In 1972, George Carlin wrote a bit titled “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” It caused quite a stir with conservatives and even ended up in front of the United States Supreme Court. The debate raged for more than a decade, and then Tipper Gore pitched a shit fit over her daughter hearing Prince sing about masturbation. Senate hearings were held with the end result of the fiasco being the introduction of the Parental Advisory labels on music. Then, in 2014, someone with a stick up their butt brought us the Clean Reader App, in which they would replace all the nasty swears that hurt your eyes or make you go blind or turn you into deviant criminals with something more palatable. In a post I am one hundred percent in support of, Chuck Wendig famously told the Clean Reader folks to go take a piss. I even wrote about it as well.
But this isn’t a post about censorship, not really. It’s a post about Facebook and how they are hellbent on ensuring creators/artists/writers dance on command and that we know they don’t give a single flying fuck about us. We are their printing press; we shall not be compensated in any way for this privilege, and we can do nothing about it.
You may ask, “So, why don’t you leave Facebook?”
A mighty fine question. Many of the more prominent pages are leaving for the likes of Substack. I haven’t made that jump yet due to their problematic handling (or lack thereof) of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers. There’s Patreon, Instagram, Threads, Tumblr, X, Bluesky, and a whole host of other social media platforms, but in the end, none of them are perfect for writers. Ultimately, writers focus their energy on places where they get the most juice for the squeeze. I have a decent (and growing) following on Facebook, and I’ve managed to sell more copies of Near Death By A Thousand Cuts than I ever thought possible. But here’s the thing: I’m left wondering how many more I could have sold if Facebook didn’t have two different sets of Seven Dirty Words.
Upon reading the first set, you’ll see two trends:
Kill
Death
Murder
White
Men
Racist
Anything derogatory towards right-wing politics/politicians/voters
In the United States, inciting violence is one of the few limitations of the First Amendment, so any private company that appears to be on board with that gets itself in hot water. That’s why Facebook will slap a ban on you for using violent and life-ending words like “kill,” “death,” and “murder.” Do you see how I might think that the title of my book might be seen as problematic? It didn’t even occur to me that it would be because, contextually, nothing about it is offside. My first mistake was assuming that context matters. Much like the Pearl-Clutching Puritans (PCP) who balk at the mere mention of a single bad word, the Facebook algorithm doesn’t care. Strangely enough, it doesn’t have a problem with the likes of Jim Jefferies tossing around the word “cunt” like he’s salting a bowl of popcorn, at least not until a PCP files a complaint).
The remaining words on that list have all landed progressive accounts in Facebook jail. “White,” “men,” “racist,” or anything derogatory towards right-wing politics/politicians/voters. This is where it gets amusing because context suddenly starts to matter for these words. It’s perfectly fine to scream and yell nonsense about being an “oppressed white man,” but gods forbid you factually state that a white man did something oppressive. You see this in the language and spelling progressive accounts use. “White” becomes “wyte,” “man” becomes “person with a dangly appendage,” and so on. There are a whole host of double standards. Just look at the word “cocksucker.” You can use it as a pejorative against a liberal, but you’ll get your wrist slapped if you use it against a conservative (don’t use the word as a pejorative in any situation, okay?)
So, my reach was negatively affected because I chose a title for my book that included a dirty word on Facebook. I’d be okay with it if that were the end of it, but as it turns out, that was just the beginning. You see, Facebook makes money off the content of its users. We are their printing press, remember? Furthermore, they want us to pay them to boost the content we already provide them for free. They already limit who sees our stuff. Of my 2,500 followers, if ten percent see my post, that’s a high number. On average, it’s about five percent. They want me to pay to reach the people who have gone out of their way to tell them they want to see my stuff. So what about the other ninety-five percent? Similar to their other list of Dirty Words, if you make a post that uses any of them, you can be guaranteed that your reach will hit rock bottom like a motherfucker.
In a nutshell, Facebook doesn’t want me to make any money while ensuring they make as much from my content and follower data as possible. They claim to have all the monetization programs, but if you read their fine print, you’ll see they don’t have to pay you out. I know more than one person who has “earned” thousands of dollars and has yet to receive a dime. My reach tanked by more than half the month after I enrolled in their “bonus program.” I was using the ™ symbol in my BossCat posts, and someone suggested that might be affecting my reach, so I stopped and guess what? My posts instantly got more reactions.
Indie writers (and even midlist writers for the Big Five or anyone at a smaller house) must wear many hats. We are small business owners without extensive marketing budgets or powerhouse publishers behind us. We are like the local mom-and-pop shop on Main Street. We rely on word of mouth more than anything else. Meanwhile, Facebook keeps pushing us further down. There’s a solution: Facebook can still make billions, and pages like mine can earn a living. That would require Zuckerberg to calm his tits for half a second, though, so it’s not likely to happen. I guess you can add Algorithm Manipulation Specialist to my collection of hats.
Earlier in the week, someone asked me when I started writing. I started the story in typical fashion for me and true to form, lost the thread and never closed out the discussion. This post answers the question and covers what’s happened since.
On November 3rd, Facebook informed me that thirteen years ago I attended An Evening With Kevin Smith in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. It took eleven days, but I articulated the impact that night had on me in a blog post. You don’t need to read it before continuing this, but it might be interesting to read after. The relevant takeaway is that the post explains the answer to the question asked to me, and traces its origin back to the Kevin Smith show.
It took a few other fortuitous connections and a sliver of synchronicity, but if my writing journey is the fire, those connections were the kindling, and that Kevin Smith show was the spark.
I’ve long supported the adage that, “A rising tide lifts all ships.” I’m also a firm believer that no two people can take the same path and that, ultimately, we are the ones who get to define what success means for us.
In the thirteen years since that fateful evening do I feel I have been successful as a writer? If you would have asked me a year ago I would have said, “Somewhat.” Through the lens of today, however, the answer is a resounding, “Hell yes.” Why the change? What happened in that year to make the difference? To understand that, I need to recap the twelve years that followed the Kevin Smith show and give you some insight as to why my response was “somewhat”.
