They're hanging folks in Dublin for the wearin' of the green... (1 of a series)

My, my. I am prolific of late.

As if you didn't know this was coming. Now in all frankness, I'm Scottish inherently, but it's not like St Patrick's Day has ever really been about Ireland over wearing green and puking up green beer. People need social pressure valves with which to release all the pent up frustration at thundering mediocrity and hopelessness of the daily grind and what better way than to find another excuse to get drunk. It's like how Halloween evolves from trick-or-treating to fucking a drunken sorority girl dressed as Catwoman in a public bathroom whilst costumed as a police officer. Holidays evolve and mean different things to people depending on their age, status, and current situation in life (ever seen a singles Christmas party? My lord). But I'm digressing, here. When I originally put this up as a kind of way in which to feel like anything I decided to write was being published, only without all the rejection letters and death of hope, I did do something along the lines of promise my audience (AHAHA) drinking stories. So within this update shall be recounted the journey to Boston in the brave year 2010 for good old St-Patrick's.

This idea germinated, as most ideas related to alcohol, in the austere and absolute misery the 1RCR Battle Group underwent during work-up training in Fort Irwin, California. More often than not pre-deployment consists of undergoing temperatures around -50 degees Celcius (that's right, Yanks) in the winter wonderland of Alberta's own Wainwright training area, the irony of contracting frostbite while preparing to fight in in a featureless desert not lost on us in the slightest. So every so often, in coalition with the States, we send our forces on a little field trip down south for some more relevant desert warfare. The double irony of this being that the Canadian Forces war-machine seems to unfailingly drag its native weather with it wherever it goes. Skeptical?

Texas, Summer of '08

Ain't that a bitch. So of course, the Surfboard State was no different - and although none of us actually believed they were sending us to fucking sunny California for training (referring the upcoming exercise as Op California Dreamin' and readying our winter-whites for Wainwright), we would probably have been better off up north. Outside being less than adequately prepared for the weather (it's CALIFORNIA! Surf's up!), the Mojave desert broke it's 22-year tradition of drought to bring us Canucks snowfalls unheard of, sleet, torrential rain, sudden and plummeting drops in temperature, all of which culminating in state-wide flash-flooding which severely interrupted any counter-insurgency operations. 

 'Once more into the breach, dear friends...' 

All two months of California sucked, and I can't remember being more miserable in Afghanistan even during the lowest points of team morale. So of course we needed some form of escapism, and outside the duly practiced traditions of FOB(Forward Operating Base)-wide prankery (focusing on conversations played out exclusively in porta-potty limerick) doing something extravagant for everyone's favourite reason to get drunk played a sizable part in our perseverance. The decision was made on Boston, and like Tolkien's Fellowship, we would return home only to embark upon another journey. 

The trip 'to Boston' became an 'epic Road Trip' worthy of a National Lampoon movie, because when you have nothing to do but keep your feet dry and smoke cigarettes it becomes easier to build on something already long-established. By the time we set off, the journey would take us to Vermont, where we would (assumedly) drink Baileys from crystalline goblets in log-cabin hot tubs while ski-bunny goddesses dripped hot maple syrup down our nubile bodies and fed us helpings of the state's famous cheese- then, to two days in Boston and a Dropkick Murphy's concert, and unbeknown to us at the time, a final and belligerent stay in London, Ontario. We suited up - because no event and no occasion should mar a gentleman from dressing his finest - and entered the screenplay of a raunchy comedy (only with cleverer witticisms). 

Vermont, of course, was an absolute bust. 

This leg of the journey was orchestrated by Jeff. Jeff (I wish I had made-up monikers for the dramatis personae of characters who will probably never discover the online record of this journey) is an agent of chaos - and I don't mean the sort of chaos resplendent in the work of Douglas Adams, but the mathematical chaos that decrees by law all organized systems will break-down inevitably due to equally inevitable agents of change. Jeff is like the weather, as unpredictable now as ever and always will be, a man whose sole existence seems to exist beneath the skin of his peers, to find the cracks in armour, to light matches against the tar-soaked foundations of reality. To say he's an alcoholic would be a misnomer - he merely propagates his will into the more socially congested intersections of society - the alehouse. He will be understanding and accepting towards incredulity and awfulness, belligerent and unruly to provoke humane responses, say the most horrible but verbose things (with a kind of poetic vulgarity) to chase away and disgust outright, or act in a depraved and savage manner (or goad others into doing so) in order to shake the comfort zones of those who find themselves in his terrible gravity. He orchestrated this trip probably to tick another social experiment off the terrible, motivational machine which floats him through life. He is the kind of guy who publicly demeans anti-war protesters and shrieks "Babykiller!" into the faces of newly recruited soldiers to just revel in the resulting negative harmonic frequency. In any case, though I immortalize him on the page he is as easily dupeable as the rest of us, and so did we land at the Golden Eagle Resort in Stowe, Vermont. 

