Take Off, Eh?

I’ve read some interesting debates online recently pertaining to the differences between UK and US English. A week or two ago, Indies Unlimited's Stephen Hise highlighted the differences between the two Englishes when it involves the punctuation surrounding dialogue. Boy (George), do people take this stuff seriously. As well they should, though—our wondrous English language is as essential to us writers as pickled sheep’s eyes dipped in fruit bat guano are to pregnant women. Utterly indispensable. But I ain’t going there. Neither pregnant women nor the Limey/Yank debate, nosiree. Not even fruit bats. No, I want to talk today about a different type of English, and one that oftentimes gets completely overlooked in these discussions: Canadian English.

Let me begin with a story. When I first arrived in this vast, slightly bewildered country from England in the late ’80s, I quickly found work in a group home for abused/neglected teens. Back then, I’m mildly ashamed to say, I smoked. A lot. Cigarettes, mostly (but I didn’t inhale, I swear). So, one evening I was involved in a stressful situation dealing with a kid who was flipping out about something or other, and once calm had returned, I said (ostensibly to myself, but for some reason the words emerged as out-loud speech instead of innermost thoughts… no doubt my first mistake), “Boy could I use a fag right about now.” All of a sudden, I had the rapt and wary attention of every teenager in that home. You could have cut the silence with a great big silence cutter (I was far lazier with my metaphors back then). They stared. I stared back. Someone laughed nervously and said “duuuude” under his breath. In that shaky skateboarder voice—you know the one. Now, don’t get me wrong, it ought to go without saying that the humour of this moment isn’t at the expense of gay people, it’s at the expense of a stupid, bigoted word alongside my own naivety and the propensity of adolescents to tend toward the homophobic. A perfect storm of awkwardness, really.

A related story, set in the same location, involved an evening in which I was helping another kid with her homework and needed to erase something (back when there were, uh, exercise books and pencils and, I don’t know, quill pens dipped in squid bile and stuff). It was some difficult math problem and I knew I was in over my head, so after getting further frustrated by everyone’s apparent indifference, I announced to anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot, “Trying to help Sally here, guys, but I really need a rubber.”

Silence again.

People giving me that Heath Ledger as The Joker face ---->

Then general ridicule.

You get the idea. We (sundry English speakers) walk a common road, but it really behooves (“behoves” in the UK, and I’m not even kidding) us to know the many points at which it forks before we stumble so far along Laughingstock Avenue we can’t ever find our way back and die of an increasingly common disease known as humiliatus lexichosis.

So what is Canadian English? To answer that question, and purely for the purposes of illustration, I am going to use over-emphasis and exaggeration right now and demonstrate it by picking a group of sentences no sane person, Canadian or otherwise, would ever speak. The following paragraph is pretty much un-Canadian (which means it hates hockey and loves Prime Minister Harper) and the one after that is a frankly absurd Canadian translation:

So this annoying person walks into my apartment with a case of beer and a bottle of rum from Newfoundland, removes his beanie hat and says “go away, please.” Sitting on the couch, I finish my Canadian bacon and suck on my ice pop, take a large swallow of soda, while thrusting one hand into the pocket of my hoodie and extracting a pair of dollar coins. “No need to be so hostile, my friend. Why not put on your athletic shoes and go grab us a couple of donuts? And while you’re at it, go check the rain gutters, the garbage disposal and make sure the electricity is working.” He retorts, “Only two dollars? You keep short-changing me I’ll end up on employment insurance. Besides, it’s quite a distance.” “Don’t get your panties in a bunch, it’s only about a mile. Get back and let’s party, okay?” “Cool, I guess.” “Awesome.”