In (more or less) chronological order:
2010: Blogged a lot. Immersed myself in the world of writing and met as many writers as I could
2011: Failed attempt at completing a screenplay
2011: Failed attempt at completing a novel
2011: “Sold” a song for a podcast opening to Kevin Smith (he “art swapped” it for tickets to see him speak)
“Spunk” (a.k.a. Punk For Kevin)
2012: Completed the first draft of a novel, No Fixed Address
2013: Short story Losing Vern published in the Orange Karen: Tribute to a Warrior anthology
2014: Completed a standalone novel, Hard Truth
2015: Completed the first draft of No Known Cure, a sequel to No Fixed Address
2015: Started writing for the OCH Literary Society
2016: Ghost wrote two short stories and completed a standalone novel, Suburbia, and sold it to the same person
2016: Completed my first nonfiction book, Bent But Not Broken: One Family’s Scoliosis Journey
2016: Three freelance articles for the website The Good Men Project
2016-2017: Two freelance articles for the website YourTango
2017: Received my first publishing contract for BENT
2017: Received a publishing contract for Hard Truth and the The “No” Conspiracies (No Fixed Address, No Known Cure, and three more)
2017: Contributed three essays to the Stigma Fighters: Volume 3 anthology
2018: Bent But Not Broken published
2018: Hard Truth published
2019: Completed the novel, No End In Sight
2020: Sent the three completed The “No” Conspiracies books to my publisher
2020: COVID. Publisher ceased releasing books (despite ebook sales growing in popularity. A decision that flummoxes me to this day)
2021: Requested, and was granted, reversion of rights to The “No” Conspiracies series
2021: Started exploring options for rights reversion for Bent But Not Broken and Hard Truth (this was not feasible as it would have cost me $1500 – per book – to get the rights back. I had no choice but to ride out the contracts to term; January and November 2023 respectively)
2021: One freelance article for the website The Good Men Project
2021: Short story accepted to an anthology (top secret project, publication date TBD)
2022: Publisher decided to part ways with me and a handful of others citing COVID as the reason (still flummoxed at the rationale, but was happy as heck to be out from under a horrible contract)
2022: Self-published Bent But Not Broken
2022: Eleven freelance articles/posts for the website The Good Men Project
2022: Completed the first draft of the standalone novel, Known Order Girls
By all accounts, those twelve years were pretty darn good. I was managing a full time job and a family with two small kids, a social life, a pretty serious bout of insomnia, and a severe concussion that had me off of work for months. Still, I carried feelings of inadequacy and laziness that have plagued me my whole life. I always felt like I wasn’t enough, that I had to work twice as hard to get half as far, that I wasn’t smart, that I was lazy, that I was capable of more.
Then came the diagnosis. Mild to moderate ADHD complicated by multiple traumatic brain injuries (TBIs). That explained a whole lot.
It was eye opening to finally understand why, despite all logical signs indicating otherwise, I’ve always carried these feelings of nonperformance, inadequacy, and lack of intelligence. In hindsight, I wonder why I never said anything. I mean, I know why I didn’t. Mental health wasn’t something you discussed openly. It wasn’t until I had friends talk about getting evaluated for ADHD and other non-neurotypical tendencies that I even entertained the possibility. Still, it took more than a year before I sought out someone to ask. I cannot understate how much it means and how helpful it is knowing why I feel the things I feel and why I am the way I am.
Half a dozen failed attempts at finding medication that works and another months long battle with insomnia that’s still rages later, I can look back at the last year and feel good about what I’ve accomplished.
In a moment of hyper-fixation during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I wrote Near Death By A Thousand Cuts: A Humorous Memoir of Misfortune in the 30 days following my diagnosis. Writing a book in a month is no small task, but writing one that’s an account of injurious events in my life and finding the humour in them was rewarding and educational both in the introspective as well as practical senses.
Then I published it, recorded the audiobook for it, and marketed it. The publishing was fairly straightforward but I learned a lot about how to make that process as efficient as possible. Recording the audiobook was an adventure I care to never repeat. I could not have done it without the help of this Instructables article. The marketing and promotion was tough. How does a virtual nobody from Canada get people to buy an expletive-laden humorous memoir? Hard work, perseverance, and a bit of dumb luck.
With a limited social media presence that was virtually nonexistent anywhere but Facebook, I needed to grow my audience and find my public voice. In the twelve months since I finished Near Death, I doubled my Facebook followers from 1,000 to 2,000. I recorded hundreds of TikToks. I started engaging more with readers, writers, and other personalities I enjoyed. I made friends and leaned on them for advice and support. Really, I was just being myself, but publicly for everyone to see. The average self-published book sells 250 copies in its lifetime. I sold that many copies of Near Death in six months.
I found an editor for Known Order Girls through my very first writer friend, the guy who attended the same Kevin Smith show as me, and whose blog post about it inspired the blog post I wrote thirteen years ago. Some of these new connections are beta reading it for me. Others are cheering me on, and that feels so good. I’m going to try to query for an agent with it when my editor is done marking it up with her red pen. Even if I don’t find one and end up self-publishing it, I know that all the hard work I put in on Near Death will come in handy. In my mind, the book is already a success. I don’t know if people will think it’s good, but it’s definitely the best thing I’ve ever written and is a great source of pride.
It would be easy to point to the new followers, new friends, the finished magnum opus, and the book sales and say, that’s the difference between twelve months ago and now. While all are great things, that’s not why I changed my answer. The difference came from all the things I learned and the change in perspective that happened along the way. These are my accomplishments, I did them on my own terms, at my own pace, and I am proud of them.
This is a post about the kindness of strangers and the joy one feels when bringing joy to others.
Backstory
In early 2014 my daughter, Avery (affectionately nicknamed “Princess Pants” or just “Pants” or “Pantalons” if we’re being formal and embracing the French language) was diagnosed with severe idiopathic scoliosis. My wife got the idea to start a family blog so we could chronicle the journey and share our experiences with others going through the same thing and bentbutnotbroken.net was born.
One thing that helped Pants through the whole ordeal (eleven hour surgery and eleven month recovery) was music, specifically the music of Vance Joy and Taylor Swift. Shortly after surgery my wife got tickets to see them play in Toronto and Pants was concerned she wouldn’t be physically up to the challenge. Listening to their music helped motivate her to do her physio exercises and kept her in a good mental state.
Recognizing this, I got the idea to reach out to both artists to see if they’d give Pants a shout-out on Twitter or something. I even mentioned how she wanted to wear a tiara on her last day of school before surgery and how everyone in her class ended up wearing one.
I did not receive a response from Taylor Swift, but a month later Avery got a next-day delivery envelope in the mail with the return address of Vance Joy’s record label and a postmark of Edmonton – the city he had just played in.
I managed to record a video of her opening the envelope. Suffice it to say, she was excited.