   

 A far cry from...

...what we expected.

We really should have taken the hint just driving through Stowe - a city (village) with an antique shop on every street corner and a population of fifty. Nevertheless, we'd booked the resort in advance - making the beds we'd all have to sleep in. After much accusatory verbal torture (directed towards Jeff) and public hysterics on my part (when the "resort", already looking more like a Christmasy bed-and-breakfast, was found to be filled with the elderly playing cribbage), we decided to capitalize on our collective losses by getting really, really drunk in our hotel rooms. Which we did, shot-gunning Coors and Bud by the crate and sloppily throwing on our suit-jackets and dress pants over dress-shirts and v-necked tees in a kind of sharp-casual mess which screamed of too-long inebriated motor-skill and coordination. After an increasingly ridiculous succession of drinking games the question remained as to what in the fuck we would do with our night which seemed all but squandered in the sleepy and probably fundamentalist community from which we thrust our hands through allegorically barred window-panes. 

"Bars?"

"Bars."

St-Patrick's of 2010 found itself hopelessly on a Wednesday, which meant of course that this new and exotic bar-scene we were trying to "quote-un-quote" hit-up would be revealing to us all the excitement and possibilities of an average Monday night. Now say what I will about the Golden Eagle (where fun goes to die), it has a pretty sweet local transit system consisting of a bus which makes its way around the local public distilleries. We stumbled out into winter darkness and eventually found ourself on the fucking sweetest bus ride ever. This was accentuated merely by the fact that our driver, a middle-aged black man with a kind of underlying contempt for his current station in life despite his very sociable personality and brilliantly jovial antics, was balls to the walls awesome. He laughed hysterically when we demanded carriage to the local pub-scene (like the word "scene" was so out of place in this sleepy graveyard of an interstate check-stop it had become a fairy-tale in itself) in slurred tones of voice and offered to ferry us about this 'winter wonderland' all for the sake of his personal amusement. Also because he very clearly had nothing else to fucking do - really the question "Slow-night?" would've probably drawn offense at this point. We discovered that Stowe really isn't such a sink-hole every day of the year, and in fact we'd missed the rush of "nubile and boozy females", who blow through the resorts and liquor-stores every year, with the early wane of winter. No skiing, no heartbeat. 

In that light (a stark and unforgiving one), he offered to drive us up to Burlington, where the college kids roam free-range through the wine-soaked gutters and hostels. Of course, Jeff and me stood up and mouthed yes with such mirth and solemnity we might have been Kirk Douglas in Spartacus - but this idea was quickly negated (and probably for good reason, although I still fail to see it) by our remaining group (who out-numbered us despite our winning personalities, those treacherous pigs). Now the secret to a solid road trip, I found, is a combination of personalities which can thrive and feed off each other or at the very least spur on the weaker iterations into tomfoolery. The three dominating forces of this particular example being Jeff and me, and Tim. Tim is a big (not even really big, mind you, but made out to be by defacto group-stereotyping) and boisterous Chris Farley of a man with a dream of Dulce-Gabbania and an illusion of class and sophistication so dramatic he postulated the "Smoke-and-Mirrors" theorem of bar-hopping - that despite your character flaws, financial moorings, and terrible habits, you can still be a social leader by disguising all of these in a finely tailored suit with minuscule, flashy accessories, sharp wit, or at the very least a larger-than-life personality. He is a man who is most often quoted as apologizing the next morning for something he did the night before. Tim is a leading personality, he is capable of commandeering the most socially awkward of personalities and dragging them through such alcohol-related adventures as to warp their perspectives on life entirely. The malformed and obnoxious gravities of us three would for the four days drawn so many into our orbit the number of lives partially affected by our savage debauchery is just nonsense. The argument, thus, was long and ferocious and drunk as all fuck but Tim managed to win out and we bid farewell to Burlington, crushed a few more tall-boys, and explored every nook and cranny in a town that seemed to be constructed of... well, nooks and crannies. 

Now the names of the bars escape this blogger. The names of people and the passage of events in many of these adventures is foggy at best and a blackout otherwise. We cruised through quite a few - some closed and almost boarded up, some vacant but for souls so crushed by factory work the beers they consumed after work and into the night kept them anesthetized though the following day, some but for the snowboard instructors and resort workers stuck in time dilation between then and the next snowfall - and some with some interesting characters indeed. Our driver stopped in for a brew or too as well, before heading home an hour or so away past the end of his shift. In any case, we quickly made friends and raised questions and drinks alike, and were eventually followed around by some of the board-jockeys whose Monday just got somewhat more interesting. We ended up at a meagre little pub where a couple of old boys were drinking and smoking and the occasional townie stopped by to say hello over a pint and a cigarettes. There we met two rather interesting characters - two older, both of whom had been on multiple tours of duty in Vietnam as part of the Marines and Engineers (I thinm) respectively and with whom we got right proper shit-faced, and if they ever stumble upon this - you boys made our fucking night.