Translated into “Canadian”:

So this hoser walks into my bachelor with a two-four of brewskis and a two-six of Newfie screech, loses the toque and says “take off, eh?” Sitting on the chesterfield, I finish my back bacon and suck on my freezie, chug on my pop bottle, while thrusting my hand into the pocket of my bunny hug and fishing out a couple loonies. “Take a pill, eh. Grab your runners and pick us up a couple jam busters from Timmy’s. And while you’re at it, go check the eavestroughs, the garburator and make sure the hydro’s on.” He says, “Two loons? You keep this up, I’ll be collecting pogey. Besides, it’s a ways away.” “Nah, don’t get your ginch in a knot, it’s only a couple klicks. Get back soon and let’s be giv-n-r.” “Skookum.” “Beauty.”

Of course, that is silly (some of these colloquialisms are regionalisms, and sadly, a few appear to be dying altogether). But then, Canada is a silly country. How else do you explain or describe a nation that takes hockey and beavers more seriously than, uh, wars and stuff? Other than “refreshingly peaceful”, that is? Plus, we can never fully decide which English we’re going to adopt. Along with the Brits, we will write “cheque” for “check”, “centre” for “center”, “colour” for “color”, etc., but will also use “truck” instead of “lorry”, “gas(oline)” instead of “petrol” and “tire” instead of “tyre”. Most of us will pronounce Z as “zed” not “zee”, which always backfires anti-climactically when we get to the very end of “The Alphabet Song” and find it no longer rhymes. So, in a very simplistic way, we’ve basically merged UK and US English and come up with our own hybrid, picking our allegiances apparently at random. A perfect example would be the suffixes -ice and -ise. For the noun, we sometimes adopt the British version (licence) while for the verb we follow the American (license). Except when we don’t: for some nouns, we sometimes adopt the American version (practice) while for the verb we lean toward(s) the British (practise). And yet, where the Brits use -ise, we tend more and more to follow the American -ize. Once you realize it’s a minefield, to be honest, you’re ready for any surprise. Or… Hize. Okay, I think I broke something inside my head just then.

But anyway, despite our apparent vacillation between and reliance upon the two great influencers, we still manage to retain over 2,000 words that are unique to Canada. Words like “butter tart” (a small pastry tart), “poutine” (fries, gravy and cheese curds… the most delicious cardiac arrest you’ll ever taste), “cheezies” (a curly cheese snack), “timbits” (small doughnut holes—note spelling—from Tim Horton’s), “deke” (a move involving faking out an opposition player, originally in hockey), “parkade” (multilevel parking lot) and “washroom” (bathroom, toilet, restroom), etc. Phrases like “drop the gloves”, which essentially means getting serious, preparing to fight, are once again derived from hockey, as is “puck bunny”, a hockey groupie (sensing a theme here?). And even the word “hoser” itself, popularized (popularised?) by Bob and Doug McKenzie on SCTV’s “The Great White North” segments, may itself refer to the tradition whereby the losing hockey team had to hose off the ice rink after a game. Although mainly a novelty/joke word in this form, we do actually use the verb “to hose”, as in “broken”, or even as in “to get wasted”: “I hit a moose and now my car’s hosed”, “that sucks, let’s go get hosed.”

So, the moral of this story? Be aware of other forms of English. It will save you much potential embarrassment. If you’re an American or Canadian in the UK, you really don’t want to say something like “I tripped over and landed on my fanny” (unless you want them to think you're a contortionist), while an English person visiting North America would be ill-advised to express their surprise with the words, “well, blow me!” Well, unless.... never mind. And if any Canadian ever tells you he’s been performing obscenities with canines, please know he’s actually saying he’s been slacking at work, no more no less.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on July 27, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Satellites of Love

I have no enemies, but no real friends neither. My only friend, Julianne, I killed late last fall and now I’m waiting for the weather (can you believe it) to give me away, although before that happens I’m thinking I might just go and do myself in, make it all easier for everyone. Weird thing is, old Mr. Jankowski knows. I mean, he knows something, just not the actual details. Every time I come work for him, he looks at me with that sideways look he has, one eyebrow up like Jack fucking Nicholson in The Shining, only with low self-esteem, and asks in that annoying European accent of his:

“You okay, Johnny boy?”

