99 + 1 too many things about me

One of the things that used to hold me back from starting a blog was the thought of having colleagues read it, slide on over to me and say, hey, you are one bizarre individual… Then one day I said what the hell, I’ll start a blog, and they can read it all they like. I just won’t reveal too much about me.

Now after a year or so of posting, I figure they know as much as you do, so here goes:

1. See that photo at the top of this blog? Add a bunch of overhead cables and telephone wires, and that was our family’s view out of the front window when I was growing up.
2. When I was born, I was driven home from hospital in a banana box placed on the floorboards of an old Austin.
3. My elder brother wanted me to be a girl. I know because he wrote that in a letter to my mother right after I was born. I don’t hold it against him.
4. Had I been born a girl, my name would be Fiona.
5. I’m glad I’m not a girl.
6. My earliest memory is of me standing up looking through the bars of the crib, that same brother coming in and saying, “there he is.”
7. I don’t know if that was a dream or not, but I can see it clearly.
8. I was only three years and eight months old when JFK was shot, but I remember where I was and what was going on around me.
9. I’m the youngest of four children.
10. My sister, the family’s first born, was killed in a level crossing accident when I was seven. She was 18. Damn that Canadian Pacific Railway anyway.
11. They say she was like my second mother, constantly taking care of me as a baby.
12. I have always missed her. 
13. Not for what might have been, because my memories of her are vague, but for what never could be.
14. For the past six generations, my family has been afflicted with a hereditary skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa.
15. I consider myself to be very lucky, because I don’t have it, nor can I pass it on.
16. We didn’t have a television until I was nearly eight. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for holding out that long.
17. I grew up during the Vietnam war.
18. I’ve been fascinated with that country my whole life.
19. I started delivering newspapers when I was eight. I’d often read ours before starting the route.
20. The Canadian town I grew up in was a one-company mining town. Anaconda -  an American company - owned it.
21. I was skipped a grade. I did the first half of Grade 3, then was moved over to the other side of the room to do the second half of the year in Grade 4.
22. School mates were angry at me because they thought I’d deserted the gang.
23. I also had a terrible time adjusting, because all of a sudden I had to write with a pen, and didn’t know how.
24. I was an overweight kid from the age of eight ’til 12, when I made a conscious effort to lose weight. It worked.
25. Perhaps too well, because when I hit Grade 8, skinny and a year younger than the other boys, I was picked on.
26. Don’t worry, I’m over it.
27. I first went skiing when I was 10 years old, and hated it. I went another couple of times that year, and hated it even more.
    Then the next year, I went skiing again, and was hooked.
28. I am still absolutely nuts about skiing.
29. Photo break:
30. 
31. I wish we lived closer to the Alps.
32. I have a deep scar on my chin from a skiing accident when I was 12. Back in the day, they used to have so-called safety straps attaching your ski to your ankle, so that when you fell and the skis released, the ski wouldn’t flit down the hill and impale someone. I fell badly and my ski whipped around, smashing an edge into my chin.
33. That happened on the Harmony Bowl at Whistler, back when a lift ticket cost a kid like me all of four Canadian dollars.
34. Blood everywhere, six stitches.
35. I spent a year ski instructing at Cypress Bowl, one of the three areas close to Vancouver.  The job’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
36. We used to spend hours either playing street hockey, Canadian football, soccer or baseball until it was so dark, it was dangerous to play.
