Candy's Christmas Kick

Candy felt funny and awkward most of the time, like a yoga class fart. Christmas seemed to underline the point. Candy believed that the world wasn't as complicated as it was made out to be. She believed that the best way to chortle was most certainly through a snorkel, and for a clothes hamper to be handy, it must also be ample.

 

But when Aunt Carol commented on the french onion dip and chips Candy brought for Christmas dinner, Candy saw red—and green. In a sally of yuletide rage, Candy dropkicks the Christmas tree—stimulating a cascade of clinking bulbs, balls, and an angel that gracefully falls into the grog of Carol's cinna-mint egg nog.

To be continued...

Pre-digging a grave.

I watched the entire first season of The Walking Dead. It was as flat as a front lawn in surburbia.

I have often had a hard time creating characters for my stories. The story part comes very naturally to me—but when I try to place characters into that story, somehow it comes across as contrived. The characters are front-lawn flat.

Recently I've begun to consider the possibility that I have been going about writing my stories all wrong. In the process of creating a story before creating the characters, I have cornered myself. The story is doomed to be an experience of "my" perspective. "I" inevitably become the character in the story.

The characterization in The Walking Dead is extremely one-dimensional. The characters each have a single personality trait that gets flogged to death by the story surrounding them. Like my flat cornered characters, these characters feel to me like they were added to a story that already existed. Probably one of the most ambiguously interesting characters—the guy who gets bitten after pre-digging the graves of the characters who are about to die—gets killed off.

Although, I suppose part of enjoying zombie narratives comes from the one-dimensionality of the experience. In zombie stories, the difference between bad and good, dead and alive, enemy and friend, is clear-cut. When a good character dies, she is transformed into a bad character—a zombie. There is no ethical or moral dilemma to be worked through; no question of right or wrong is wrestled with.

Ambiguity in stories like The Walking Dead has a very slim chance of surviving. The heroes are well-maintained front lawns while the villains are piles of dead leaves. Anything other than that: start digging your own grave.

Dovercourt Road, Toronto

I don't recommend walking down Dovercourt Rd. with your back to oncoming traffic. You may very well get back slapped to the sidewalk by a sideview mirror.

At this particular moment, I live on this street. There are always good-looking folks walking up and down Dovercourt, whether they're leaving from/heading to the YMCA, hopping from one venue to another, or heading home from their day jobs.

The street has two-way traffic.  However, because of the parked cars lining the west side of the street, there are barely 1 and a 1/2 lanes.  The cars squeeze past each other at surprising speeds.

There is also a cop shop a few doors up from me. It is a plane, box-shaped building with all of its vertical blinds closed in all of its windows. In the summer time, someone planted red and white impatiens in the planters of the civilian entrance—but no one watered them and they died. A cave in the side of a mountain during winter is more inviting than this police station.

For the most part I enjoy their presence, assuming that any bike thief or cat burglar might think twice about stealing from me—what with the steady stream of cop cars heading to and from the office.

On a regular basis, I hear the squealing of tires. At the bottom of a slight dip in Dovercourt—a tiny ravine—there happens to be a crosswalk. I quite enjoy the Film Noir effect of the sluggish, flashing yellow lights. The squealing tires come as a result of speeding vehicles slamming their brakes at the last moment, when folks are crossing the street at the crosswalk.

Across the street from the cop shop, a newer, bigger, and better cop shop is being constructed. There are construction vehicles regularly parked or stopped on Dovercourt, forcing traffic to adapt to a one-way. In spite of the obvious need for a police officer to direct traffic during these moments, there has never been one. Yes, we will pay cops to stand unnecessarily all-day at construction sites all over the city—but not here on Dovercourt. No not here, in front of a police station where the construction of another police station causes traffic confusion. 

Sometimes when I see a big huge cop stuffed to the brim in a police car cruising on by with all of his gear and his layers of uniform—sometimes I share a little giggle with myself. It brings to mind images, like marbles in a medicine cabinet, or a funeral for the exclamation point.