Now all through the weeks leading up to and the road trip itself we were perfecting a sublime and exaggerated fallacy in which we would disguise ourselves for the sake of our personal entertainment. This was posing as deep sea bulldozers, a lie so polished its plausible deniability surpassed its stupidity. Combining the austere manliness of deep-sea diving and salvaging with a fabricated acceptable ratio of 'operational casualties' to rival the French Foreign Legion's, we took bits and pieces of roughnecking, submarining, and every other interesting job we could think of and began to create. Everything from hidden cultural references to alarm those with granules of intelligence (like naming our 'aquatic dozer' the HMCS Bellafonte from the Life Aquatic), to a fabricated slang language to grease our own comfort level (and thus, believability), to ancient post-Industrial schematics of hypothesized undersea machinery, to an outright insane hierarchy of crewing positions like 'first science officer' and 'skipper'. A 'dig' was an operation consisting of excavation on the ocean floor, a 'push' was removing debris, we were 'aqua-dozers' for short. We even fabricated a legend surrounding Jason's father, the 'greatest dozer' in the history of the job, who'd died rescuing Jeff from an accident that left him physically scarred (more on that later). 

This shit was eaten up with such eagerness it makes one somewhat misanthropic, but even if more than half those people didn't believe one bit of it, it was all in great, great fun.

Of course, we dropped this facade when we ran into the 'Nam vets, because it was quite simply more interesting talking with these guys than it was dragging along jockey after jockey on our insane lie. The highlight of the night was enduring one of the townie's swearing by 'the time he tried to join the army' and the reasons he wasn't able to, a story every enlisted man has heard a million fucking times by a million fucking slobs all trying to work their fingers into the cracks of a private conversation or simply to offer thanks for something of which they know absolutely nothing and understand even less. Raising his glass with an unstable arm, he toasted to the 'men who protect our freedom' or some such drivel while everyone else at the table kind of looked around uncomfortably and then, tuning in on the same vibration - a kind of frequency through which was communicated every feeling of alienation against the civilian world - one of the vets smiled, raised his glass and said 'Semper Fi, you hosers' to which we all cheered uproariously. 

Our trip through Stowe ended with the first of an increasingly painful chain of morning-afters, blasphemed by the rays of the sun and the noise with which it crept through our shuttered windows. I can't remember if we drank more when we got back to the hotel - although I think we staggered in unevenly one at a time from wherever we ended up - and for some reason (as inexplicable as the suddenness of an earthquake) Jeff had shit in my favorite hat and left it there as a testament to his individuality. Even I couldn't help but laugh.

We crammed into Cody's Ford and set off for Boston - ready to turn the city into our toilet. 

Stay tuned for the next entry, which will cover in detail the following morning and...   

Well

Actually that chicken was alright. Made dipping sauce out of mustard and Frank's Red. St Patty's Day tomorrow and I think within the next few I'll illustrate the kind of thing I usually do this special time of year, notably my 2010 trip to the city of Boston.

Damn Insuralife

There's  a somewhat marked difference between living on your own and living on your own, and it's really best differentiated by whether your parents are willing/capable to float you through University (and beyond if you're one of those) or not. I moved out west at the literal drop of a hat - without preamble or foresight, based entirely on the overpowering volition to get away and see something else than the bloody stagnant Ottawa valley. I had about 2, 000$ in my pocket, hadn't paid tuition beforehand and went to University as broke as can be expected from someone with the poor decision-making skills I seem to revel in. I worked three jobs, snuck onto Lethbridge's mediocre bus transportation system (or indeed, found marvelously brilliant ways in which to spend little-to-no money without ever shucking out the 600$ for a school-term bus pass - like dumping unfathomable amounts of change which in fact only amounted to like 65c), drank Black Label or the local college drinkery's patent-blended swill, knew every drink special of every day of the week, and hadn't even started smoking yet.

