ummmm....

That photo is funny.

Well, maybe to some it's more than funny, but when I snapped it, I was laughing. They're trying to get the cork off the bottle. Insert nine million bad metaphors and jokes and similies here. I'm not going to.

We had a dinner party on the weekend with Stacey's ex-boss at Chatelaine and my ex-mentor teacher. Our gay guardian angels. guardian gayngels? i'm trying to figure out a good word for it because i'm going to write them a poem. they go above and beyond in trying to help stacey and I out, so i figure with one of my legendary poems, we'll be even.

i realized lately, while trying to take care of all my business before MONDAY, that i don't like work. SURPRISE!

my senses are heightened on this issue because i feel like a man condemned to prison, and these are my last days. initially i was rushing about trying to secure gifts for my family for christmas so i wouldn't have to be a weekend guy jostling with the throngs of late shoppers who would gladly crack your jaw to get ahead of you in line.

but after two days of it, i realize that i can't do it. i can't concentrate that long, that hard, on shopping. even when i get some nice gifts i still feel like i wasted my time. perhaps shopping is meant to be a social event.

like golf in that you talk to someone for 4 hours, while intermittently hitting a ball around. but really it's about the talking.

i've been everywhere in the city lately.

there's a place on mavis road where all the outlets have congregated. it's like las vegas for suburban shoppers. stacey and i went there initially to get dishes for our dinner party with the gayngels, and then i also happened to buy pants and a new dress shirt for work. i'm confused about buying clothes for work: so i have to spend money so i can earn money? when do i start breaking even?? it's bay street so i have no idea what i'm supposed to be wearing. BAY STREET! HAHAHAHAHAHAH! i crack myself up. a good job on bay street. yeah, that's what i always wanted.

in fact, in my early university days, that's true. irony? no. empathy? please. yes.

so the end of my freedom dawns. as bush would say, there is a price for freedom (visa bills) and now i need to pay for it. (only bush would include a clause that says if i can't make the minimum payment i have to send a sellable organ to the credit card company as a deposit).

what i really wanted to do here was post some pictures from my phone of the basketball game i was at. louis got some tickets to the game. they were AMAZING TICKETS. he decided to take me. muchos gratias, my friend. they were about 3 rows behind the raptors bench. the game was phenomenal. of course we lost in the final two seconds.

if you took 'ode to joy' and sped it up, added the sound of gunfire, tires screeching, and a vocal track of a man rushing into iraqi combat screaming his head off, that's how i felt watching this game.

i said a few kind words to the GM Rob Babcock. I mouthed off the "raptor killer" sign carrying guys who were in front of us, because i felt the sign was disrespectful to the team. I jumped up and down for joy when matt bonner hit a game tying bucket with 2 seconds remaining.

a two and a half hour event that feels like a big build up to emotional orgasm. just when it feels like you're almost there, jason terry sends you home with blue balls. we must not forget the joy we had for the past 2 and a half hours.

while in a giant future shop on mavis road i took a seat on a plush leather couch in front of a giant screen television and played a hockey game on the new xbox 360. i was incredibly unimpressed. looks just like any game on the PS2 or Xbox.

i'll take my sports up close and personal, please, and my freedom with a dash of income.

our society is a fucking mess

women still inferior

the glorification of shallowness and greed

the cult of celebrity and the rise of the meritocracy

those we trust to lead the world are rife with scandal

corporate control and exploitation


this is brilliant, because it means there is room for great art. 1984, animal farm, the clash, american beauty, apocalypse now, gulliver's travels, a modest proposal, public enemy, death of a salesman, et al. friends of reason, compassion, empathy and justice, will return in new guises.

blogging

some people don't blog.

my friend jbaum has never been to the site, even though i talk to him as though he has:

ie.

