Why would I have a problem with her keeping the gifts I had given her? But then what use would she have for anything that was so obviously mine, like those mugs—the kind you don’t see anymore with the big letters on the side . . . the J and the R that I bought for us to drink tea together?
     So, I reclaimed the R, little suspecting that her next boyfriend’s name would begin with the same letter as mine, and that that boyfriend would last forever, and that I would think of that asshole every time I open my cupboard.

There were politics in the air last night.
     Our new member of parliament attended the fun fair at Fern Avenue Public School, and I got the chance to engage in small talk with the leader of the Green Party.
     “I voted for you in 1988,” I said. “Were you the leader back then? ”
     “In those days,” he smiled, “we weren’t sure we should even have leaders!”
     “And I caught you last week in the field launching those paper hot-air balloons. It was pretty impressive.”
     “It’s one of my specialties,” he said.
     Didn’t I tell you he’s the shop teacher here?

I enjoyed his company, and he seemed to enjoy the attention—so much so that, even after he landed his first serious girlfriend, he still let me hang around, mostly it seemed so that I could watch them kiss . . . on the couch in her parent’s apartment . . . on the subway platform while we waited for the train to come . . .
     Sure, it put me off, but what the hell . . . until I finally got a girlfriend of my own, and there wasn’t so much time for him. Maybe he was jealous. Maybe he resented the fact that I wasn’t so eager to share.

My shelves are full of albums that contain a single wonderful song I heard once or twice on the radio, then managed to track all the way downtown to the bins at Sam the Record Man. That those same bands were capable of producing another forty minutes of crap annoyed me, but seldom kept me from paying for those few fine minutes. The Internet was supposed to have changed all that—download only what you want, they say—except for me, who now finds himself panning through an entire back catalogue in the hopes of finding just one more gem.

I stumbled down my mountain of midterm work, crested a dune, and found myself staring down a bright, busy beach. Back in the theatre it was still October, but here the sun was hot; so I ditched the jacket and took a knife to my jeans—shorts and bare feet to blend in with the crowd.
     I tried not to bore them with school, but they asked, and someone on the crew told me the director always seemed to be on the lookout for another engineer . . . another war movie . . . a romance? . . . an adventure, no matter whether we won or lost.

     “My mom got a call from New Jersey,” I said. “My father just died of a heart attack or something.”
     “Oh no,” she said.
     “That’s okay,” I said. “We’re driving down for the funeral . . . so I won’t be able to see you on Saturday.”
     “Now I’ll never get to meet him.”
     “I don’t know if you’d have liked him much,” I said. “He smoked too much, he voted for Regan, and he left my mother with two kids when I was eleven.”
     “I only wish I’d had a chance to get to know him.”
     “I know,” I said. “Me too.”

     The last decent photo of me was taken in 1990, some time after Christmas but before New Year’s. I’m sitting on the couch in my cousin’s house in Germany, and I know I was in London before the end of December. I’m wearing red socks, my signature footware at the time, and holding a little glass of something strong.
     The thing is, more than fifteen years later, I still use that picture to identify myself . . . to someone who’s never seen before, to potential clients . . . even to me, I suppose, in lieu of a mirror, and a good dose of reality.

I was riding along Queen, focussing my narrow wheels on the strip of asphalt between the cars parked on one side and the streetcar tracks on the other, when something told me to slow down just a little for the big, stupid car turning into the traffic ahead of me; then just watch as his fender touched me as gentlly as could be, like that clumsy come-on in the men’s room . . . at first you couldn’t believe it was happening, then your friends tried to convince you it was really kinda funny, but you just sat there getting angrier and angrier.

After the X-Men movie, I started to wonder about all the people with more mundane mutatations, any of which would probably still frighten normal people but leave the mutant unable to defend himself. For every X-man mutation, there’re probably a hundred who can only do things like change their hair colour, make a cel phone ring just by thinking of the number, or maybe bind meat to metal. Sure, they might have a future as a fry cook or something, but they’ll be of little help to the really cool mutants when Magneto regains his power in the next movie.

I’m rather enjoying the talk these days of “peak oil,” as, I imagine, are most people who depend on their bicycles to get around this city. We all look forward to the day when the wells run dry and the last SUV rolls off the assembly line, when people will have no choice but to abandon the still, rusting hulks they once depended on.
     They’ll venture forth from their underground garages and onto the wide empty streets, and only then will they finally be free of the automobile.
     Only then will they learn just how dangerous a bicycle can be.

