It turns out I was wrong: The power came back on Saturday morning, not Sunday. It just felt like three days by then. But I was so certain that I found myself arguing this with the fellow who runs our video store, to the point I think where I had him convinced , poor guy, because he also sells ice cream, and the blackout must have ruined everything. But of course that’s why I made a point the first night of walking past, half hoping he might still be there, even giving it away, but the shop was closed up tight.

He was home for dinner so little these days he had begun to feel out of place at the table. And their son was misbehaving again, or so said his wife, but what could he do? The boy never listened anymore, and he was getting too big to smack. So he said, “Sit up straight, will you? And wait until everyone’s served.”
     “Don’t wipe your hands on your pants.”
     “Don’t hold your fork so far down the handle.”
     Until the boy gathered his courage up tight, threw his napkin as hard as he could, and ran away to his room.

I suppose it was good I had written it all down. It might even have been what started me building the time machine in the first place—a long list of missed opportunities and bad decisions I had determined to fix. The theory, of course, warned of paradoxes, but then who better than me to observe their effect? And so I started dropping in and out of the last forty-two years determined to set it all straight, crossing stuff out, changing the names, adding more problems, until I could barely make sense of the thing, let alone finish the machine.

You’ve got to give up on her now. Sure, she’d let you fuck her eventually, but hasn’t she told how her last boyfriend pestered her for four years before giving up? Don’t ask me to explain this power she has; let’s just say it’s more to do with your own desire than anything she has to offer. And don’t ask me how I know that; if she says she’s a virgin, that should be good enough for you. But if you do decide to stick it out, please don’t ask her to move in. This time she might say yes.

The child of a child of the Depression can’t just shake off the lessons he’s learned. Especially when even he remembers when movies were a dollar and the subway cost a dime, how he used to pay fifteen cents for a chocolate bar and twenty-five cents for an ice cream cone. And don’t even think about spending a dollar for a bottle of water—“There’s a tap full of water,” his mother would say, as he has said to his son, who sees every trip down the street as an excuse to spend his allowance as quick as he can.

She’d never been good at making friends. She’d had two when we started going out and soon after dropped down to one I don’t think she liked all that much. She told me that I was her best friend, and she seemed to like my friends and quickly came to consider them her own. At least until after the break-up, when she and I were trying to be friends, and really, I was trying to be friendly when I let her know about a show she’d be wanting to see, but that I wasn’t inviting her along, and she cried.

I certainly don’t need you to tell me how rotten it is to grow old. I’ve watched enough people do it to understand the unpleasant things that can happen, not to mention my own limited experience in a body that is just now starting to complain about my few feeble demands. And then, of course, there are all those big ones: my father’s heart attack, my mother’s cancer, my sister’s depression, my grandmother’s dementia. But, say, if you could just tell me specifically what I have in store, I could stop worrying about everything and just get on with it.

Sure, people shout at me from their cars all the time, as I stubbornly cycle my way along their roads. I’m used to it, and I’m not too proud to admit that at least some of the time it’s for something I’ve done wrong. But then there was the summer the anarchists were in town for their big international convention. As if that weren’t already oxymoronic enough, the group I encountered were crowded into an old gas-guzzler chugging along Harbord Street, when one leaned out of his window with a broad smile and shouted to me: “Hey, Mr. Appropriate Technology!”

I used to secretly make fun of Rob when he arrived all decked out in his safety gear. He wore a bicycle helmet before the government made them mandatory and years before the manufacturers even tried to make them look cool. He wore a reflective vest that made him look like a street sweeper on his way to the office. And he capped it all with a fussy little flag that stuck out into the traffic. Several accidents later, and I finally purchased a helmet, and someone I don’t even know had the nerve to call me a Safety Bitch.

Maybe there’s something wrong with the way I approach death, or maybe I’ve just not cared enough about the people I know who have died, but while popular psychology seems to insist on five stages of mourning—Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance—I can’t seem to help myself, after an embarrassingly brief period of sadness, wondering what they might have left me in their will. There are times when I hope that this is my own special shortcut to Acceptance, but I know that a psychologist would insist that I’m still in Denial? No, Doctor, not denial . . . Avoidance.