Dear Avery, I find your bravery and strength inspiring. It means a lot to me that you have been listening to my music. I don’t have a tiara on me right now, but I have decided to draw me in one. I’m on your team! [drawing of a face with a tiara] (Looks more like a crown, sorry lol)
I could not have written a better ending to the story and retelling it brings a tear to my eye, but as it turns out, that wasn’t the end. Fast forward to March 2023, nine years since diagnosis, eight since surgery, and seven and a half since Vance Joy made Pants the happiest girl on the planet.
Pants was studying abroad and took it upon herself to make a solo trip to Barcelona to see Vance Joy play. I reached out to his rep again and asked if there was any way he could do a shout-out for her as an early birthday present. Unfortunately, that particular tour date was already packed with lots of personal stuff for him and there would not be an opportunity. They said they’d see if they could work something out in terms of a birthday card, but that’s when I mentioned that our family would be seeing him at the Sommo Festival in PEI in July.
Hatching A New Plan
After too many emails than I care to admit, Vance Joy’s rep, Rachael, finally agreed to a meet and greet at the festival. This was big news, but keeping it a secret from Pants was going to be a challenge. She was aware I tried to set something up in Spain so there was a good chance she’d put two and two together eventually.
The big day arrived and I got word from Rachael that there would be a small group meet & greet at 5:15. Vance Joy was slotted to be in the culinary tent at 5:00 and Pants really wanted to see him there, so I’d need an excuse to pull her away. My wife and I ended up telling her that I had a friend of a friend on the crew who got us a backstage tour, and as luck would have it, Pants thought that was really cool and “would see Vance Joy perform later anyway”.
Now, at this point, it’s important to mention that only Rachel and my wife, and I (and Pants’ brother) knew that this was a surprise. None of the security people, promotion company folks, or the PR people around knew, so as I was running around trying to figure out where to meet and who to talk to and whatnot, other people part of the meet and greet started to arrive and a bit of a buzz formed in the area where we were standing.
At some point, one of the security people called out, “Are you all here for the Vance Joy meet and greet?” and thankfully Pants was like, “No, we’re here for a backstage tour,” which really confused the person because I had just spoken with her about making sure we were in the right spot for the tour. At that point, however, we had to congregate in a specific area and were going to get instructions on what to do and where to go. So, the jig was up. I turned to face Pants.
“Surprise!”
There were tears. Lots of shaking and crying. She was, to put it mildly, a mess. The security person felt terrible for spoiling the surprise, but it all worked out (rest easy, security lady!) The advanced notice allowed Pants to do her freaking out beforehand so when she got to do the actual meet and greet she was composed and not in tears tripping over her words (in hindsight, I should have factored that in and let her in on the secret).
We told the backstory to the promotions people and they got their Social Media person to interview us, which was pretty cool, and then it was time.
Vance Joy was so friendly, and kind, and Pants got to properly thank him in person for the letter he sent all those years ago. He remembered her and said that he gets a lot of fan mail and can’t reply to all of it, but some stories stick with him, and hers was one. They had a brief chat and then took selfies with me, then my wife, and son, and I got to thank both him and Rachael for making this happen. Seeing the joy it brought Pants meant the world to me.
As we exited the meet and greet area, we were approached by Bianca from Whitecap Entertainment (the promotions company). She said that our story was so heartwarming and unforgettable that they wanted to give us a special gift (hat tip to my wife who ventured outside of her comfort zone and told the story to anyone who would listen): Wristbands for the limited-access pit right at the front of the stage!
We got to watch Vance Joy from as close as you can get and then close out the festival watching Mumford & Sons from the same spot. It was absolutely fantastic. My son and I even got to meet former NFL player and owner of Amazeballs and chef/host of the show Mad Good Food, Derrell Smith.
So, there you have it. The happiest of happy endings for everyone involved.
Special thanks to Rachel from Unified Music Group, the Sommo Festival, Whitecap Entertainment, their awesome employee Bianca Boutilier, and of course Vance Joy.
Marcus Mumford & Maggie Rogers Covering Taylor Swift’s “Cowboy Like Me”
My dear friend and writer extraordinaire, Gordon Bonnet, and I share a brain. Where our thought processes and levels of comprehension differ, we end up being complimentary. Academically, we both studied physics but gravitated (no pun intended) to different things. We both share levels of anxiety but manage it in different ways. He likes to run. I only run if I’m being chased, and even then I’d have to think long and hard about it depending on who was doing the chasing. He likes going shirtless where as I am self-conscious of my upper body and shun pants at every opportunity.
Gordon recently wrote a thing over at his award-winning (okay, it’s not, but it should be) blog, Skeptophilia. In it, he describes hitting a brick wall when it comes to understanding Classical Mechanics. This was actually one of the few subjects I understood when studying applied physics at the University of Waterloo back in the mid-90s. My Achilles heel came in the form of Electricity and Magnetism 2.
I scraped by Calculus 3 by some miracle (or administrative error, we’ll never know) even though it was near incomprehensible gibberish to my eyes and ears. I did pretty well in Thermodynamics. Classical Mechanics was a lot of fun. I was even staring down the barrel of a degree in Astrophysics before life intervened in the form of an actual paying job and boss that didn’t give a rat’s ass if I majored in anything so long as I had a general bachelor of science. I had enough credits for one of those, but that dang Electricity & Magnetism 2 class almost screwed up everything.
Thirty percent of my grade was comprised of assignments and labs. Another thirty percent was given to the midterm exam, which you could throw away if you weren’t pleased with your mark, leaving a final exam worth either 40% or 70% of your total grade depending on your situation. I was scraping by with my assignments and labs and tanked the midterm in glorious fashion setting up a showdown at the end of the term.
Important Note: if you neglected to write a final exam it was an automatic fail regardless of your grade going into it. You could have a perfect 60% heading into the final, but but if you didn’t write it, you’d fail. In these cases, the school would assign you a grade of 32% for averaging purposes.
Anyway, I wrote my final exam, was sure I’d failed it, and waited to see how bad it was when they released the grades. I got a 30% in the class. I’d have been better off not studying at all and going to the pub for a drink. Anyway, as a physics major I needed that class so I had to take it again. The results were only marginally improved. When it was all said and done I secured a grade of 42 (sadly, only the answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything and not how to get a physics degree).
Now, I wasn’t ready to give up on a physics major yet (that would come a year later), but if you failed a core class twice they’d kick you out of your program, so I had a problem. I went to the prof’s office as soon as I got my grade and begged him to pass me. I brought in all my assignments, all my study notes, and assured him I went to every lecture and every study period. He pulled my exam from a file cabinet and proceeded to grill me on every mistake I made. “Why did you use this formula? What was your thought process on this step?” Etc.
When we finished he put his pen down. “If I give you a pass will you promise me to never take another one of my classes ever again?”
