Coast To Coast

006: Not Pulling Off The Look

Manhattan, 2008

The year I lived in New York, I didn’t have a work visa. My savings lasted for a few months, and then I started borrowing money from my parents. I say “borrowing” because if I ever win a multi-million dollar lawsuit, I’ll be happy to pay them back. I understand that the money’s not mine. But let’s be honest, they’re definitely never getting paid back.

At some point I realized that for the amount of money it cost to live in New York, I could live in a different world-class city every month. I think people who love New York are on pretty thin ice to begin with, but when you think about all the other places you could be instead, the problems with the city really take on a radioactive glow.

But I hung around, because I was dating this girl. When I met her I’d been in New York for a few months, and I was realizing that you could really get away with anything in that town. If there was ever a time for me to get a mohawk, this was it. Surrounded by other trust-fund shitheads, unable to get a legal job, the time to act ridiculous was nigh.

I got my roommate Mike to help me with the haircutting, and it must have been pretty anticlimactic, because I can’t remember what it looked like. That may be weird to say, but my memories of New York always seem hazy and unreal. I don’t have any pictures, but I’m assuming it looked like I had always feared: Like I was a nerd with a mohawk. I kept it for awhile, but after that first day I let it lay flat, and usually covered it with an old man hat. That look was actually pretty good, I probably coulda learned to pull that off.

So this girl I dated: I’ll call her A, just to keep her name out of it, in case she runs for president some day. Not that I’m gonna say anything bad, I actually admire that girl a lot. She’s got a spark, a really headstrong attitude that’s very rare. I haven’t met anybody like her since. Maybe Canada just doesn’t breed people like her.

I think the best way to describe what happened in our relationship is that our personalities both have a lot of sharp edges, and it eventually led to us being a bit afraid of each other. Hanging out became like walking a tightrope, a moment away from tumbling into an argument at all times.

But her spark hooked me right away, and I pursued her pretty hard. I met her because her friend knew me from my guest appearances on the Keith and The Girl podcast, but beyond that my tiny internet celebrity didn’t do me much good.

Let me give you two memories of the first days I met her. I was at Nice Guy Eddie’s with some girls I knew, and A came in with her friend. I was wearing a Punisher t-shirt that my friend Spooky gave me. I thought it was kinda anti-cool to be running around Manhattan wearing it, and anti-style is all well and good, until you’re trying to impress a girl. That’s when you realize that you’ve got a goddamn Punisher shirt on.

A’s knowledge of culture was massive: Pop, high, drug, music. She knew a bunch about everything, and was able to deduce by talking to me that I wasn’t the kind of guy who would be wearing a Punisher shirt through a legitimate love of his vigilante techniques. You know, the way guys will wear t-shirts with dragons on them because they really fucking love dragons and wish they could fly around on dragons.

She recognized the symbology of “comic book”, but immediately gave me the benefit of the doubt, and steered the conversation to Sam Kieth’s The Maxx, and MTV’s Liquid Television. I was surprised over and over by the stuff she knew. Most women will give you a blank look the instant anything remotely niche comes up. And don’t tell me that ain’t true, ‘cause it way is. Ladies.

It probably also helped that one of the people I was hanging out with was my beautiful friend Devon, and A mistook her for my girlfriend. So maybe A was pleased I was paying her so much attention, and leaving my apparent girlfriend in the wings. Or maybe I was just charming as shit.

I don’t remember how that night ended, but the next night I was walking with A and her friend through the streets of Manhattan, looking for an after hours bar she knew. To have needed an after hours bar in Manhattan, it must have been about 4:30am. This bar was one of those unmarked doors with no handle — A had spent a few years bartending around Manhattan, so she knew a ton of cool places like that.

Her friend had gotten way too drunk, and as we walked he was playfighting with her. He wouldn’t calm down, and eventually accidentally hit her for real. So to get him to chill out, she punched him right in the face. This guy was huge, easily twice her size. They were friends, but I still wouldn’t have done that. This girl could talk about The Maxx, and when push came to shove she’d mash your lips against your teeth. She was a little embarrassed about it, but man, to me, that was perfect.