Donald was basically a big noisy jerk. Every office has one, and our business has lots, but in Don’s case even the other jerks couldn’t stand to have him around. Still, he was in early every morning, he never missed a day, and there was no way I could let him go with the numbers he brought in. And it’s not like I forced him to go to New York, since the bastard worked it all out behind my back, and I’m sorry he had to die the way he did, but I really can’t say I’m sorry he’s gone.

My dad was okay, I guess; but I never really saw him much. He went in on the train every day early before I got up and usually came home after my bedtime. He told me about his office once and promised to take me there and to take me to lunch in the big restaurant at the top for my birthday, but he never did it. And you know what? I thought those explosions were awesome, and one of the big kids told me to shut up, and I told him to shut up because my dad was dead.

Remember when you got your first box of business cards and wondered how you’d ever hand them all out before your first promotion and your next box of cards, even after they stuck you on the phones all day and kept you away from the trade shows? Don’t throw them away! Pack them along with your CDs, your posters, and your cubicle toys; because old business cards are excellent for taking down messages and writing little memos—sort of like sticky notes without the stick—and a handy reminder of how much loyalty you should invest in your next job.

She’d often get on top, which once would’ve suited him fine, except that from there she’d invariably proceed to rock with an earnestness he never failed to find just disturbing enough to throw him off the moment and back to night last summer they’d actually tried to do it out on the lake in her family’s canoe, with him on top, bathing suit down to his knees, holding onto the gunwales and mostly just trying to keep his butt low enough while the boat teetered on the edge of capsizing and his knees rubbed raw on the wet fibreglass. Thwarted.

Believe it or not, when you grow up in New Jersey, there comes a point when New York loses its allure and becomes just another place for school trips, a birthday at the aquarium, or a family outing to the Museum of Natural History in your father’s smokey Oldsmobile.
   “I think you better let me out!”. . . across the sidewalk to Central Park, against the stone wall, looking down at the snow, through the wrought iron, and into the trees.
   “Maybe if I walked a bit,” says the boy, on the streets of New York City, shadowed by a brown sedan.

If I can just get through today, then maybe I can handle the last few weeks to our first anniversary, which I’ve stupidly been making a big deal about but she thinks is just silly, even though she didn’t complain when I surprised her this morning, then later this afternoon when I showed up with a band-aid to mend the broken heart, a romantic dinner, then bed, where I lay beside her worrying again about the crush I have on the girl at work and wondering what sort of bastard breaks up with his girlfriend the day after Valentine’s Day.

This time I wasn’t just passing through and might even be part of the next tour of Intensive Care where I’d seen the kid who they might have told me had just had the surgery I was scheduled for, except that all I could see before I almost passed out was the drainage tube running from her chest and a single bubble of blood inside being sucked back and forth. This time they had taken my clothes, and I was sitting alone in a room with two beds wondering if it was too cold to walk home in my pyjamas.

Two days out of the city on our bike trip and I was already thinking of the food I’d buy as soon as I got back, as a reward, of course, for cycling almost five hundred miles . . . or at least that was the idea. At the top of my list was a banana split, specifically the kind from Dairy Queen, but a few days on and I was already dreaming of a plate of french fries with gravy and any number of other rich or fatty foods way beyond the meagre budget we’d alotted for our week on the road.

But what’s the point of setting yourself up with a reward for finishing, if long before you’re done and all the rest of the trip you start stuffing your face with all the banana splits and french fries and fresh strawberries and any number of other treats you’ve promised yourself entirely out of proportion to your daily progress? And what makes it even worse, is that when I finally did get home, after one week of cycling every day, all day, I was still so hungry I simply couldn’t stop eating and set about to reward myself all over again.

I don’t know what drives poor John, but at least you can always count on him to get things done, like organizing the entire canoe trip himself. But once we were under way, I do know things would’ve gone better if he’d just held himself back a little. They certainly couldn’t have gone any faster, with him paddling solo half a mile ahead, goading us on with his overbearing good example, while we just did the best we could and passed the time by planning how we might dispose of a body in the shallow soil of the Canadian Shield.

