Menacing Unibrows and the Ugly Green Swirly of Truth

I looked down at the green swirly and sighed. Why does history repeat itself? I suppose because bad habits sometimes die hard.

Lately I have been contention with imperfection in my life.

As a part of the mosaic of humanity it is understanded that I will fail, but facing failure is hard to look straight in its’ one eye. It’s a rather ugly eye. It has a menacing perfectly arched unibrow overtop. I’m not sure which I am more fearful of – seeing the hairy catepillar of a brow or the eye itself.

Anyways point is, there I stood overtop of our toilet watching the mess in the toilet swirl around and around. Not only had I killed our herb garden due to lack of maintenance but I had decided it was time to do something about it and had given it a sever growth cutback. I thought, now where should I put the dried out basil leaves. I went straight to our toilet.

The logic should hopefully be more than self-explanatory. I would flush and the problem would be no more and shriveled up basil is small. Well I didn’t calculate the branches getting stuck. They were withered and completely small enough to go down that pipe but apparently not to cooperate. So there it swirled. This mass of droopy green and brown mess. Tangled much like the logic that had brought me to this predicament in the first place. Suddenly a flashback to a particular dinner party came to mind. I have a habit of thinking that the toilet can be used like a garborator.

I had been in a rush to clean some stuff out of the fridge before guests came. I had seen a bunch of containers that needed to be cleaned out. I rinsed them out, barely glancing to see what was inside them and rushed to the toilet to dispose of the nasty water. Went on my way cleaning the house and thought nothing of it. The guests arrived for a lovely dinner and just as we were cleaning up, someone emerged from our bathroom with a perplexed look on their face.

They directed me to find molding tortellini floating in the toilet bowl. The whole party gathered around to see what the kaffufel was all about. Embarassing moments are bad enough without an audience. Our rubber gloves had ripped recently and so not only did I have to wear a plastic bag over my hand to fish them out, it was captured on someone’s camera.

The roar of laughter was enough to even put me in a good mood. Even if it was happening to me, it was hilarious. We tried to flush after the tortellini was safely in the garbage.

Unfortunately it backed up again. I dove my bagged hand in again. This time to my horror I fished out a full piece of lotus root. The laughing subsided to questions of “what the heck is that?” and “how did that end up in there?” How I hadn’t noticed the lotus root go into the toilet bowl is beyond me. Even to this day I have to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

Above and beyond that, I know eventually I’ll learn from my mistakes. The green swirly I think was enough of a reminder to hammer the last nail in that coffin of my memory on that.

What Would Captain Planet Do?

So my car has been on bed rest for the entire week. As a result I have been walking everywhere. The good weather during this wonderful fall has been a blessing despite the frustrations with a cantankerous automobile.

It's surprising what we miss when we're on the rat race of the congested autobahns of our cities. Today I was walking from the car shoppe to my work place and watched as a gentleman let his dog go to the washroom on a lawn that had not been properly maintained in a very long time.

He fished around for a few moments for a bag in his pocket and pretended to pull out an imaginary bag while I watched him. I'm not entirely sure how bad he truly thought my eyesight is. It's bad, but that's what the glasses are for. And if I remember correctly, they have been on my head all morning.

Then he quickly ran ahead of me with his dog. I looked over in the patch and his little Shitzu had made the number that I had predicted.

I sighed and walked past. It's funny how we are supposed to play by unspoken rules wherever we live. Who comes up with these rules other than the grumpy collective.

The man ran ahead and then when he realized he had to turn around he quickly scuffled past me with his head tilted down looking at his feet. I had to smile on the inside.

Yes. Dog poop is unsightly. Yes. It stinks. Yes. No one wants to step in it. But in a society so hung up on saving the planet, I am convinced that we should be a little more willing to let nature take its course and bio degrade and watch where we step more often. Cheers to Captain Planet.

In other countries it's your fault for not watching where you're going if you step in someone else's dogs remnants but that would interfere with our North American sense of self-entitlement.

So what would Captain Planet do? Save the planet, kiss David Suzuki, tell me I'm ridiculous for having a car. I think most of all he would draw the line at picking up after other people's dogs.

Reading Between the Adult Lines

Be back in 10 minutes.

I read the sign and took a sip of the stagnant pumpkin spice latte reproduction in my hand. There was something so comforting about those organic words scribbled on a taped piece of paper in cursive. Who uses cursive anymore?

I could have cared less for the drink in my hand. Sustenance for the immediate and not necessarily something that produced longterm comfort.

The house in front of me exuded a welcoming atmosphere despite being confined by lock and bolt. I was standing on one of the more sleepy busy streets of Port Moody. I say that because the busy portion of that oxymoron comes from the rushes of traffic that plague the commuter corridor onto the highway. The sleepiness comes from all the quaint treasures that await finding in the forgotten houses turned into businesses. Yep, this would be my neighbourhood.

Few stop to look and pay attention. The used bookstores, a forgotten place tell a story of their own: stories of people taking home library books and being too embarrassed to turn them into the library so they sell them to a used book collector; stories of university students burning the oils of the midnight hour furiously trying to figure out what Shakespeare meant in his witty quips in olde English; stories of those who pride themselves of having a collection of classics that never get read; stories of young children eager to learn to use their budding artistic talents, loaded with more potential and less confined by the conventions of drawing within the adult lines.

Lately I have found that the adult lines is an interesting concept. Ones that we fit within not necessarily by choice but by necessity of survival and the nature of how old our physical beings are. I had a really interesting conversation with one of my friends recently and we were talking about the concept of being a teenager. They pointed out that being a teenager was a concept that didn’t exist in previous timeframes in history.

I thought about it for a while and realized just how accurate this observation is. Many different cultures have rites of passage to define being young and old but that’s just it: what defines a teenager. It’s a moderate adaptation to the fact that we don’t want to grow up and we don’t necessarily have to if someone else is going to do the adult thing for us.

Some will live as forever young at heart and grow up. Some will live as forever young in every aspect of life and choose to never grow up. Others were born grown up and there was no going back. The old souls and the fresh souls; we all make up the orchestra of life.

The choice is ours to step up and embrace age. To age gracefully is a beautiful thing. I hope that I can accept the wisdom with the tides of time yet still honour my memory of what it was like to be young, just so that I don’t pigeon hole my relational dialogue with others. But as I stood there in front of that monumental home turned business with the chipped paint, partially sealed windows with the warped glass and the worn stoop and the wood framed door with the bell hanging over head, the comfort washed over me.

The comfort of knowing that despite the fact that at one point this store was brimming full of people and was something different at one point in time, it wasn’t trying to be something it wasn’t. It wasn’t trying too hard. The character was ingrained into the wood. It was a used bookstore and it was just exactly that. It would always be simple and I now know the gravitational pull of that.

A book will always be a book. And although the denouement occurs, it stops when you close the cover and you can come back to it another day. So, yes, I will resume perusing with the hardcovered classics section in 10 minutes.

I turned on my heel and headed on my way knowing I wouldn't be able to resist coming back.