfortably full with three raspberry jelly topped English muffins in my belly. The power going out meant no coffee and no shower any time soon. I had about three hours until I had to show up at work so I wasn’t terribly concerned.

I grabbed Luna, plopped into my bowl chair and listened to the opening chapter of an audiobook on existentialism. The silent, sunset shrouded, multi-hued apartment was the perfect setting for the topic. I enjoyed it. After more lounging around, listening to music and snacking, time began to be a concern. I had to get ready for work. I took a little lit camping lantern into the washroom and shaved in candlelight. By this time my apartment was dark. I tested the shower water, and as I submerged my hand, images of arctic glacier streams, frozen lakes and the polar bear club overwhelmed my senses. It was impossibly cold. So I fetched a little pot and filled it with some of the horrible icy water. I patiently held the pot over a little candle flame and passed the time with evil dark thoughts directed at my malevolent landlord, The University of Western Ontario. It didn’t work, if that water warmed at all, I couldn’t tell.

I ended up trudging to work feeling totally disgusting and smelly. My hair was truly great, half of it standing on end. I wore a toque even though it wasn’t really necessary. Anyway, since I was taking over for a friend he was understanding of my strife and waited while I showered in the men’s changing room for the pool. I felt better. I would have felt great if scholarly obligations weren’t crushing me quite so bad right now. I’m still fighting with Merle too if anyone cares. She called me scum in our last conversation. So yeah, things are going great between us. 

I just read the Scorpio-Scorpio relationship profile for kicks and it seems to fit pretty good. Jealousy is a major theme of our relationship and was the root of the scum comment. I tend to just think she has an undiagnosed case of Borderline Personality Disorder. My tooth still hurts and I don’t really have the money to fix it. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to that existentialism chapter. Now I feel I have to find my passion. Maybe lumberjack. I need a coffee. I wanted to leave for work early and pick up a sub and a snack. Instead I had to bring cans of soup. I am so sick of soup. Soup sucks. I like how this post started out as a story and then just degraded into me whining and complaining.

I’m almost done Fast Food Nation. Congratulations, Eric Schlosser, you succeeded in taking an already anti-corporate, environmentally and politically conscious, counter-culture, media suave young man and making him even more jaded. I’m thoroughly disgusted with fast and processed foods and the corporate and franchising powers that be. I also now know why McDonalds French fries taste the way they do. Actually, I now know why all processed foods taste the way they do and the quiet industries that facilitate them. I just got through the slaughter house chapter. It was the book’s money shot of gory detail, I found myself cringing as I was walking to work and listening. Apparently, since cattle varies so much in shape and size, automation of these plants is extremely difficult. So meat packing plants rely on unskilled migrant labor with employee turnover of over 80% yearly. Pressure to keep the line going quickly is enormous and the workers have the highest rate of serious injury (mostly lacerations) among the manufacturing industry. They are also all supposedly addicted to speed. An orgy of slashing, hacking, blood and methamphetamine. Yee-Haw. In a similar vein, last night I got a rare chance to watch one of my favorite things, The Fifth Estate, an award winning Canadian documentary show that looks at societal trends and issues.
The topic of this one was U.S.A. politics as presented through the American media eye. Funding sources and probable agendas of various organizations and the effect media bias has on news coverage were examined. It was the type of show that I delight in watching as I simultaneously become frustrated and angry at the material presented.

I felt it was quite objective even though the conservative talking heads came off looking like real assholes. Bob McKeown is the long time host of the show and he had an interview with Ann Coulter. Bob asked her something about U.S.-Canada relations and she replied along the lines of, “Well, Canada used to be the strongest ally of the United States. They sent troops to Vietnam to help ours and…”. Bob cuts her off in a mild but decisive tone, “Canada never sent troops to Vietnam” (very true). Coulter wouldn’t concede the point though, right there on the Fifth Estate being interviewed by a respected Canadian journalist who has been in the game maybe since before she was born and she told Bob he was wrong at least twice. My jaw just dropped open at the ignorance and pig headedness, I couldn’t believe it. Al Franken’s right (who also had an interview), she’s insane. A total psychopath. Unfortunately, I believe they are probably more common in government and the media than one would typically expect. A man who runs an organization monitoring media ethics said some things that struck a chord in me on how information and the real story doesn’t seem to matter anymore. There are just blue facts and red facts; The truth is different depending on which party you support. I found myself admiring Phil Donahue too since he came off so intelligent and informed. An old thoughtful media veteran. There was other meaty stuff on style and accountability too but this is depressing to write about, it really gets me upset. It hurts to ponder the greed, absurdity and patriotic ego of it all.