I can't help but look back on those halcyon days with a kind of gleeful enthusiasm, despite the gross financial miscalculations I made, and even though I am much less comfortable now it was probably still worth it, well, in the Jungian sense I guess. Actually, Carl Jung would probably fork the evil I at me from across the street in those days (I really just wanted to use the word Jungian, fuck it, nobody reads this). Well, fuck him, too. In order to finance (ha, finance) my way through post-secondary I took out a $10, 000 bank loan (a student loan) - OSAP was and is too inept and bloated a financial aid institution for me to rely on, since I had no money to speak of and needed rent money pronto). And well, this "get out of jail free" card sank me through enormous binges, fraternal initiatory ceremonies, groceries, and occasionally books. I ashamedly will admit I borrowed from my parents back then, but dammit, I was the only child gone away for an education and the next-up was wholly devoted to work-place alcoholism with the military on a full-time basis in Ottawa. Of course, in January I'd bled that vein dry, and had to take out another one. And then another.

I was never raised in a rich family, or even a comfortable one in that sense - the phantasms of debt, bankruptcy, and poverty stormed above our kitchen table like Mordorian thunderheads - putting my parents at ferocious odds with each other - especially on budget night, a word that became synonymous with divorce and foster-home on Webster's dictionary of "words kids hate overhearing". And yet, the littler things - like watching The Simpsons in its earliest inception on a 13-channel (and I mean 13 buttons people) television the width of my laptop computer screen, the Nintendo my aunt and uncle gave us, and the once-in-a-blue-moon trip to Macdonald's - seem brighter in colour by suns than the worst of times. I can't say I've ever been materialistic and probably never will be, I don't need a new car or tv or, well, really anything except books and something to write with to live in contentment. When I was formerly moving to Newfoundland I was overjoyed at the prospect of saving up enough money to make a down payment on a brightly-purple coloured shanty stacked on top of itself like a closet with four-walls and raising a kid in a cramped and cozy little swamp.

Still, $30, 000 of student debt for two years worth of university is awe-striking and imposing spectre to banish. It's also a fuck up. Had I properly saved money (or read The Wealthy Barber before I was chewing on my fucking belt) during my year-plus of work-up training I could've banished the shit out of it and then had my tour-money to play around with as I pleased.

Today I was about to leave buy myself lunch for the first time in two months, found out Insuralife had stricken $26 from my bank account, putting me into overdraft again. So in a half hour I'll be enjoying two unseasoned, expired chicken patties I'd forgotten about long-since in their corner of my minuscule freezer instead of a Reuben at the Arrow & Loon, which is my defacto pub due to its silly walking distance from my front door. Last night I managed to whip up canned beans and corn with steak spice. Things are somewhat.. different these days, and the options are scarcer. When I moved in to my little hovel in the Ottawa Glebe I had the foresight to do a disaster-grocery - we're talking underground bomb-shelter type food-stuffs and now I'm watching my supply of canned foods dwindle. I managed to cover last rent, and have since been ignoring the ringing of my phone and waiting for any income that can get me some bread.

Now granted, there are people who're far worst off than I am and have burned far more bridges, but this is a bitter spoonful and a bit of a learning experience which is why I'm ranting about it now. The worst I'd been off was a week in University where all I could afford to do was pushups and visit the food bank. The difference now is the horizon is much farther off these days, and other questions - like what I'm going to have to do to set myself back on track - are echoing a little louder. Me and my second-youngest brother (who's as bad at making decisions as yours truly) weren't doing much but smoking when we had 'em and waiting out the storm. I'll remember distinctly being stranded in Nepean with nothing after a job interview with Iron Horse security, where we had to sneak onto the 95 without being challenged lest we walk back my house near Lansdown at night through Ottawa's spectacularly shrieking winter. There's a point where your friends ask you to come out to the bar, try and guilt you even, and the anger sets in - because they don't seem to understand what you mean when you say I'm broke, the $20 they offer you for Jaegerbombs would be better spent on groceries, and there's something frightening about being that broke and hung-over.

Money's a god damned bitch. I'm at a point, post-Afghanistan, where I have no fucking idea what I want to do in life - and the only thing that feels right is going back to University. Crossing my fingers I'll be able to afford it.

Nuff said.

Just have to have one last..."

 . 

You know when I do actually get the motivation up to update this thing (bet you thought it would never happen, eh? Eh? Pff!) I do have to strain the working of my mind on what precisely I should write about. Booze, sex and smoking right? Still, I can stand to be a little more creative. I was going to write up a rather elaborate post about the nature of New Year's Eve, and just how virulently everyone's expectations seem to rise towards having a good time just this once to the point where the night's activities never really fill the void. Actually How I Met Your Mother does an excellent job in one particular episode illustrating just that. Actually the whole series does a particularly excellent job illustrating many of Life's ups, down, all-arounds and overwhelming realities and truths - whether it be specific to relationships, personal goals, or even career paths. Even touching on minute social phenomenon like the art of "winning a break-up" or quitting smoking manage to reflect periods of our lives with surprising solidity.