We’d been dating for about 3 months when I hatched my plan to get a mohawk. This was right at the peak of New York summer, which is not a pleasant time. I debuted the look at some little bar near St. Mark’s, and that’s another reason my New York memories seem especially dreamy — I never knew where the fuck I was. It’s not a complicated layout, but I was always shocked when I realized one place was only two blocks away from another place I’d been. Traveling underground instantly fucks me up. I always come back to the surface with no sense of where I am.

A was at this bar talking to the bartender, sharing bartender stories. She had a way of putting out a sexualized energy that she was mostly unaware of. It wasn’t flirting, it leap-frogged right over flirting. As a fellow male, I got a bead on the bartender’s mindset right away: It was early in the evening, so this girl wasn’t likely to still be around later on. But if she was, going home with her would be no big problem. If I had told A that he was thinking that, she would have denied it, and denied that any messages of the sort were traveling through the air. But, females of the species, you gotta stop imagining that you know better than we do about what’s going on in the male sphere. It’s not complicated, and it’s not ambiguous, and we can see it lit up like the Vegas fucking strip.

So I roll up, and A’s initial review of my haircut was pretty tepid. My hair’s natural curl made it curve up in the back, and she said I looked like a peacock. At this point, the bartender’s vibe changed to vague disappointment. I obviously had this chick locked down, because she wasn’t exactly fawning over me, but she was clearly still gonna leave with me. Only the groundwork I’d previously laid was allowing me to so easily sweep her out of there.

I can’t remember what we did that night, but probably waited in line to squeeze into some japanese restaurant that was way too busy. She took me to some great restaurants, but the constant waiting, then rushing of New York life is a real fucking drag.

The next morning we went to brunch with A’s friend, who worked at a restaurant owned by slightly-famed restauranteur Keith McNally. I’d never heard of him before, but apparently New Yorkers know him. So that was a weird way to be introduced: “This is the guy with the same name as your boss.” I kept my hat on over the hawk, and we sat around drinking coffee and mimosas. When A went to the bathroom, I asked her friend what she thought of my haircut. She said she didn’t love it. So I decided to keep it for another week, but its days were clearly numbered.

That day was so fantastically hot that I traveled from Manhattan all the way home to Flushing and didn’t have to piss at all. Normally I have to piss all the time, and coffee and mimosas don’t help. It was supernatural, how hot is was. All the liquid in my body just evaporated. My roommate Mike and our friend Spooky were in Corona Park doing a clown job, so I cut through on the way home trying to find them. But I didn’t see them, probably because they melted.

Quick post-script: The next time I saw A, my head was newly shaved, and she was a little taken aback. She said I shouldn’t “bic my head”, because it made me look like a skinhead. Once we got to her neighborhood in Bushwick, I saw what she meant. In Canada, that wouldn’t have been any kind of a thing. But in America, I seemed like some weird racist.

Which also reminds me - post-post-script: When Mike had a mohawk later on, some guy in Queens tried to give him white-power literature, and invited him to a meeting. I’m not saying America is full of racists. Just that a never-ending string of racist things happen there, all the time. I think that’s fair to say.

Anonymous asked: Hey Kieth McNally, your writing rox. Keep it up. Very easy to follow, to get drawn into. I read the whole blog of 5 episodes from beginning to end, not wanting to get up and clean up after a hard day's work, not wanting to look in the fridge and see if there was anything edible there, not wanting to take my wet laundry out of the machine and put it in the dryer, just wanting to keep reading your blog. I too am inspired by Chris Walter and it was googling Chris that led me to you. And you inspire

Thanks, man. I got kind of stuck on the next entry, since it’s mostly about an ex-girlfriend, and I got kinda self-conscious about it. But fuck it, I just gotta plow through. I’m glad you like what I’ve got so far.

005: Pulling Off The Look (2/2)

Vancouver, 2004
The Cactus Club, Davie Street

One night at 3am I was coming home from my shitty dishwashing job, and it was so cartoonishly awful that I’m amazed it was a real day. It was raining, but rain never gets too hard in Vancouver. Most of the locals don’t carry umbrellas, because it does so little against the drizzle hanging in the air.