I’ve decided to leave the UWO webring…. but before I go I will disclose three little known facts about the University.

(1) You can print for FREE at the printers at Weldon or the Taylor library (And I’m not talking about the honor system one by the circulation desk for CD-ROMs, I’m talking about the 7 cent per page ones). Only two people know about this. Me and my partner in crime. Most textbooks are available in ebook form. Draw your own conclusions here.

(2) Everyone knows about the UCC-SSC tunnel but… there are underground and above ground tunnels connecting the following buildings into one big mega complex that is ALWAYS OPEN. Middlesex College, Western Science Center, Biological and Geological, Physics, Chemistry, Natural Science, Kresge, Medical Science building. In winter this is very handy. When I am walking home from work at 6:45am on Sunday morning and it is freezing out I use my card access at Middlesex College and take the tunnels through WSC, Physics, Nat Sci, Kresge, Medical Science and then it is just a little skip and jump home to Bayfield Hall. If I brought a crowbar I could bring home a cadaver or particle accelerator or something cause all those building are totally empty at that time.

(3) As long as you keep paying you can keep coming back.

I make a differentiation between soft and hard deadlines. The softies are self imposed. I don’t know why I keep the facade up though. Every time I write “soft deadline for blah blah blah” in my little black dayplanner I might as well write in “I’m going to win a million dollars today”.  Anyway, I worked all day on a half way done assignment that’s due tomorrow in a very hard way and I desire a break. Lately I’ve been reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. Well not exactly reading. I’m listening to it on Luna in Audiobook form. It’s pretty good; territory I had seen already covered in Super Size Me, but Fast Food Nation came first and goes deeper into the historical development of fast food and its marketing etc.

Anyway, it made me hungry for a thick juicy burger and lucky me, last week on the Okituk expedition, I bought a pack of Presidents Choice thick N juicy burgers, lettuce, tomatoes and sesame seed buns. The Prince Albert Diner has a yummy yummy burger where they throw on all the standard stuff and then they add a thick layer of peanut butter to the patty and this is what I recreated. It was so fucking good. The peanut butter got all hot and melty and yumm yumm. It mixed surprisingly well with the mayo, mustard, ketchup and onion. So good. SOO GOOOD!!!

My kiwis are finally ripe too. When I got home from work yesterday morning at 7am, outside it was still pretty dark, but a reddish glowing kind of dark because all the white snow was reflecting the little light that there was and the sky was kind of purplish just before the sunrise. I came into my dark apartment and put on CHRW campus radio and it was perfect dark glowing morning kiwi eating music.
It was ambient spaceship mars landing slow dreamy surreal type stuff. I sat down at my kitchen table and only had on a little fluorescent lamp and peeled my kiwi in the eerie glow and I pretended I was eating a baby alien pod and it was delicious then I had a little nap before class. The End

So, I wasn’t very nice on the phone last night. I was pretty frayed going in and my typically deep well of patience was depleted. There was enough left in it for cordial relationship-maintenance conversation but it wasn’t the time to take a shot at me. She jabbed the wounded animal and he woke up proud and angry. All pretenses fell away and I indulged that evil well of darkness existing way down deep at the core of my essence. It laughed with joy to finally be in control and delighted in stripping off the sugar coating on my thoughts and feelings towards her and replacing it with a cruel dark taint. It grinned as I cut at her in a righteous fury with emotion unbuffered and raw. I don’t feel like going into specifics but rest assured it was thoroughly vicious. Say goodnight to the bad guy.

This post isn’t going to be very fun cause I haven’t been doing so good this weekend. I’m sliding on the down slope of a big three month valley that represents my final term of university. The source of my anxiety is my thesis. I’m so incredibly behind on it to the point that I feel sick every time I think about it. (which is hourly). Academia isn’t the only thing crumbling either; my long distance relationship with Merle is not doing well. It’s becoming clear that if I don’t land a job in Massachusetts after this term that will be the end of that roller coaster. Our last two phone conversations were fights, she wouldn’t come out and say it directly but she won’t come to Canada if I can only land a job here. She’s a certified teacher with a Masters and apparently worked hard to get Mass. certification. I would love to have the kind of security a teacher has, I feel I’ll be lucky to find anything in my field, so if I land something good in Toronto or London, clinging to it for a while would probably be wise. It’s hard to find the will to apply to jobs when I have serious doubts I’ll even land my degree though. My parents and grandparents are pressuring me for the graduation service date so they can book time off. I just love having that breathing down my neck.