Having said that, I'm going to do precisely what I said I was trying not to and talk about smoking. I watched the latter episode with one of my younger brothers John, and we immediately afterwards went out, bought and pack, and shared a cigarette. Why? It's hard to say. There's a certain weight of social gratification which comes with the act of sharing a cigarette with someone - in some obscure way it makes weighty subject matter weightier when it must be done silhouetted in smoke or punctuated by long and solemn drags that break up the story or problem like brooding paragraph breaks. Ironically, the more the government and purists attempt to segregate and typecast smokers the more I'm inclined to have a cigarette just to- literally - blow smoke in their fat fucking faces. As a disclaimer, I'm aware of all the death toll statistics and tar measurements and cancer risks (moreso than most non-smokers I would go so far as to say), but right now I'm 22 and I really don't fucking care. I'm also aware cancer can just fucking happen whether you were following all the right healthy roads of not. The fact is I'm always going to know and I will eventually quit but by God it won't be now. It's all about moderation, I guess, or not, whatever, I've spent nights on spectacular drunks and have had my succeeding hangover hurt all the more compounded with the awe-striking realization that I smoked two whole packs that night (that's fifty, count 'em, I'm even forgoing good Canadian Press rules to illustrate the point).

It's hard to quit. Not in terms of "craving" the nicotine, but in walking outside and having a smoke with your buddies. I'm part of possibly the only institution which unwillingly but almost religiously promotes the act of smoking - the Canadian army, which proverbially runs off "cigarettes and coffee". All the long-standing cliches of yester-year stand proud and celebrated today. We smoke when we get orders, we smoke after a firefight (hell we smoke after emptying a mag), we smoke because we're scared shitless, we smoke because we're pissed, we smoke because sometimes it's hard to get everyone in one place any other way. Hell, sometimes you go off and have a smoke as an excuse to get away from your buddies. When someone looks at you and grins that grin and says "let's go hack butts" you grin right-the-fuck back and light up with all the eagerness of a toddler playing with his new toy. We're people, like the creatures we evolved from we're social animals. If there's one thing that will never disappear on this earth it will be smoking and alcohol because both are systematically ingrained in our consciousness as the simplest way to get people together. Hell, my mom starting smoking at the age of fifty - when me and my brother were on our way overseas, and that act alone drew the entire family into itself until the six of us would get up and leave together to all smoke and chat on the patio. It says something about our lack of communication when really that's what it took to bring us all that much closer together, but it still managed to.

The ironic part I guess is that I don't sit at home and want a smoke. I have no urge to have one right now, didn't yesterday, and probably won't until I see the boys again. Or someone asks me to go out for one. My roomate (thankfully) doesn't smoke so neither of us are dragging the other into it. But bars? My god. He hangs out in the smoking area just to pick up women. I don't want to make exaggerated and probably factually baseless statements like "smokers are more fun" or "smokers are happier", but smokers are more fun, dammit! At a crowded bar where the music is too loud, the cover band sucks too hard, or the guidos are trying too hard to swell outside their Tapout t-shirts, going out for a smoke is probably the most rewarding experience there. And whether it's suffering through the biting cold, the torrential rain, or just the asshole stares of those offended by your collective habits, everyone in the smoking area is brought ingeniously together as a loose-knit group of people ready to make friends. Bumming smokes, passing them out, refusing to take offered money, it's common ground less tumultuous than alcohol over which to meet people. And picking up women? We had a whole series of elaborate conversation-pieces revolving around the act of being professional "cigarette-lighters" on their first day wandering around lighting up smokes for the hottest babes. Or asking for a lighter to no avail only to light your and everyone else's cigarettes with the one you had all along. People reading this (women especially) probably think this "ruse" or whatever low-brow description might be used is offensive and unrealistic but the genuine fun-loving honesty of coming up to a group of girls and establishing conversation with a laugh is just outstanding fun at its best. It's all about being charming, and honest - and if you think lying isn't being honest, find me the person who actually believes any of the lies perpetrated by men in establishments of drinking on sex's direct behalf and I will snicker impolitely. If you aren't slightly amused by lavish and made-up careers like "deep-sea bulldozers" or "hot-air balloon pilot", you don't need to look around because you killed fun and you suck for it.

There's enough iconic movie images related to smoking out there that I could fill this post up with nothing but, and the irony is that anti-smokers will debase these as nothing but advertisements for the Tobacco giants when really the fact that you can't show people in smoking as often these days always struck me as unrealistic in itself. The Ghostbusters smoked because people smoke. Get over it. And if I ever find a copy of the movie where the cigarettes are airbrushed out I will fucking throw a pie.

