A Perfect World

Someone told me the other day that this is not a perfect world. Gee, I already knew that! In fact, I’ve known it for a long time, at least a year or so. In the five decades prior to that I merely suspected it. What tipped me off? Well, it wasn’t any one big event, just the culmination of a lot of little events. That couch I paid $29.95 for on eBay never showed up. The birds at my feeder kicked out the bird seed and pooped on my deck chairs. The dog packed up my suitcase and took it with him when he moved in with the neighbours. Other hints: my iPod showed up in the dryer after boldly venturing into the washing machine. It was the first time I ever witnessed music committing suicide. Last Christmas I came down with a bad cold, just like the previous eleven out of the twelve Christmases. The only year I was spared the cold I had Norwalk virus instead. What a mercy it was to return to the simple rigors of a fever and a runny nose the following year.

I’ve also begun to notice that globally the world is a little less than perfect as craziness crests ever higher. When there are devastating wildfires in California or Australia, some people run for their matchboxes so they can get in on the act. The rest of us are left banging our heads on the Wall of Disbelief. While most people either strive to make the world a better place, or at least are feckless enough to avoid setting off the general ruination of the planet, there are a few who are so inexplicably malicious that we are left stunned with the jaw-dropping stupidity of their actions.

Why can’t we ever have perfection? To figure that one out, we would have to understand just what perfection is. Apparently, Aristotle was the first one who flopped down in his lawn chair and allowed this concept to wash up on the shores of his brain. When it was all over and the three barrels of wine had been rolled back into the cellar for refilling, he had decreed three rules. Perfection has to be complete – no parts can be missing. It has to be so good that nothing similar can be any better. Also, it needs to have some sort of goal in mind, and it needs to achieve that goal, like a hockey player with a vendetta lucky enough to have a crossed-eyed goalie on the opposing team. There can be no margin for missing that goal. Pretty heady stuff – can you imagine what Aristotle might have come up with if he had stopped after just one barrel of wine? Or if he’d sustained a puck to the head?

I tried to think of things that might fit with Aristotle’s three point plan for perfection. Shopping came pretty close, but fell down on the goal part. Often I buy the no-name brand when I can’t find the premium brand, or when the premium brand has a price so high that I require treatment for altitude sickness. Likewise, driving a car almost fit the bill, but when I applied the “nothing could be better” part I had to admit that my car was a Ferrari only in my mind. Regrettably, swimming in a lake on a hot summer day also fell by the wayside. While, for the most part, it satisfies all of Aristotle’s carefully constructed principles, I remembered that time I emerged from a swim with a blood-sucker the size of Lassie stuck to my leg. I’ve never felt the same about swimming since.

Then I thought about ice cream. Could it possess the potential for perfection? I began to apply Aristotle’s line of thought to find an answer. If you stick the ice cream in a cone, it is complete – no parts are missing. Can ice cream be said to be “so good that nothing of the kind could be better”? If you throw half a paycheck into this endeavor, that will most definitely be true. No point in getting the cheap stuff when you are seeking paradise. Does ice cream achieve its goal? This is a toughie, and you can see why Aristotle needed all those barrels of wine and a cozy lawn chair as assistive devices. It’s not something you can just decide in a moment or two. It must be tested. Ben and Jerry’s, Hagen-Dazs, homemade ice cream – all these depths must be repeatedly plumbed. Lumps of cookie dough must be deployed. Cherries must be Garcia-ed. Vanilla beans must be paraded down your palate, front and centre. Chocolate must be placed on the altar of your tongue and given its due diligence. It takes a lot of years and a lot of effort to make these important decisions about perfection. I’ve worn out more than one lawn chair in this exploration, possibly making me a larger authority than Aristotle in more ways than one. And when it was all said and done, when the multitudinous tubs of ice cream were swept away, and when the sugar fix wore off, and the bathroom scales loomed up into my consciousness, I would have to say that, unequivocally, ice cream fits all the criteria for perfection.

So while I admit that this isn’t a perfect world, there are those rare moments when it comes close enough not to matter. And in those moments, your fist is wrapped around a sticky cone, your forearm is awash with a river of ice cream, and bathroom weigh scales were never invented. That, my friend, is what you will find when you reach your Shangri-La or your Heaven – a big frosty ice cream cone. And it will have not one but two giant scoops waiting. Just for you.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest…

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" How many times have you dueled with that tired scrap of philosophy? I never really get as far as thinking about whether or not there was a “sound.” I tend to get caught up in the part about the tree falling in the forest. Now, I can’t be certain, but I am pretty sure that, like all other things that don’t quite turn out the way we wanted, it’s my fault. The point isn’t whether or not the event was noisy, it’s my role in it that counts. Somehow, a tree has fallen. No doubt, it happened because I forgot to wash, feed, clean, or mail in something. Somewhere a sapling is without its mother and I am to blame. A bird’s nest is crushed on the forest floor in a yolky mess, a squirrel is missing his nuts, and a whole lot of bark beetles are wandering around trying to decide what to do next. And I know that it can all be traced back to me.