F: so it's finally happening.
J: what, your penis reduction?
F: no, i got the job.
J: you did? when?
F: didn't you read my blog?
J: i have never read a blog in my life.
F: oh, here's the link, read it and call me later.

just kidding, i don't give him the link, but it would make things easier.

it's funny that by having people read this, they are somehow catching up on my life.

i realized the importance of blogs because of my friend mai and her blog at comrade chicken. in reading her blog, i felt closer to her, more aware of her daily life, however constructed and edited a blog is. but it's better than nothing.

the surgery photo below is awesome. i don't know why, but i'm saving it. it's just so fucking bizarre to me that a dentist would sew up someone's gums through the gum and out the other side. bizarre isn't the right word: repulsive.

i pulled one of the stitches out yesterday. i was trying to brush really lightly and it came loose, so i put my finger on it and pulled it out, fascinated and horrified as i watched the thread exit the wound and begin to bleed. CODIENE!

speaking of, i went shopping today for metamucil. didn't buy it. do you know they charge $15 for you to crap regular? nope, i'll do it the old fashioned way: i'll do nothing.

okay, i'm sure the old fashioned way was probably to shove a stick dipped in boiling water up your ass. i love that they might have sterilized the stick so that they could cover it in the vilest excretions our bodies create. there's a reason we're repulsed by it - EVOLUTION. those who were interested in and played with the proverbial brown died, and those who thought it was nasty didn't. having too much fun imagining things that didn't ever happen.

although i have a theory that anything that you can ever imagine has happened to someone at some point in history. ie. -

a guy jumps off a building to kill himself but lands in a garbage truck and lives. unfortunately, an hiv infected needle pricks him, and he dies a slow terrible death over the next ten years.

a woman cuts off her husbands penis and he becomes a famous porn star after its reattached.

oh wait...

stranger than fiction indeed.

my fiance is about to go to sleep and so i must leave my ranting mid stream! lucky you :)

MY DENTIST HAD ME IN STITCHES

((((the black lines there are stitches that go right through to the other side of my gums. this picture does the carnage no justice))))


i've been having a tooth saga. it goes way back. i'm going to go way back for you.

dental plans. stacey got one while at rogers. it took me a while, but i went to the dentist for the first time in 5 years. The last time i had gone it was because my mom's coverage was about to expire on me when i turned 25.

i had sent out a mass email to my toronto people asking them for dentist recommendations. seems that not a lot of them go to the dentist, as there was only one referral (louis - shout out!) that i didn't follow up on. jesse had suggested "that place in kensington market", but he'd never been. i called and booked and went and took xrays and was told that if i didn't get to work on one of the teeth it would turn into a root canal.

HAH! i thought as i left. root canal? my teeth are in great shape. he's looking for money. i put it off. and off

and off

and developed the need for a root canal. not painful at all, just expensive to cap the tooth. insurance covered thousands and thousands of dollars for all the work i had done. thank you ted rogers.

since then, i have had every cavity save 2 redone to replace the mercury fillings with the white stuff. LEGENDARY. very happy.

let me also say that i love my dentist. he's very cool about pain: "if it hurts, tell me, and i'll be happy to freeze you. it costs me next to nothing, and makes you happy, that makes me happy". and yes, that makes me happy. i get 4 needles every time i go. shit, i walk past the place on my way to buy fruit in the market and i stop just to numb my face. that's how much i love this guy.

so i've been there A LOT. we're like friends. the dentist has a basketball court out back, and one time we went and played for a while before he removed we got down to work on the teeth. i did a great left handed spin/fake move on him and ever since he thinks i'm an amazing baller. he keeps inviting me to play on saturdays with him and his "he played for team canada" friends. my dentist is a basketball loving black man.

i want to play but am nervous i wont' live up to the hype, because he keeps calling me a 'gym rat' and a 'gamer' and stuff, and saying "i was just like you man, when i was your age". then again, i've been a bit of a legend lately at the gym, so i'm thinking of going to settle the matter.


back to the tissue. i was having a lot of problems with this one tooth, and he did a test and determined that it may have been cracked. he opened the tooth and saw an exposed nerve, so he did a root canal. that didn't fix it either, because he thought it was still cracked and a cracked tooth needs to be removed.

