Flight of the worms

Every man has a disgusting habit.

Mine keeps worms.

This is actually admirable, when compared with, say... watching sports. Or building little boats in jars.

To be more precise, he vermi-composts. Which means that there's a box of worms and dirt in our kitchen. The worms eat eggshells and vegetables and make them into dirt. He lavishes attention on his worms. They love him back.

Every once in a while, the worms start to leave their warm, dirty home. Maybe it's a bit too damp in there. Kind of like the Fraggles, they -- not all of them, maybe a dozen at a time -- go exploring across our kitchen and I find them in the morning, dried up within a 15-foot radius of their dirt box.

I know, it's disgusting. But you get used to it. Sometimes they travel all the way to the bathroom before contorting into dry, little husks.

Now that I have a one-year-old, I'm even more vigilant about hunting down outriders. I can just see Finn's pincer fingers reaching out slowly. He has one eye out for approaching adults. And the other eye on the worm's journey to his pointy little half open toddler mouth -- the mouth of curiosity, the mouth of delight.

Sometimes I come into the room and Finn has this crooked smirk and I know he's enjoying forbidden fruit. Usually something he dropped there earlier. But you can never be sure...

Now I'm going to go off topic. Back in the cave, there weren't any highchairs. My theory is that babies eat off the floor because some ancient part of their brain thinks that this will help them survive.

Picture a tribe of really hungry people, eating something disgusting and there is little Finnegan, crawling around under their legs, picking up whatever looks interesting. Getting nutrients and learning about roast zebra or whatever.

I'm not sure where vermi-composting fits into all this. Except maybe back in the cave, men thought that finding a disgusting habit would help them survive. I'm still working on this one...

While we're on the topic of knives and greyhounds

It's funny how you forget about things that happen to you until your memory is triggered, by the media or someone else's story or even just a similar feeling.

Back in my Commercial Drive days, I was riding a city bus when a guy holding aloft a large kitchen knife tried to share my ride.

He looked like he wandered out of a busy kitchen somewhere nearby. He was dressed simply, and clearly very stunned out. In my imagination, I thought maybe he had been cutting carrots for 18 hours straight, then walked away from his counter and decided to go home, knife in hand. That would be the amusing version, and probably the truth.

Except now he was on a city bus, my city bus, holding erect a large, sharp kitchen knife. The driver asked him to leave. But instead he stepped into the bus walked down the aisle.

Everyone froze, eyes huge, watching that knife.

I was near the back door. It's amazing how you can move without actually going anywhere. My body went cold and I slowly, imperceptibly started shrinking closer to the sides of the bus. So did everyone else. In total silence. Nobody wanted to stand out more than anyone else.

He continued walking down the aisle, vacant eyed, knife in hand. Toward me, and everyone else near the back of the bus.

And then he walked out the back door and went away.

Unlikely but interesting alternate future: Circus hippie

You only notice the circus hippies if you hang out a lot in Parc Lafontaine. Correction: if you hang out in a specific corner of Parc la Fontaine.

It starts in the spring, when you see weird looking vans next to the park. They're always there... and they look... homey. With curtains, and guitars and and maybe a cat.

And then you see the guy eating his breakfast in the park. Hey: who needs to live in the country when you can sleep, eat, and practice your tight rope in a manicured pastoral paradise, for free? Hell... you can bet I'm jealous.

It starts slowly on summer afternoons. It can even take hours for the circus hippies to string up their tight rope. One climbs a tree, there's a lot of tossing and looping, pulling taut, testing... And more tree climbing to get on the rope, arms a-kimbo.

People who hang in this corner of the park don't even stop to watch anymore.

Then the other circus hippies appear. Jugglers. Fire stick people. Hula. Tumbling. Stuff I don't even know the word for. At the peak of summer, there could be several clusters of circus hippies cavorting. Others show up and play music, bring kids and dogs.

It's all very civilized. The circus hippies are beautiful. Tan... lithe... All summer long, the vans come and go. Some are just visiting, maybe from other circus hippie parks? And then the weather turns colder, the days shorter, and one by one they start to slip away.

Until just one van remains. Maybe he's the circus hippie park custodian. Maybe a bit of September warmth will bring out two or three more dreadlocked cavorters. And then they're gone, somewhere else beautiful no doubt.

Six random paragraphs

The wicker man
I was biking to work yesterday morning and I saw this awesome guy. He looked like that scraggly guy from the front of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. He had a little pointy beard and a floppy kind of witchy rain hat on his head. And he was riding a bicycle that was all about wicker. Yes, wicker. He had woven wicker into both of his wheels; they looked like big, flat rattan pancakes. And he had multiple wicker baskets on the front, sides and back of his bike. Go wicker man!

The 1970's: pre-stained
I promised J that I would blog about one of his obsessions: pale creamy yellow utensils and furniture from the late seventies. His theory is that people in the seventies started to manufacture things that looked previously cigarette stained. Because everything already looked all dirty back in the sixties and seventies anyway.

Hey, this is Jason here, correcting the paragraph, immediately above. We have all seen appliances in that awful tallow yellow colour, right? A yellow fridge, or stove. It dawned on me a while back that these disgustingly coloured appliances actually match cigarette stained kitchen walls perfectly. So I figured that in the early 70s, when these colours started appearing, it was a market response to tired 50s moms, who could no longer muster the strength to repaint their kitchens and wanted something that matched. There. Get it? Jason out.

Hey, how come my parties aren't this much fun?
And by looking up "1970s yellow" I found these amazing party photos. These people look like fun.