How do I know this? Well, why would the tree be an exception? I am responsible for all the other things that have gone wrong in the world, so surely my influence encompasses unsuspecting trees. It’s a guilt complex served up with global tendencies.

The magnitude of my complex has crept over into megalomania. The war in the Middle East? I’m pretty sure it’s my fault. After all, haven’t I been sucking down all kinds of gasoline in my Honda Civic, driving as much as four miles a day, and mowing the lawn without regard to fuel consumption? And what about the current economic mess that is sucking the life out of our entire planet? Yep, probably did that one too. I’m not sure of the mechanism, but somehow I must have played a tiny unwitting role that set this calamity in motion. Probably it was that account I closed at the bank with the $23.95 in it. One day someone will identify it as the fiscal tipping point that started the ball rolling.

So, how I have come to place myself at the centre of these crucial events? I’m really not clear on the “how” of these situations, but my guilt meter relentlessly claws at me. A dog gets hit by a car in Africa. Yep. Also my fault. If I’d sent that twenty dollars to the Save the Canines Fund, the dog would have been happily sleeping in a dog house. It would have had food and water, three rubber toys, and a photo of me hanging on the wall. It would not have been wandering willy-nilly in the streets scouring for food. My fault, all my fault.

I admit that I might have let my sense of responsibility get out of control, but it all started with little things. Someone spilled a Coke on the rug. I failed to clean it properly and now the permanent bear-shaped stain is my fault. I have to live with that terrible knowledge. The toothpaste ran out. I was the last person in the house to set foot in a store. I completely let my family down by failing to buy toothpaste. It doesn’t matter that the store was Blockbuster Video. Just wad that up and add it to the bin labeled All My Fault. A bridge collapsed and three people were injured. Oh oh – I was a little tiny bit late with the municipal taxes in 2003. I should have thought about how that transgression could lead to a disaster. In another city. In another province. Mea culpa.

So, for whatever reason, I have begun churning down the Hill of Guilt, deeply embedded in a giant dirty snowball. Its diameter is ballooning with the stretch-marks of remorse, and I’m picking up a lot of debris and momentum as I cascade ever downward. And I almost hesitate to report this: that tree in the forest is firmly in my sights. And when I hit it, no one is going to care if it made a sound or not. But the unleashed blast of guilt is going to pepper the entire planet.

Not Much Stock in Bond

I dragged myself out on a totally frigid, snowy night to see the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. I haven’t missed seeing a Bond film since Live and Let Die had me wallowing in laughter and popcorn back in the 1970’s.

I always make a point to recognize the “specialness” of the Bond films by seeing them on the big screen at the theatre. At ten dollars a head, I reserve this honor for relatively few movies, mostly because the deteriorating conditions of our local theatre are now easily eclipsed by the average TV set in the average home. But some things still need to be seen on the biggest screen you can find. As I watched the movie, here is the question that chiseled its way into my brain: where, oh where, was James Bond?

James seems to have traded in his personality for the Unlimited Edition of his License to Kill. Perhaps too many flying fists and knives and guns have sliced off his charm. Clearly, this was an action film that has fallen into the froth of maximum overdrive. It made Mad Max look like a sissy. Every single character got smacked or shot or knifed, usually with a sprinkling of each. This tended to occur in multiple ways and in multiple exotic locations. Some of them survived it, but most were left like turfed litter on the floor of a hamster cage. During the course of the film, Bond’s License to Kill actually had to be reloaded more often than his gun.

Of even more concern - Bond was so engaged in fisticuffs and dodging broken glass that his sense of humor was completely lacking. He even failed to concoct any of his usual double entendres. The James Bond who quipped "I am now aiming precisely at your groin. So speak now or forever hold your piece" in The Man with a Golden Gun was a no-show. I guess it could happen to anyone. I know that personally, the more people I beat to a pulp on the average day, the less funny I am. It bothers me to the point that I’ve cut back to decking less than a dozen people a day. It’s helped me regain the balance I need in my life. I also try to duck a lot – too much head pounding can put me in a mental fog. I become like a man with a hammer: every problem starts to look like a nail. Maybe that’s what has happened to Bond - one blow too many to the head. It’s rendered him desperately serious. He’s left his personality behind in the hotel safety deposit box, where it’s languishing in his wrinkle-free Armani tux and charming the panties off the safety deposit box next door.