I have more serious issues with Merle too. She proposed and I turned her down. She’s been festering over that ever since. I sense that the breaking point will be in late February when I have a week off and won’t want to spend the time with her.

Forcing myself to sit down and actually work on my thesis or assignments this month has been near impossible. I try my best to eliminate distractions but there is always something else. I remove as many time wasters as possible from my environment and then I just end up playing FreeCell. It kills me that I am squandering an opportunity that others would kill for. My schedule is a problem. I work nights Friday through Monday, then three days off. Establishing any semblance of a routine is extremely difficult. As hard as I try, I just can’t focus at night and at my job. I can’t handle the type of work I have to do. I can’t think critically.

Listening to this indie emo rock sure isn’t helping matters either. Early Day Miners. (they’re good).

In case anyone was wondering about the thing with Ms. O from last week, I doubt anything else will develop. I’m not going to initiate contact anyway. I just don’t want to deal with anything extra right now. The feeling seems to be mutual. I just want to muster enough drive to carry me through until April. I hate continuously feeling like I’m a tight little ball of tension and anxiety.

Maybe I should just head back to Northwestern Ontario. Transfer all my Biology credits into a forestry program back home and work for a paper mill. Just another regular Joe-Bag-o-Donuts like Pa. I could be happy. I would have a fireplace that I cut my own wood for and a big furry dog named Okituk. I don’t have passion for computer science/genetics. I don’t think I’ll be content working as an underling for someone who does.

I made a new taxi friend at the grocery store. Usually, I stubbornly trudge home with my groceries strapped to my back and on each arm. It is tough but it makes me feel like a voyageur.

Anyway, the highlight of my supermarket adventure was probably when the quite large female butcher paid me a compliment when I was picking out steaks that put a goofy grin on my face for five minutes.
“Can I get those two steaks right there. And have them bundled separately please?”
“Sure, for a good looking guy like you anything.”

While I was in the checkout line, a short and stout comely young man lined up behind me. My groceries were splayed out on the conveyer belt and he seemed to find them fascinating. I scowled at him a little for his unhealthy interest in my meat. Today I was ravenously hungry so I ended up spending three times as much as regular. Calling a cab was a necessity. After shopping I waited in the foyer for my taxi. As I stupidly stared out into the wintry parking lot, Mr. Nosy crept up and asked me,

“Are you waiting for a cab?”.
“Yes. ummm… U-Need-A.”.
A lengthy disorienting pause, then he says,
“You aren’t going to University housing are you?”.
“Yeah. Which one are you going to?”
“Bayfield.”.

We locked forearms in a steely embrace as the sun set majestically in the background and thus the alliance was forged. In the cab I found out he lives on the basement floor. He confirmed my suspicions about the lower floor hot water advantage and then said in a deep solemn voice,

“I see you bought rainbow trout. That’s a good fish.”

“Yes, I actually would have preferred salmon but apparently they’re filled with PCB’s now.”

He agreed and passionately expressed anger at the degradation of ocean quality and fish stocks. A kindred spirit. Even after that little bit of heartfelt bonding, splitting the fare was awkward as hell. It came to $6.75 and we each had a five. What would you do there? It’s a little too much to tip and an odd amount of change to split. We just ended up giving it to him. Upon exiting the cab, I gave him my name and asked his.

“Okituk.” “It’s Inuit.” he added after looking at my perplexed face. It was at that moment I wondered why I hadn’t noticed the sealskin boots and spear earlier. We agreed that if we ever saw each other at the supermarket again we would renew our pact. I went upstairs and cooked some sausage and perogies cause I had class all day and was too tired for anything else. The end.

Cold shower today! In my building during the dead of winter I get the short end of the heat stick. I have suspicions the students on the lower floors have it nice and steamy wet hot. The shower water was just tepid enough to entice me inside with the promise of more warmth to come. And it did get a little warmer, so I started brushing my teeth. Then when my mouth was at its frothiest it went cold. I started to shiver and yell angry guttural tribalisms. After I couldn’t bear the icy torment any more, I was forced to get ready for class not only massively sleep deprived but chilled to the bone and toothpaste encrusted. I bundled up in three huge sweaters and two layers of fuzzy pants with a whole bunch of unique socks on each frozen foot. My dirty unstyled black hair and unflattering facial growth added the finishing touch. I felt like going down and yelling at the rental office ladies except they’re much meaner than me and would yell back better. 

My Christmas scanner is now setup so here are a few pictures.

Ben Thans restaurant, London Ontario.
Family cabin near Bear Point, Rainy Lake, Northwestern Ontario.
Niagra Falls. (Stoic blue)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston USA.
Showing maturity.