read it online at www.themcpress.com
Issue #4
How to Fit in: with Gavin White (page 1 1 )
Marcus (page 2) Why I Write (page 11)
The Campus Awards (page 8)
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Marcus
If I had to say one good thing about Marcus it is that he really stood out. Not because he looked funny or talked funny, but simply because he seemed to exist in his own unique reality. And his eyes and speech—always being passionately convinced of this reality—made people want to listen to him, have sex with him and, yes, even respect him. Because more than the possession of truth or authenticity, the majority of humans admire a person primarily on the grounds that they display a strong, self-assured personality. Of course society also prefers it when a person puts on the airs of being sincere and empathetic, but that is of secondary concern. Sincerity won’t get a crowd’s attention nor will it get you laid very quickly. I first met Marcus when I arrived at Hostelling International in the savagely wild mountain town of Jasper, Alberta. This hostel, which had been converted from an old ski lodge, stood halfway up a deeply forested mountain. The first time we met was in the beautiful month of June. I remember walking into the hostel’s communal kitchen, surrounded by swarms of sexy, sophisticated girls speaking French and German and other European
MARCUS
languages. I felt embarrassed around these girls because all I ever made in that kitchen was peanut butter on bagels and occasionally processed ham on bagels. That is all I ever ate while travelling. Marcus on the other hand made gourmet, organic meals that took hours to prepare and clean up. And that, in fact, was one of his secrets to scoring tail. But I’ll get to that later. At first I was fairly cool with Marcus. I even took him for a bona fide hippie. He wore unhip glasses and looked like a welltoned woodsman. He also sported a Grateful Dead t-shirt and spent the majority of his night cooking or reading on his laptop while everyone around him noisily drank beers. During my first Jasper trip in June I barely got to know Marcus. We had one short conversation sitting at a long kitchen table where we sort of bonded. We talked about how we both got really into smoking pot in high school and how a love of psychedelic rock naturally followed this habit for both of us. He called himself a “Dead-Head”, said he used to play drums “professionally” and talked obsessively about his hiking exploits. One day I came back from hiking by myself up a lonely road on the hostel’s mountain. On the way back down I saw a
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black bear poke its head out from the roadside bushes. It came onto the side of the quiet road and looked suspiciously at me. I passed it nervously, singing John Denver’s Country Roads until I came within feet of the bear and it scampered off into the bushes. Back in the hostel my heart was racing and I went to tell everybody about my rendezvous with the wild beast. Marcus listened with his usual tense and forceful smile. When I was done, as people were going “Whoa!” and “Aww cool”, Marcus took the floor in his perfectly crisp and steady English. He began, “I remember one time I was doing a 30 day hike—” “You did a 30 day hike?!” Spectators gasped at the claim. “Yeah I was raising money for cancer research.” Marcus offhandedly added, “—when a bear walked right up to me on the trail and stood up, as if to challenge me. And I just held up my hands and said, ‘Hey!’ and it ran away in fear.” The crowd of hostellers surrounding Marcus now listened intently to him and “oohed” and “awwed” at his tale. Marcus had good stories. But the more I thought about it he seemed very guarded and insecure. And he sure had a knack for rerouting any conversation back to his own life and his own accomplishments. One of the last days I was at the hostel that June I went out for a wild night of drinking with three other hostellers. An Irish guy and
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I made a secret pact not to let a drunk Newfie (who was giving us a ride in his rigger truck) convince us to get too wasted. We failed. At the bar the Newfie kept ordering shots and the cute bartender chick with a Kiwi accent convinced us all to drink. I told the French girl at our table, who I had genuinely fallen for, “Melissa. I know I don’t know you very well but I think you’re so cool and so attractive and I just had to tell you that.” She said something beautiful in French and left a few minutes later to catch her bus out of town. She was one of those travellers perpetually running from town to town. The next morning I awoke hungover and without my French love-interest anywhere near me. I sat down at a kitchen table feeling a bit dizzy as light poured into the huge communal kitchen. Marcus walked into the kitchen with a dark-haired Irish girl closely at his side. He immediately took to making one of his patented, over-the-top, organic, gourmet meals (this time consisting of elaborately constructed omelettes). The Irish girl stood thoughtlessly at his side looking hungover. As Marcus prepared breakfast he groped her ass and thighs and gave her the occasional peck on the lips. From eavesdropping and common sense I pieced together the story of their previous night: Marcus and the girl got drunk out at the firepit behind our hostel (where swarms of hostellers drank and partied every night). Then somehow, somewhere, Marcus and
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(graphic by Joel Hill)
this girl presumably had sex because they looked way too cozy with each other this morning. And now Marcus was going to feed this girl and take her for a hike later in the afternoon. Marcus didn’t look very hungover at all. Meanwhile the girl kept saying in her thick Irish accent, “Ooh, I’m so hungover I don’t know if I’ll be able to hike.” So, as far as I could tell, either Marcus was an extremely well-seasoned drunk (which almost certainly wasn’t the case) or this girl got way drunker than him the night before and he essentially took advantage of her. But I had too many worries of my own to care what Marcus did with this girl. The French girl I desired was gone for good. And after two months since quitting cigarettes I smoked my first one the previous night, which made me feel especially grumpy this morning now that the buzz had worn off.
