Legally Tender (Cafe Danse – Open Mic Night)

Part I – IndignitiesThis will either ring close to home like a gargoyle knocker on the front door that is my readers’ hearts, or it will bounce haphazardly off that very same door knocker, like the newspaper an over-hormonal teenage boy would toss on his way to beating up younger less hormonal middle-school children.

I’ve always been a firm believer in manners. With that comes an underlying urge to present myself in a fashion that other people deem appropriate. I’m quite sure this is not born of respect; but rather, of a deep rooted need to keep all of the indignities I currently possess to myself. It appears to me that a vigilant and thorough demeanor parading a predefined self presentation can quite adequately paint over an entire world of dirty little secrets. As an exercise in self healing, I thought I might share a few of those indignities with you today. Most of these inadequacies purposely revolve around my bathroom, simply because the kitchen offers no subject of particular interest and I’ll not allow you into the sexually frustrating world that is my bedroom.

Firstly, since I have moved into my Kindersley house on October 1, 2005, I have cleaned the bathroom once. I agree that this is not the shining example of male bachelorhood that you’d expect from yours truly; however, there is something to be said for the courage and valor it took for me to buckle down and get it done. Like a haz-mat officer wading into the potentially deadly area of a nuclear power plant I crept into the bathroom. I wore all of the amenities the job demanded. I had yellow latex rubber gloves that were deliberately a size too small giving me that extra grip and maneuverability. I had raggedy old sweat pants one, for I knew I would be using at least four barrels of bleach, and by the end of this escapade, I’d have spilled enough on myself for those same sweats to resemble Swiss cheese. I also had a homemade visor, for the inevitable splash-back. I made it out of an old golf hat (the kind with no top), a coat hanger, and saran wrap. I was as ready as I could be for the job that lay ahead. Two hours I spent scrubbing, mopping, wiping, and crying. When I was finished, I gave tours and charged my friends a half-dollar to see my handy work, that’s how happy I was with my performance. That was three days ago, and today the bathroom is as dirty as it ever was.

Secondly, many of my underwear have holes in them, yet I do not toss them out. No, no, no, most have not had bleach spilled on them. I simply can’t bring myself to throw them away. I’m not sure how they get so filled with holes. Come to think of it, the ones I’m wearing now (presuming I’m wearing any), likely have holes in them too. Perhaps a tiny mouse is sneaking its way into my underwear drawer and gnawing away at the tasty cotton fiber, although I can’t imagine underwear being that tasty, unless it’s edible, and it’s really sexy. Even then, it’s not really the underwear you’re after. Ok, I’m off track, where was I? My underwear has holes.

Lastly, I sprinkle when I tinkle. Often, albeit in the middle of the night, I am not a sweetie and I do not wipe the seatie. This entire issue revolves around the aiming versus thrust model, which I’ll not go into here. Suffice it to say, they should simply make larger toilet bowls. I will blame this on my twelve years of minor hockey. At my very first hockey practice, there I was, a short little undersized child. Even though I had the smallest hockey equipment available it still hung off of me like the dress shirts James Bond gives to his women after a nights’ escapades. As I readied to go out onto the ice for my first game I felt that familiar tingle in my lower abdomen. As I headed back into the dressing room to begin the monumental task of finding my wee-wee amid five layers of hockey equipment and clothes, one of the other boys told me matter-of-factly that my sports cup, was in fact, some type of mobile toilet. It all sounded incredibly reasonable to a five year old boy, especially since the short name for a sports cup was a ‘can’. If I needed to go, it stands to reason that I should go in the can, just like at home. My pee habits haven’t been the same since that Junior Novice hockey game where I single handedly flooded the ice myself.