Fireside chat for other cyclists
One of the things I love about Montreal is that we're a city of anarchists. Nobody does what they're told. If you tell a Montrealer to do something, she'll often go out and do the absolute opposite.

Still, I had a secret moment of glee I heard that the police were out ticketing cyclists. Because, as much as I endorse the city's "do whatever you want at your own risk" credo, I've seen cyclists do some pretty retarded things... risking their lives just to look cool or save time or hell if I know...

The way I see it, we're never going to get respect from drivers if we're riding our bikes all over the road as if we don't understand how to read traffic signs. At least, as cyclists, we need to act like cycling is a choice... not something we do because we're too stupid to go out and get a driver's license.

Hoedown at the anti-hippie nudist dock

I spent part of four weeks on Saltspring Island this summer. It's pleasant there. Most of the people who move to Saltspring are either very rich, or new age types who walked away from other lives to do something different. Like fix rich peoples' chakras.

Normally I'm intrigued by new age people. I think a lot of them have figured something out: that life actually has meaning. This is refreshing.

But when you get to Saltspring Island, life has lots and lots and lots of meaning. Everyone you meet has so much... time to tell you about it. They've all found the answer. Your soul is their cottage industry.

But Saltspring has another very special and kind of person: the anti-hippie. No, they're not gun-toting rednecks, but dark, scary white trash hippies that live in the woods and hate everyone.

We met some before our swim, one afternoon at the nudist lake. The dirty hippies were drunk and stoned, reeling like sailors, stark naked on the dock. They had long hair and sinewy, tanned bodies and faces all twisted up with hate and hard living.

The dirty hippies were cussin', fightin' and spreading hate like nobody's business.

It sounded like this: "Hey, man, I just want peace and love, you know. But he's here spreading bad vibes. And man he... HEY YOU SCUMBAG M*****F***** you get away from my dog!"

Next came naked hippie wrestling on the dock, the tattooed one versus the tall lanky one with the dangling... oh... nevermind.

All I can guess is, a place like Saltspring dredges up it's own special brand of counterculture to juxtapose all that sickly sweetness and light. In a way, they were their own special brand of homegrown punk.

Because two-year-olds are very devious

We live with a two-year-old. Things don't always go her way, as you can imagine. We're beginning to learn that she will always find a way to get what she wants.

Sometimes her machinations are very complex. It can take an hour, or even days for her to figure out her next move. And then "whhhtttt", she does it. Fast as a viper. Right behind our slow, dumb-ass adult backs.

I used to think that two-year-olds were just overgrown, mono-syllabic babies. Toddlers, they call them. Which is a kind of disarming word, like they're not responsible for what they do; like they're little wind up toys.

What I know now is that two-year-olds are hyper intelligent. She's smarter than the two of us put together. And she has boundless energy. And lots of time to watch adults blunder through their overcrowded lives.

If our two-year-old could say all the words she wanted to say on any given afternoon, we would be living with Sarah Silverman.

And then, all of a sudden, she gets all quiet and overwhelmed by something and you feel all this empathy for this tiny little person who needs you to hold her hand while she goes down the slide.

Let's take a minute to geek out on the Matrix

I watched it again last week: The Matrix.

And now I'm geeking out, 1990s style, on virtual worlds and all that.

I go back and forth. Between thinking that it's pretty cool that we can externalize our imaginations and share them with strangers. And thinking that we're making a huge mistake, retreating into imaginary worlds while the real world around us gets all polluted and broken.

Here in Canada, most of us can go into a clean world of pretty pictures whenever we want to. Whether we use TV, movies, video games or the Internet, it's really all the same thing: alternate realities that inform us, and distract us.

When we're walking down the street, those alternate realities are in our heads: advertisements, songs, websites, stuff we want. You could even say that our daily lives, our homes and identities are built from ephemeral consumerist daydreams...

Meanwhile, someone else grows our food, makes our clothes, builds our roads and houses. Many of us who work in media spend all day building alternate realities for other people. We make money that pays someone else to deal with all the unnecessary aspects of hard, cold reality.

Don't get me wrong, we're a long way from living in little Matrix pods, factory farmed by giant, hungry robot bugs.

But I also wonder... maybe the hippies have figured it out. (Then I remember my recent sojourn to the land of the hippies, Saltspring Island, where we met dirty old hobo hippies who had gone over to the dark side... but that's for another posting, another time.)

Despite their bad music and questionable hygiene, maybe the hippies really have broken out of the matrix. And maybe, next year, I'll try growing my own food. Just to see how it feels.

Handbags, and women, and handbags

Yesterday I was in an elevator and I fixated on this woman's giant, leather, fake Gucci handbag. And I tried to understand it.

What was in there? I. just. never. understood. purses.

Then later, I was leafing through a glossy magazine. And again, all those ads for handbags. A lot of handbags... giant purses held in front of skinny legs. Purses, glowing like magical talismans. Purses glinting in the sun.

What kind of power do handbags have over us?

We all know the analogy of a purse as a woman's girl parts, right? Handbags don't speak to men. They speak to other women. In a power language that only other women understand.

Work with me here:

So why not blow 10k on some kind of big ass, super expensive Italian handbag? It's like saying: "my #*%& is more expensive than yours..." Fair enough. It probably is.

But how do you extend that analogy to the fake Gucci handbag? Compared to the real deal, a fake Gucci handbag is pragmatic. But it's also a fantasy object.

And this is where I stop, because I still don't understand purses. And I feel mean, for wanting to deconstruct another woman's handbag. Sorry.