We’re standing in the entrance to the barn. Magpies swoop back and forth over our heads, one at a time, stealing from the dog food dishes inside. Usually I ignore him or grunt or something. But today I answer him.

“No, Mr. Jankowski, I’m very much not okay.”

“Aaaah”, he says, like he’s gotten to the best part of a cake or a movie and is getting set to savour it, “you have girl troubles?”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I do.”

“Aaaah,” he says again, all the while looking at me all knowing, like. An urge to tell him the full truth comes out of nowhere, just to wipe that cockiness off his leathery old face. He stands there waiting for what feels like ages and I very nearly spill the beans.

“Ah fuck, it’s too complicated to explain.”

His eyebrows meet in solidarity. “Why you have to use language like that all time, Johnny boy?”

“My ma says it’s ’cause I’m a… let me think, an in-ar-tic-ulate moth-er-fuck-er.“

He stares at me for a couple seconds, wiping his large hands on the front panel of his coveralls, then he gestures toward a large brown paper sack.

“Go feed chickens.”

He walks off, slightly stooped, almost like he’s carrying a sack of feed himself, right there on his round shoulders. It’s weird, but I feel almost sorry for him.

This cold is a bastard, though. Winter’s been a bad one.

*****

I think Julianne is the second person I’ve really loved, if you count my dog Rascal as the first. Rascal is gone now too, by the way. Hit on the main highway a couple years ago while chasing a gopher of all things. I don’t tell anyone this – well, okay, Julianne knew – but I cried my eyes red-raw at the time. No shame in that, I was just a kid then, and he was a good dog, nice and friendly to look at and a real fast runner. Not fast enough, though, it turns out. Who else? Oh, my ma can be alright sometimes, when she’s not drinking or having one of her so-called Dr. Phil moments, but love? She’s just kind of there, providing as she says, although what she provides comes mostly from the government and ain’t all that much really, you gotta say. And my dad I can’t remember too much of – a green baseball hat that I still have stashed in my room with the faded John Deere logo, a Chevy truck key and chain, vague memories of raised voices, night shrieks sudden-cold as coyote calls, the smell of Crown Royal and stale Marlboros. And the next day’s silence of course.

But I’m getting off-track here. Julianne. She moved into town when we were both around twelve and right away we got along real easy. She made everyone else seem like cartoons. Summers, we’d go swim at the lake or tie a rope swing at Carson Creek, and in winter we’d build shaky igloos from crude snow blocks or hop on her brother’s snowmobile and take it up to the draw, white train fanning behind, everything noisy and careless. We mostly just did things together – clambered up pine trunks like starved bears, stalked deer, careened down scree falls – but we’d also talk, and when we did her ideas fit alongside mine real comfortable, like peas in a pod or whatever that phrase is. She had the same smartness I’m cursed with; the kind adults don’t usually twig to. We shared a love of the stars – no, not just the Hollywood kind (although them too), but the night sky itself, so spiderweb shimmery up here pretty much most nights I seem to recall. And horror movies, especially the end-of-the-world zombie kind, all those various living deads with their unsatisfied hungers. More recently, a messed-up Limey singer named Amy Winehouse. The Jerry Springer show, too, because it’s downright sad underneath the mockery, and we couldn’t help rooting for them poor saps, talk about underdogs. An ’80s movie nobody ever seems to remember called At Close Range. Oh yeah, all that and a singer named Lou Reed from New York, who talked-sang in a way we couldn’t help but understand, kind of pissed-off and knowing and wishing everything could be different all rolled into one. We also spoke constantly about one day leaving this place, going to the big city, or a bigger city still, maybe even New York itself, becoming something else entirely like actors or genuine TV celebrities it didn’t matter which. I had it in my mind that we’d do this both together when we graduated high school a couple years away, so when she told me on that chilly evening last October, behind the big toolshed over at her place, that she was thinking of running away now this instant, well, I got mad fast, which you might say is weird, but hell I already told you I loved her, didn’t I?