Going off topic, you know I find it ironic that everything I love about being in the military has never been (at least to my knowledge) shown in cinema except by movies that.. well, aren't war movies. I mean, combat or psychological issues aside, you never get a really good glimpse of the sitting around the locker room shenanigans I'm trying to flesh out here. The tv series Rescue Me prevails not because of the scenes directly relating to firefighting - but through the in-house interactions (the smoking, natch) and kitchen-table conversation. In fact, scenes like this have always been the most powerful to me: the opening scene from Reservoir Dogs, the crew of the Nostromo gorging themselves at the dinner table over cigarettes and financial debate, Alec Baldwin and his crew huddling bleary-eyed and stressed over rolled-up shirt-sleeves and loosened ties trying to pierce Jack Nicholson's criminal empire in The Departed... (I'm going to omit the fact that most of these scenes involve smoking in some sense or another). All of these speak to an ideal kind of work-ethic in my mind. I was never and desk-jockey and don;t really have the chops to be. Despite taking English in university (and history, and archaeology, and that sort of thing) my calling has always been work work not customer service work. The scene in Ghostbusters that made every kid want to be a Ghostbuster (or even actually made them firemen, paramedics, soldiers, or even exterminators) is the scene when they walk out of the ballroom holding their captured ghost in its trap admiring out loud a whole slew of specifics meant to classify these different "vapours". The fact that they wearily drudge through their work-load in filthy overalls with used-up equipment and a lack of sleep just speaks to a kind of inborn respect for five-day-a-week labour. My work-load involve knocking walls down with sledgehammers, axes and ice-picks, trekking through ditches so pregnant with afternoon heat they baked the sweat from your forehead, processing local nationals, and firing my weapon empty at distant, amorphous enemies, all in a pair of combats so run-through with filth and sweat they could stand up on their own. And half that time? I had a smoke in my mouth, and so did everyone around me.

In any case, that's all I'm dropping. I'll try and put some outstanding stories of debauchery on paper the next time. I also hope no non-smoker lights up after reading this - although I do like the idea that a smoker just might.

Ruminations

[apologizing profusely for the yawning chasms between updates]

I loathe flying. I guess I could go so far as stating that I hate most every form of public transportation, from riding the Grey Dog province-to-province to any local city transit. I remember catching the Greyhound from Alberta to Quebec, two and half straight days of sitting cramped between rows of felt seats ornamented in rows like crooked teeth in a noisy mouth. At first, it's an adventure, and you meet people who won't be getting off the bus until near the same time as you. Then you gradually realize you hate those people. If you're like me, every rest stop is a set of dips or pushups off the rear trailer hitch or chin-ups in the bathroom off the stall door while people eye you like you're a psychopath, and falling into a hermitic state of isolation on the furthest seat blocking out their ignorant vibrations. Probably while listening to Godspeed! You Black Emperor, or I dunno, Tool or the Black Angels (submersive shit, you know?).

I have this habit, of starting things off on a dark and sour note, don't I?

My apologies, it's the holidays and as much as I will forever love Christmas and the Muppets this is one of those particular times of year that still manages to exert itself on my nerves like a stress-inoculation exercise. I just recently got myself a two room apartment in a townhouse in the Ottawa Glebe and looking forward to moving in and having nothing to do but collect unemployment insurance, attempt fruitlessly at hoarding that money away for studies in the Fall, and working out like some sort of savage.

I think the main engine driving my perpetual ire is the fact that due to this being the Christmas holidays and me being stuck in the backwater sinkhole my parents refer to as a home I haven't been laid or even really pursued being laid and it's driving me fucking bat shit. They define satyriasis as the male-affected form of nymphomania and although my thoughts on sex-addiction ruminate more or less on the wholesale dismissal of personal responsibilities towards one's significant other there are times where I ponder its sultry implications. I swear to God I have beat off like eight times a day and gorged myself on pornography to a point where it's getting to be saturating. I really, really love sex. My friend M generally feels the same and we really have an outstanding time when I visit her up in Alberta when she's single or feeling adulterous. We connect on the weird and I think spectacularly intense way that freaks and fuck-ups do, exchanging personal experiences and shrouded intimacies while lying wholly exposed on whatever mattress made itself convenient for our dynamic forms of conversation. She once admit to me that she'd decided to do the craiglist prostitution thing, why slave away getting her ass pinched by losers in a dead-end town serving drinks when she can make a month's worth of profit in a single night. I find myself truly comforted by the fact that she backed out of this at the last minute (litterally at the john's door) as fast as her feet could carry her, because she is one of those people who leave footprints on your heart and I care about her and know all to well the kind of emotional stigma which can develop from that kind of shit. I occasionally think about doing porn, or at least looking into it, with the grotesque amounts of adult material I've sifted through on the Internet you come across enough male "stars" with small dicks or weak ass motherfuckers who can't get hard even though two gorgeous models are litterally kissing each other around their dicks -and let's be frank, or at least I will, blowjobs are probably the greatest fucking thing in the world. I would sell my left arm for a great blowjob. But back to porn, I worry about what I assume everyone has about that line of work. It's pretty much it's own form of prostitution.

