Kaisun (ky - SOON)

 A little background on this poem:  Years ago, a friend of mine took me out commercial fishing with his father near Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands).  We ended up taking shelter from a storm in a harbor named Kaisun, a place the native Haida believe to be haunted by spirits.  While anchored, we finished off a bottle of rum and decided to write a poem, put it in the bottle, and cast it out to sea.  We added the name of our boat and the name and address of the skipper, hoping someone would find it and let us know.  Nothing so far . . .

 

 

To anyone reading this note:

we hope you will read what we wrote

and remember it well

for it sent us to hell

from the troller on which we did float.

And if you do read what we've written,

try to imagine us sittin'

in a boat with one wish:

to catch us some fish

but upon us Lady Luck has been shittin'.

The Future is Friendly. But It's Always a Day Away.

My cell phone and I are having relationship problems. I guess they started when I signed a contract stipulating that for three years it could treat me as though we were roommates in prison and I was the bitch. Ergo, I now pay through the nose for the privilege of being boned in the ass. The worst part about how we hooked up is the fact that our relationship is based on a lie. A lie told to me by the filthy sow who sold me the contract -- a malignant dungbeetle of a woman who told me that if I signed up for three years, something I would never have done under any ordinary circumstances, my phone would be covered with a full replacement warranty. Extraordinary. Full replacement warranty, the rancid fartsniffer told me. She then went on to explain to me that full replacement warranty meant if anything happened to my phone, they would replace it with no questions asked.

Sta Uot uv mi HUOS

My three year old (C__) brought me this today. He informed me that it was drawn by his brother (J__), who is six.

The text, obviously, reads: “C__ – PlEES. Sta. Uot. uv mi HUOS”. To the untrained eye, this may appear a bit cryptic.

Twit

Well, I did it. I started a twitter account. It felt like I was pissing into the ocean and hoping someone on the other side of the world noticed, but I figure if one person reads my stuff because of it, it will be worth it. Well, maybe not one person. Let's face it, that doesn't exactly amount to a wave of renown. But maybe that one person will be the pope, and he'll retweet it to all his friends, and I will become the next big thing in catholic entertainment. The pope will follow my blog; we'll get to know each other through banter in the comments section, and the next thing you know I'll be summering at the Vatican, knockin' 'em dead with my pope jokes:

“. . . I Just Feel Better When They're Not Around.”

One night I was on my way to a rock show downtown when I saw a car with its hood up at an intersection. Having been raised properly in a small town, I circled the block and stopped to lend a hand. I soon learned one of the myriad reasons why many city dwellers wouldn't have bothered.

I helped out the nice lady with the radiator problem and sent her on her way. Feeling pretty good about myself, I bid adieu to another fellow who had also stopped to help. I got into my car and . . . it wouldn't start. Dead battery. No big deal, I thought. It's a standard, I'll just get a push from buddy and start it up on the fly. Which woulda worked just fine. Except . . .

As we started to push the car, we heard a siren whoop and lights began flashing behind us.

Here we go again . . .

"I Don't Hate Cops . . . "

The police and I have not always seen eye to eye. When I was a young man, I will admit to feeling somewhat at fault for our relationship problems, but as I grew to be a man, I became more aware of their wants and needs, and began to treat them with the respect they seemed to feel that they deserved. It was then I realized: it really was them, not me. But it did become apparent to me that being polite is generally the best policy to adopt when dealing with assholes whose job it is to strenuously exert their authority over you. However, they say there are exceptions to every rule.

Let's take a trip back a few years, to a time when I was bartender at the local watering hole . . .

Man's Best Friend

                   image © perry bible fellowship http://www.pbfcomics.com/

Front page news today in the hub city: 'Buddy, Maggie Top Names For Dogs.”

Because I'm not much of a dog person, I don't really care.

Because I'm an intelligent person, I really don't care.

Here we go. Let's talk about 'Dog People.'

1 – You don't know what your dog is thinking. Or 'saying'.

You can guess. You can pretend. You can wish really, really hard. But you don't really know, in the incredible detail you think you do, what your dog is 'saying' to you . . . You know why? Because his capabilities of speech are rudimentary. At best.

Spiritual Amway 2

  After school lets out, many parents take their children to the adjacent playground to shut them up about taking them to the adjacent playground. This is another place where you will have to interact with other parents, whether you like them or not. Some of them are great, and it is just like talking to real people. Others . . .

Massive Head Wound Harry

Recently, a friend of mine had a terrible scare when she went down for a much needed nap and awoke to find that her baby daughter was unable to breathe. Every parent's worst nightmare, to be sure. The cause was decided to be an unknown virus, and baby is on the mend. But the feeling it gave me to hear this news reminded me of our own children and our own hospital encounters. One in particular . . .

When our son was 3 months old it was determined that he had a condition known as craniosynostosis, described by the Mayo Clinic Staff as: “ . . . a birth defect in which one or more of the joints between the bones of your infant's skull close prematurely, before your infant's brain is fully formed. When your baby has craniosynostosis, his or her brain can't grow in its natural shape and the head is misshapen.” Which sounds bloody awful, to be sure. Our son's condition was (probably) not going to affect his physical well being, but his quality of life would suffer. It's harder to get dates when your eyes are bugging out of a head shaped like the one on the alien from 'Alien'.

"We Live In A Society!"

I am a huge fan of japanese food, and decide that I want to learn how to make it. So, I procure a cook book and make a list of ingredients. I venture out to get them, only to discover that the best asian food market in town has transformed into yet another whitey food store. Disappointed, I trundle off to the nearest alternative, the great canadian s___ store. I take my 3 year old, because there he is, and leaving him somewhere to fend for himself is frowned upon. When we arrive, I need a cart, which needs a dollar, which I don't have. I am forced to go to customer service and leave them my driver's license, for which they'll lend me a dollar to use. The line is lengthy, but not smack your forehead curse the world and leave in a huff lengthy, so I decide to wait.