37. My first real girlfriend had an identical twin. They were beautiful girls, always leaving me at a loss for words not only for that, but because I couldn’t tell them apart when they greeted me.
38. Then on January 27, 1977 at precisely 4:20 pm Pacific time, I kissed one of them.  After that, the difference was unmistakable.
39. I learned to drive in a 1972 MGB, but I have fonder memories of a 4-door 1970 Plymouth Satellite.
40. The first three years I had my driver’s license, I was in five accidents. I haven’t been in once since.
41. If you don’t know what I mean by real girlfriend, then don’t ask.
42. I used to run around in the BC coastal rainforest behind our house from the time I was old enough to be let loose out the back door.
43. It was like a forest village, with a stream to catch frogs and make dams, great hiding places under old stumps and logs, a clearing to play little games of baseball, a hill for a lookout, and patches of huckleberry, salmonberry and blackberry to plunder as Spring slowly ripened to Summer.
44. When I arrived back from my first long trip away from home - a year-long jaunt with a backpack through most of western Europe, Egypt, Israel and Turkey when I was 20 - I discovered they’d clear-cut my forest playground to put in a fucking trailer park.
45. First day back from that trip, one of the first songs I heard was, “The Rodeo Song.” Its first line, “Well, it’s 40 below and I don’t give a fuck, got a heater in my truck and I’m off to the rodeo” didn’t make sense to me.
46. It made me wonder if I was coming back to the right place.
47. I miss Canada a lot, but I think it’s mostly nostalgia not for the place, but for the careless days of youth.
48. I can speak French and German fluently. I prefer to play Scrabble in French, though I haven’t for a while.
49. I sometimes dream in German.
50. The first five words I learned in Cantonese were five, four, three, two and one in that order.
51. I have an extremely good memory for places and dates.  That skiing photo was taken in February, 1992 at Owl’s Head, Quebec.
52. I can be very self-deprecating. That’s a good thing, because it puts me in some good company.
53. I love learning new things, even if some of them are unpleasant.
54. For example, I had to learn the hard way the meaning of narcissistic personality disorder.
55. I don’t have narcissistic personality disorder.
56. I dislike crowds intensely.
57. I have no superstitions save one: I never write anything in red ink.
58. I have climbed to the top of two of the three pyramids at Giza, Egypt. They say you’re not allowed to do that anymore.
59. In the winter of 1980 - 81 worked as a ski patroller at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, Israel.
60. I paid my way through university and for that backpacking trip by working for the Canadian National Railway at a job that doesn’t exist anymore thanks to the fax machine, a device now overtaken by email.
61. Thanks to that job, I know what it’s like to live in pretty well every town between Prince Rupert, BC and North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
62. I used to work for Overwaitea Foods packing bags and stocking shelves.  One day, the manager came up and asked me to start stocking the frozen food section.  As I was doing the job he came up to me again and said, ”the reason I’ve asked you to do this is we’re serious about training you for management, and this is the job we give everyone who’s starting out in that direction.”
63. Feeling horrified, I looked up at him with a bag of frozen peas in my hand and said, “Well, I’ve registered for university in the fall.”  He looked disappointed, and two hours later, I was packing bags again. 
64. I was robbed in Nice, France in 1980. Two years later, I was robbed in Cannes.  Watch your stuff when you’re on the Côte d’Azur.
65. When I started scribbling things down for this, my goal was to have 100 entries in the list.
66. I believe the secret to boring the crap out of everyone is to tell them them everything, so I’m going to stop here.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