Some days I didn’t realize it was raining until I got inside and realized I was wet, or noticed little ripples happening in puddles. I like rain a lot, and one of the things I missed was heavy rain. On the west coast the rain never seems to really come down, and there’s almost never thunder or lightning.

This night it was raining harder than usual. I’d worked some insane nightmare shift where I was on my feet for 9 hours straight, skipping my break because I was somehow so terrible a dishwasher that there was no time to pause. I still don’t know how I never got better at it. I’d spent my whole youth playing video games — Tetris, that fucking game where you connect the pipes together, all that puzzle shit, but it didn’t do me any good. Maybe without it I woulda been so shitty a dishwasher that the whole place would have caught fire, who the fuck knows.

I cabbed up Broadway, then got out to walk the last leg. By then the rain was pouring down, thunder and lightning crashing, it was crazy. I don’t know why I didn’t get the cabbie to take me all the way home. Distances in my head are half what they are in reality, and I always think I can walk it.

Giving my legs a little break in the cab was a bad idea — A minute into walking through the rainstorm, my left leg got a severe cramp. I saw an enclosed bus stop down the street and was trying to hobble my way toward it when my other leg also got a cramp. It was fucking unbelievable. Never in my life had that happened, both my legs in intense pain and barely functional.

Somehow I made it to the bus stop. I wish I could re-live that span of time, because thinking back I really can’t imagine how I didn’t just collapse on the sidewalk. I slumped against the inside of the shelter and screamed as the cramps seared through my legs. I do not have total-recall, so I can’t confirm that lightning flashed through the sky at that exact moment. But I’m pretty sure it did.

I sat there for awhile, rubbing my legs until they were finally more or less back to normal. Then I trudged the rest of the way home, where I went to sleep so I could get up and go straight back to the nightmare machine.

This was the environment in which I finally pulled off looking like a punk. Not the happy farmboy punk I wished I could be; not the skinny art-fag punk I actually had the build for. But the bitter, ruthless punk who would stab an old lady with a broken bottle and not even bother robbing her.

I had shaved my head because I didn’t wanna deal with my hair. I was wearing a Bad Religion hoodie, the one with the Jesus cross stamped out by a big Ghostbusters “NO!”. I had bought it years before in Montreal, just because I had a chip on my shoulder about religion and I thought it looked cool. I wasn’t wearing my glasses because I was in no mood to look at the shitty world or people’s shitty faces.

I was late for work, sitting in the back of the Hastings bus. Since I was so late I put my nail clipper in my pocket, and started cutting my nails on the bus. Frightfully rude behaviour, and not something I would normally do. But I wasn’t myself. I was like some animal, cast aside from polite society, voluntarily marching each day to a bizarre, wet cell to do a menial task that was also impossibly complex and unmasterable.

I looked up from my nail clipping, with all the hate and loathing for my miserable life flooding from my eyes, and I noticed that no one was sitting anywhere near me. A middle-aged lady looked hurriedly away from me. The body language of the people in that bus was something I’d never experienced before, but it was unmistakable: They were kinda afraid of me.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never experienced it before — When a girl checks you out, or another man seems intimidated by you, you know it instantly. I was projecting the aura of an angry skinhead. All it took was a shaved head, the right shirt, and the magical fairy dust of complete and utter hatred to make it all come alive.

A little piece of me wanted to pat these folk on the back and say, “Hey! Relax, old lady! It’s your pal Keith! I ain’t gonna hurt ya! I loves ya!” But instead I gave a mirthless grin that I could never re-create in a million takes, and kept cutting my nails.

So needless to say, I quit that fucking job.

One weird thing about that kitchen was that before you talked, you were supposed to say, “May I speak?” “Antoine, may I speak?” “Tim, may I speak?” Then you waited until that person acknowledged you before continuing. It technically made a lot of sense: In a kitchen with twenty people, you can’t just be yelling shit all around. Half of what you say is gonna get lost in the din, it’d be chaos.

“May I speak” feels weird to say at first, and I think that’s why it’s so effective: It’s a very queer sounding phrase. No matter what machinery is clanging, when someone says, “Keith, may I speak?” I turn the fuck around. Who said that bizarre phrase? Oh, it’s a manager, here to yell at me.