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That sunny afternoon I went biking with James, the Irish guy who agreed we shouldn’t get too drunk the previous night. He and I had a wonderful bike alongside mountain lakes and through mossy forests despite the fact we were both still woozy from last night’s shenanigans. Then, like awakening from some sweet, dramatic dream that seemed to last for both a few minutes and an entire lifetime, I returned to my mundane life in Saskatoon. Only now I had an escape plan. I was going to make it to France and see Melissa again. I took out books from the library on French grammar, I studied the French dictionary obsessively and I started watching exclusively French TV. This continued for weeks until Melissa wrote me online saying she would not be able to go biking with me in France (as we agreed to do back in Jasper). I was crestfallen. I kept working my shitty job selling
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popcorn at a movie theatre—a job I only started in order to save money for France. Slowly I began communicating on Facebook with another girl I met in Jasper. She was German and her name was Nicole. She told me she was moving to Jasper for the fall and winter because she found a job at a hotel out there. On a particularly impulsive whim—even by my standards—I quit my theatre job, packed up my life’s possessions and took the Greyhound out to Jasper in hopes of finding a job. My new dream was to make a living out there, write amidst the peaceful mountains and ideally wind up romancing this beautiful red-headed girl from Germany. So once again I arrived in Jasper. Nothing had changed except the days were a little darker and cooler now that it was August. They were still hot but not like in June when you started sweating as soon as you stood in the sunlight. I spent my first week back in Jasper at the same hostel. My days were less romantic than in my first Jasper trip. Now I mostly biked up and down the mountain, riding in and out of town searching for a job. One day I returned to the hostel after a typically exhausting bike ride up the mountain (though bike ride is misleading given I had to walk my bike up the steep mountainous incline). I entered the communal kitchen of the hostel to the sight of Marcus sitting at one of the long wooden tables in his grey Grateful
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Dead t-shirt, squinting through his glasses at his MacBook. It was now August and somehow this guy was still here. Nothing had changed. “Hey.” I said. “Hey.” He said knowingly. “Hah, do you just live here now or what?” I joked. “Uhh, well I have a week off from work so I’m coming here to replenish my mind and my spirit.” He said some such hippie dogoodery. “Oh. Sorry what do you do again?” I asked, remembering little if anything about Marcus except that he probably fucked that Irish chick a couple months ago. “I work on the oil rigs up in Fort Mac.” I looked a little surprised at him. “Hmm, I would have thought you were some sort of business guy.” I said this because of Marcus’ strong English skills and because he seemed to have the guarded, competitive personality that the professional business world beats into a person. “No, no.” Marcus smiled a little more genuinely than I remembered him doing in the past. “I’m just a roughneck.” He chided his bad luck, though I later discovered it wasn’t exactly true. His job was to drive around the rigs in a truck all day and make sure real riggers did their work. He was basically a supervisor out there. Learning about his occupation confused me. Marcus was essentially a rig-pig who played a nature-loving hippie boy on the
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weekends. I never heard of such a combination. But it seemed completely judgmental and wrong of me to think since he worked on an oil rig that he couldn’t simultaneously be a humble, ascetic hippie. After all, Marcus seemed to genuinely love hiking. That night I was in the communal kitchen toasting a bagel. I stood waiting by the toaster feeling and looking glum. I had no job offers yet. Furthermore I was still eating crap and my bowels had hardly gotten over the bus ride out (where I couldn’t use the bathroom in the Edmonton Greyhound station because there were used needles in the toilet). It’s safe to say I was edgy those first days returning to Jasper if only because I ate exclusively bagels and juice and always felt like I had to take a shit but couldn’t. Marcus on the other hand, kept making his fancy meals. One time I asked him if he got all his strange ingredients from Super-Foods (the still pricey, though more working-class of the two grocery stores in Jasper). “No I never go there.” Marcus subtly scoffed. “I only shop at McGavins. Their products are predominately organic.” “Yeah but isn’t it really expensive there?” I asked while slowly chewing on my bagel with peanut butter and drinking a cup of tap water. “It might be a little more expensive. I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it.” Marcus brushed me off. At that point, I remembered oil rig
