I made a birthday cake in the shape of a sunflower today. I’m really chuffed about how it turned out.

Both the flower and the pot are spiral cakes mixing chocolate and vanilla, covered in rolled fondant. Unlike my previous attempt at a carved cake, this time I selected a sponge cake recipe so it’s holding its shape under the weight of the fondant. But just like last time, there was far, far more cake carved off and discarded than ended up in the final result. I really have to try my hand at a less wasteful design.

Wrapping the fondant around the sphere of cake that formed the flower took approximately one hundred billion years of frustration and repeated attempts. And that’s rounding down.

Whomever has their birthday next better be a fan of square cakes. Or better yet, store bought square cakes.

If the atheists can have a bus, I guess the nihilists can too.

Wow, Keele and Finch. I knew this corner well. Those buildings, this gas station, that sidewalk.

My first girlfriend lived right over there in that line of brown buildings, back in high school. We didn’t go to the same school, though. I was all the way across town at A.Y. Jackson, and she was south of here at William Lyon Mackenzie. Teenage years spent inside a pair of famous Canadians. The 12 KM distance as exotic and daring as a transatlantic romance.

On our first few dates I met her right here at this Esso station because she didn’t want her parents to know she was dating. I’d assumed we were meeting here because she worked nearby or lived in a run-down house she didn’t want me seeing straight away. When she told me it was because of her dad, I put my foot down (look at me, so macho) and insisted I pick her up at her door for our next date. The dictates of chivalry, you know?

Only a knight-wannabe nerd like me would be so insistent on bringing forward the Meet The Father event, and he turned out to be a burly, scowling, growling Russian man who scared the crap out of me. So did his dog. Come to think of it, so did his daughter.

I remember the night before our first date. A drive across town on a dry run. A simple straight shot along Finch Avenue, but what about construction? What if the road isn’t contiguous all the way across the city? What if there is more than one Finch Avenue?! What if EVERY street on that side of the city is called Finch Avenue and nobody speaks English?! What if I’m so nervous I forget how to speak English too?! What if my head explodes because I can’t remember my–BLAM!

There’s the building she lived in, and the elevator lobby in which I so badly fumbled my first kiss. There’s the sidewalk where a few months later I looked at my watch and asked her to be my girlfriend (I’m the sort of guy who doesn’t just want to remember an anniversary, but also the time of the anniversary). There’s the parking lot we often argued in. And there’s the plaza we argued in. And there’s the other plaza we also argued in. Oh, and we argued over there, too.

I thought I’d be awash with nostalgia, internally opining my first love while I wipe my windshield. But 12 KM doesn’t seem so far away any more. I could do that thirty times on this tank.

As a student, I was a bit of a handful. I’ve always had a gnawing hunger to learn things, but an almost equally strong urge to buck authority. Well, arbitrary authority at any rate. My so-called permanent record was (note the tense, kids) stuffed full of commendations and disciplinary notes in equal measure, if not equal use of euphemistic adjectives. Yet I loved school, and excelled at it. The kids are alright! School’s out forever! ¡Viva La Vevolucion! I’m taking math this summer for extra credit!

As Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (suck it, losers.)”  That’s from memory, so I may be misquoting him ever so slightly. 

One couplet I definitely can quote accurately from memory is one of my all-time favourites from that same poem:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. 

That was it. Right there. Reading that in grade school was the first time poetry actually spoke to me. Those lines were the first to resonate with me, to urge me to action, although quite what action I should take I wasn’t sure. Poetry as a force, an impetus, the way I later learned that satire was supposed to be when I read Swift and Pope. But those beautiful, ugly fellows and their sad, funny words came much later. First it was just me and ol’ Walt W. in the big round library pit in the centre of Mill Valley Public School.

At the very last second of lunch break I swallowed great gulps of orange soda then carefully, carefully, ever so carefully walked back to my desk, my belly a carbon dioxide time bomb. I was a Grade 6 version of The Wages of Fear, minus the French melodrama but with all the suspense. I churned with potential energy as I lowered myself into the chair.

I waited just long enough for Mr. Richards to turn around and begin to scrape white chalk on the green blackboard. Then I raised my arms akimbo and shook my belly to build up huge hippopotamus gas ball inside me, rising and growing and rising and growing and rising and–

“YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWP!

I think it wasn’t actually the belch that got me in trouble. It probably wasn’t even the cacophonous laughter of my classmates. I bet it wasn’t even my triumphant look of delight, although that couldn’t have helped.

It was the fact that when Mr. Richards spun around to see whose foghorn had just gone off, young Carrington sat tall in his chair with his arms still stretched out to the sides as if to say “Ta da!”

And that’s when I did the Jazz hands.

Did I get detention? I got multitudes.

Definitely that shirt, I decided. Yes, definitely that one. Maybe.

I tossed it and a few other candidates into the washing machine. I still had lots of time before I had to leave.

The pants had been easier. My gender only has two choices, and today’s choice was denim. My wardrobe is about as colourful as pre-tornado Dorothy, so selecting among trouser candidates had been a snap.