James is now so jaded and shopworn by endless adventures in the spy world that he has almost nothing left for the ladies. Or did his supply of Viagra fail to arrive from that dodgy internet source? Instead of wooing the ladies, oh wait, make that lady since there was only one this time, he merely nodded his head, in a you-know-the-drill kind of gesture. No champagne, no titillating gambling, no white dinner jacket. I don’t know if she even bothered to murmur the customary “Oh James!” Even Moneypenny got better treatment than that! The only woman lucky enough to receive the Bond Treatment in this film had the boringly chaste name of Strawberry Fields, clearly a downgrade from the daring Pussy Galore of yesteryear.

And where was the indomitable Q or facsimile? While actor Desmond Llewelyn was impossible to replace, leaving a pandering John Cleese as a mere husk of a Q in the last few films, they both still made us laugh. Now in order to jam in more brawling, they’ve left out the whole spy toy reveal scene. I suppose MI6 now gets their kinky guns and laser beam watches over the internet like the rest of us, cutting out the middle man, and avoiding those huge liability insurance bills for their test lab. We didn’t need those laughs anyway, and it allowed them to punch in yet another action scene that was so tightly shot, I couldn’t really tell what was going on. Mostly, it was just more bashing, gun grabbing, and environmental ruination. To up the ante, the action took place on slippery roof tops and frail scaffolds. Lots of glass broke, but not in the elegant and regretful way it did in the antique glass museum in Moonraker. It didn’t make me want to charge in with my broom and my dustpan and my glass blowing repair kit.

Even the villain was kind of watered down, although not nearly as much as he would have liked by the end of the movie. He wasn’t so much evil as annoyingly snotty. His plan wasn’t the usual lofty goal of world domination or destruction, it was, well, stealing the water from a small poor country and selling it back to their corrupt goverment at a high price. Gee. Doesn’t this happen in the real world just about every other day? Water, oil, pantyhose manufacturing – isn’t it constantly wrestled for in the global marketplace where people use stocks as their weapon of choice instead of loaded guns?

So, I guess like so many other franchises that have lasted for decades, Bond has gotten tired of it all – the dead lovers to be avenged, the brain-teasing intricate spy plots, the megalomaniac bad guys, the humiliation of reporting to a woman, the lack of stimulating new spy toys sporting miniature saws and blow torches that come in handy in those everyday hopeless situations involving ropes and sharks. He’s had enough. Every molecule of suave sophistication has been sucked out of him. Like the rest of us grinding away in routine jobs, James Bond has become burned out. Perhaps it’s time for him to fill out the papers for his MI6 Spy Division Pension and kick back at the casino with his own cash. It’s time for him to settle down with one (or two, or three) women and sort out his collection of cravats. Maybe then his charm will resurface with a few of those one-liners to keep the hotel maitre-d’ chuckling.

As for me, I too am retiring. I probably won’t go to see any more Bond films until they can give me a character once again, not a robot attached to a pair of murderous fists. When Bond needs a personality transplant from The Terminator, it’s time for me to throw in my Official Glow in the Dark MI6 Spy Watch. The Bond franchise has melded with all the other soulless action films and forfeited its uniqueness. If they left all the brutality on the cutting room floor, you would miss the entire movie while carting your over-priced tub of popcorn back from the snack bar. So, the next time there is a Bond offering, stay out of the cold winter night and out of the theatre. That way, you won’t feel the need to punish yourself for wasting your time and money by sticking your tongue on an icy fire hydrant on the way back to your car! Keeping your ten dollars in your pocket may fail to provide you with a whole quantum of solace, but it should at least give you a cup full.

Half Empty? You Bet!

The other day someone indicated that I was a “glass is half empty” kind of person - as if it was a BAD thing! Of course my glass is half empty! After decades of consumerism and self indulgence, I’m surprised to find that the level is only half way down!

A glass that is half full is suspicious. Maybe it was never filled all the way to the top. But a half empty glass? That most certainly started out full at one time. Between the full state and the half empty state, someone got to slurp down the delicious contents. When the glass gets to be half empty, it’s because the contents were good. So, despite misconceptions to the contrary, a half empty glass indicates a life well lived. A half full glass? That’s likely as good as it ever got!

I must admit that half of anything always sends up a red flag. Recently they began marketing half Christmas trees. These are neatly bisected from top to bottom, so you can mount them on the wall, in the Christmas version of the wallflower. That way the tree doesn’t intrude by taking up too much space. This smacks of rampant practicality. Christmas tree are supposed to be large and showy and in the way. They are supposed to drop needles in your coffee cup as you walk by and tempt even the most docile cat into an ornament-busting climbing expedition. And there should be plenty of room underneath for a small child to get lost in the wonder of the packages.