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workers all became rich quite quickly. At least provided they didn’t blow a shitload of their money on drugs, gambling, dualies and prostitutes. Thinking of these things, I wondered if Marcus could honestly be a humble hippie and also be supervising an oil rig operation. Certainly I knew every adult had to make money to survive. And surely his job on the rigs qualified as an honest, dignified way to make a living. But the many sides I saw of Marcus weren’t adding up. Something was amiss.
"...oil rig workers all became rich quite quickly. At least provided they didn't blow a shitload of their money on drugs, gambling, dualies and prostitutes." That night, after the sun went down I sat at a kitchen table pouring over maps of Jasper, tracing my finger over the bike trails. I was mostly pretending to be absorbed in the maps as an excuse not to talk to people. I wanted to sit amidst people in the kitchen but I didn’t have the energy to get super social with these travellers. I felt weary from biking all day, digestively anxious from my weird diet and generally nervous because I was now trying to move into this strange secret society of a town. Meanwhile all the travellers around me were simply looking to party and have a good time before autumn returned and their jobs and real lives started
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up again. As I looked at the maps, Marcus sat next to me, squinting into his MacBook. I could see he was looking at graphs and what seemed to be stock market reports. Now why would a hippie be following the stock market? Why would someone coming to the wild to “replenish their mind and spirit” simultaneously be studying economic trends? This is where I realized Marcus was filled with such fundamental contradictions that he had to be coming out here for something very different than the fresh air.
"Why would a hippie be following the stock market? Why would someone coming to the wild to 'replenish their mind and spirit' simultaneous be studying economic trends?" A balding man eating near Marcus, asked him offhandedly and in a gregarious way, “I take it you follow the stock market?” And like that Marcus took off into his own selfabsorbed reality. “I actually run an investment firm. It’s largely to handle my own investments, for tax purposes and such. Do you invest?” Marcus said, with the subtlest accusatory tone. “Ohh,” The balding man looked eager to learn from Marcus and gently replied, “Well
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I’m trying to learn. But I have the bank do most of that stuff for me.” “Which bank do you use?” “RBC.” “Oh boy. Big mistake.” Marcus closed the lid of his laptop and proceeded to lecture the man on his money handling miscues and how to get rich quick. Marcus laid it on thick. The supposed roughneck claimed he himself would be retired by 40 because he had a shrewd understanding of the stock market. He explained that he only invested in gold, because when the energy crisis explodes, and the global economy inevitably crashes, gold will be the only safe commodity. It was made to sound like every rich investor would be ruined except Marcus, who would spend the apocalypse pushing wheelbarrows of gold through the smouldering ashes of our fallen civilization. It smelt like bullshit to me. After all, if the global economy did in fact collapse, it wouldn’t matter whether people invested in gold or Microsoft. Not when the entire earth became engaged in a state of savage war, fighting with brutish force for the last scraps of energy and food that remained from the civilized world. I went downstairs to my bed in the hostel (in a room with 30 other beds) and listened to my iPod, trying to relax. Late at night I came back upstairs for a glass of water and Marcus was still at it; only now the balding man was on the edge of his seat looking
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8
CAMPUS AWARDS
The Campus
“Five years. Geez, when you say it like that…” “You wonder where all the time went?” Although this quotation comes from The Shawshank Redemption it might just as well have come from myself and a friend. I have been at the University of Saskatchewan for half a decade now and because of this I find myself feeling ever more like an old-timer around here. And just like a long-time prison inmate, I feel as though I know the ropes of my institution better than many newcomers. So whether you’re a fresh fish or a fellow lifer, I think you’ll find this list of my favourite things to be found on campus quite useful.