The day I decided to quit I saw the kitchen manager talking to the floor manager, a block away from the restaurant. I don’t remember their names, so let’s pretend they’re both named “Rudy”. The sun was shining, and I was feeling a sweep of relief that the decision to quit had been made. What a nice opportunity to get this information to the proper authorities.

So I ambled up and smiled. I waited until their conversation gave them a moment to turn toward me. Then I said, “Hey, Rudy. Man, I don’t think I’m gonna make it. That dish pit is just doing me in.”

Rudy said we’d talk at the restaurant, and other Rudy gave me a hearty “Sorry to see you go!” I went to work feeling better than any time I’d ever been there before.

Then kitchen Rudy arrived, and crazy-town resumed. “Keith, may I speak?”

“Yes you may,” I said, tying up my apron.

“That was very unprofessional, what you did out there. Rudy and I were having a business conversation, and it was not the place to” BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. I can’t even finish writing it. FUCK YOU, RUDY. Holy shit. I’m a ghost! I’m out! The only reason I even showed up is because you were generally on okay guy and I didn’t wanna fuck you over. What the fuck was this reprimand shit? IT’S TOO LATE TO PULL RANK! RANK IS DONE! My rank is t-minus two weeks to being a former dishwasher. What the hell, Rudy? Oh, Rudy.

My hope is that in moments like that, the involuntary narrowing of one of my eyes lets the person know how utterly I disdain their whole value system and, by extension, their whole life. My expression seemed to make Rudy a little angrier, so something got through.

From there I made a point of being late every day. When they would say, “Keith, you’re late,” I would say, “Yep.” And they couldn’t say shit after that.

After a week they found a replacement dishwasher, and told me I didn’t have to finish out my time if I didn’t want to. I respectfully accepted. In one of those bizarre shows of pointless politeness, they said I should swing by and see them in the future, to let them know how I was doing. So far, I have not done so.

004: Pulling Off The Look (1/2)

Vancouver, 2004
The Cactus Club, Davie Street

I never managed to look like a punk, but there are a few times I felt like a punk. At shows, coming out of the pit, cutting through the crowd, I’d feel like I was outside my body, away from my normal life. Punk as fuck.

But that feeling was hard to carry into the normal world. I’d always know that it wasn’t quite me. The only time I carried it clearly enough for people to notice was after I became a dishwasher in Vancouver. I got a job at The Cactus Club in Yaletown, and the place was ridiculous. The bathrooms had leather couches, just in case you wanna chill while people are pissing everywhere. But it had the cleanest kitchen you can imagine; I really would eat off the floors, it was immaculate.

It was the first real job I’d had; I’d been working for years, but mostly at a comic shop, or as a secretary at my parents law office. They were soft jobs, so the dish pit was not an easy transition.

My image of dishwashing was to stand in front of a pair of sinks with a rag, like from an old sitcom. Instead, we put dishes on big racks and fed them through a machine that was like a miniature car wash. It was pretty cool, but somehow the technology had never been improved enough to stop rice grains from clogging the water jets. More and more rice would get clogged until the dishes weren’t coming out clean anymore, so everything had to stop while I went in with a toothpick and systematically unclogged all the little holes.

It was like a game, figuring out which dishes to arrange on which style of rack to maximize dish output. I never got good at it, so I was always behind. The servers were supposed to stack plates according to shape, and when I was 5 hours deep into a shift, hopelessly behind with no end in sight, that’s when I’d look over to see that some dumb bitch had put a square plate in the circle pile. It was infuriating. This is a square, this is a circle. Did you cunts not watch Sesame Street? The balance of the pile would be compromised, so I’d have to abandon whatever strategy I was using and focus on the corrupted pile, to remove the offending plate as soon as possible. If I ever had a flow going, you could guarantee that some retard with no sense of shapes would monkey wrench me before long.

Then the jets would get clogged by rice, so everything would have to stop. While dislodging rice with my toothpick, a floor manager would yell that my plate stacks were getting too high. Then a stinging on my upper thigh would remind me about crotch rot. Within a few days of working in a constantly damp environment, you’ll inevitably get enough water on your pants to cause a rash that stings whenever you move. Everyone in the kitchen knew about it. I’d never heard of it. No one’s heard of it. Life is not supposed to be about constant, stinging pains near your dick. It’s not.