“Sir, that is a promise I can keep.”
He looked me dead in the eyes. “Congratulations, you just passed E&M 2. Please don’t ever darken my doorway again.”
All this to say, not knowing something isn’t the end of the world. With very few exceptions, not being able to know something isn’t the end of the world either. It’s okay, you know other stuff. Not a single one of us can go it alone and I can guarantee that if you ask you won’t have to wait very long for a yin to compliment your yang, or lend you a pair of pants.
It happened, then it took twelve years for it to happen again, and another seven for it to happen a third time.
Until recently, every year I would watch the captain of the winning team hoist the Stanley Cup above his head and plant a giant kiss on it. This memory is burned into my brain from at least 1980 onward. Certainly, for my entire adult life, I know I have not missed the raising of The Cup more than a couple of times.
I normally root for one particular team to win The Cup but this year I was rooting heavily for the Vegas Golden Nights to win. You see, last night this particular situation arose for only the third time since 2002. I like to think of it as my own version of Halley’s Comet.
Back in 2002, my wife was pregnant with our first child who was due on July 4. I was always a bit ticked off because of all the days for a True Canadian to have a baby, I got stuck with American Independence Day as a due date. Three days earlier would have been ideal.
At any rate, there we were living in Cambridge, Ontario and as always I was watching the Stanley Cup Finals. It was mid-June. In fact, to be completely precise it was June 13. Detroit was playing Carolina in game #5 and Detroit was up 3 games to 1 in the series.
As I mentioned, for as long as I can remember I have watched the Stanley Cup get hoisted by the captain of the winning team. I can go back to when I was a kid and my dad would let me stay up late to watch them hand out the cup. I’m not sure what it is about it, but growing up with a dad who played hockey at a very competitive level, playing it myself for 10 years, going down to the old CNE grounds to the Hockey Hall of Fame when I was a kid and seeing the Cup up close (and even touching it), well, it’s a feeling stronger than common nostalgia that’s hard to explain.
So, three weeks removed from our first child’s due date, my wife and I were lying in bed watching Detroit win The Cup. Lidstrom got the Conn Smythe trophy for playoff MVP and then Gary Bettman came out and presented the cup to Steve Yzerman. Stevie Y hoisted The Cup over his head and planted a big kiss on it. Right then, I turned to her (she was pretending not to watch the game), patted her on the stomach, and said, “OK, you can give birth now”.
At 05:00 the next morning she woke me up with, “Andrew, we’re going to have a baby”. More than half asleep, I replied, “I know,” and she said, “No. We’re going to have a baby TODAY. My water just broke”.
A little more than twelve hours later our daughter was born. That makes today her birthday (and aside from making me feel slightly old that means yesterday was June 13).
I waited twelve years for The Cup to be handed out on June 13 again but the Hockey Gods must be looking upon me favorably because I only needed to wait another seven for it to happen once more. Last night the Vegas Golden Nights won the Stanley Cup and today my daughter celebrates her twenty-first birthday. Congratulations to them and a most wonderful happy birthday to her.
Hockey may have the greatest trophy but I have the greatest daughter and to me, that’s worth more than any sterling silver cup, Stanley or otherwise.
I had a plan for what to do when my rights were returned for both of my traditionally published books, but due to a not-so-author-friendly contract, it was still a year away for one and almost two years away for the other. I did have a plan, though, and I was all set to work on it. Then, as the saying goes, the game changed.
With apologies and a tip of the cap to James Fell…
–-On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 4, 2022–
The email was unexpected and brief. I was unceremoniously dropped by my publisher. The plan I had in place had to change. The first order of business was to get the nonfiction book about my daughter’s struggles with spinal fusion surgery out ASAP.
I’m happy to report that less than four months later I released Bent But Not Broken: One Family’s Scoliosis Journey on my own. It was one hell of a learning curve, but I did it, and I’ve never been happier. The cover is better, the layout is better, and I’m in complete control.
ALL royalties from that book are being donated to charities (Canadian Blood Services and Ronald McDonald House). That would not have been possible with a publisher taking a majority cut of the already small slice of pie. You can find your favourite retailer here if you want to buy it (don’t ask me what’s happening with the Australian paperback, that’s an Amazon “quirk” for which I have yet to see a resolution).
I shelved Hard Truth and wanted to turn it into a quadrilogy of short novels (about 175 pages each) and planned on doing that last year in advance of the midterm elections (the characters are all flavoured similarly to some of the names you hear in the news and the stories are them getting their comeuppances), but then a friend came to me with the idea for my #MisfortuneMemoir and that shiny object captured my attention (the newly minted Reprisal series is slotted to hit the shelves, at least in part, before the 2024 election in the U.S.).
I put all the things I’d learned getting BENT out into the world into action and as I hope you are aware, Near Death by a Thousand Cuts: A Humorous Memoir of Misfortune will hit the shelves on April 1st. I’m beyond excited about bringing this book to you and am proud of myself for taking control of a challenging situation.
Am I done with publishers? Partly. Yes, my experience was definitely tainted due to one bad apple, and I’ll continue to self-publish, but I do have a few novels finished that I think would be a great fit for a traditional publisher (I think one, in particular, is damn good and I promise it will have a shorter title than my nonfiction). More on that after I get past this upcoming release.
So, happy January 4th, everyone, and remember the saying about doors closing and windows opening or something. I don’t know, there are lessons in there. Or not. Do with this information as you will.
Peace, love, and penguins, Andrew
P.S. I made a conscious decision to not call out my former publisher by name here. Aside from them having an itchy trigger finger from a litigation perspective, I don’t think dragging a company publicly over these differences is cool beans. If you message me directly though I’d be happy to share my experience. Onward and upward, friends.
James Burke had this splendid television series called Connections. Every episode he would walk you through a weird and wild chain of events and inventions that led to some modern technological advancement. Imagine the Moon landing of 1969 only being made possible because of some fourteenth-century monk’s desire to make beer more efficiently. That’s the type of story he told week in and week out, and it was fascinating.
So, let me take you on a similar journey about why tomatoes make me think of persecution.
Way back in late 2014 I was quite active on Twitter. I amassed a following of seven or eight hundred people and I followed about six hundred. Not a huge sphere of influence by any stretch, but not nothing either. In addition to people I knew in real life, I followed all the political parties and their leaders for Canada as well as Ontario. I am active politically, I care about democracy in my country (and elsewhere) and want nothing more than for it to be a fair and representative system for the people participating in it.