Best Place to Study:
The whole North Wing of the Murray Library is as quiet as any place on campus. And the endless aisles of outdated journals seem to throw you into a rather timeless, not quite real-world atmosphere. In the North Wing it’s easy to focus on your studies because you’re never distracted by crowds or the modern-world.
Best Place to Spot Hotties:
For anyone seeking girls, the first rule is to not waste any of your time hanging around the Engineering building. For guys and girls alike, I recommend large first-year survey classes like the ones offered in psychology, biology and astronomy. These classes, which are held in large lecture theatres, are ideal venues for spotting hotties as they are filled with dozens of attractive classmates for you to ogle over (which in turn makes your lectures seem fresher and more worth
waking up for). Furthermore because these survey classes attract the aimless students who are straight out of high school, you see many people in attendance who quite frankly seem too attractive and air-headed to be enrolled in university.
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CAMPUS AWARDS
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Awards Best "Mickey Mouse" Course:
Okay this term may be a bit dated, but at least back in our parent’s day, “Mickey Mouse courses” referred to the classes that require no brains or effort and yet still give you the same credits any legitimate class would. Based on my own academic career I have no choice but to give this coveted award to 100level Human Geography. Not only is this whole class one rambling, idealistic speech about Marxism; it is also the kind of class you can pass without doing dick-all. A person need only show up for the exams. In total I spent about 12 hours studying (and half that time I was simultaneously getting drunk) and yet I passed. Granted I had plenty of stimulants in my system when I sat down for one of those brief study (Above: All you need to know) sessions. Audience award: My sources indicate first-year economics is comparable to grade 10 math and therefore more deserving of this award.
Best Place to Get Stoned:
The rooftop of the Physics building can be climbed onto and provides a fine venue for the adventure-seeking smoker. But for those looking to not compound their illegal activities with more illegal activities, the square behind the MUB is a fine place to liven up one’s evening—and it’s right beside Louis’ Pub.
The MC Press Best Restaurant:
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CAMPUS AWARDS
The STM cafeteria, formally known as Choices, is the only campus restaurant “that won’t make you sick and kill you.” Unlike the popular Marquis Hall, Choices meals can be purchased for under ten dollars. A gourmet sandwich at Choices costs you about six dollars and is made right to your specifications. It’s the same price as a sandwich purchased over at Subway except you don’t leave the STM cafeteria smelling like you just came out of a bread oven.
Best Jaunt:
The Bowl is the undisputed best place to jaunt, promenade, meander and frolic. In the fall and spring you get ample eye candy in the form of sun tanners who wear revealing dresses. Come the cold and snowy winter, The Bowl is also the one place on campus where you can behold the living skies, for which Saskatchewan is supposedly famous, and not feel overcome with the wintertime blues.
Best Hidden Gem:
The Innovation Place Zen Garden is a venue that seems to be known about only by wedding photographers. But alas, even though I call it a hidden gem, a person is hard-pressed to find a time in the summer when wedding photos are not being taken there. In the winter however the Zen Garden becomes deserted, despite its pond being lit up with floodlights all night and made available for ice-skating. After a night of drinking several years ago, a friend and I had the luxury of hitting up this wonderful little spot for the joyful and aimless pursuit of spinning in circles on a sheet of ice.
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GAVIN WHITE
How to Fit in:
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with Gavin White
Gavin White is the award-winning author of How to Win Hip Friends and Influence Douchebags. He is also reputed as having had sex with a lot of loose women. Dear Gavin, Every day I wear a band t-shirt and loose-fitting jeans to university. Somebody told me this tells society I have no fashion sense. Should I be worried about what strangers think of my appearance? - Mark Hi Mark, Yes you should be worried. Real beauty may be on the inside but that stuff doesn’t show up in your Facebook pics nor does it surface when you’re standing in a crowded club trying to make an impression without actually doing anything likable or impressive. If you don’t know anything about fashion, don’t worry. Just look at contemporary magazines and photos of popular artists on Pitchfork. Then dress exactly like they do. And when you walk around, try to look like you have a silver spoon up your ass.