so i didn't go back for 6 months.

not because i was a coward, but because stacey didn't have a health plan, and my actra fraternal plan has already been maxed out.

so stacey now has a plan from house and home, and i'm back in the dentist chair. i go in on thursday, and we talk, and he tries to save the tooth again (instead of extracting it and putting in either a bridge at $2200, or a drilled in implant at $2800). he drills to the tips of every root of the tooth, then fills it, then takes an x-ray - looks like a crack. i make an appt for the next day to extract it. so -

on friday he slices open my gums, does a bunch of stuff, and determines that it's not a crack, but a perforation at one of the 4 points of the root - that's why it was looking like a crack. so he says he's going to save it. he also did some work beneath the root of the tooth beside it.

so with the gums opened, he realized that all he HAD TO DO WAS GRIND ONE OF THE FOUR PILLARS DOWN. understand that this is above the gumline.

so that was done, my tooth refilled, and i was on my way. oh, yeah. we've got to close up that lush bleeding pile of wounded flesh.

to close up the gums, he had to go THROUGH the gums to the other side. i have 3 sets of stitches that go THROUGH MY GUMS!!! take a look at the picture again, and consider how hard it was to push the string through.

EXCUSE ME WHILE I VOMIT ON MYSELF.

my face has now swollen up immensely. i have to take tylenol 3, antibiotics, and a mouthwash, and i bleed constantly, especially when i laugh. fortunately, stacey's not that funny :)

unfortunately, that's not true, and i have to hold my face, literally, when i laugh. but pain doesn't feel like pain when you're laughing. maybe the USA should tickle people while they electrocute them. just a thought.

but the tooth is saved. hopefully. i wouldn't go through this again.

yesterday i had to be in stratford at 8 in the morning, which meant i was up at 6. problem was, i went to bed at 1:30, stacey woke me up when she got in at 2 to have a recap of her night, and then i was worried about the alarm, so i kept waking up every 45 mins to check the time, eventually just getting up at 5:30 and starting the day. I WAS EXHAUSTED. the drive, the drugs, the teeth, the sleep.

on the highway i was having hallucinations. was strange. could have been the pizza. but the effect was as though the entire world i was looking at was in two dimensions. it would all go flat. sometimes it would blend together a little bit, like the clouds would blend into a car, or a car would blend into a transport truck.


when i got home i popped half a tab of T3 and half a glass of wine and fell asleep - and missed hinto's play. i woke up at 9:30. the play started at 8. my sincerest regrets my dear friend. i was a disaster yesterday. i know you would do come to my performance/award ceremony/funeral and not miss it for anything. you're a wonderfully supportive friend. i'm thinking of something to make it up to you.


on friday when i went to the dentist, i bought him a bottle of my new favorite wine and thanked him for trying to save my tooth. he was so appreciative. which is nice, because he spent 2 hours on me the day before and didn't charge me anything. and then after yesterday, he's not going to charge me anything that i can't get covered for, and then, he's not going to charge me until they pay me. he's nice like that. we'll see if he's nice like that after saturday when i kick his ass.

bought a new tie and shirt today for me new job. handsome devil, me!

rented madagascar, the 'kids' movie. i love 'kids' movies more than 'normal' ones.

my pvr is still king - BUT I FORGOT TO RECORD THE FIRST RAPTORS WIN OF THE YEAR TODAY!

long post. i'm going to get rid of the google ads. i thought there'd be a chance, naively, of generating even 5 bucks a month, but that's not going to happen. i'm sure most people don't even see the ads, and i don't want to run a big ad down the side of the blog.

2 more weeks of freedom.

it's not the NYT, but it's a start

SONGS IN OLD SUITS

-- Site Summary ---

Visits:

This Week ........................... 69

Average per Day .................. 9

Average Visit Length .......... 2:57

thanks for making it all worth while, readers. i'd like to thank my mom, for making this possible, and my mom's mom, for ditto, and god, ditto the ditto.

anyway, i got the job. just found out. money. good.

i bought a TV tuner to watch basketball on my computer and let me say that it is the GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD. stacey was watching some show she likes last night, and i was watching STEVE NASH THROW DIMES! it was heavenly.