Sometimes it seems legitimate though. And realistically I've done some pretty despicable shit in my life in the pursuit of sex or at least in its service. I've implemented ball-gags, cuffs, chinese rope, once savaged a chick across the face because she wanted me to beat her around, have cheated and been cheated on and been 'the other guy', had sex on beaches and walking trails in hotels-by-the-hour, campus dorm-rooms and common-areas, stair-wells, alleyways... I once fucked a woman, Dorianna (I'll never forget because it was a unique name), who I met only because I sent a text message to the wrong number, while her three-month old played with inter-locking paper cups on a motel room floor. I did my best to show him that you could pop the cups out of each other when you stacked them while his mother did her best to take the entire length of my cock down the hallway of her throat  before she slid herself down on top of me. There was a manic, desperate edge to the sex which was electrifying. It was one of the hottest sessions I've ever fucking had, but that's still a pretty white-trash piece of shit thing to do. I mean maybe that shit flied back when we still threw feces at each other but it somehow seems wrong, now. Sometimes I wonder if we ever really evolved passed the baser instincts our living predecessors exhibit in the zoo - I mean you ever listen to the Jason Ellis radio talk show? Enough women seem to have grown up secretly fucking throw pillows or action figures or crucifixes to satisfy the desperate hunger of carnal fulfillment while men either fuck teddy-bears in their juvenile years or find whatever they can to masturbate with or agree to have sex with the most debasing or human examples just because, hey, fuck it right?, that sometimes watching chimpanzees fuck coconuts makes epiphanic sense on the Darwinian scale.

Assholes keep a count of how many women they've slept with. Tucker Max (an asshole of outstanding calibre) once said "when you hit the three-digits you start forgetting whole women entirely. I'm definitely at that point. This isn't a macho elaboration, and I think you'd be surprised to know what dirty, freaky shit most people you know have gotten themselves into and never confessed. One of the "few" forms of pillow talk which drive me fucking crazy is the all-too-famous question "how many girls have you been with" or vice-versa, like the number defines you as a person. The fact being that I'm here with you in the now and the more partners I've had the better chance you have at getting off more than once you goddamn stupid. There is so much bullshit stigma attached to promiscuity. And at the same time so much tragic deception. The proverb the "grass is greener on the other side" is the more true for it, I think. My friend Dave, who is currently married and has been with less women than I have fingers on one hand, constantly states he lives "vicariously" through me while I do the exact same with him, envying the stable and loving relationship with all of its ups and downs and uncertain futures. Down another of life's roads I might have been living in Newfoundland in a cramped two-story and completely purple house running a stroller up and down the winding and hilly avenues of St-John's for exercise and I still wish it was so today. Life sucks ass back and forth and for everybody, but I think that's what makes it so god-damned endearing. Sometimes I wonder if I'm only at peace when I'm at war, despite harrowing memories of fear and bloodlust and monotony and heat and drudgery and political bullshit. That's off topic, really.

When I take a step back from the pub-crawling and public-sex and revert to my more subversive cinephile and literary roots I always find an appreciation for fictitious (or historical) personas who, through power or fame or fantasy, detach themselves emotionally from their human brethren. On my return to the 'world' passing through Cyprus and finding myself at, yes, a "cabaret" while Russian goombas lit my cigarettes and offered me drinks as expensive as handjobs I sat myself next to a Ukrainian women who was clearly a sex-slave. For the previous week I found myself ignoring or becoming bored with pretty much every piece of ass who flitted into view around the bar-scene but this woman was captivating. We exchanged stories, she appeared wide-eyed and curious as to my immediately preceding experiences in the Middle-East while I was enthralled about how she had ended up where she was and her kid back in the Ukraine. I paid 200 euro to take her back to a brothel/hotel and we fucked non-stop for like three goddamn hours, I came in her mouth and wherever else she demanded, we moved into the shower, et cetera. There was a haunting kind of softness to the whole thing. That all changed at aruond 6am when two attackers tried to break my door in (I assume to roll me, so I went over the balcony), but that's another story. I have this complex for distressed women and it gradually seems to worsen, and I find myself dismissing normal women for single mothers, strippers, prostitutes... this may all stem from my formerly failed relationship. I guess deep down I just want to change someone's world. Isn't that fucking sappy? Ugh.

We humans are fucking insane.