Before Christmas trees became mere facsimiles, they were actually organic and came out of the forest. You would go out swaggering like Paul Bunyan, scout around, and chop one down. Ultimately, every Christmas tree was pretty much just half a tree. Of course, the tree looked great – until you chopped it down. Then it looked… not so great. By the time a tree was hauled over hill and dale and arrived in the living room, you felt blessed to have a quarter of a tree left! There was always a less than perfect side, one with only a few thoughtlessly placed anemic branches. It wasn’t exactly a perfect half of a tree like the current renderings in plastic, but it definitely wasn’t a full tree either. A little bit of Martha Stewart style carpentry with a saw and a drill would be needed to correct the problem. It required only a little skill, plus a tolerance for sap on your floor, your pants, and your cat.

Now life is so much more complicated that it’s turned the corner back into simplicity. You can just buy a mere half of a tree. If you change your mind in the future, you can go back to the store and buy the other half and strap them together. Voila – you now have a whole tree. You have just bought a Christmas tree on the installment plant er, uh, plan.

The advantage of half a tree is that it requires only half the lights and half the decorations. The downside is that it yields only half the presents, all of which must conform to the theme of one half. For example, you may receive one sock out of a pair, a container of Half and Half, or half a loaf of bread (better than no loaf). If will only take you half the time to unwrap your gifts, and blissfully, you will have paid only half as much as you would have with a whole tree looming over your wallet. But, worryingly, half way through Christmas Day the lights will go out, since you never should have cut those strings in half. Hopefully you bought a bunch of them – at least six of one, half a dozen of another. But things will work out okay. I suspect that in the long run, it actually won’t even be half bad.

Marshmallow Men: The Memoir

Have you noticed that Christmas traditions come and go just like everything else? Even something as venerable as Christmas has trends. Our family once enjoyed a decade-long love affair with Marshmallow Men, the spawn of Kraft Mystery Theatre. This was one of our favorite TV programs back when we had a single TV channel. The low-tech advertising on this show was just as engaging as the episodes were. At times it was even better. Kraft furnished all of the advertising during that hour. Each commercial break was leisurely and homey, unlike today’s ads that slingshot you from product to product like a dizzy marble in a flaming pinball machine.

Kraft commercial breaks featured an attractive beehived and aproned homemaker. Without stooping to the soul destroying style of Martha Stewart, this motherly figure demonstrated recipes made with Kraft products. They always included our favorites - Cheez Whiz, or Miracle Whip, or Jell-O, or, best of all, Velveeta Cheese. After all, what would be the point of Kraft lovingly producing all those family fortifying food products if families didn’t know what to do with them? At least once during every episode of Kraft Mystery Theatre my mother would leap out of her chair claiming “Oooooohh!” and run for a notepad and a pencil. That is how we were introduced to the Marshmallow Men.

That particular Kraft commercial detailed how to build your own army of white puffy pseudo snowmen. Two large marshmallows were used for the head and body, and four miniature marshmallows were drafted into play for arms and legs. The whole Man was assembled with toothpicks carefully broken in half so as to not stick out and reveal the secret of their assembly. Additional toothpicks were dipped into food coloring and used to paint on the eyes, noses and grinning mouths. I had a particular fondness for using yellow food coloring to draw in blond curls, revealing my secret desire to be blond and curly. We never made any Marshmallow Women – the recipe simply hadn’t given any instructions for that! The Men remained alone in their sugary celibacy.

Then there was the question of just what to do with the Marshmallow Men. You certainly couldn’t eat them – they were too handsome, and there were those sharp toothpicks to consider. The only option left was to display them. Sometimes the Men took up residence in the Christmas tree, and at other times they graced the coveted top of the TV set, deposing the ceramic Santa. Once, in a bizarre but somehow satisfying exhibit, they were featured in a Nativity scene. After a few days, they were mostly forgotten as they silently morphed into dusty white cement.

TV commercials aren’t nearly as benevolent these days. They don’t generate Christmas traditions. They only want us to buy stuff - mostly stuff we can’t afford, or don’t truly want, or stuff that we will tire of before we get the wrappings out to the trash. There are no elegant instructions on how to craft Marshmallow Men or make a casserole laced with Velveeta Cheese. For that, you would probably have to turn to the internet. And there you would probably just get distracted by instructions on how to build weapons of mass consumption. I don’t recommend it.