Just listen to yourself. You’re already pretty angry at him, and I don’t see how it can get any better.
     Remember Cash? Once he got on your wrong side, you just couldn’t stop hating him. And then there was that scatterbrained manager who didn’t believe in writing anything down. And before that the whole concept of a regular paycheck for the rest of your life. Face it, Roy, all it takes is a nudge into the red and you’re on another long slippery slope to getting fired
     You might as well quit now, because it’s only going to get worse.

You have to wonder at a boy who would willingly tie a balloon to his belt informing anyone who cares to know that he’s just turned 18; especially if he was planning on celebrating his new old-enough-to-vote-but-too-young-to-drink status in any meaningful way. I can only assume then that it was the handiwork of one of those girls standing there with him. Of course, had I two young women to help me celebrate my coming of age, I’d have happily endured such a humiliation . . . now I’d only worry how high a balloon large enough to hold my years might take me.

     You know what? Things just worked better when it was just the two of us, before we made our first million. So, to hell with the marketing consultants and all those stupid meetings. We know exactly what the market wants.
     To hell with profit-sharing plans, benefits packages, and performance appraisals.
     And to hell with all that beta testing. All it does is hold us back from getting the product out the door. We’re going to release this thing by the end of the week. We’ll do our own website. We’ll write our own documentation. And we’ll prove you all wrong.

I spent a good part of that year trying to get Maureen to kiss me, or at least convince her she might want to. I gave her Valentine’s flowers (with a poem, no less) but all that got me was the first in series of diminishing dates, until another (birthday) poem found me walking up Yonge Street to keep her company until the bus caught up with us. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been tight, but she just turned around on the first step up and caught me quick before I could even try to kiss back.

     Technically, I think you need to demonstrate a certain behaviour more than once for it to be considered a syndrome, but that didn’t stop her from accusing me of only paying attention to her between girfriends; but then neither did her observation stop me from trying again . . . and maybe at least one more time after that.
     It wasn’t as if I was obsessed by her, or anything; it was more like suddenly finding the time to pick up a pet project you never got around to finishing and trying to finally get it done before another damn thing crops up.

And besides, who is Garry Trudeau to tell me I can’t recycle my stuff? Especially these days, when it seems that every few months his Doonesbury does a “flashback” and reruns a series of strips from earlier in the year, often confusing a perfectly good story line or recalling events that already seem way out of date.
     So, aside from the fact I’m not a Pullitzer-prize-winning multi-millionaire, my next few stories will be repeats. And although they’re more than one year old, they never did get published, since that month I was even further behind, and then just gave up.

Sarah’s first husband believed that five-minute epoxy could fix anything. “You won’t even see the crack,” he insisted, as I searched for the glue that would repair the coaster he’d inexplicably thrown across my living room, with a globby seam I was too much the host to call him on, and a memory of failure that catches up with me years later in house we’re renting from Sarah this summer. So many things in her life have been broken since then, I’m hoping she won’t notice the little angel of hers I had to put back together with crazy glue.

Before we’d even noticed the old sink was leaking, it had soaked through a seven-year supply of expired medication, the fancy soaps we’d never used, and mixed it all together with our collection of complementary toothbrushes. So, I took out the sink—although I’d never plumbed before—removed the second sink from Rowan’s room, tore out the old supply, soldered the new pipes in place, installed a new cabinet, dropped in a new sink, re-routed the pipes (again), purchased a new Flexitrap to make up the difference, hooked it all up, turned it on . . . and we still have a drip.

When I was single and trying to save money, I had a friend who’d drive me to the big Knob Hill Farms supermarket out near Weston Road and the 401, where we’d somehow find a way to cram a month’s worth of groceries into his old Mini Cooper. Everything was bigger and cheaper out there. The queue for the chicken legs stretched forever, the aisles were so long you’d have sworn the ends met at the vanishing point, and if you were stupid enough to miss something on your list, it was not worth the time to retrace your steps.

Even before we had Rowan, I was beginning to feel that having just one child might be strange. Perhaps it was the statistics I’d grown up with, or maybe it was my genes that were egging me on, but mostly I think it was the couple who sat down near us for breakfast at Ari’s, the two of them on one side of the table and their son on the other looking as if his date had again stood him up. But we’ve got a boy and a girl—a millionaire’s family—and now it’s three kids that seems odd.