“Julianne, you’re 15 years old,” I started babbling, “you can’t just up and go like that, you’ll get hurt or killed, you’ve got nothing to your name, no money, I mean, it’s damn near wintertime, where would you go…?”

“I have to get away from him, John.”

My face must have looked funny ’cause she actually laughed at me for a second or two, although it didn’t really sound like her heart was in it much.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

And I did, too. She’d dropped a few hints along the way that her dad had been doing stuff to her but I’d tried to ignore it, I’m not sure why. Okay, look, I have an idea why, but it’s totally shameful, okay? Then again, what the hell, who’s left to care? I’ll just say it, get it out: I was jealous. Of her old man. Of his decisive hands. I wanted to be the one touching her, not that creepy old bastard. I could have been not just her mostly best friend but her fucking complete boyfriend if only I’d had more balls.

“Hey, look, I can come with you.”

She fixed on me with a complicated look on her face and I knew right away it could never happen, this dream of flight and reinvention and marriage beneath the stars.

“John-John, this is what I have to do. You have something different to do. It’s like the satellites up there, they follow paths; sure they might cross a few times, but basically they’re alone, silent, always moving on.”

“Unless they fall back to earth.”

“Which case they’re dead.”

“I won’t let you go.”

“Yes you will.”

And she turned away, and all the awful sadness inside me came together like the stillbirth of a failed sun and became instead rage, swelling red hot and briefly roaring, and I grabbed at her, and she fought me, tried to get away of course, and I flung her far from me, and she landed roughly on the hard ground, her small dark head dinging off of a large rock with a sound both hollow and final. Around us such sudden silence, such a hush. Within it I heard the quiet straining of spring shoots beneath tough surfaces, the beginnings of whispers, stirrings, wingbeats. And hey, raised here all my life, trust me, I know death. After a brief gasp, eyes pinning like some exotic bird, her face a war of confusion, disbelief, deep disappointment, Julianne died in under a minute even if it felt more like ten. Without thought, I loaded her body on an ATV and drove to the far edge of the furthest field on her family property, where a barbed-wire fence-line is interrupted by a small stand of birch trees, too sparse to be called a wood or even a copse. I left her there, amid the trees. My actions, myself, not rational, stupid with shock, abandoned and lost more surely than any airless world spinning lonely in some desolate reach of some outflung nebulae.

*****

How, then, could I have known that winter would come so soon, that the weather itself would buy me time? Time I neither anticipated nor desired. Blessed, cruel snow, each bright flake forcing me to choose, choose something, to grow up, to run off or to opt out altogether.

*****

Mr. Jankowski is back, silhouetted in the doorway. He is staring at me. I realise I’m crying, silent tears, runnels of snot, no sobs. I wish him away, but he stays, watchful. It may not happen today, or even this week, this month, but soon, the snow will melt and reveal the frozen evidence of what I did. To my girl. Everyone thinks she ran away. Some who knew her better even have an inkling why. But when the white expanse melts to gloomy patches and then stark iron ground, amid those quiet white birch will lay my love and my fear, exposed for all and sundry to judge or to mock. I don’t know if I can bear that.

On the Internet, I found a way to tie a noose. The rope is in the tack room, loose and ready, stuffed behind old cracked Western saddles. I look at old man Jankowski. I remember from when he got all paranoid that time a shady bunch of city folks came through town possibly robbing folks or worse so the whispers went he has a phone in his kitchen with the local RCMP number on speed dial. My face is all creased up and heartbroke like when Sean Penn cries at the dramatic finale. I ask him what to do and he says “do what you think’s right, Johnny boy”, but I don’t know anything about that, or which direction to head in, or how to reach a single fucking place of warmth, and there’s a roaring first in my ears then seemingly everywhere which I take to be love and space and finally I get brave and take one small step for a boy.