So close, so far apart

My daughter and her Oma spend a lot of quiet time together. I love it that they get along so well and always seem to have something to talk about, even during those times when there’s not much to say or left to do but play checkers for awhile.

But as much as I love to stop and look at the two of them in their calm togetherness, I can’t help thinking that by the very nature of our family, one part of her childhood will always be hopelessly one-sided.

Her German Oma lives only a couple of hours down the Autobahn and comes to visit us regularly, but her Canadian grandmother lives nine time zones and a long, expensive flight away. My mother is turning 85, still fit and active, still drives a car, goes out with friends and takes short trips, but understandably no longer feels up to the exhausting flight to Europe from the west coast of Canada all by herself. She’s made the trek three times in the 10 years we’ve been living in Hamburg, and we’ve flown there four, but now it’s all up to us.

I’d like to be able to offer my daughter what I feel is the best for her, and that includes regular contact with her grandmother. But by the very nature of having a family where grandparents live on opposite sides of the world, on this I fear we are always going to come up short. In contrast to the close, comfortable relationship she has with her Oma, her contact with her Grandma will always be like getting to know one another all over again. She’ll still be the red-haired girl, but each time she’ll have grown and changed into a new version of herself. Depending on mood, the effects of jet lag and any other combination of factors, there’s no guarantee the two of them will ever be able to settle into each other’s company, and after our time’s up and it’s time to go, that’ll be it until the next time.

We’re headed to Canada this year, not just because we want to, but because it really has been too long since she last saw her grandmother. It’s going to be a great trip: a week in Canada, then a wander down the coast of Oregon and California to Los Angeles. There we will stay with a friend of ours, before flying home from LA.

I really don’t know when the next time will be. And in the back of my mind, I’m always wondering: is this time going to be the last?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Views of a London long weekend

Since the weekend was already a week ago, better wrap this London thing up with a few photos.

Our friend Douglas works hard for the money, and on a Friday night, he likes to nip around the corner to the local for a beer or two and have a bite to eat. We joined him. After dinner, the ladies bid so long, so the two of us ordered a couple more, then a couple more. Sometime toward the end of our evening we got talking to the people at the next table, who were laughing a lot and taking photos of each other One asked if we’d like to have our photo taken. Sure! Just don’t put it up on some website or some BLOG. So they took our picture. Then I asked if I could do the same.

I told them that I have a blog, and that I was going to publish it. They were OK with that, so I gave them this address. Hey guys, I hope the rest of the night was fun.

(Guaranteed not photoshopped.)

If you’ve got time in London to do some touring, but not much, at least check out the Tower of London. Sure it will cost you five times more than what Ryanair claims their tickets cost to get in, but once there, you could spend the whole day poking through crannies and getting lost in corners. We took the tour, offered free once you’re in. Hang around the entrance, and if you spy this guy, make sure you take a tour from him. Name’s Kevin, and he’s an absolute scream.

Douglas lives at the London studios where Alfred Hitchcock shot many of his earlier movies. It’s been recently converted to residential and offices, but the great director’s legacy lives on. This sculpture dominates the central courtyard. Not sure what the watch symbolises, but then again, I may just be exposing some cinematic / cultural illiteracy or complete laziness to go looking on Google for the umpteenth time today. Sometimes, I just like to keep a little mystery in life.

We dropped by St Pancras station, the new terminus for the Eurostar train via Channel Tunnel from Paris. It’s stunning, and even on a Saturday, swarming with people. I’d love to have seen it when it was dirty and gritty.

Canadian readers will get a kick out of this one. We all knew the guy was a crook, and now he’s finally in prison. But why did they waste all that time with a trial? He already came with a warning label, and you can find it within a shout of Buckingham Palace at the Canadian war memorial there, just inside Canada gate.

The Millenium Bridge is one of my favourite spots in London. I know, not very original, but there’s something about the way what looks from afar like an almost impossibly flimsy thread of steel has become such an important link between two of the most iconic sites in the whole city: St Paul’s on the one side, the rejuvenated Tate Modern on the other.

The Tate Modern’s turbine hall is stunning even when it’s empty. Right now it mostly is, save for a crack running the entire length of the floor. It apparently took weeks to install, and it’s interesting to look at up close, but I don’t know. It left me rather cold.

I’m putting in a shot of the same space a year ago. I tell you, whizzing down those slides was one hell of a lot more fun.

Our lives are intertwined with Hong Kong. It’s where I met my wife and where my daugher was born. It’s also where I met Douglas, who began as a colleague and remains a friend. We gravitated to Chinatown, not because we were hungry for barbecue duck or pork, but to re-live in some small way the atmosphere of what to us is so familiar. It also reminds me of Vancouver, because the sights and smells are to be found there too.

Actually, I lie. I would kill for a place in Hamburg to get decent barbecue pork. We bought a box of it and ate it like candy on the way home.

Saved the best for last. I don’t post photos of my wife or daughter, but the swirls of colour on this one somehow work. Happy accident.

© 2008 lettershometoyou
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Blogging into the Guinness Book of World Records

Lorelle over at Lorelle onWordPress has challenged bloggers to come up with a list of world records bloggers could break.