Dear Gavin, What’s more hip? Liking a flavour of the month band that somehow already has millions of followers on Facebook? Or liking a reclusive musician that will never have more than 50 fans because he intentionally alienates his fan base in order to stay underground? - Sincerely, spineless music fan Hey Spineless, Very good question! As is so often the key to seeming “in the know”, you’re best off mixing and matching. Go see LMFAO one weekend and then check out a folk artist’s CD release party at somebody’s basement the next weekend. This way you can impress everyone. If you’re around indie-purists who only support D.I.Y shit then you can bring up the folk show. But if you’re around pop-culture whores who are fed all their interests from mass-marketing
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GAVIN WHITE
How to Fit in: with Gavin White FROM PAGE 1 2
Dear Gavin,
machines then you can mention that you I’m a 23 year old dude who essentially were at Lady Gaga recently and thought “It views women as mere sex objects to be use was wicked” and “the best fuckin’ show solely for satisfying my primal biological ever!” urges. But I’m hearing all this talk about feminism these days and how even guys Dear Gavin, should be feminists! If I get behind feminism will that score me more chicks? I‘m a straight edge 21 year old girl. I’m finding myself unpopular at parties because - Gary of this. If I want to be accepted by people who don’t really respect me anyways, what Hey Gary, drugs should I take and how often should I take them? Yeah, I mean you don’t have to actually hold those girl-power beliefs internally. But - Brittany Roberts there’s two things that you as a closet chauvinist can do to appear more like a Hey Brittany, feminist to the outside world. First, declare you don’t support patriarchal gender roles The short answer is that you should get or the glass ceiling that exists in our society drunk and high on ecstasy every time (even though you do, say this anyways). you’re at a concert, house party, or any Secondly, don’t go to any more rock, other gathering of disingenuous trend metal or other music shows where the linesetters. Remember, you’re young and you up is entirely guys. Try checking out those want to set the world on fire. indie-rock bands that have 11 members You sound like a nice girl, but you would where half of them are rugged featured girls totally get laid more often if you just went playing eccentric instruments like the harp, out and got drunk and high on drugs every accordian or hurdy gurdy. Hope this helps weekend. Just saying is all. you bro!
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mesmerized by the wise, prophetic teachings of Marcus. I turned on the kitchen sink and watched Marcus from afar. This guy would have made a great cult leader. He had conviction, public speaking skills and an unflinching certitude about his philosophies on life.
"This guy would have made a great cult leader. He had conviction, public speaking skills and an unflinching certitude about his philosophies on life." The next day, I came back from a relatively unsuccessful interview at the local newspaper. The heat outside was scorching, and as I dragged my bike up the mountain, sweat pooled down my back and soaked my long, flowing hair. I stepped inside the hostel, weary and hungry. The huge kitchen was empty, save for a staff member sweeping the floor and Marcus sitting down reading about how his money was doing on his MacBook. He smiled his tense little smile, “How did the job hunt go?” His voice was always so white and proper, like the male voice you’d hear on a how to speak English tape. “Well I had an interview at the local newspaper, but I’m not sure I can get a job there, or that I could even afford a place in Jasper with a journalist’s wage.”
