Category: Stories
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A Dream I Had That I’m Now Writing Up as an Idea for a Movie, Because Why Not?
The pitch: It’s the Time Machine meets Passengers meets Meets Logan’s Run without a time machine or a spaceship or a society that kills anyone over 30. Intriguing, right? — In the not too distant future, a man and a woman with movie star good looks but average joe jobs live their lives in a…
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Not Quite a Shaggy Dog Story
Hello everyone, I have reason to believe there is going to be a spike in traffic to this blog in the next few days. I will have more to say about about that after it happens, no doubt. In the meantime, I have not done much with this blog in some time. Now I have…
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Chasing Atlantis: Something You Should All Know About
Hello again, everyone, I’m going to start with an apology: Once upon a time I resolved to write on this blog regularly, making a point to have at least one entry a month, come what may. That was a pretty easy thing to commit to when I had a couple hundred readers a day –many…
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Feeling My Age, Loving The Beatles
Last weekend I went to a family barbeque, and I wore a hat. That is not a rare occurence for me. As I mentioned in my essay on the male barbershop experience, I have a pretty thick head of hair –I’ve never had a barber who didn’t make a sheep-shearing joke at some point in…
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I felt the whole world tremble today. I’m adding it to my list of unlikely experiences.
Today I felt the whole world tremble. I never thought I would experience an earthquake. I know for many people it is something that is viewed as the cost of doing business, but I live in Toronto, which doesn’t see a lot of seismic activity. What little we do get –the ‘pop back’ from the…
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The worst phone call of my life (or, how I earned $50 for not caring if I got fired)
It’s time again for another one of my long and rambling annecdotes. Today’s story from my not-so-ill-spent youth: The worst phone call of my life (or, how I earned $50 for not caring if I got fired). When I was seventeen I came back from England and got a job working for a Sprint Canada…
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Meditations from the Barber’s Chair
A couple of days ago, I got a haircut. Haircuts are one of those peculiar male rituals that huge swathes of the population don’t understand without even understanding there is something deep and weighty there that has escaped their notice. The rules of a man’s haircut are handed down from father to son and through…
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The Day Stephen Harper Shook My Hand and Called Me a Liar
From time to time people talk about meeting celebrities. I suppose I’ve met my share, but the one story that everyone always wants to hear is the day Stephen Harper shook my hand and called me a liar.
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My Grandmother, Serena Anderson
I mentioned last month that I’ve scanned in a number of pictures from my grandparents’ old photo albums. Everything I’ve put up thus far has been from my grandfather’s youth, and so I thought I’d mix things up a little bit by putting up some information on my grandmother. A great deal of the following…
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The Most Incredible Thing I Ever Ate Out Of A Dixie Cup With My Fingers
I’ve heard the most powerful trigger of memory is the sense of smell, followed closely by taste. I’m inclined to believe that’s true. Several hours ago I was two hundred kilometers from where I now sit, enjoying a bowl of pea soup at my grandparents’ house. The first whiff of my lunch transported me six…