Sometimes, when I’m standing around in the kitchen, waiting for the espresso machine to heat up, I see a common magpie land in our front yard. It’ll hop there, glance around, strut around with a swagger, looking all classy in black-and-white, like it’s walking on a red carpet on its way to a gala dinner.
Although, there’s something a little sneaky about it, too. It hops, looks around, as if to see if anybody is watching its every move.
I used to be able to fit a hockey puck in my mouth. Sure, it took some pushing, and I had to pull my lips over with my hands, but at least on that one sunny, spring day, I could do it, and I have witnesses who can back me up.
Well, you may not think that’s anything special.
I’m on Twitter. I tweet a few times a day, posting links and very, very short stories. Most of the links take you to my stories, either here, or to some other site that has published my writing. The short, short stories are all mine, as are the fake news I sometimes post.
I created my first Twitter account on May 1, 2007, so I’ve been tweeting almost four years now. I got on Twitter, because at the time, I wrote about the Web and technology for Scanorama, and thought I’d have to know what was going on.
At 10:22 that night, I told the world … this:
just spilled a cup of coffee
I think my second one was along the same lines. What can I say, I spill a lot of coffee. A few tweets later, I started to look around, to see if I could find people to follow, but basically, I stopped tweeting for a few months. Nobody was following me, nobody was listening to me, so what was the point?
Unlike Groucho Marx, I’d be happy to get into a club that would have people like me as a member. As a kid, I started numerous clubs, and always designed membership cards for each of them: Tarzan club, Pecos Bill club, Tex Willer club, and Woody Woodpecker club. They were ultimate anti-Groucho Marx clubs, because most of them had just one member: me.
I didn’t care about not having any other members in my clubs, that wasn’t the point anyway. The point was the card, the official badge that I could flash whenever I felt like it. The cards had my name, my membership number – “1” – and the club logo on them, often “a stamp” of the main authority. Me.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but haven’t got around to trying to make one. Anyhow, you know how certain songs always take you back to a certain place? Like, for me, Bruce Springsteen’s “Night” always takes me back to that one winter’s night when I was in high school, and Dad stopped at the traffic lights and then the drums kicked off “Night”. I know exactly where we were.
And “Heaven’s on fire” makes me think of Terry, and how he would rest his feet on our dog while watching music videos.
I was sitting, resting, at the gym at the Orillia Y when that summer’s big hit, “Brickyard Road” was playing and I remember hearing the lyrics clearly for the first time, and how sad I thought it was.
So, here’s my attempt to create my historical musical map. I’ll update it as new songs pop into mind.
See a larger map on Google.
Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
– Cheers theme song
All the cool guys in all the cool movies always have their regular hangout, and when they get in, all they have to say to the bartender is “the usual”, or maybe not even that. Maybe they just nod, and get what they want. Even Homer Simpson.
I wonder how many people an average person meets in his lifetime. I actually think about that quite often, when I’m on the subway, at the airport, or, like now, sitting at a coffee shop. And when I think about meeting people, I mean connecting, not just being in the same place at the same time.
For example, I haven’t really met that bald man in front me, even if we just had eye contact. (Then we both looked away). Those two women to my right, with their cool glasses and salads and scarfs, aren’t people I’ve met, in these official meetings statistics.
They could be.
I read a great story in the paper this morning, about a Guldsmedshyttan hockey team that was getting ready to put the finishing touch on their Cinderella story in Sweden’s under-16 national championship tournament.
The team hails from a 3000-people strong village of Bergslagen and had beat big Swedish clubs, such as Djurgården, Linköping, and Leksand, on their way to the Final Four, against all odds.
Even though I can’t order a croissant in Paris, and have practically never spoken Spanish with a Spanish-speaking person, I proudly list both French and Spanish under “language skills” on my resumé.
And why not, I had, after all, somehow passed my French exams in business school – the ones I quite literally slept through, forcing me to learn two year’s worth of French on my own – and even studied two years of Spanish at the same university. I do know the lyrics to “Besame Mucho”, and feel pretty good lip syncing to “La Bamba”. Yo no soy marinero.