You could travel for miles on the empty lakes and not see a soul, but come the end of each day and the people would paddle out of nowhere to join the race for a decent campsite before they were all snapped up. And if that wasn’t enough to dispel your delusions of breaking new trails through the wilderness, all it took was your first encounter with a neat pile of someone else’s shit, topped with just enough toilet paper to confirm that this was not merely the droppings of some careless animal that had neglected to cover its scat.

The toilet’s not broken, but it’s certainly not flushing with the enthusiasm I’m looking for. Simply put: I don’t want people to see my shit; and while I once thought this might be a manifestation of the instinct that compels lesser animals to cover their scat, I wonder now if it might not be merely the inverse of my desire to not see others people’s shit. When camping, I’ll go out of my way to find a secluded spot and cover my business with a chunk of moss or some leaves. At home, I just flush and flush and flush.

They used to let us out early sometimes so that we could cheer on the football team— 2:30 for games against the local schools, but sometimes even earlier when we managed to make the playoffs. Those were the best, although I never went to one, partly because I couldn’t have cared less, but mostly because I relished the freedom of that extra hour gave me, even as I invariably wasted the time on Star Trek reruns and cartoons, the thrill of being home alone, before anyone knew I was there, before the obligations of the evening began to set in.

One of the guys from the crew ended up giving me twenty bucks for my phrasebook, as I was heading back to Canada, and he needed it to help him write a letter to let down the girl he’d picked up in Buenos Aires the Friday before. They’d been lucky Italian is close enough to Spanish for them to all find dates before the evening even got started, including the law student he’d stayed with till Sunday afternoon. I wondered how much she could really care about this dumb construction worker? But he cared enough to be worried she might.

I can accept that a portion of pretty much every dollar spent on new computer systems goes right into Bill Gates’s pocket, but what I want to know is what’s happened to all the hours I’ve wasted over the years waiting for Windows to start up, or trying to get Microsoft Word to properly format a numbered list, or tricking Internet Explorer to recognize the standards every other browser follows as a matter of course. I can certainly understand Bill’s desire to be the richest man on the planet, but what could one man possibly do with all that time?

I got to talking with one of the fathers waiting in the schoolyard, and it turned out we’d attended the same elementary school. We talked about the things we remembered and the teachers we’d shared, and figured Chris couldn’t have been more than one year ahead of me.
     “I really should remember you,” I said. “But I don’t.”
     “Don’t be sorry,” said Chris. “I tried to be as invisible as possible. I’d be more upset if you had remembered.”
     Today, he was sitting away from the other parents, wearing his don’t-talk-to-me headphones and reading, and I walked right past him.

I made sure to take some change that night in the hope a few drinks would give me the courage to phone the girl I’d been trying to call all month. There should’ve been nothing to it, but instead I’d just lie on my bed every night listening to the same sorry tape until I began to wonder if I’d ever have a girlfriend. Four beers later and I was off to the washroom, past the phones, but still sober enough to realize a phone call from a noisy bar was probably not the best way to start this thing.

I looked forward to the phone calls I’d get from my dad after the divorce, until I realized he was usually drunk when he called. Maybe he needed to be, especially after the support payments stopped and my mother would grab the phone from me. Or maybe he was a sentimental drunk, and after a few beers got to thinking of the children he’d lost. But I only clued in when I called him at work, and he turned out to be more interesting when he was sober, and I wanted to tell him I liked him better that way.

Today, during the weekly all-staff meeting, Cash Laredo asked us an open question that nobody answered. “Let’s make that a rhetorical question,” he said, trying again to encourage a response. “But you’re not supposed to answer a rhetorical question,” said someone from the Documentation group, which tends to take the English language a little more seriously than Cash and publicly denounces his fondness for the passive voice, who once refused to sign off on his press release for Rambunctious Software’s second “flagship” product, then screamed in frustration when he offered the “exclusive” story to any publication that would review it.

You wouldn’t know it to listen to me, but I really don’t miss the girlfriends I’ve had and even less those who rejected me outright. But they do all have one increasingly seductive feature about them, and therein lies the problem: They’re all still suspended back in their twenties, while Mary and I have turned thirty together, then forty, then stuck by necessity in an inexorable present, while the others who caused me such grief can, even so, take me back to a time before I had to rouse my tired body every morning to a house full of responsibilities.