Aside from the easy pants picking, the morning wasn’t going well. I was in full-on klutzy nerd mode. I tripped over the rug. I stubbed my toe on a chair. I dropped a glass, but it didn’t break. I picked it up, fumbled it, and down again the tumbler tumbled, this time exploding against the hard kitchen tile. 

Before that, there was a soap incident. 

I was in the shower when the empty soap dish reminded me of something. The something was the fact that I’d forgotten to buy soap. No soap in the shower, no soap in the cupboard. That just left the hand soap by the sink. The flowery hand soap in a pump.

The foaming flowery hand soap in a pump. 

And that explains why a hint of lilac wafted behind me as I rushed about and painfully failed to avoid chairs kickable, rugs trippable, and the dangerous dusting of glass on the kitchen floor.

I did not want a lilac waft. I did not want shattered glass under my feet. But above all, I did not want to glance at Mr. Clock and find out it was NINE forty-five instead of EIGHT forty-five. 

Ha ha ha too bad for you, said Mr. Clock. That’s what you get for looking at me when you are all sleepy and yawning. Maybe next time you will pay attention to what Mr. Clock has to say. Ha ha ha Mr. Clock laughs at you and speaks of himself in the third person jauntily.

Mr. Clock was still laughing his little analog ass off as I took the stairs a million at a time down to the laundry room to clank open the washer and yank out my still soaking shirt.

I twisted the shirt to wring a waterfall into the washing machine. The shirt was still damp, and now wrinkled as well. Damn and double damn.

I raced back up the stairs and set up the ironing board as if I was trying to impress a NASCAR pit crew. I plugged in the iron. Get hot get hot get hot get hot you bastard. Mr. Clock said tick tick tick ha ha ha look how fast Mr. Clock is weeee!

I pressed the shirt with rapid strokes and impatient swirls. The steam hissed up around me, a great cloud of warm vapour. It really brought out the lilac.

Dry enough gotta go gotta go gotta go. I shimmied into the shirt on the run and leapt back down the stairs again with an audible KRACK at the landing which was me breaking an ankle.

Wait, no, I could still run, must’ve been the sound barrier.

Out the door and away, a sweet lilac breeze trailing behind me like a gossamer cape. If every traffic light co-operated I might just make it on time for brunch, where I’d try to stay calm, stay cool, and, most importantly, stay downwind.

Someone left a huge bottle of syrup for me at work. At least, I hope it’s syrup.

It looks like I’m keeping my own urine in a bottle on my desk. At least, I hope it’s my own.

I wish I was interviewing job seekers today. I’d go all Howard Hughes on their asses, tell them to describe their work experience without using the letter U, and speak to them only through a hand puppet from under the desk. 

“Mr. Flopsy wants to know your salary expectations. No, not down there, speak directly to Mr. Flopsy! No no no, there is a ‘U’ in ‘This is ridiculous.’ DO NOT ANGER MR. FLOPSY!”

[Continued from part 2]

The phone didn’t ring any more on Friday night, and by Saturday morning it had been cleaned inside and out, wiping the dirty bits both literal and figurative.

My cellphone doesn’t have a batch delete option for the camera, so I had to delete each photo individually. The images flashed on the tiny screen, one after the other like a little nudie flip book. A jittery silent porno. Not much plot, but I’ve seen worse.

It wasn’t until the afternoon that I found the text messages.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Continued from part 1]

I left my cellphone in my car all day, this time on purpose. It needed charging soon, because the battery was low, and it needed cleaning even sooner, because it smelled of smoke. Yuck.

Later, as I was driving home after work, the phone went ping. The ping of a missed call. Or, in this case, the ping of 22 missed calls.

Missed call: Blocked ID
Missed call: Blocked ID
Missed call: Blocked ID
Missed call: Blocked ID
Missed call: Blocked ID
And so on, and so on…

Read the rest of this entry »

There was a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. This was notable for a few reasons. First, she sounded a little drunk and it was 8 o’clock in the morning. Second, it was my cellphone she was answering.

Let me back up a bit. I’d lost my cellphone earlier that week, on Monday, maybe Tuesday. I don’t use it much, so I didn’t notice it had fallen from my jacket pocket. Happens a lot to me.  Well, I guess technically it happens to the phone. I should probably get a little holster for it, but then I’d be the kind of guy who wears his cellphone in a holster.

Read the rest of this entry »

*Click*

That was the sound of my door shutting and locking.

*Damn*

That was the sound of me realizing my keys were on the other side of the door.

I do not like a door that locks itself. Gives it airs. Smacks of impropriety. Interferes with an otherwise congenial human-door relationship. And more than all of that, I don’t like the fact that I can accidentally lock myself out of my home.

Thursday. Early evening, still daylight. Nice breeze and birdsong. Lovely weather to be temporarily homeless. Better than February, I tell myself. Clearly I’m putting a positive spin on this and hoping I won’t notice that I’m not wearing shoes.

*Damn*

Well, that didn’t work at all, did it?

Read the rest of this entry »