Socially, the place felt like high school. All the servers and hosts were cool, trendy, beautiful people. Meanwhile, all the salt-of-the-earth weirdos were put in the kitchen. Everybody was pretty nice, but the delineation between us was clear.

Because I was always so behind on dishes, I’d be there until 2 or 3am, finishing up and helping give the kitchen a meticulous end-of-day cleaning. You hear stories of rats in New York kitchens all the time, but I can’t imagine such a thing at The Cactus Club. I’m not complaining, it’s a great way to run a kitchen. It’s just no fun keeping it that way.

By the time I got off work the trains and buses had mostly stopped running. I couldn’t afford to take a cab all the way home, so I’d walk across the Granville bridge, to Broadway. There’s a Denny’s right there, and I went in one night. Turns out Denny’s is fucking gross. At Broadway I’d take a cab to Nanaimo, and from there I’d walk the last ten minutes home.

But then I’d WAKE UP AND HAVE TO GO RIGHT BACK TO WORK. No time to read a book, no time to stroll around the neighborhood, no time to idly ponder the mysteries of whatever the fuck. Just back to ten hellish hours of noisy machinery, thigh rashes and a bunch of restaurant randoms I didn’t give a fuck about. It was unbelievable. Surely something was super fucked up here. This couldn’t be how life worked.

But I did the math, and this was how life worked. This was what everyone else was doing. They were giving up their whole lives for some dumb ant colony bullshit. The enormity of it was overwhelming. People were doing life wrong. This normal life, she was not the life for me. This was a life for people who never wanted to achieve anything else, and who needed every minute to be packed with dish washing adventure, because they really had nothing else going on.

I don’t care if this sounds snotty and elitist. Fuck you. Fuck you and your whole life. Just so we’re clear where we stand here: Working your life away at some random fucking job is retarded. Totally, fully, super fucking mentally retarded like the most retarded retard who was ever retarded.

As a dish pit drone, the idea was to work your way up through the ranks until you were eventually the most famous chef in all the world. So after a few weeks of toil, my big break came. I was granted a test day one rung up the ladder, as a prep cook.

Here’s what I did as a prep cook: The cheese slices for cheeseburgers came in stacks of fifty. To make it easier for the cooks to grab a slice in a hurry, my job was to rotate every second slice at a 45 degree angle.

Who the fuck does these jobs? What the fuck? I know I didn’t go to University, and I apologize to the job gods. I’m sorry I made you angry. But this was like being in prison, and the only way out of the crotch-pain wing was to walk into the lobotomy room. Prep cooks can eat my dick.

One day I dropped an edamame bowl. By accident, I wasn’t practicing juggling with the god damn things. They were these bowls used only for edamame beans, which were ordered from actual Japan, even though it was just a fucking bowl that you could have bought anywhere. One of the managers took me aside, and drew me a pie chart of the restaurant’s gross profits. Supplies, mortgage, payroll. The tiniest sliver was profit. It seemed reasonable, and was actually sort of interesting to learn, though I didn’t know why he was telling me all this.

Then he told me that to order a replacement bowl would cut into the profit sliver. And since it takes this whole pie to generate this tiny profit slice, then this $20 bowl actually costs the company about $200.

WHAT!? What the fuck are you talking about? A $20 bowl is a fucking $20 bowl! And what about that “supplies” slice? Nowhere in your business plan is there any concession for things breaking? You thought you’d stock up once and then ride that shit to the apocalypse? What fucking business school did you go to? The school where they teach you how to make each broken bowl seem like a heartbreaking tragedy instead of a goddamn fucking bowl?

Did they really think that was gonna make me be more careful with the bowls? Or was it gonna make me dream about tipping over the whole dish rack and never coming back? Maybe speeches like that were intended to suss out people like me, because anyone but drony worker ants would fuck their shit up. It fucking worked, I’ll tell you that.

