The Edge Of Reality: Can't You Smell That Smell?

Credit Valley Footpath was quiet and I was quietly lost in the middle of nowhere and there was nobody and it was awesome. All of a sudden, a tree started talking to me. What the fuck? I wouldn't talk back to it and it wasn't Skedaddles the Cat, but wow, it was a fucking big ass tree staring at me with wooden eyes. Looking down at me, it wouldn't leave me alone. Its leaves were huge, tree trunk enormous and round with roots spreading out, dominating the forest -- there was nowhere to hide.

The tree said to me, "You don't have the credit to be in the valley of my footpath." The tree was right. I had blown my savings on Amazon, betting on Indian sports teams, Nyquist as the Triple Crown winner, and NyQuil. I wanted to go home, but I was curious about the talking tree.

"How did you know that?" Maybe the tree put on a suit and tie and worked at RBC when nobody visited him. Everything was trippy.

"I've read your diary," the motherfucker echoed. "You're a poet." Shit, I had Lionheart Leaks and unreleased installments. It was worse than the Sony cyber attack. I was going to sue his goddamn wooden ass.

The tree grew a second face with three eyes bugging out at me, another mouth formed under its two noses and it grew nine branched-out arms. It was the most wood that I had ever seen. It tossed my diary at me with two of his hands. His third arm reached out and grabbed a fat joint underneath a log. Buddy was into the herb and Indians.

Indian Teams

Buddy rolled another joint. I took a mean piss on his ugly roots. It felt good to relieve myself and I wanted to piss off the tree. The tree tried to grab me with his arms. Wood was flying everywhere, but I escaped. I started running away. Stopping once to look back, the tree turned around and mooned me with his wooden ass. His deep crevice spat out birch bark, but I was beyond his teepee and the edge of the magical, enchanted forest filled with giant mushrooms and eleven-leaf clovers.

Credit Valley Footpath

Urn Your Way To The Top

Get Rich or Die Tryin' was a hip-hop biopic crime film starring 50 Cent. I couldn't reinvent rap or the steel, but I wanted to help the economy by shopping at the LCBO. I bought a shitload of liquor and brought it home. I opened up one of my half-pint bottles. I drained it in one continuous shuddering swallow, licked the mouth of the empty bottle, buzzed wildly and imagined I hadn't just drained my bank account like I was a professional wrestler feeling hard times. The TV was on The Kentucky Derby and I had sports on my mind. I drank Tennesse Whiskey and I was ready to wrestle my inner demons whilst wearing my Undertaker T-shirt. 

Downing the NyQuil™ felt so good after the whiskey, and shit I was tired, but it didn't take long to watch Nyquist win the fastest two minutes in sports. Blasting WOW 87.7 FM and roaring louder than Chewbacca on a heavy dose of wookie steroids, I obsessed over the female form. I went to bed and groped my wife and woke up the next day around noon in a sticky mess. Feeling nauseous, I turned my head and puked in a stylish cremation urn next to the bed. It would help if I knew the professional and functional purpose of the urn.

Heavy Metal

Lo And Behold Bisons And Good Drinking

Bisonmania

The Blue Jays and Herd have been streaky. Batters are getting time in the cage and pitchers are pitching a lot of innings. LeBlanc has been hot. The beer at Coca-Cola Field is top notch; and I'm urging anyone who likes to drink ten or eleven or twelve beers, and is not driving home, to go see a Bisons game and power drink.

Buffalo, New York

We went to see the Bisons on the same day that we went to the Burlington Humane Society and picked up our new cat. We took our cat to the game. Ten or eleven beers later, it was the seventh inning and I skedaddled to the car to spend quality time with Skeddadles, our new cat. It was around this time, I started tripping out, having acid flashbacks, hungry and craving metal. I needed loud music. I put the key in the ignition, ran the battery in the car to power up the stereo, and pumped WOW 87.7 FM in the Bisons parking lot. I was hungry for heavy metal music and so was Skedaddles. To hell with the Herd, I wanted to be alone with the cat because we were craving loud, headbanging music.