I GOT THE JOB.

wow.

been a long time.

i'd like to thank hinto, for checking in, and steve, for being a loyal and sympathetic reader (who just a few days ago told me he was going to offer me a job), and my cuz J-Rod (my real cousin, not no street slang), and my moms, and anyone else out there in the real world working a real job. wait up, i'm coming too.

updating is pointless, no?

i'm not sure if it's better to update continuously, or to actually put some thought into the post but post less often. feedback would be great.

i was surfing the interweb yesterday and came across an add for my yahoo personals column (wise guys). HILARIOUS! and that stupid photograph that is supposed to represent me (the used car salesman one) is a part of it. damn, that's dorky. at least my name is patrick decker (am i supposed to let that out of the bag? **looks around to make sure i'm not attacked for giving terrible advice**) and no one has any idea. funny to see, though. wonder what the exposure is like.

my mom's computer got fried the other day, possibly by the electrical storm. she took it in to a computer place and he told her it would cost $400 to fix... ummm... dell has brand new systems, with a monitor, for $449. annoying. anyway, she wanted me to call and just talk about the specifics, so i did, and it's a guy i went to highschool with! hilarious! he was the biggest nerd of all time, and i don't say that lightly. he was a nice guy, but classic nerd. dandruff, weird old blue sweaters, bad glasses, massive acne, and LOVED computers. he was in the A/V club. when i was in grade 4 or 5, we hung around a bit. i would go to his house and play on his commodore 64. in highschool, i'd say hi to him and stuff, i wasn't a jerk, and didn't make fun of people, so when i called him and said "is this bob, who went to central?" and he said "yeah". i said, do you remember me, it's fergus? and he went... "fergus... hmmm... i'm not sure". LIKE HE WAS FLIPPING THROUGH ALL THE FERGUS'S HE KNEW! it was HILARIOUS! dude, it's okay, we're grown men. i knew you. it's cool. you're fixing computers at Frankie's in Stratford, that's great. why are you pretending not to know me!?

so i said, yeah, it's you, we hung out in grade 5, playing commodore 64 at your place. He said "yeah, and look where i am now". that was sad. i wanted to tell him i was a big unemployed loser too, so we could commiserate, but i thought i'd let it slide. people are strange. but lovable.

hinto keeps calling me while i'm out, and i want to tell him that i have a cell phone, but he knows that, so i'll write this.

took in two teacher's apps today, and got lost at both york and U of T. york is a fucking disaster, architecturally. it looks like it was thrown together by kids with giant blocks of bland shitty toys from different depression eras.

two down, one to go.

no word on the job.

updates

there are no updates.

my mom had a great time in toronto, as did I. Late night at the pub, then home, then tired, delirious laughter, the kind that you get when you're really really really tired, and won't stop, and you giggle and giggle and giggle.

i don't know about the job yet (thanks for the concerned call, hinto, although i'm sure you wanted to gloat about KG or at least trading away that awful hines ward guy :) , but i'm already buying things in my head. new basketball shoes, and new shoes. i'm not greedy. oh, and a suit, from the store www.extoggery.com (i think it's .com, but it could be www.extoggery.ca) . they have nice used suits for $140 - $80.

i'm waiting on telefilm funding (what film person isn't?).

i'm tired, for some reason. oh yeah! today was the end of week 6 on the patch, and i had to go down a dosage, so i'm getting less nicotine. fine so far.

watching 'charlie and the cholocate factory'. 6 out of 10.

have completed all of my teacher's college applications. damn, that took FOREVER. will hand deliver two of them, and possibly the third (to UWO).

received my degree in the mail today (the paper part), and saw that they included 'dean's honour list'. i will always have that to show my kids/your kids/friends/enemies/etc when they wonder why stacey has her Master's and i only have a BA: "she had to keep going to school until she got A's", whilst i got off easy.