That said, I can be very passionate in my opinions and I acknowledge that sometimes that emotional investment does not always positively further debate and some find it offputting. I can be talked off my outrage cliff easily enough, but if someone doesn’t have the energy or desire to call me out on that and instead just walks away I understand.
With that in mind, let me tell you about this person we’ll call “Pierre”. I was introduced to him at a regular social event and he seemed like a nice enough fella. We decided to “do lunch” after a couple of times running into each other at this event. Not halfway through the lunch, he busts out a multi-level marketing scheme.
I took his materials and gave him the token, “I’ll for sure look into this,” before tossing them in my recycling bin as soon as I got home. We did keep in touch though and saw each other around town a few times. Even then I wouldn’t have said we were friends but instead would have defined us as friendly acquaintances.
Then the prospect of a Canadian federal election happened. At that time, Stephen Harper was the Prime Minister and he was behaving like a real piece of shit, leaning into very anti-democratic ideals (muzzling scientists whose research contradicted Conservative ideology, limiting voting rights, committing and defending election fraud, and my personal favourite, destroying science and research books because they didn’t have anywhere to put them). He was also into heavily divisive politics (keep in mind this was right as the U.S. election was set to turn the political landscape on its head).
One day we got into it and after a little back-and-forth, I made the jump and invoked Godwin’s Law.
Instead of addressing the merits of my claim (which I was fully prepared to argue properly since I know well enough I was being hyperbolic in my comparison), he replied with a “very fine people on both sides” sort of comment. This was a couple of years before the village idiot Oompa Loompa used the phrase but that was the underlying argument he came back with and it was then I decided that this wasn’t a person I wanted in my life. So, I unfollowed him from Twitter and took him out of my friend list on Facebook.
Immediately thereafter he sent me a message on Facebook railing about how he was being persecuted, which tracked rather nicely with all the other “arguments” he attempted since there is this tendency for certain people to extend the definition of “persecution” to include individuals who simply don’t want to hear their crap anymore. It’s laughable that his sense of entitlement led him to believe that every other human on the planet owed him an audience.
“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
Emerson
Here’s a pro tip for anyone improperly playing the persecution card: No one owes you shit, you’re not being “cancelled”, and you’re certainly not being persecuted simply because a random citizen decides to remove you and your bullshit opinions from their line of sight.
So, tomatoes.
To say that Pierre isn’t a fan would be a gross understatement. I’ve never seen anyone hate a specific food with the intensity of this guy. My son’s deathly allergic to peanuts and I’ve never even seen him emotionally collapse the way Pierre does at the mere mention of tomatoes. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen anyone hate anything as much as he claims to hate them. His is a completely unhinged, visceral reaction that legitimately has me concerned for any wait staff that mistakenly hands him a plate with so much as a single cherry tomato on top.
It comes up because I can’t look at a tomato without thinking about Pierre, his watered-down whiny definition of persecution, and his pyramid scheme. It also happens that this past weekend I made salsa. I sliced, peeled, crushed, and drained close to 150 tomatoes and with each one I giggled maniacally at the thought of Pierre sitting in front of a plate of them while being forced to watch clips of Justin Trudeau.
Persecution salsa for the win.
Edit: I dug up the original email he sent me and he used the word “prosecution” instead of “persecution”, which just makes this even more hilarious. Just thought I would share.
The most formative twelve months of my life happened between August 1989 and July 1990. When digging around in the basement more than thirty-two years later, my wife uncovered a box filled with cassettes containing a veritable treasure trove of nostalgia and some pretty awesome music.
Therein were dozens of purchased cassettes, mixed tapes, and bootlegs recorded tape-to-tape or from these newfangled digital compact discs. Included in this musical ark were my first two attempts at making mixes with meaning that documented those magical, formative twelve months and ushered in a new era of my human development.
Before we get into a rundown of my autobiographical mixes, let’s first take a minute to appreciate the sheer eclecticism of this collection. If you know me and my wife, you’ll be able to pick out whose are whose, but there is some definite and in some cases surprising overlap (I’ll leave it to you to guess what that is). On the top layer alone we have the following artists represented:
REM, Steve Vai, The Mighty Lemon Drops, George Michael, The Northern Pikes, RUSH, They Might Be Giants, Billy Bragg, Sting, Concrete Blonde, James, Bootsauce, Pink Floyd, Beastie Boys, 54-40, Yaz, The Grapes of Wrath, ABBA, Sarah McLachlan, The Pursuit of Happiness, Tori Amos, Culture Club, The Jam, Depeche Mode, Rage Against The Machine, Aerosmith, Pachelbel, The Cure, L7, Sinead O’Connor, Lenny Kravitz, Tom Petty, Faith No More, House of Pain, Lava Hay, Voice of the Beehive, Bananarama, National Velvet, Violent Femmes, Ride, The Murmurs, The Watchmen, Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, and Michael Jackson
I don’t think there’s a playlist in existence that contains all of those acts and I suspect that iTunes’ or Spotify’s algorithms wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to do to come up with a “recommended for you” list.
It’s worth noting that with all my wife’s (clearly superior) tastes intermingled with mine in one fantastic pile of music there was but a single cassette requiring pencil surgery!
Challenge: Create a playlist with one (1) song from each of the above artists and share the link. I want to see what you come up with.
Here’s mine (minus National Velvet because they aren’t on Spotify)
Let’s start with a look at the music I put on those tapes back in the middle of 1990 and I’ll walk you through the reasons they’re on there after you’ve had a chance to absorb the list:
Mixed Tape #1 – “1st Attempt at Perfection (Boy Was I Off)” Recorded on a BASF CR-E II 120 tape around June of 1990.
Side 1
Mixed Emotions – The Rolling Stones
Hold On To Your Hat – The Rolling Stones
Rock And A Hard Place – The Rolling Stones
Get Off Of My Cloud – The Rolling Stones
Paint It, Black – The Rolling Stones
Ruby Tuesday – The Rolling Stones
You Can’t Always Get What You Want – The Rolling Stones
The Joker – Steve Miller Band
Swingtown – Steve Miller Band
Rock’n Me – Steve Miller Band
Here I Go Again – Whitesnake
All Join Our Hands – White Lion
Love Ain’t For Keepin’ – The Who
Pour Some Sugar On Me – Def Leppard
YYZ – Rush
Side 2
My Generation – The Who
Pinball Wizard – The Who
Hello, I Love You – The Doors
In My Life – The Beatles
Revolution – The Beatles
Imagine – John Lennon
What A Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong
Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin
Welcome To The Jungle – Guns N’ Roses
My Michelle – Guns N’ Roses
Fallen Angel – Poison
Baba O’Riley – The Who
Money – Pink Floyd
With A Little Help From My Friends – Joe Cocker
Mixed Tape #2 – “Repeat Offender” Recorded on a TDK IECII/TypeII High Position cassette tape around June of 1990.