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A version of this post appeared on BlergPop on July 20, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Erasure Poetry Contest

So Geist magazine right here in Vancouver is hosting a poetry contest. I've never entered a poetry contest. I rarely write poems—not because I don't like poetry, but because they are so damn hard to write well. So why did I enter this one? Well, first, for an entry fee of $20, they throw in a year's subscription to the print version of Geist, and it's a fine magazine. But also—and here's the clincher—the premise looked like a lot of fun. Basically, they provide a chunk of prose (in this case, an exerpt from the novel How Should A Person Be? by Sheila Heti) and you set about it with a metaphorical eraser, not so much rearranging the text as whittling it down to something essential. You can drop letters and join the remnants of words to make new words, but you can't move things out of sequence. In a way, this is the closest writers get to that near-cliché of discovering the form within the block of marble... although this particular block has itself been wonderfully sculpted.

So I started it (follow the link above if you want to see the original prose), got frustrated early, almost gave up, but then something started to emerge. I'm not sure whether it's good, but I did find that it became very emotional for me, at first elliptical, then sad, but later not so sad. I was surprised by the power of it—the technique not my attempt. And I wonder if something along these lines could be incorporated into a therapeutic approach.

Anyway, here is my attempt. It gets stronger as I grow into the procedure. I think the secret was to not read the original prose for sense, so as to avoid images forming early. It's titled "Can't Ouch".

I can't interest a mouse.

You doctor fire, win singing. I do too.

Come over to our nation before I stop.

Paint. Record. Feel.

Should I wonder? Help a celebrity?

No, actual hope is simple, one example of everything.

Simple, undying.

I don’t part, I don’t want.

Every heart—I am them.

Alive.

My head an image, unstartling, magnetic.

It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities.

I shoulder my friends. An illusion, like me.

I appear to be, I appear to be, to be who I am.

A speck of dirt, alone in my contempt, my fucking… contempt.

Low-job artist, nine cents, tops.

I cannot gag, can't ouch our throat.

I breathe roughly, sucking to kiss.

Side jobs, though, rough with being girl, just rough with it. Sore with mass. Lustre time to a genius.

One good woman. Weave to man, am a golden idea mode for my mind.

Hold me.

It’s pretty.

Laugh when they won’t say what they mean.

Study them forever. Thinking: Christ, you're living in heaven.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Safety Deposit

I placed something valuable somewhere hidden.

They didn’t know what happened to you. Everyone speculated about where you’d gone, wide-eyed and wildly wrong. As if acknowledging the most likely truth would allow something irrevocably dark into their own lives, god forbid. I was the least likely to say it, yet I did say it. You were gone. Chances are for good. You burned bright yet short, which is better than some longlived nobody never even sputtering into life at all. You were somebody. Somebody. Your dreams were also concrete—your adherence to the well-trod trails while attending countless wild auditions; your marriage of pragmatism and fancy. Possessing neither, truth be told, I envied both. Hell, probably I envied you. Publicly (and far worse, privately) I cried as much over this as over your absence.

None of which anyone knew.

Observe that bank of trees, that near-vertical forest, bearing its weight of snow with nary a complaint. It is the triumph of the mindless collective. But also, one has to admit, deeply, deeply beautiful. Heavy limbs so darkly green they may as well be black, straining and actually prevailing against the weighty onslaught of white, as if the history of the races of our world were being mockingly re-enacted with alternate outcomes through this silent, neutral Canadian landscape.

In this aquarium of traffic—blue-green bleeding to blue-violet—everyone feels the need to flick on headlights. Especially here, right here in this place, the exact location in which you stepped from your Subaru Forester, apparently for a bathroom break, beneath the gathering imposition of pine and fir and spruce and cedar as the daylight failed to the sound of a seething creek, only to disappear forever, my love, my enemy, my perplexing friend. Your ticking station wagon abandoned on the shoulder, shut down, cooling fast, the last CD in the changer an ABBA mix.