It was our second trip to Nova Scotia when we finally admitted that the only place our little family seemed entirely happy and normal was on a big, empty beach somewhere. Rowan was five, and the beaches were free of the distractions and conflicts that increasingly plagued our time together . . . no walls to bounce off, no people to worry about, and just one simple rule: stay out of the water. Only this allowed us a break, from hollering at him in the car to a broad stretch of sand where we could each go our own way for a while.

Leave it to me to fuck up something as simple as a lemonade stand, but I thought there was something wrong with Rowan setting the price a ten cents a glass. There was the cost of cups, the mix . . . and of course I wanted him to make a profit so he wouldn’t be disappointed. It was to be a lesson in simple economics. I even stupidly thought he might find it fun, except he didn’t care and that made me angry, as usua . . . and who’d have thought he’d make so much from people who told him to keep the change?

My first step in breaking the television habit was to move away from home, where the cable was free. If I had to paid for it, I reckoned, I would watch even more; so, I stuck to the aerial, hid the thing on the highest shelf in the closet, and brought it out only for special occasions, then to my girlfriend’s apartment, then to my sister’s. It was years before I really needed one again—believe it or not, for a job—and I shopped for the smallest set I could find . . . actually paid more money to have less TV.

I’ve been playing poker for ages. Never for a lot of money, and seldom more than three or four times a year, but still enough to make Mary worry I might be some sort of compulsive gambler.
     Me? I only worry about how crappy I am at Texas Hold’em, and so resolved to play enough hands online to finally get a feel for the game. And though I’d never played Internet poker before, I quickly turned a $3000 stake into $29000! Play money, unfortunately.
     And the only thing Mary says is: “I certainly hope you’re not playing for real money.”

If I were a bird, I could’ve pushed him out the nest. If I were a lion I’d have eaten him by now. But as a more sophisticated mammal, I’m finding myself limited by my regular collection of cop-outs.
     If he were my employee, I’d fire him.
     If he were my boss I would quit.
     If he were my friend, I’d slowly stop returning his calls.
     If he were my lover, I’d just dump him outright.
     But he’s my kid and already acts as if he’d rather be anywhere else, and so I have no choice but to keep him.

If you’ve never heard a real gun, I can tell you it’s not like it sounds on TV. Outside it’s usually nothing but a little pop. Inside and close up, you’ll think you’ve just blown off your ears.
     “Jesus Christ!” he said. “I thought we had an agreement.”
     “It was an accident,” I said. “You didn’t tell me it was loaded.”
     “You idiot, I think you’ve actually hit me.”
     “Sorry.”
     “This is bad,” he said, as he sank to his knees.
     “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll go get some help . . . I just want to watch you bleed for a while.”

The online poker I’ve been playing has released the adolescent inside me, the student who always did well in school but never failed to feel embarrassed by his success, the guy who’d snatch his assignments from the teacher before anyone else could see another 10 out of 10.
     Even playing poker with my pals, much as I enjoy winning, there’s still a part of me that feels bad if I keep on winning. But safely online, the gloves come off, and I get to laugh out loud at the losers who couldn’t figure out that I probably had another flush.

We’re wrapping up the company and need some expenses to offset our sales, and so I’m sitting in the Harbour Sixty steak house asking for water.
     “Sparkling or still, sir?”
     And although we’re about to embark on the Most Expensive Meal Ever, part of me is hanging back at Swiss Chalet with my mother, who considers a beverage an unneccessary expense when the water is free and, figuring that “still” is just fancy talk for “tap,” makes what I think is the most frugal choic . . . and ends up with 800ml from a Norwegian well and another $12 on the tab.

I should probably keep off the streets as much I can, so I’ll just wind along the bike path for a while, cut through the Exhibition grounds, and follow the Molson Indy until Parkdale.
     That’s right, you’d better get out of my way you poor people, because you have no idea how drunk I am. I have drunk with the rich tonight. I have listened to waiters apologize over the age of their scotches, and I am just as drunk and just as stupid as if I’d polished off the rest of the cheap stuff I keep under the sink.

So, I ride slowly up to one of the girls who’s always working the corner at King Street and Wilson Park. It’s a cold night and already she’s sizing me up . . . like she usually takes the Johns down to the parking lot at Sunnyside or one of the alleys off Queen, but where in the world are we going to go on a fucking bicycle? But there she has me all wrong, because really I’m a lot more drunk than I look.
     “Will you give me a kiss for ten dollars?” I ask. “Just on the cheek.”
     “Twenty,” she says.