Side 1
YYZ – Rush
The Spirit Of Radio – Rush
Limelight – Rush
Tom Sawyer – Rush
Red Barchetta – Rush
Take The Money And Run – Steve Miller Band
You Shook Me All Night Long – AC/DC
All You Need Is Rock ‘n’ Roll – White Lion
My Michelle – Guns N’ Roses
Red Red Wine – UB40
Side 2
Blowin’ in the Wind – Bob Dylan
It Ain’t Me Babe – Bob Dylan
Paranoimia (feat. Max Headroom) – The Art Of Noise, Max Headroom
Mr. Tambourine Man – Bob Dylan
Legs – The Art Of Noise
Peter Gunn (feat. Duane Eddy) – The Art Of Noise, Duane Eddy
I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) – The Proclaimers
Sunday Bloody Sunday – U2
Magic Carpet Ride – Steppenwolf
Wild Thing – The Troggs
Piano Man – Billy Joel
Three and a half hours of music, 50 tracks (48 unique), and very little of it current for the time. So what exactly was going on?
The Rolling Stones (7)
In late 1989, at the age of 15, my good friend Jon who was a year older than me, got tickets to see The Rolling Stones through a contact of his grandfather (I think he played cards with a concert promotor). It was the Steel Wheels tour and it was my first ever concert. Forget the fact that it was at Skydome (now Rogers Centre) before they figured out how to make the sound work well. Forget the fact that we were a mile away in the lower bowl. I was with my longest-standing friend watching the Rolling Stones and it was freakin’ awesome.
RUSH (6), Billy Joel (1), Louis Armstrong (1), Joe Cocker (1)
Two words; High school. More specifically, Jer, Shelby, Nicky, Melissa, Michelle (more about her later), Deborah, and Heather.
For reasons I cannot remember, Louis Armstrong and Joe Cocker songs were popular, but all those friends were who I hung out with so I’m just assuming they had something to do with them being on the tape.
Billy Joel is on there because he was definitely a favourite of all the girls I mentioned above. I didn’t go to his concert with them but they did surprise me with a concert t-shirt the next day and that was really cool.
As for RUSH, that’s entirely Jer’s doing. I was sitting in the hallway with him one day and he gave me his headphones and pressed play on his Walkman. The opening riff of Limelight blasted into my ears and could do nothing but sit there, mouth agape and in complete awe. I was hooked and they remain one of my favourite bands to this day (RIP Neil).
From late 1988 to the summer of 1990 I worked as a bus boy at a place called The Firefighter’s Club. My dad, not a firefighter, had a membership and put in a good word for me with “Coop” (John Cooper) and got me the job.
There was supposed to be an initiation that involved being wrapped in an extension cord and hung upside down from the balcony of the pump house beside the pool or dunked in the grease pit or something. I don’t remember exactly, just that as the new guy it was a rough introduction to my first job outside of delivering newspapers.
Everyone had a nickname: Pig, Der, Smurf, CC… I didn’t have one for the longest time but eventually, a couple of the others started calling me “Bat Butters” on account of the fact I had a 1989 Batman t-shirt I wore in the mornings when we’d be cleaning up from the night before and setting up for that evening’s events.
Anyway, the job sucked. It was incredibly long hours with little pay. I may have even been promoted to washroom cleaning at some point. However, it had its perks. Most notably, open bars at weddings from which the bartenders would slip the bus boys and girls drinks. If you were lucky enough to get the pump house as your assignment it was a veritable free-for-all, which was nice.
The kitchen where the dishes were done was separate from the kitchen where the food was cooked and that was where Pig lived. I think his actual name was Dave, but he was the resident dish pig, and so he was named. He was a metalhead, a super nice guy, and played music, loud music, while he washed the dishes. Whitesnake, White Lion, Guns N’ Roses, Poison, and AC/DC were all bands that he played that had some tunes I enjoyed – even if they weren’t as heavy hitting as the songs Pig preferred.
Missing from my tapes that Pig liked to play: Metallica, Motley Crue, Iron Maiden, and Black Sabbath.
It’s also worth noting that the GnR song I included in the mixes was there because I was into the aforementioned Michelle. It’s not a song one would normally associate with a teenage crush, but the title aligned, and so on it went.
Pink Floyd (1), The Doors (1)
I won’t go into too many details here, but suffice it to say that it was Smurf who introduced me to a beer bottle with a hole in the bottom and that had a lot to do with my sudden interest in Pink Floyd and The Doors.
Def Leppard (1), Led Zeppelin (1)
Toward the end of each academic year, my high school had a big dance. Everyone got to vote on their favourite songs and we’d have a Much Music (the Canadian equivalent of MTV) Video Party to count down the top 100 songs. They’d write them on a big thing of packing paper and unroll the list until they got to #1.
For both Grade 9 and 10 (1989 and 1990) Pour Some Sugar On Me was still hugely popular, in spite of the song coming out in 1987. Stairway To Heaven was the perennial number one, mostly because it was a song you could dance slow to (for most of it, at least) and was like thirty-seven minutes long, so you knew that so long as it hadn’t played you still had some time to work up the nerve to ask someone to dance (I was supposed to dance with Shelby but Evan swooped in before I could work my way over to her and I’ll be honest I’ve never really forgiven him for it).
Steve Miller Band (4), The Art Of Noise (3), Bob Dylan (3), The Who (4), Steppenwolf (1), The Troggs (1), The Proclaimers (1), The Beatles (2), John Lennon (1), U2 (1)
Two words: summer camp. More specifically, Rhett, Doug, Matt Zinner and an incident that simply became known as “The Belt”.
In August of 1989, I was in my last year as a camper at Sparrow Lake Camp (SLC). It was my fourth or fifth year there and as I’d have to apply for the counsellor in training (CIT) program next year nothing was guaranteed. My counsellors, Doug and Rhett, either took this into consideration or were just awesome guys because they gave me the most memorable two weeks of all my summer camp experiences.
While the Art of Noise and Proclaimers were in general popular around camp, it was Rhett and Doug that made sure Bob Dylan, The Who (Magic Bus was our lip synch contest song that year), Steppenwolf, The Troggs, The Beatles, and John Lennon were firmly entrenched in the soundtrack of the summer. Rhett and Doug also helped me through the traumatic belt incident. They helped me “lean into it” and taught me more about human nature in those two weeks than I’d ever learnt to that point.