bad humour, but that is the point of blogs.

constance

I had a monster night playing ball last night. i was unstoppable. the only drawback was that i was dropping my shots on fellow friend/baller/fantasy pooler/late night phone caller louis. such mixed blessings. when i hit the last game winner, a fake left, spin right hook shot in the lane, he said, "you can celebrate more, it was a good shot". i didn't want to rub it in.

my dear friend joel wanted to make a documentary about my father. at first i thought it would be fine because joel is a gentle and wise soul, and i have known him since i was in grade 4, which is the longest i've known anyone. then i balked. i realized i wouldn't be comfortable with someone playing with my father and my family's legacy like that. When money is involved, things get strange. if he was doing it for free, i think i'd be okay with it. but to do it to make a buck feels exploitative and so i shut it down. sadly.

i feel bad for joel, he was so excited to do it and he was going to frame it around my family tracking down the 8 half brothers and sisters we've never met. yes, for my mother, i was a first born. for my father, i'm number 11. perdita (translation: lost child) is my mother and father's 'LAST child'.

yes, my parents hung with atwood and lawrence (the margarets), yes, dad punched farley mowat, yes, they were a part of the canadian literati scene. It can seem so bloody interesting when looking into the past at all of these incredible public figures that were just drunk on the couch, but i'm not interested in seeing that story. i see it all the time. in my head. (no, i'm not crazy... heh.. right?)

sometimes we drop things on our friends that make us feel good, but has the opposite affect on them. in basketball, that's the nature of competition - i try hard to stop you, you try to stop me, we elevate our game and have fun doing it, and when it's all over, we go out for a bite to eat (i had the P4 at noodle bowl, by the way, and it's DELICIOUS).

in the world of business, the nature of competition is such that it can obliterate friendships, and i value friendships more than business so in the case of joel, whose friendship i am honoured to cultivate, i opted to nip the business aspect in the bud before it could blossom.

in an email i wrote, i said: in rereading this email, i remember that you're such a wonderful and gentle soul. i hope i have not offended, you are so kind, generous, patient - all of the qualities i value in our species. you are a prince among men, and i am honoured to call you a friend.

enough on that.

today, my mom is in town and sleeping over. her and her friend dorothy are in the big city to go shopping to help her friend get over some recent unfortunate events. that's so cute. right now, as i type, they're probably laughing really loud about the fact that mom is about to vomit on the subway.

life is a beautiful circus peppered with laughter. my memories are generally a faded grey, and all i remember is laughter breaking the haze like fireworks, popping, cracking, booming over the universe that is my life.

DAILY BLOGGING

http://www.tonypierce.com/blog/2004/06/how-to-blog-by-tony-pierce-110-1.htm

reading this list made me realize that i SHOULD be blogging every day. so i will. sorry that this isn't much, but if you blog, that link is a quasi-cheesy rant with some cool links (like the hit counter that is free that you can put in your blog).

i believe i got the job that starts at 7 am and ends at 5:30... YAY?

of course she liked me. i give a great interview.

here's hoping.

basketball season has started. AWESOME.

i'm trying to get a TV tuner for my computer so i can watch and record games in here. anyone who has info about how to do it on the cheap for a laptop, drop a line.

ferguscookathotmaildotcom

money

you need it.

because you need it, you want it.

sometimes you want it even when you don't need it.

i went for a job interview yesterday. it was at a big banking institution that is involved primarily with investing. i told the nice conservative lady how i loved that the stock markets could be viewed as having the entire global economy on dialysis, monitoring the world view tick past.

this is blatantly not true.

she asked me if, as an artist, how i felt about the capitalist system. i said it's not perfect, but it seems to do the most good for the most people. she said, then how do you feel about our governments support for the arts. i felt like i was being innoculated against liberalism. so i trashed the very system that had given me my income ever since leaving school. first wave, after all, was also privy to tax breaks and bonuses from the government. then on to telefilm, all the films i worked on which were american companies shooting here for the government benefits, and even mustard pancakes (no comment).