I don’t often feel compelled to respond to these things, but this one might be fun.

Besides, it’s been one hell of a long time since I’ve set any records.

Nothing close to Guinness Book material, but back in high school I managed to overcome a chronic state of laziness and sloth to set school records in the 200- and 400-metre sprints, advancing to the BC provincial finals in the 400. The school had been around for a few decades by then, so I figure I’d done pretty well. That is, until the next year, when both records were shattered by twin brothers, coached by the same teacher who trained us so well the previous year. Thank you, Mr. Hotston.

I came in last in the provincial finals race down in Vancouver that year, but in true Canadian fashion, I can still claim some victory: I had to beat out several others in heats to qualify for the final, ran a personal best of just over 50 seconds, and the CBC broadcast it live, so everyone in my home town saw me on TV. That was fun.

But Blogging yourself into the Guinness Book of World Records? Let’s see.

1. Deepest post. Submarines and oil platforms not permitted.
2. Highest post. No hand-helds, must be on ground.
3. Fastest post. Probably the space shuttle?
4. Longest post in shortest length of time.
5. Most posts in one 24-hour period. Minimum 500 words per post. Any language. No blogthings, no youtube, no plagiarism. One link minimum, one original photo per post.
6. Most posts in one 24-hour period without using your fingers, toes or voice software.
7. Greatest number of comments made in one 24-hour period.
8. Blogging marathon. One five-minute break per hour. Last blogger to fall asleep wins. Tea and coffee permitted. No energy drinks.
9. Greatest number of scrapers, sploggers and spammers kicked in the butt in one 24-hour period. That one I’d love to try.
10. Longest time spent staring at a screen logged into WordPress with a milk bottle balanced on your head while enduring the psychotic warblings of Mr. Bungle.

Better stop there. Quite honestly, I’m sure this post won’t set any records either.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Giving in to the Facebook Temptation.

Stuck for juicy blog fodder Too curious for my own good, I finally contacted Nicole, girlfriend of 21 years ago whom I found dangling there in two dimensions on Facebook some weeks back. The post drew a lot of comments, some very thought-provoking. About half were in favour if my contacting her again, the other half saying, nah - just let the past stay in the past.

What intrigued me about the whole story is part of my growing interest in how we adapt to the rapidly changing capabilities offered by new technologies.

Twenty years ago, no-one would never have even been put in the position of having to decide whether or not to click a button to re-establish contact with anyone. The process would have been so difficult, so time-consuming, it would have taken on the aura of obsession.

But now it’s so easy, it’s like: why the hell not?

So I did.

Here’s what I wrote her:

Hi Nicole,

West End Vancouver, summer of Expo ‘86? Four months of fun and three months of none? How are you? Are you still nursing? In case you’ve ever wondered what became of that guy who didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life, here’s a short update for you. I quit wasting my time with that awful job with those awful people, went skiing for a while and kicked around a bit, left Vancouver two years later to live in Montreal, went back to school for journalism, worked as a reporter in Sherbrooke and Hong Kong, where I met my wife and where my daughter was born. We’ve been living in Hamburg, Germany for the past decade. I’m still in media and still enjoying it. Hey, guess what? That post-university quarter-life crisis I was going through when you knew me? It now has its own label, website, support group and everything! And you can now - perhaps too easily - get ahold of old girlfriends on Facebook, but believe me: I hesitated a long time before hitting the send button.

Pretty much what I said I’d write.

She answered right away.

Here’s what she wrote:

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I don’t want to be mean or anything but i don’t know you. I’ve never seen you in my life.
I think you must have the wrong person.
I’ve never been to Vancouver.
and in 1986 I was only 12 years old and i didn’t have a b/f.
I’m happy to hear that you have success in your life and that you found the right girl.

I still can’t believe it.

Looks exactly like her, and the age she should be. Same name. Does this sort of thing happen every day?