I don’t know much about the kitchen world, but my roommate at the time was a french guy named Gay Andre. He was in his late forties, and had worked his way to the top of the kitchen food chain. Ironically, this made it hard for him to find jobs, because he expected pay appropriate to his 20 year struggle. When I told him how much I hated kitchen work and how hard I was finding it, this was his advice:

“Find the head chef. Go up to him and say, Sir.” Andre put his hands together like he was in a goddamn Dickens novel. “Sir, could you tell me please how I am doing? Tell me if you have any advice for me, or if there is anything you would like me to change?”

I guess it’s not bad advice. If I had gone up to the kitchen manager and said, “Hey, I’m having a really hard time with this. What am I doing wrong?” Maybe he could have mentored me through the process, taught me some tricks to the Tetris game that is dishwashing.

But Andre’s attitude was so pathetic, so spineless… Maybe, being gay, Andre just liked the idea of a young man begging him for masculine guidance. But no. I think Andre’s rise to the top had been a slow, slimy crawl of bitchery, and I did not wanna end up like him.

I tried to be polite, but the dish pit had really worn down my social graces. I managed not to laugh at the guy, but I’m sure some kind of sneer must have crept onto my face. With great restraint, I simply told him that method wasn’t gonna work for me.

This is getting pretty long, so I’ll continue it in the next entry. For more dishwashing adventure, stay tuned! Also, fuck dish washing.

003: Five Bucks

Vancouver, 2005
The Asbalt

Because the inspiration for this blog came from Chris Walter, let me tell you the story of the time I met him.

My friends Erin and Derek were into the punk scene; I was a weekend punk, and even then only on the occasional weekend. I loved the style, venues, the people, the bands. But I could never bring myself to go all the way. I didn’t get a tattoo or a mohawk. I was always scared off by seeing nerdy punks.

Occasionally you’d see some skinny guy with a studded leather jacket, awesome hair, cool tattoos. But he’d look nervous. He’d look like he would jump at anything. The punk aesthetic was a suit of armor for him, rather than a fire inside him that was burning its way out. I saw at least one of these guys in every city I went to, and I didn’t want to be him.

If you’re looking for armor, punk clothes are a terrible choice. All they do is draw attention, which just makes the person seem more awkward. Instead of imitating the fashion, I told myself it was more important to cultivate the punk mindset, and let the clothes come second. But I could never maintain the mindset in a consistent way, so I figured it was best just to stay normal.

I also didn’t do many of the things that punks did. I didn’t drink excessively, I didn’t do any hard drugs. The one thing I did, that a lot of punks didn’t, was that I could hold my own in a moshpit. I used to come back from punk shows in Fredericton so beat up that I could barely move, and I was proud of it. As a kid who almost never played sports, moshpits are where I learned how tough a human body is. It doesn’t matter if you come out of something bruised and bloody, because in a few days you’ll be fine. The pain the next day made me feel good. It was a clear message, straight to the brain: I was out last night, I was accepted by a cool-as-fuck part of the world that I love, I did something painful and exciting that most people won’t do, and I’m fine. For an introvert, that’s a fucking powerful cocktail. Chasing that feeling was a big reason for leaving my hometown.

The punks in Vancouver weren’t the same as the punks back home. Vancouver punks were more like hippies. Lower energy, less concerned about what they wore, more into drugs. The punks I met on both coasts were really nice - one maxim I learned early on was that punks are nicer than nerds. My theory is that nerds feel pressured and put upon by society, and that makes them into mean, sarcastic pricks.

Punks have made a clear decision to pursue what they want in life, and not to be funneled along. You can argue that punk doesn’t mean what it used to mean, but it still means something. It’s still a lifestyle that I didn’t have the balls to pursue, and you probably don’t either. Having crossed that gap, punks don’t have much to prove. They already proved it.

Me, Erin & Derek went to see SNFU at the Asbalt, on Hastings. The Cobalt had been the most famous punk club in Vancouver, but had to move, so they took over and renamed the Astoria. It was right on the edge of where Hastings started to get bad. East Hastings is generally considered the worst neighborhood in Canada, and I believe it. It fucking sucks.

The Asbalt was painted black inside, and was kind of a clusterfuck. The stage was low, and when we got there some shitty hardcore band was playing, and it was a big messy wall of noise. That was the first time I ever walked into a bathroom and openly saw people doing coke, and on the way out I overheard someone asking about meth. There were a lot of longhaired metal guys at the show, which I think kicked the drug use up a couple notches.