it was as though i had to destroy the hand that fed me, in order to be given food by this new, 'proper' and 'capitalist' hand. it was spooky. i can't express this enough. why were we having this conversation about my incongruency between believing in a capitalist system and then also believing in cultural protectionism? there was a subtext and it was: this is the real world. dog eat dog. i'll fucking kill you for your salary so sit up straight, pray to jesus, support the death penalty and lower taxes for the rich, and believe in the power of money or i'll throw you back to the hippies you artistic leper. you've been living off of daddy's handouts long enough.

i felt sick to my stomach with this slap in the face to my past, so i added an addendum - i said that the film world handouts don't work because there are too many pigs at the trough, abusing the system. the money isn't allocated properly. of course i believe this - all struggling artists who miss out on the pot of gold accuse those who do get it of abuse. doesn't make it true, but it feels good to say, sometimes.

i also said that the government help incubate start ups, that many countries do this, especially when faced with extraordinary pressure from outside the country (ie. USA). cultural protectionism is a strange concept because it is as though the government is suggesting that artists define the national identity. i know it's more complicated than that, but if i may use blanket statements, and i will, than that's it in a nutshell. the government is paying for the abstract.

even my initial chosen field of academia, economics, is abstract. nothing exists but in our heads. i wanted to explain to ms. capitalist interviewer that the economics of protectionism make the money the government dolls out come back in double.

so the job i went out for, i got the interview through replying to an add on craigslist. it turns out, a headhunting agency was posting it. so i'm going through a headhunting agency, which means that if i get the job, a part of my wage goes to the agency, because the agency is the one paying me. fine. it pays $19 an hour, which is fine. i'm just doing this until next september anyway, when i go to teachers college.

i was told that the job was to start at 8 am, and go until 5. that's fine, i can live with that.

at the interview i find out that the job starts at 7 am, and goes until 5:30, and that many times i might be there until midnight. oh, and if you think that's okay for you, mr. hippy, remember that just because you were there until midnight doesn't mean you can come in a little later the next day - 7 am, sharp (and i'm sure if i slept there they'd be okay with that too).

okay, i said, that's fine, i've done worse. it's hourly, right, so there's an incentive there, and i can be financially motivated to work those hours, sure. if i'm working 15 hours a day, i'll snag almost $300, and that, i can live with. well, not exactly, it is hourly now, but we're trying to change that... and go with a flat rate.

wellllll of course you are. anything else would mean that you'd be a socialist hippy, by actually paying them for the hours they worked. no, it makes more sense to pay them a flat fee, of course, haha, hahaha, let's have tea! splendid.

and that was my interview with the capitalists. splendid.

the tragic-comedy begins now, because i'm fairly confident i'll get the job.

the job is: proofreading the insane amount of reviews of various stocks written by senior analysts. pages upon pages about X company. these men (and they are all men) know more about XX mining company than their own families. i'm serious. they can tell you a companys birthday, they can guess what the company is going to do, it's entire wonderful and fascinating history... it's woefully depressing.

my job would be to make sure the sentences and numbers are correct. and there are crazy deadlines. the 7 am start is to ensure that when all the investors and people who work at the company arrive, there is a slew of reports for them at 8:15.

and if i get the job, i'm going to have to take it. it pays too well. am i a victim? am i a cog? well, i get paid well enough to get moving on to teacher's college, so despite me crying victim about waking up at 6 am and working 12 hours, i'm using them as much as they're using me (?). probably not. obviously they make more than they pay me, but if i'm willing to work for them, then it's a fair barter.

if a company hires a recent university graduate, they get a percentage of that persons wage back in taxes. i wonder if they knew i was a recent grad, if they'd use it. i wonder if ms. capitalist would.

socialism is a poor man's capitalism.

capitalism is an abstract concept that makes monsters. and makes me get up at 6 in the morning. well, if i'm lucky.