Her full profile - now that I can see it, because I couldn’t when I wrote that other post - puts her birthdate in 1974, so yeah, she would have been around 12.

Good thing it wasn’t her, or I’d probably have a few jail stories to tell.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

The Facebook temptation. Poke, send message, or just ignore?

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

- Oscar Wilde

I was feeling homesick for Canada and all things Canuck early last month, which as any North American dressed in a tuque for pond hockey will tell you was around the time for Canadian Thanksgiving. But with no turkey, stuffing or pumpkin pie in sight, I went looking for a little home comfort in the CBC and Radio-Canada sites as well as a few Canadian blogs.

Stumbling upon a Québécois one, I could hear that familiar twang and drawl come through in the writing and it brought back a flood of memories, and of course they included certain people. So I got to thinking that since I’m now on Facebook, why not see if any of they are there too?

Big mistake.

Because now I’m tempted to send a message to Nicole, a Québécois woman who dumped me more than 20 years ago. Her name is very common so I had to scroll through a few pages, but when I saw her picture, I knew it was her. Maybe a little puffier around the edges, but otherwise still the same.

We had been living together in our 14th-floor apartment for little more than six weeks when one day she said, “I think we both have to face up to the fact that we’re just not compatible. We have to break up.”

It wasn’t out of the blue. I could see there were problems germinating even before she started hanging out with her friends all the time instead of with me, and soon I was doing the same, both of us avoiding the inevitable.

The endgame was difficult and painful, but at least I learned who my real friends were. Like Max, who helped me move, offered tea and sympathy and beat me sometimes at Scrabble in French, as I beat him once in a while at squash. Or Brad, - gay as they come in Vancouver and sick of all my hetero turmoil - who said one day: Ian, to hell with it. Just ditch the bitch and make the switch.

Didn’t switch, though I did fight a lot, eventually giving up and moving on, the stained fabric of her memory faded yet interwoven with a time I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself.

A generation ago this temptation to contact someone again would never even have come up. You’d move, change phone numbers, avoid people they hung out with, places they’d go, and even if you lived in the same city, that would have been it. You’d never have had to see them again, unless, too late diving into the frozen food aisle, you’d be forced to spend a couple of awkward moments at the supermarket.

Yeah, not much. You? OK, uh… see you.

Now she might be living on the other side of the world, but because contact is only two clicks away, why not? It’s not as if I had to devote weeks of intensive research and detective work into tracking her down, so I won’t come off as having some ulterior motive, sinister or otherwise.

But why, 21 years after a woman pushed me out of her life, do I even feel the slightest pull to do this? Is it mere curiosity, or is something else at work? Is it the desire to say, See? I was a bit of a lost soul back then, OK, but I’m not anymore? Why should she care? Why should I?

And what is it about the temptation to contact her, but not others? The three pricks who called me Chicken Bones and shoved me around all the time in Grade 8 gym class because, having skipped a grade, I was a year younger than they were and a hell of a lot weaker? Canada’s most toxic waste dump / flute player? The no-talent colleague from my Hong Kong TV days who blatantly tried to use our so-called friendship to bolster her relentless career ambitions, and, when I refused to give her a crash course in Economics 100 from Adam Smith through stock markets to the Federal Fucking Reserve, had a screaming, arm-waving histrionic shit-fit in a newsroom packed with gaping journalists, later topping it off by spreading vicious lies about me?

Not that I harbour a life-long grudge or anything, but I’d sooner be strapped naked to a massive block of ice and let a pair of starving ferrets chew through my eyeballs to the back of my skull than see so much as a blurry thumbnail of these losers again, let alone waste a nanosecond searching for them on Facebook.

But how about this:

Salut Nicole!