Sign Here, Please

I can’t believe it. Ringo no longer signing autographs? After October 20, 2008, Ringo Starr will no longer sign autographs. His stated reason: he simply can’t keep up with all the demand. But… I can’t help but wonder… could it possibly be just the opposite? Maybe as the bags of fan mail have dwindled to a trickle, and girls both teen and middle-aged have finally moved on to other idols, maybe this is just sour grapes. Is there anyone left on the planet without a Ringo Starr autograph? It seems like I can’t open a sock drawer or fish through an old coat pocket without a Ringo autograph surfacing. I’ve used them to write grocery lists on, to start camp fires with, and to line the bird cage with, and still they keep showing up.

I suspect that the truth may no longer be skulking under heaving bags of fan mail. A day-in-the-life of the great man probably goes something like this. Ringo wakes up in his country mansion, and dons his Gucci smoking jacket. He slips past all the dusty Beatles memorabilia frowning out from the walls, passes through his TV room where someone has left A Hard Day’s Night playing in an endless loop on the DVD player. He picks up a pack of smokes from the hallway table so that his wife will think he’s just nipping out for a puff. All the dogs are still sleeping, so he goes down to the mail box at the end of his private laneway, alone. Even though he had the groundskeeper oil the hinges yesterday, they still squeak a little as he slowly pulls the door open, the door with his own face painted on it.

The mail box is empty. He sucks in his breath and quickly looks around to see if anyone has noticed. It’s only six a.m., but you never know if Eric Clapton might be looking out the window of his study. This time of the morning he’s nearly always sitting there, downing his third cup of Earl Grey, and grimly working his way through the mountain of fan mail. It just wouldn’t do for him to notice that this is the third day in a row that Ringo’s mail box has been empty. Clappie would never understand how it is with drummers, and how they tend to fade into obscurity more quickly than show-off guitarists. At least Ringo doesn’t need to worry about stares from the neighbors on the other side. Ozzy is back in California at this time of the year, and the trucks usually just dump his fan mail right into the empty swimming pool anyway.

It’s so much better to pull the plug yourself than to have your plug yanked by lack of interest. Ringo knows that the public wants what they can’t have more than what they can have. All those days of signing slobbered-on cocktail napkins, and plates, and toilet seats, and baby bottles, and questionable underpants are best forgotten. Better to be proactive, pick a date, and just stop autographing. That way, whenever Ringo gets short of cash, he can release a signature or two on eBay, since all his John Lennon memorabilia is pretty much gone now. And the best part? He won’t have to face the mailbox every day, and stupid Clapton and Ozzy will have nothing to sneer about!

Profile This!

About me. I’m not fooled by this demanding little phrase that lurks around on blogs and other websites. This is really just a profile – and “profile” is simply a euphemism for “autobiography.” Such a thoroughly abhorrent realm.

Why such a reluctance to chronicle my life? Like everything else, it has its little black roots back in the tedium of my childhood. There was always one thing you could count on during the first week of school each September. The teacher placed the Gun of Obedience to your head and compelled you to write “What I Did on My Summer Vacation”. Unless you had spent the summer trekking in the Himalayas, or had been lucky enough to have wrestled with a rabid bear and two cubs underneath your back porch, this assignment was fraught with peril. You could come up looking duller than dust and I routinely propelled myself right to the top of the dust heap.

My composition invariably read something like, “We went to our cottage. My Dad caught a fish.” After that I was pretty much stumped. Even then I could recognize this autobiographical gusher was a bit of a literary embarrassment. The real meat of the summer wasn’t suitable material for school compositions: my uncle had discovered that he could keep beer cold in the well and stayed drunk for fourteen days proving it; my mother had murdered a snake with an with an axe so dull that the snake committed suicide to ends its own suffering; a sibling drank too much Purple Jesus and passed it off as food poisoning; the boy next door kissed me; I began to suspect that boys were not nearly half so disgusting as I had thought… You can see how things could get totally out of control if you ever started indulging yourself biographically.

More than a few years have intervened since anyone has had enough power over me to make me crank out a weary memoir. I haven’t been inclined to explore the profile-driven social networking services like Facebook. But now, after years of autobiography-free bliss, I have succumbed to the lure of blogging. And with that comes the wanton cries of the “about me” section. Suddenly, I am propelled all the way back to my seat at school, chewing on a tasty sodden pencil, mired in a blank haze. And when I think about it, things haven’t really changed all that much. I still go to the cottage in the summer. My Dad is no longer there to catch a fish. Me? I’m quite happy to leave the fish right where they are. And, for the most part, this seems to make the fish happy too. And it still happens – I still get sweaty palms and a film of fur on my tongue every time I start trolling for that ever elusive fodder - something, anything, to put in the “about me” section!