My one cabin mate, Sean, whom I’d shared a cabin with in previous years was a huge U2 fan. At one point the year prior he’d written the lyrics to Sunday Bloody Sunday on the cabin ceiling (seeing as it was a United Church camp it was his little piece of rebellion). There was also another counsellor named Roop that, when I first met him a couple of years prior, wore a Joshua Tree concert t-shirt. Both of them were cool cats and remarkably nice and the prospect of getting to see them again in the summer of 1990 was exciting.
Lastly, we have the Steve Miller Band. At that time, his Greatest Hits 1974-1978 album was experiencing a resurgence, especially at summer camps for some reason. At SLC there was this one particular counsellor, Matt, who was the absolute shit. I can’t remember if it was 1989 or earlier, but Matt was the reason I wanted to become a counsellor myself. He was remarkably well-liked by the campers and treated everyone really well. I wasn’t one of the “cool” kids, but in the presence of Matt it didn’t matter, because he made me feel like I was. One day I was in the communal washroom taking a leak and Matt sauntered in (he was too cool to simply walk) and stepped up to the urinal beside me and just started singing Steve Miller’s The Joker at the top of his lungs, adding extra emphasis on the “midnight toker” part and then giving me a wink.
UB40 (1) and Guns N’ Roses Reprise
Remember my high school hallway hangout crew from earlier? Well, this is where shit gets teenage angsty. Heather’s Sweet 16 party was held on a boat that cruised the Toronto harbour and Michelle was there. For months I’d been working up the nerve to make a move and with the school year winding down and summer camp on the horizon (I was accepted as a CIT and would be gone for all of July and Michelle was going to be away at her camp as well), Heather’s party was my chance. She wore a red dress and we danced to UB40’s Red Red Wine and either shortly before or after that song (it’s all kind of a blur so many years later) we kissed.
A couple of days later her brother drove her to my baseball game where afterwards she took me aside and explained that her parents forbade the relationship because I wasn’t Jewish. I was devastated and as I watched them pull out of the parking lot, her brother turned and gave me this shit-eating grin before driving away (like Evan with Shelby, I haven’t forgiven him for it, not that I hold 30-year-long grudges or anything). So, UB40 made it onto the second mix along with My Michelle (again) in an effort to help process (read: wallow in) my grief.
Michelle and I stayed friends, which is good because she was a beautiful human and we shared a lot of common friends, one of whom was Jer (remember, he was the one who introduced me to RUSH). I forget when, but she started dating him at some point, was crowned prom queen with him as king our graduating year, and then they married. They’re still together and they’re both still beautiful humans that I am fortunate to know.
So, there you have it. My memory isn’t what it used to be, but the ones I shared above are about as permanent as they get. As I look at the other mixed tapes I created in the years that followed I can clearly see not just the evolution of my musical tastes but also the evolution of me as a person. The twelfth mix was done sometime in 1995 and with the exception of one Hootie and the Blowfish song it still holds up today.
I’ve created Spotify playlists of the first two in the twelve tape series (sadly, I’m missing #6 and #10) and will create more for the remaining tapes when I get the chance.
In 1993 I was accepted into the Applied Physics program at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) and in the fall of that year, I began my post-secondary educational journey. It was a co-op program, which sometimes meant job placements during the “normal” school year and studies in the summer. Add to that terrible showings in a few classes (curse you, Electricity & Magnetism 2!) and by the summer of 1996, instead of heading into my fourth year and polishing off my degree as an Astrophysics major with the minimum allowable GPA, I was languishing in the middle of my third-year course load.
Enter Calculus 3.
The year previous, I want to say it was in my Classical Mechanics class, we did a walk-through of Newton’s “invention” of calculus. Newton’s Principia was the culmination of more than 20 years of work and we covered it in three, 3-hour lectures (as our prof pointed out, “He had other things going on, so it took him longer.”) I was a big fan of the class and it pretty much cemented my interest in the field. Little did I know that this would lead me to Calculus 3.
Calc 3 sucked. It melted my brain and was impossibly hard, especially for someone scraping the bottom of the academic barrel. Even those with a lot more mathematical know-how than me found the course a challenge. However, it was a necessary part of the gauntlet an undergrad physics student had to run to get out with a degree.
Dr. Paldus was our prof and he… wasn’t the most engaging professor in the school. Smart? I’m sure of it. Thoroughly knowledgable in all things calculus? No doubt. Teacher of the year? Not quite. He wrote a mile a minute and filled up the chalkboard so quickly you had to scramble to take notes before he erased it. He also mostly kept his back to the class and spoke straight into the chalkboard, mumbling with his thick Czech accent.
No one could understand a damn thing, so we’d scribble down the equations when he eventually stepped out of the way and then review them after.
As a result, a small group of us took a casual approach to the class itself and play euchre in Waterloo Park before class, have some food, enjoy the local flora and fauna (especially the flora), and meander in (on time) relaxed and ready to write down equations with our bellies full and our hands nimble from the card playing.
In one class early on, Dr. Paldus started putting extraordinary emphasis on one particular phrase. He’d be writing at near-light speed, mumbling into the chalkboard, and then every now and then would yell, “Nablaoperator!”
No one would know what in the ever-living hell he was talking about because his body would block whatever symbol it was he just drew. He assumed we would know what the hell this was, but it had even the class smartypants stumped.
Keep in mind, this was before the internet had anything useful on it (it was mostly just slow-to-load porn and not even close to real-time sports scores), so a Google search wasn’t possible. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbooks were where we found answers and this is where one savvy investigator in the glass figured out that “Nablaoperator” was actually two words “Nabla operator” and that his was another word for the “del operator”, or to put it in lay terms, an upside-down triangle.
So whenever he yelled “Nabla Operator” that’s what he drew, and he clearly thought it was important enough to yell it at the top of his lungs. Because he did this whilst blocking our view, no one knew what he was writing until way later and there was all this other shit on the board.
Now, all of us studying astrophysics had to take Calc 3 with Paldus. Given that most astrophysics was just complicated fancy math this is not a surprise. It was also not a surprise that all the astro students shared more than that one class together. Suffice it to say, that after a few lectures the lore of the “Nabla operator” had grown and was being discussed by many in the physics building.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there used to be this wholesale food store not too far from the school called Knob Hill Farms. It was like Costco before there was Costco but from what I can tell it was only for food.