West End Vancouver, summer of Expo ‘86? Four months of fun and three months of none? How are you? Are you still nursing? In case you’ve ever wondered what became of that guy who didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life, here’s a short update for you. I quit wasting my time with that awful job with those awful people, went skiing for a while and kicked around a bit, left Vancouver two years later to live in Montreal, went back to school for journalism, worked as a reporter in Sherbrooke and Hong Kong, where I met my wife and where my daughter was born. We’ve been living in Hamburg, Germany for the past decade. I’m still in media and still enjoying it. Hey, guess what? That post-university quarter-life crisis I was going through when you knew me? It now has its own label, website, support group and everything! And you can now - perhaps too easily - get ahold of old girlfriends on Facebook, but believe me: I hesitated a long time before hitting the send button.

I don’t know. I might do it, but then again, just because the Internet has rendered effortless something which was impossible only a few years ago doesn’t make it worthwhile.

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Why you have to go through hell and back (Part 2)

I’ve been putting off posting Part Two of Hell and Back because the entire episode makes me cringe with embarassment and a bit of regret and horror, but since  I’m usually true to my word, I’m just going to have to plow through with it. Given myself one hour and whatever’s written up ’til then I’m going to post and, uh… to hell with it.

It all had to do with the fact that 16 athletes all wanted to get a shot at eight open starting positions on the University of British Columbia’s two eight-man rowing crews. The year was 1983, and we were all young, foolish and eager to please.

After nearly three months of strenuous training on and off the water, the day which until then had only been whispered about was finally upon us: Initiation Day.

The guys already on crew had set the day out before us. We met at a bare, concrete block changing room at the edge of a rugby field at the far side of campus and were given our instructions. We were split up into four groups of four and given a list of tasks to perform, with the warning that we were not allowed to talk to another group should we accidentally run into one. And no shirking! The organisers had watchers posted at designated locations and would know if we’d failed to do what we were told.

The tasks seemed to be designed either to bewilder or humiliate us, but little did we know the humiliation that was to follow once we returned at 6pm with tales to tell.

Among our tasks was: buy a jar of olives, a block of ice and dixie cups. What the hell are we supposed to do with them, we asked? No matter, just do it.

Oh, and streak - for those who forget, that means on a rainy Saturday afternoon in late November with the streets crowded with early Christmas shoppers, take off all your clothes and run from the Hotel Vancouver across the square and over the steps of the old courthouse to a van waiting on Howe Street.

For those who’ve done that sort of thing, no problem, but for us it was the ultimate in daring. We could be arrested! Kicked out of school! What would our PARENTS say?

That was thankfully the last task of the day before we headed back to the rugby pavilion to meet the other groups and begin part two of the initiation.

Each team had to designate an orator. As the mouthiest of the bunch, I was thrown up on a table and started to recount the day’s activities.

“Show us your joke, show us your joke, show us your joke!”

So I did. Pants down, cheering, laughter, beer bottles shaken and fizzed all over me.

Next up, we finally found out what the jar of olives, the blocks of ice and dixie cups were for.

Everyone had to strip naked and line up in four rows of four at one end of the room with an empty dixie cup on the floor in front of the first man. At the opposite end of the room one olive lay on each of the four blocks of ice.

Try to picture it: the place is cramped and sweaty, you’re standing naked on a concrete floor being sprayed with beer by a bunch of jerks standing on benches around the perimeter dressed in streetclothes and laughing their fool heads off, and then you’re made to walk the length of the room, squat over the block of ice, pick up the olive with your buttcheeks, keep them squeezed tight enough as you waddle back to the line, squat over the dixie cup, and drop it in. Miss, and you gotta do it again.

I can’t remember whether our group won or not or whether there was even a prize for the winner, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to send us all to hell and back. To throw us all through an experience we wouldn’t forget, either as individuals or as a group.

It was more than 15 years later not long after I’d moved to Germany that I was attempting to tell that story in my fractured German at a bar when someone leaned over and said, “that happened to me too!”

I was stunned. I’d been telling this story for years in Canada and Hong Kong, and nobody had ever said that. Here I was thinking this experience had been unique to us, that these fellows had been geniuses - evil and twisted, but still geniuses - to have devised something guaranteed to weld us together as a group like nothing else.

“We had to go through that during our year in the Bundeswehr - in the army. One guy threw up in the middle of it all because he couldn’t stand it. He was never part of the boys after that.”