I can almost hear the shush-shush of tires as they pass, taut-faced drivers all wary of twilight ungulates, kids asleep or grumpy-sly in back, nobody paying any meaningful attention as the vengeful shadow pulls up behind, bides his quiet time until your hip-hugging pants are lowered mid-thigh…

…and you squat quickly and neatly, desiring a quick release in the cold, never even suspecting that a quick release could mean something else entirely, while the avenger falls upon you—crushing, final—and your still-warm body is dispatched (the wrench) and collected (the flinch) and deposited far, far way, somewhere, I don’t ever want to say where (the stench), and perhaps we’ll recite Donne or Auden and play “Dancing Queen” at your memorial amid a galaxy of white lilies while I alone recall those laden branches—the burden of life beneath wet relentless weather, a quick shudder while the ghost vacates—and smile a little self-mockingly at one small victory however fucking tawdry and goddamn it all to hell I so ache with missing you girl.

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A version of this post appeared on BlergPop on June 28, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Use Your Imagination

Life is busy at the moment, so please forgive the short post. One of the earliest pieces of writing advice I ever remember reading arrived courtesy of Stephen King. It was three simple (if slightly crude) words: “ass in chair.” Okay, fine. Thanks for that, Stephen. It can’t be argued with, though. But the next question occurs once you have molded said body part firmly onto the furniture in question: how do you keep it there? How do you stay motivated and focused enough to type out the allotted number of words at whatever rate you’ve set yourself? Well, this week I thought I’d be helpful and share five simple techniques to keep you in your seat, facing your screen, typing mindlessly into a document. An activity we mystifyingly insist on calling “writing”.

1. Remember the scene in Lethal Weapon 2 where Danny Glover is sitting on the toilet and a bomb is wired to explode if he gets up off the seat? Well, there’s a real clue to our dilemma right there. I don’t mean boobytrap your computer chair with an actual bomb, although that would work too, I suppose. Albeit a tad risky. But no, we don’t have to recreate it literally; I mean, we can let ourselves imagine a bomb going off if we stand up before our word quota is met, right? We are writers, after all. With imaginations, presumably. Oh, never mind.

2. So, you’re quietly seething because all your friends took off for a day of sun and surf and you’re sitting alone in this dingy basement again. How do you resist the urge to join them? Simple. With an unhealthy dose of schadenfreude, that’s how. You tell yourself those selfsame frolicking, carefree friends will all lose ten years off their lives thanks to the malignant melanomas that were hatched in their damaged skin cells on this very day. You made the right call, and not only did you write your allotted number of words, but you will be healthier than everyone you know (as long as you ignore the impact on your health of lengthy periods of sedentary existence punctuated only by the rustle of a chip bag or the uncorking of another bottle of Cabernet).

3. You steadily release these literary masterpieces into the black hole of the mighty ‘Zon. You then pointedly ignore the unanimous silence of the world’s cruel indifference. In the movie that runs in your head, the one in which you are the star of course, you watch excitedly as your genius is acknowledged by the literati; you are now lauded among the greats. Okay, if you are able to ignore reality this remarkably, it isn’t any great leap to further pretend there is a man with a hefty cheque waiting for you if you only finish this chapter, edit that section, proofread this paragraph. Add as many zeros to said cheque as you like. Hell, spell it “check”, even, I don’t care. Make the man a famous celebrity. Have him place a Care Bear in a headlock for no apparent reason. Make him laugh at sly librarians. It’s your scenario. Self-delusion (along with near-psychosis) is an essential part of being a writer.

4. Tell yourself if you don’t meet today’s word quota, not only will you make the baby Jesus cry, but you will plunge a battalion of the adorablest kittens into a chronic depression that will eliminate the will to live for 38% of them. You want that on your conscience? (Wait, my spellcheck didn’t flag “adorablest”? Has the world gone mad?)

5. And finally, if the other techniques fail, buy an industrial staple gun, around twenty tubes of Crazy Glue, a roll of the ever-handy duct tape, and use them in ways that will become obvious on even the most cursory of reflections to affix your rebel carcass to your chair.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on July 6, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.