Skedaddles the Cat

Heavy Metal Awareness

My wife was sober when the game finished and she joined me in the car because it was time to go home and the Bisons won, 2-1 over the Syracuse Chiefs in a nail-biter. My long nails were scratching the cat as my wife drove out of the parking lot. We were listening to WOW 87.7 FM for the drive home. My wife was driving; I was buzzing badly and repeating the same things over and over to myself. "Wow," I said to my wife. She just looked at me and said, "Wow." All of a sudden, I realized there needed to be a week dedicated to metal awareness. I was like a heavy rolling stone and my head was weighing a ton, but we couldn't drink in the car. Cranking the sound up in the car, I was thrashing my head side to side and pretended I was writing deeper than a rolling stone writer too good to write for the magazine. Wow.

Heavy Metal Appreciation

La Buena was so good and I started thinking more and more about Lionheart Leaks and holy shit it was like a religious experience in the car going over the Skyway Bridge, driving from Hamilton to Burlington. WOW, it was so good and I didn't want to get out of the car when we got in the driveway, but my wife reminded me that I had to work the next day. WOW....

Lionheart Leaks

Acid Flashback No. 55

The Blur

Deer Creek Golf & Banquet Facility, Ajax

I'm going to warn you up front that this blog will offer little of value. You won't find much focus here. I don't have any fantastic takeaways. I don't have any solutions. I sit here between the polar forces of optimism and rage, trying to reach for one while shielding from the other. Part of me wants to retreat from conversation entirely, to escape the culture and to settle down in a castle and sit on a throne and put on headphones and just wait it all out.

The culture I'm talking about is geek culture. Nerd culture. Pop culture.

Really, our entire culture, because our entire culture is pop culture these days. Geek culture is dominant. News is entertainment. Nobody wants to smell a fart, but they want to hear about it. Wow....

I'm looking out the window. Taking time to contemplate the existence of free writing at The Ontario Writers' Conference workshop begins to conjure deep thoughts. My thoughts are heavy, but my head isn't in space. I'm not going to meet Bowie. My mind is focused on metallic minerals and I'm thinking about the richness of music, a goldmine of sound deafens my existence. The music of Metallica causes a headache within, but I don't have Advil in my pocket and I can't steal the pain reliever from the person beside me. Thrashing my head from side to side looks silly, but now Anthrax and AC/DC are penetrating a heavier beat in my head and it feels so fucking good. I take a sigh of relief that would make the makers of Advil jealous.

I'm thinking to myself how faith requires an irrational belief.

Jesus Jim, the weakness overcomes my mind and soul as the music stops, I'm not finding strength from Monday or looking outside at the pretty golf and country landscape. I need to resurrect my creative thoughts from ancient times. The workshop is over and I'm being told to leave. I'm being told to get out.

I'm opening the door and it leads outside into the wilderness. I'm in the middle of nowhere and trucking home might take two hours if I drive above the speed limit. I'm sitting in the parking lot imagining my failure. 

Exiting Ajax, Ontario

Driving home, I put the pedal to the metal. I'm going faster and faster and my mind is tripping higher and higher thinking Beyond the Blue Kite. My latest reader had a couple of thoughts and told me to take it with a "grain of salt" because he mainly reads mysteries for enjoyment. 

"Good use of language to convey emotion. I would guess that you have an academic background because of your phraseology and the quality of writing."

I can almost hear the stranger's voice after he read my novel.

"In general I felt it was well written. The last quarter of the book was brimming with excitement -- well worth the read."

But it's never enough. Talking Heads greet me in the driveway.

"And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself: 'Well.. how did I get here?'"

"I don't know," I tell the empty mailbox and open the door. The spirit world welcomes me home. I'm terrified about rejection from my first manuscript from the literary world, but there's Voodoo or Nirvana or The Doors. But I slam the door and go to the bathroom. At the very least, let this be a call to do better. Burn the rejections, toss them in the toilet, rain my piss upon their parasitic heads, and say bye-bye as I flush the bowl with clean water once more.

TOILET BOWL BLUES

The scene is a crowning glory

From the roof to the toilet,

I'm sorry I can't show you

Since it ends with a story.

From the bowels of my soul

To die of a massive coronary

Without even knowing it, 

Shit, to the toilet bowl --

I hear Mozart, my good dog:

"Pay no attention to whatever,

To anybody's praise or blame."

I mostly enjoyed a modest log. 

It'll send your heart reeling

If you follow a true feeling.