I really didn’t give a shit about the first band, so I ended up outside with Erin and Derek, in a circle of about seven people, passing a joint around. We were standing on the sidewalk next to a chain link fence, with a recessed parking lot on the other side. At one point, this fucking weird sketchy street guy in his twenties clambered all the way up the fence and dropped down next to me, taking his place in the rotation. Everyone was pretty impressed with his climbing skills, so they welcomed him in.

This little forgotten memory just came back to me: At one point, this super hot drunk girl in a tartan skirt flashed her tits for everyone on the sidewalk. I wasn’t paying attention and missed it. It sounds like a little thing, but in the supercharged environment of being at a show in this fucked up neighborhood, around all these cool people, buzzed… I couldn’t get it out of my head that I had missed those tits. I kept thinking about it all night.

SNFU were awesome. They’re a melodic punk band Derek had introduced me to, and they’re great. The One Voted Most Likely To Succeed and their final album In The Meantime And In Between Time are my favorites, if you want to check them out. After the show, on the way out, I saw Chris Walter, just hanging out in the club.

I knew from his books that he and SNFU’s singer Chi Pig were friends from back in Edmonton, so it made sense for him to be there. One of his books had a picture from those days, with them in their late teens or early twenties, before they had moved to Vancouver. Now Walter was in his forties, and easy to spot. He was tall, bald, and his whole head was covered with an enormous tattoo.

I never had much money in Vancouver, because I hated working anything more than part-time, and Vancouver is not a cheap city. I’d only bought one of Walter’s books, Punk Rules Okay, because it had a cool cover. The rest I’d gotten from the library, or borrowed from Derek.

I wanted to say hi to him, and wanted to keep it short, because the club was loud and people were still trying to leave. I reached in my pocket and felt five dollars. It was literally the last five dollars I had until payday. So I came up with an idea that probably belies my social problems.

I went up and said hi, and told him how much I loved all his books. He said thank you. Then I told him how I’d always borrowed them from my friend instead of buying them, and I put the five dollars in his palm. I told him it was a rental fee.

He looked a little confused and said thanks again, and I was on my way.

Afterwards, being totally broke, I did feel kinda dumb for not just saying hi and keeping money out of it. But I’m still here, so I guess I found some food somewhere, and it all worked out okay.

002: Recipe Cards

Fredericton, 2003
Saunders Street

I lived for a year with a guy named Dave, my friend Matt’s brother. Dave used to go to the Yukon for the summer, to work for a gold mining operation near Dawson City. I never understood exactly how it worked, but it had something to do with high powered water canons that were used to separate gold from rock as it traveled down a chute or some shit. His friend Coady used to do the summer gold run as well, and one year he got a hernia from the exertion of controlling the giant water canon. Basically, it was a bunch of shit I could never do.

But I was going to go with them the summer after our lease expired, before their plans fell through. I wasn’t intending to gold mine, just to vacation. I could rent a tent plot for $30 a month, and I was just going to bum around and write while everyone else did manly gold mining stuff.

Dave told me that once a week, everyone would pitch in for a room at the single hotel in Dawson, so they could take showers and watch movies. The rest of the time they’d hang out around a big bonfire at night and drink. Since the sun never went down, sometimes they’d realize it was 5am and scramble to get ready for work.

One piece of advice Dave gave me was that if I hooked up with any girls in Dawson City, not to get attached. The population was so overwhelmingly male that no girl who lived there was your girl. They were the town’s girl. That’s probably good advice in general, to keep one from getting jealous: No girl is really your girl. They’re the world’s girl. Also, he said, wear a condom. Always. No fooling around. You must.

Dawson’s population shrunk enormously in the winter, since all the well-paying work was seasonal. Dave and his friend Kenneth stayed one winter, and vowed never to do it again. Two of their stories of the cold:

1) Kenneth was walking to someone’s house, in temperatures that no human body should experience. On top of his other layers he wore a windbreaker jacket, and he kept his body as still as possible as he walked. When he finally got to the house, he moved his arm to go inside, and the sleeve of his jacket broke off.