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Marcus kept his eyes glued to the computer screen. “Well I’m sure things will pick up for you.” He flippantly remarked. Then in a delayed reaction he looked up from his computer and gazed at me. His eyes were wide and cold and seemed to challenge my young idealism. I looked back at him. I could have swore at that moment my messy life situation made Marcus think to himself, boy am I glad I have a car (so I’m not biking up the mountain like him), and a real job so I’m not stranded in a foreign town with no safety net like this kid. I should have walked away right then but Marcus was one of the only people I could talk to in Jasper. The girl who I came out there to fall in love with was perpetually busy at her hotel job. And to be fair Marcus was one of the few people in the hostel who was book smart, spoke fluent English and wasn’t living an unsustainable life predicated on partying and hopping from town to town. In these three ways I could relate to him. So I poured my heart out to Marcus and told him how hard it was for me to make a living as a writer, but also that I needed to become a writer; how it was all I could see myself doing in life. After my rant Marcus looked at me with those same cold wide eyes and opened his mouth. I was hoping he’d say some proverbial wisdom to help me figure my life out. Instead he said, “You know I often considered being a writer myself. But it wasn’t for me. I just wasn’t
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interested in language enough to really pursue it professionally.” That night around six, as the European travellers poured into the kitchen to make their sophisticated European dishes and drink wine with each other, I made my bagels and Marcus made his own ritzy meal. The kitchen was crammed and getting ridiculously loud as literally dozens of people filed in. A short, innocent looking German girl was talking to her friend when Marcus, busy stirring something in a pan beside them, leaned over and said, “That’s an interesting accent you girls have. Are you West German?” The shorter girl hesitated “Uh yeah. Do you speak German?” She spoke confidently in English but carried a noticeable accent. “No I’m Polish. I just have a really good ear for languages.” Marcus congratulated himself. But it wasn’t true. I’d been watching him for days. He walked up to every white girl he didn’t know and asked her if she was from West Germany. Half the time the girl would say “No I’m French” or “No I’m Italian” but half the time he was right. Marcus was simply playing the odds, as he learned from experience that most white girls with accents who travelled to Jasper were from Germany. And of those German travellers most were for some unknown reason from West Germany. But I can see how if a German girl thought a Canadian guy didn’t already know these
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stats, it would seem really impressive when he correctly recognized her accent as “West German.” As for me, watching Marcus was like watching a magic trick to which I already knew the dull, demystifying secret. “Say,” Marcus turned to the short German girl again, “I bought all these extra groceries. Can I interest you in sharing some of it. We can prepare it together?” “Well, are you sure? I have food.” “Absolutely. No problem, I bought way too much anyway. I’m going to make some Hungarian Goulash with…” Marcus always had some pretentious meal planned. Later that night I saw Marcus and the German girl sharing beers in the crowded, drunken kitchen. Marcus was regaling her with tales of his harrowing adventures: like his 30 day hike through a Central American jungle or his ice-climbing adventures or his time as a drummer in a touring band. Suddenly his obsession with gold and the economy sank into the background of his self-portrait. Actually he never brought it up. Like a switch, Marcus turned off the shrewd financial planner side of his persona and retrieved from his files the charismatic, backpacker side of himself. I watched him from afar. If I wasn’t so turned off by his shifty tricks, I would have almost admired his interpersonal skills. The man knew how to pick up women. With this German girl, and with every other girl he chased, he had perfected the art of getting
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WHY I WRITE
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Why I Write First of all, yes I did steal this title from the late, great George Orwell. But he is dead and I am not so I doubt he will mind. My understanding of this question begins one night last summer. I was stuck on a long Greyhound bus ride talking with a strange but amiable character I met at a hostel in Jasper. He was a Chinese man of about 25 who lived in Texas and somehow had neither the slightest hint of either a southern drawl or an Asian accent. His voice reminded me of my own and we spent the whole night on the bus just talking about writing. I explained to him how I felt like I was predisposed to be a writer because everything looked like a story to me. I told him, “Even my real life feels like a story. Even as I’m speaking to you, I’m taking in all this information, about this environment and this lighting, and I know I’ll remember it all in vivid detail. Tomorrow I could write a precise account of exactly how it felt when we had this conversation.” He replied that writers generally seemed to share a certain kind of personality. “They’re sort of detached.” he said, and I thought that was the perfect way of describing what it feels like being a writer. Personally I write because it is one of the