Ta,

Gin

"Cheers"

You know it was only a few months ago I found myself sitting hunched over one of those big, mahogany-looking group tables on the bottom floor at Patty Boland's in the Ottawa Byward Market, staring at the ice cubes jostling silently with each other the bottom of another empty gin & tonic and feeling perhaps lonelier and more miserable than any one person could condense inside a frail human body all at once. A week or so later I would find myself back in Afghanistan, which, much like the life and times I'd left behind, had already become a much different place anyway. That night, like virtually every night of my chaotic vacation-time, all in different cities and provinces, I spent thinking of a beautiful girl in a blue dress who would wear her house-key around her neck on a bath-chain, because otherwise she would 'probably' lose it. I thought about other things, like why I wasn't being shot at and wondering if I ever had been, but mostly I thought about dark eyes and a smile that made me feel like I was six-years-fucking-old-happy and playing in cardboard-box castles. And more importantly I brooded on how amazing I was at fucking up, the one thing I seemed to get so right, along with the boozing, debauchery, womanizing, death-defying and the occasional game of Mario Party. I have no fucking idea why I'm writing this. Mostly, I think, because I am currently sitting alone - which is an important detail - in a shitty hotel room in Montreal, watching drifts of snow float lazily around the orange glowing of street-lamps, I have to wake up three hours from now, and I'm still thinking about that girl and hating myself for weeping and wanting everything back when I think a more sober part of knows it never will be.

I guess I'm starting this little 'journal of a gentleman bastard' on a bit of a down note, but take that with a grain of salt - I'm in a down fucking mood, I'm listening to "Swelling", a song by Sarah Jaffe, and the riffs and vocals are cutting me like razors, and I want to get more drunk and fuck something but North America has this thing about serving alcohol passed two-am unlike it's more civilized counterparts in Europe. I'm reveling in being a lush. The laws I broke vindictively in the impossible hours of the morning on the island of Cyprus would really just be scraping the service. And you'll hear about that, and you'll hear about a ton of shit, I expect.

I'm a writer, I guess. I say 'I guess' because I have this thing where I've never even attempted to publish anything or even finish anything in order to get it published. I may just be a soldier, but I don't even do that full-time. I'm a man of enormous appetites and inflated virtues and amorphous commitments. I love to learn and procrastinate, fight and converse, write and destroy, drink and fuck and all the while wishing I was married (which was, I'll bite, a very new wish to my ears) and had a kid on the way. I never really thought about writing a blog, either. Not until I read 'Confessions of a College Call Girl', which is a visceral and ironic window into exactly what it advertises. I dated a call girl, and related deeply. Fuck me, right? I used to love reading about the shenanigans of 'Tucker Max' until I realized that nothing he did was really extravagant at all and quite a few people could compete with that debauch story-telling, myself among them (and I suspect, that really is why everyone loves it). This whole thing is probably going to end up sounding pretentious, I'm only 22 for crying out loud; but let it, if it does, and if it doesn't thank God someone else is convinced.

In any case... this is me. I went to university as an English major, spent two years in Lethbridge, Alberta basically pursuing every vice I could and hemorrhaging as much money as I could towards everything but the pursuit of a Bachelor's degree, the resulting tens of thousands in student debt landing me on a combat-tour of the Middle East with the 1st Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment, from which I only recently returned. I can be a borderline alcoholic, have spent my share of nights vomiting uproariously into toilets, boudoirs, bathtubs, gutters, and occasionally all over myself. My drink, is gin. Bombay Sapphire. With tonic, a slice of lime, and a slice of lemon. I think every man should have 'his' drink, maybe not something he limits himself to but at least something he can comfortably start off a night with. I smoke. I smoke 'John Player Standard', because my dad smokes 'John Player Standard' and I will never forget the smell. But, if I feel like a smooth ride, 'Belmonts' will always be the Cadillac of cigarettes. I love women, and I love sex, and I pursue and will continue to pursue sexuality until I probably get run over by an ambulance. I love travelling - I've been all across Canada, lived in more cities than I can ever manage to squeeze into the 'past residences' section of any job or school application. I've been overseas, into the United States, and god willing I'll see the rest of the planet one bar at a time. I engage in astronomical highs and morbid lows, I seem completely unable to ever do the right thing at the right moment, am spectacular at fucking up and somehow coming off as charming while doing so. I can be petty and vindictive, passive-aggressive when I should speak my mind and an emotional time-bomb when I should restrain myself. I'm about as big a klutz in relationships as I am in real life.

All this to say I'm going to talk about sex, I'm going to talk about drinking, war, rage, jealousy, relationships, sex, and drinking. And I'm curious as to who is going to give a fuck and read it.

In any case, ladies and gentlemen, it's Gin O'clock, so let's get started. Just let me light up, first.