2) Dave and Kenneth stayed in a very small house, with a front door that opened directly to the outside. There was a small gap under the front door, and one morning after a snowstorm they woke to find a foot high snowdrift in their room.

After hearing these stories, I remember wondering how horrifying Alaska must be, being even further north. But when I looked it up, I found the temperatures in Canada get much, much colder. The coastal climate of Alaska keeps it relatively temperate, whereas anything but very southern Canada can reach temperatures like a crazy person might have a nightmare about. Which, I’m just gonna say, is not real fair.

I bring up Dave’s Yukon stories because one relates to this blog: Dave knew a guy, a decade or two older than himself, who lived up north all year long. The guy had a box full of recipe cards, and on each card he wrote a simple sentence about a moment in his life. Once in awhile, he would have some wine and look through the cards, thinking about his past. It was his version of a photo album.

Since I never met that guy, and have never seen his place, I have this postcard view of it. I imagine him living in a wooden cabin, next to a lake, snow everywhere. The sky is the eternal darkness of the northern winter, the stars clear in a way that they can’t be in a city. He’s inside, sitting with his box of recipe cards, his eyes closed, just remembering. Maybe his dick’s in his hand, depending on whether or not the last card he read said “Jenny’s big, luscious tits.”

That story was another inspiration behind this blog. Maybe it will become like my box of recipe cards, little memories to flip through. Though now that I had that idea of making it pornographic, that seems way better. A visitor could be flipping through the cards and see:

-Betty’s Big Ass

-Jizzing on Caroline

-Finger up Eleanor’s Butt

“What are these?” the flipper would ask.

“Memory recipes, my man. And you’re gonna wanna wash your hands there, fella. They’re covered in jism.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t be sarcastic, son. No room for that in the north. Just gold, and snow, and memories and women’s lips on my dick.”

“I tend to fuck seal and otter, myself.”

“Aye, my lad. Aye.”

I guess I don’t really know how to end this.

001: Chris Walter

Vancouver, 2005

When I lived in Vancouver in the mid-2000s, I read a lot of books by Chris Walter. As a teenager he was part of the first wave of Canadian punk rock, and when he got older he brought his ideals to publishing. If no one wanted to publish his books, he published them himself. He even wrote himself into one of his novels, as a character sitting on Commercial Drive with his books laid out in front of him, while the protagonists of the story ran past.

To me, he’s an inspiring guy. A lot of people sell books on the street, but nobody else I’ve met sells books they made themselves. His novel East Van, about the parallel stories of a junkie trying to get clean and a businessman falling into a life of addiction, had a big effect on me. My brother is a drug addict, and it’s something that makes me feel every bad emotion there is, in alternating waves. Angry, hopeless, ashamed, angry again, etc. Walter laid out the process of how a person’s life might go down that path, and how they might find their way back out in a way that really stuck with me. If I ever had the opportunity to make a film, East Van would be very high on the list.

What more directly inspired this blog are the books he wrote about himself, a series of autobiographies, the first called I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk. It’s the best biography about a normal guy I’ve ever read. Instead of following the through line of some unusually eventful life, he wrote a series of basically random memories from his past, told in random order. Each chapter was short and easy to digest; characters may not recur, events may not have had any larger effect or later significance, there was no “story”. It was just a series of different days, but I was enthralled. This wasn’t a story of some great achievement, it had no lesson to impart. It was much, much bigger than that. It was a life. This was a guy’s one-and-only, precious little life on Earth. All those amazing little moments that novels and movies try to capture, this was nothing but them. Little stories that couldn’t possibly matter to anyone but Chris, but did matter, because they connected me to his life in a way that seemed immediate and exciting. By removing the expectation that there be a clear point, the larger point that this is what life really is became much easier to see.

I think a lot about the weird little moments of my life, and I’ve recently rediscovered how much I like writing. So I decided to write this blog, in the style of Chris Walter, about random events in my life. The updates will be sporadic, but hopefully about once a week. My plan is to keep the entries short, but if one starts to get away from me, I’m gonna let it go. Like my podcast XO, I’m naming this blog after an Elliott Smith song, Coast To Coast.

I’ll include an approximate date and location for each entry. For anyone who wants to do some age-math, I was born on September 18, 1979.

Thanks for reading, I hope you like it.