only ways I can connect with the strange world and people I am surrounded with every day. Writing makes my world feel more tangible. There is a book called The Unbearable Lightness of Being whose title I love. That phrase perfectly describes how I often feel when I’m not writing or engaged in some mentally taxing (and usually artistically-centred) activity. One day this year I picked up my friend from work and drove to a local bar. On the ride over my friend said, without provocation, “Don‘t you think this world is completely meaningless?” Being a philosophy major I wasn’t about to brush him off with a simple, “Oh, just try not to think too hard about that stuff.” What I did tell him was this: “You need to find things that ground you to the world in some way: things like religion or family or art projects.” For me, writing is what makes this world concrete. Even if a person could prove the world was meaningless—in some abstract, spacey and philosophical way—I would still find the weight of words to defeat this whiney argument. To me, writing grounds my existence, at least to the extent that my being has a more bearable lightness. Many people, including George Orwell, claim writing fulfils some egoistic desire to
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1 6 WHY I WRITE
(Left: Kerouac holding the famous "Original Scroll" on which he purportedly wrote On The Road in three weeks. live forever and make a name for oneself. I conversation I’ve thought about my writing feel this sometimes, but I by no means more in these terms. believe that writing a book (that may keep Of course, selfishness still motivates my my memory alive for an additional 100 or writing, but not simply in the sense that I 200 years) is going to help me cheat death. seek glory from what I write. Usually I write I remember a debate a buddy and I had imagining myself to be the primary audience while drinking and playing guitar in a park simply because there is a lot of personal shit one starry night. He told me that all an artist I’m trying to sort out when I set down to should try to do with their artwork is change writing. I never know if others will find my the world that is around them right here and words as revelatory as I do. Nor should I now. He argued art is not about leaving a worry much if they don’t. I learn legacy. Nor is it about retreating into your fascinating, insightful things about myself own weird, artistic world that no one but every time I bother to write: like the traits I you understands. It is about engaging the consider most valuable when comparing other humans that are living and breathing at women as potential romantic partners (this is this very moment. Ever since that a subject explored in my first incomplete
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novel). And in spite of my writing for myself, I admittedly get a huge kick out of reaching others with my words. It’s one thing when a person says “I read your story. I liked it.” This is honestly a very good feeling. But it’s quite another thing to hear that your work really took somebody somewhere. When you know that your writing gave a person hope or a sense of not being alone or, above all, changed their life, you feel something wonderful and inexplicable inside. It is a feeling worth dying for. Not being a highly established writer myself, I speak to this more from my experience as a consumer of art who is everyday kept alive by the words of other writers. Though I’m confident many writers would agree that this sort of heartfelt praise is the most satisfying thing they get out of writing. More specifically, I write for the outliers who see the world through the same lens I do, or at least would like to see it through my lens. Call me self-absorbed but I feel like I possess an unusually colourful innerlife that a great deal of people ought to hear about and experience second-hand through my work. If this sounds conceited to you that’s because it is. As Orwell so eloquently stated in his own treatise on writing “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy…”. But then again, every human being is the same way. Lastly, I have a reason for writing that is
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so embarrassing and petty I was quite tempted to omit it from publication here. But alas that would undermine my whole pretty speech about how I write to bare my real soul to the public. So here I admit that in addition to the social, spiritual and therapeutic reasons for my writing, I also write because I in some strange way think it might win over my dream girl (wherever she is). Before you judge, bear in mind that I grew up on the mythology put forward by rock ’n’ roll which says that a sensitive artist can be less than devastatingly handsome and still get laid by a gorgeous woman simply because he is a much-adored artiste. I myself am not totally sure how this would apply to the world of writing. I mean, it’s not like writers perform at arenas where after their set they can retire to their dressing room and find groupees waiting in the shower. But I wouldn’t want such fleeting pleasures anyway. Less deplorably, I sort of have in mind that the girl I’m meant to be with on this planet will see in my writing the better half of me (as opposed to the worse half which I show society more often then not). And even if my dream girl isn’t moved so deeply by my writing, I hope that some people will be. In a sense this is the only reason I write: to convince people (including myself) that there is beauty and goodness in who I am and what I stand for.