© 2007 lettershometoyou

Why you have to go through hell and back. (Part 1)

I must be on a real truth and lies bent lately, but it keeps cropping up so often that I might as well run with it.

I was listening to an amazing podcast the other day which had a few stories that made me sit up and say, “No way! That can’t be true!”

Then I played it back again and realised these stories could very well be true, because I went through something similar - if not nearly so gory - my third year of university.

It was a one-day trip to hell and back.

The podcast has an interview an American writer who talks about how stories people tell him can be strung out to become a short story or even a novel.

He tells three:

“My first job was at the Freightliner truck assembly line in Portland. The first day my foreman tells me to go to the Finished Cab work area and fetch a squeegie sharpener, which was ours. So I went up there and the foreman there tore me a new asshole one, called me every obscene word you could think of, and then told me to go to Engine Buildup, and they tore me a new one, calling me every swear word around, and they sent me off to Rough Cab, who sent me off to Paint Booth, who sent me off to Wheel Buildup, then on to Radiator Hanging. And at the end of the day, the only thing I had learned was that there is no such thing as a squeegie sharpener, but I had also learned every area of the plant, and I had basically introduced myself to every foreman in the plant, and received the same abuse that everybody had received there the first day.

“I told that story, and a friend of mine - a pediatrician - said that on his residency, they wait until you’ve been on call for 36 hours, and you’ve really eaten nothing but Skittles out of the vending machine, and the moment you lay down on a gurney in the middle of the night for a 10-minute nap, they announce, “Dr. So-and-so to room such-and-such, Code Red, staff!”  And you go racing down through the hospital delirious, sleep-deprived. You hear this woman down the hall in a room screaming, and you reach the room and throw the door open. The patient’s room is draped in this odd way: all the fabric and screens are pulled. There’s a woman laying in bed naked, covered in blood screaming, and something hits you in the chest, and you instinctively catch this thing that has struck you, and the woman is screaming, “You Bastard! You bastard! You killed my baby! You killed my child!” And the thing that you’ve caught is a dead, naked, bloody baby. And the room is draped so nightmarishly, because every doctor on staff is hiding in that room, and the woman in bed naked is a nurse, and everyone who is there is there because it has been done to them, and they want to see it now done to you.

And I told that story in Paris last year. And after, a man came up and says: I’m a veterinarian, and it’s incredibly hard to get into the Academy of Veterinary Science in Paris.  I had to apply for six years, and once you’re in, your peer group, your mentors and advisors, they hold this big party for you, and you get very drunk.   And if you don’t pass out, they put something in your wine so that you do pass out. And while you’re unconscious, they take off all of your clothes, and they bunch you up really, really tight, and they very methodically sew you - surture you - inside the belly of a dead horse.

 You wake up cold and suffocating inside this tight, dark stinking place, and you’re sick and you’re sore and you’re cold, but you can hear them out there in the darkness around this thing, so they start shouting, “Join us! Fight for it! Come out! Fight your way out! Be one of us!” And so you have to fight your way out of this thing, you don’t even know what it is, and the moment you squeeze out they say, “Now you’re a veterinarian. Now you are one of us.”

I leave it up to you to decide whether these are true or not. But as an old editor said to me once, half in jest: why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

So to get to my own hell-and-back story: what do a jar of olives, a few blocks of ice, Dixie Cups, a Polaroid camera, a tape recorder have in common?  I invite you to return over the next couple of days to find out.

All for now,

Ian

PS:  To anyone from the CBC should you stumble upon this: please don’t go off all copyright lawyer on me. After all, I am referring to your Definitely Not The Opera podcast in the best of light, even if I do transcribe a small piece of it verbatim. I’d thought of paraphrasing, but the impact would have been lost, and I need the stories to put Part 2 into context.

PS: My iPod crashed in the meantime and DNTO has since taken down the podcast, but if anybody recognises who the author of the above might be, please drop me a line.

© 2007 lettershometoyou