Their logo was this steer-looking thing with a maple leaf on top:
One day I walk into my Astro 4 class (taught by the excellent Dr. Gretchen Harris, who faced the class to talk and didn’t yell random mathematical operators at us), and one of my classmates had this drawn on the chalkboard:
Postscript:
I received a scholarship out of high school. It wasn’t much, $500 per term, but it was something. The conditions of maintaining the scholarship were simple: achieve an overall average of 75% with no core physics classes under that percentage. At the end of my first term, my overall average was 74.8% – and they took away my scholarship (I guess rounding up 0.2% wasn’t a thing when big bucks were involved.)
In my second year, when it became clear that first-year marks in the mid-seventies were not a strong enough foundation to excel in my field, I went to my undergrad advisor, Dr. Brandon, and asked him for his thoughts. He told me to quit. “Science, and in particular physics, is not for you. Reconsider your choices.”
I said, “I’ll take this under advisement. Thank you.”
Well, I was 20, full of piss and vinegar and not a hint of self-awareness, so I promptly declared astrophysics as my major.
Fast forward to the summer of 1997. It was a year after the dreaded Calc 3 debacle (which I passed, but only barely). I was taking one class at that time and working two part-time jobs. As I registered for my last full-time semester and started picking my classes I wondered what the hell I was going to do with an astrophysics degree.
As mentioned, I wasn’t in the top 5% of my class (more like the top 95%) but I didn’t feel too bad about it because being in the bottom 5% of an astrophysics program still had me in some pretty good company (I’m only as dim as some far-off galaxy when compared to some people with pretty big brains.) Nevertheless, a future in the field wasn’t looking good.
Enter this third-party travel medical insurance company based in Richmond, Virginia, with its Canadian headquarters in town. A fellow struggling physics student friend of mine (who a little more than a decade later would sell his company to RIM for a dump truck full of money) worked in the call centre there and noticed they were hiring junior programmers. He knew I could program a little and suggested I apply. So I did.
It turns out that the hiring manager was a graduate of the University of Waterloo and saw my resume and that I was a soon-to-be grad and he brought me in for an interview. The interview went really well. I was honest with him and said that if I got the job I would not be continuing with my honours astrophysics degree and would instead pull my registration and fill out an intent to graduate form for a general bachelor of science. Since I wouldn’t be doing much astronomy in my day-to-day he was cool with that.
A couple of weeks later he called and told me I got the job. I officially started my first career and I didn’t even have a piece of paper from my school – yet. Life was grand.
I started filling out the intent to graduate form. I double-checked all my compulsory credits. Everything there was good. I double-checked all my elective credits. Everything was good there, too. Then, I get to the confirmation of my overall average portion of the form. It wasn’t very high, but I failed a couple of classes, positively tanked several others, and beyond my first year only had a few really good marks.
I checked my transcript, logged into my account and checked it on the computer, and called the registrar’s office and had them verbally confirm the number for me.
Turns out I was getting a bachelor of science from the University of Waterloo with 0.1% to spare.
Let me take you back to the first week of September 1993. I saw this girl during orientation week at university. We were on a school bus on the way to a bar for a drink fest (this was back when schools allowed and even sponsored these sorts of things). She was standing in the aisle, one hand on a seatback, the other pushing her hair behind her ear. She was talking with her friends, or maybe just some random people, it was hard to tell. She looked happy though.
I was sitting two rows down from her. I turned to the guy beside me and said, “I’m going home with her tonight.” He sized her up, then looked back at me and said, “No. You are most definitely not.”
He was right.
However, a short time later I was in the room of a friend across the hall, my new buddy Riaz, and she was there playing Sonic on his roommate’s Sega Genesis. We got to talking and I asked her if she wanted to see these new glow-in-the-dark stars I put on my ceiling.
She said, “Sure, why not?”
We went back to my room and hung out, and thus began a casual fling that lasted a couple of months. She did drive me to vote for the very first time, and my mom did make her a toasted tomato sandwich, but eventually, it ran its course. I won’t bore you with the details, but a few months after the end I was a Jerky McJerkface and she didn’t say much to me for the greater part of a year.
Then, I went to a house party she and her roommates were throwing (I was invited by one of them; I didn’t just show up). I met her brother. We talked and hung out. It was nice. As another year went by, we spent a lot of it playing pool, hanging out, and just enjoying each other’s company. We’d occasionally share a kiss or two, but it wasn’t a thing. What we were starting to notice though, was gravity appeared to be stronger when we were in proximity to each other.
Me in the legendary house at Avondale. 1996.
Then one day in October of 1995, I’m working a student co-op job in a city about an hour away and I come up to the on-campus pub for Wednesday’s Rock and Roll night. She was there, playing pool (she and I could each own a table for the night and often did). We chatted, shot some stick, and then I asked her, “How about you come down and spend the weekend with me?”
Her friends all told her it was a bad idea, no good could come of it, and so on. Well, not too long after I floated the idea of a weekend get-together, the guy she was casually dating walked in, saw her, and didn’t so much as wave hello. He went straight outside to have a beer and cigarette with his buddies.
She turned to me and said, “Sure why not?”
We spent the weekend playing pool at Skyline Billiards (which, sadly, has since closed), hanging out with a med student friend of mine and his weird med student peers, and enjoying each other’s company. On Sunday morning we walked up the street to a local pancake house and had breakfast together (shoutout to the Maple Leaf Pancake House). She said she’d stay another night. She rode the bus with me to work Monday morning and was supposed to go home but when I got back she was in my house. I think she might have even made dinner.
She said, “I’ll go back tomorrow.”
She rode the bus with me to work on Tuesday and did go home. I called her that night to make sure she got back okay and mentioned that the weekend was really cool. She agreed. I asked her if she would like to be a regular thing. She said she would.
All our mutual friends gave it a month on the low end and a few months at best. A bit more than a year later I was taking her to the hospital to get her fingertip sewn back on after The Great Bagel Cutting Incident of 1997. Two years later we moved in together. Three years later I proposed. Four years later we were married.
For our first (paper) anniversary, I commissioned an art student from our alma mater (the University of Waterloo. Go Warriors!) to do a chalk drawing of my wife as a 19-year-old standing in the aisle of a school bus.
“Girl on a Bus”
On November 6, 2022, we will celebrate 23 years of marriage.
A few years back someone asked us if there was a moment when we knew that the other was “the one”. For me, it was after we had moved in together and I was doing the prep for a barium enema (a hilarious story that’s going into my next book). Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but for sure it was shortly after we moved in together earlier in the same year (when I started the process of having her engagement ring custom-made).
Her response? All she said was one word.
Pancakes.
How she knew, I’ll never know. All that matters is she knew. The rest, as they say, is history.