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into a girl’s pants: through his subtle flattery, his feigned interest in the girl’s personal life and most of all his ability to find desirable chicks who drank too much and therefore lost their inhibitions. The next morning brought a strong sense of déjà vu to my mind. Marcus and a girl—this time German—were in the kitchen making breakfast. And as Marcus fondled her thighs and gave her innocent looking kisses, the girl stood there looking hungover and hungry and like she hoped Marcus was worth her while. For a second I thought: maybe I’m more like Marcus than I care to admit. After all, I did come out here to try and score a hot German girl. Maybe the only difference is that he was successful at getting his. But no I thought. I didn’t merely want a girl to fool around with for a day, or to relieve my sexual tension for when I’m stuck back on the hellish rigs amidst greasy men. Nor did I want a girl I could add as a notch to my sexual achievement belt and use to tell my coworkers, “Yeah, I fucked a German chick this weekend.” As far as I was concerned, Marcus was like every other oil-rigger who might go to a dumpy bar on the weekend and pick up a trashy girl to fool around with. Only Marcus had a sneakier system. He drove out to this hippie town and pretended he was a backpacker. Truly he had found a gold mine of interesting women to take advantage of. The last I saw of Marcus was the night
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before he left to return to his rigging life. On a very rainy night he came into the kitchen with the short German girl and big bags of groceries from McGavins. It was nine o'clock and the two of them appeared rather edgy and hungry. “Why don’t we get you chopping the mushrooms.” Marcus commanded the girl. She took out a cutting board and started chopping the crazy looking yuppie-store brown mushrooms Marcus bought. They looked like mushrooms you’d see on a rich forest floor, or like some Amazonian mushrooms that would possess bizarre psychedelic properties. Marcus cut other vegetables while lecturing the girl on the health benefits of these strange mushrooms. “They’re really good for your immune system. And they’re rich in antioxidants.” Right as he was giving this speech the girl stopped cutting and stepped back, looking a little pale. “What is that?” She asked. “What?” “That white stuff.” Marcus put down his knife, picked up the mushroom she was chopping and saw little maggots squirming and crawling through the mushroom’s insides. “Oh fuck. That’s disgusting. Are they all like that?” Marcus, for the first time since I’d known him, looked unsure of himself. The girl stepped back a little embarrassed and Marcus cut them all open to discover the mushrooms were crawling with white
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worms who were making their home in his groceries. “Well we gotta throw them out.” Marcus scraped them into a garbage can and returned to cooking. Only now he didn’t speak of the health benefits of mushrooms. In fact he didn’t speak at all. Him and the girl cooked in silence. I meanwhile sat at a table a little ways from them and felt as though I’d witnessed a little victory in this cold, indifferent universe. It was stupid but Marcus had fallen back to earth and I enjoyed that. Of course he hadn’t learnt any truly important lesson: like don’t take advantage of intoxicated women. But I saw a crack emerge in the mighty edifice that was his ego that night. I saw the financial wizard, the radical musician and
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the smooth-talking ladies' man made to look like an utter fool. But I’m sure it wasn’t long before Marcus climbed back on his high horse. He was too good of an actor, and too successful a conman, to not keep reeling vulnerable women into sex and impressionable men into worshipping his philosophies. In the end I’m glad I met Marcus. He reminded me that the truth usually lies deep beneath the surface. Because you have to sift through appearances if you’re going to find anything closely resembling reality. In the case of Marcus, you had to know him long enough, and to see his routine with women, to realize that he was rotten. You had to cut through his ultra-healthy exterior to discover the parasitic maggot that crawled inside him.
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The Back Page Hoser of the Week
The Stupidity of English
"I read the book and now I read the book." Why the past and present tense of this word are spelt the same is beyond me. Apology: 1. An admisson of fault in one's own actions. 2. A formal defense of one's own actions (most typically of one's own beliefs). Dollop: 1. A large amount. 2. A small amount.
"I went out to B. C. cuz they said there was jobs out there. But there wasn't jack shit. So now I'm back in Alberta. See my cousin's got me framing houses with his company up in Calgary there. They dick you over on pay but a job's a job, " - Daryl "Overtime" Fischer
60 Second review
Less than/Fewer than: Are technically two distinct ideas. When comparing things that can be counted one must use "fewer" (as in 10 items or fewer) while things that can not be counted and have no plural require one to use "less" (as in I make less money than him).
Sly and the Family Stone's debut album A Whole ew Thing (1967) is a sexy and smooth melange of funk, soul and Sixties rock. Tracks like Underdog and Turn Me Loose showcase the band in it's grooviest and most energetic style. Meanwhile Let Me Hear it From You and What Would I Do are perfect examples of the late Sixties, soul-based make-out ballad.