Part II – Home Field Advantage

Sport is an incredible endeavor, even for people who don’t like sports. I think people can at least find on sport they manage to identify with. I think people with narcolepsy would like the luge. People who enjoy sweeping their floors might like curling. Those who enjoy watching the long term effects of subtle brain trauma might like boxing. I personally like hockey, that doesn’t mean everyone has to like hockey, that’s just what I like. The European countries have their football or what we call soccer. I personally find it a little dull since I’m cursed with the western world’s ultra thin attention span.

I find home field advantage to be a curious part of sports entirely. The fact that a sporting event can be so greatly influenced by viewers and factors having absolutely nothing to do with the actual field of play, it is astounding for sure. I was on the Internet and I looked up a statistic that said nearly half the time the team with home field advantage wins. No, really, it was marginally more than that. But the point of all this is that I was intrigued. In my usual fashion, I began thinking of applications and adaptations of home field advantage in other areas.

I think the most basic and granular adaptation of this theory would be your household. Everyone feels comfortable in their own home, imagine if you could apply the sports home field advantage to all of those ‘less than favorable’ outbound missions you must complete on a routine basis. I guess the question is, could you gain that same favorable advantage by shifting such activities into your home?

I did try to put my hypothesis into practice; however, I had a hard time finding the professionals to play along, even when I explained it as ‘for the sake of science’ (and not for some cheesy open mic night). I asked my dentist if he’d consider performing a root canal at my place. He thought it might seem unprofessional, and quite unsanitary given the state of my bathroom. I would have liked to have known if the dental experience was more favorable in the comfort of my abode, I bet it would have been.

Other interesting implementations’ I’ve thought of for this application include, the lottery (why not a ticket kiosk at my house to improve my odds), the banker (maybe we could apply for this mortgage at my house?), and even dating…

Now, I’d like to get into dating for a bit. Actually, I’d like to ‘get into’ what dating gets me into (if you know what I mean). It is no secret that having a date at your house is already a huge advantage. Granted, the first time you have a member of the opposite sex at your house, that you’re interested in, there’s definitely a little jostling and uncomfortable maneuvering. You have to give the tour of the house, and you’re leading them around your crumby little house or apartment or whatever it may be. If your stuff isn’t the nice Ikea home and garden type stuff then you try to compensate by pointing out random new items to draw attention away from the old crap that you managed to salvage from ten years of garage sales. You point out new toasters and the four thousand dollar stereo that surrounds your thirteen inch black and white television.

The entire time you’re giving the household tour all you can think of is, “I can’t wait to show her the bedroom”. Personally, I think it’s weirder if you don’t show her the bedroom, I even show her the bathroom, but I make her wear the homemade visor. So the whole time your thinking alright, this is going good, I’m gonna’ show her the bedroom, something might happen. Because we think, or guys think anyway, anytime you can get a girl in the bedroom, its implied, it’s a done deal. She can’t say no. So back to the tour, you’re working your way down the hallway and you come to the bedroom door and you step in to show her around and here’s what she does. She does this ‘lean into the room thing’ without actually stepping foot in the bedroom, thereby nullifying and voiding the mandatory bedroom action ratification. It’s incredible how far a woman can lean and not set foot in the room, it’s like a crazy forward Taekwondo stance (it’s the reverse of the backward Taekwondo stance you use when people with bad breath always want to tell you secrets). The entire time she’s leaning into your room she’s clinging for dear life to that door frame. Like a hanging sloth stuck in a tree being attacked by a Bengal tiger, there’s just no way she is letting go of that door frame. So you know what I do, here’s what I do, before they get to my house, I loosen the door frame, then when they fall in, I jump on them. You couldn’t do that at her house, home field advantage. If you were at the girls’ house she might just hire a mason to build a brick wall across the door to her bedroom when you come.

Part III – War

One last excellent application of home field advantage I think is war. As long as there has been man there has been war, on smaller scales and on larger scales. Thumb wars, Gas Wars, Gang Wars, Civil Wars, and World Wars. Looking back through history it is very easy to identify instances and situations where the organization fighting on its native ground decidedly became the victor.

World War II is probably the finest example of this. In 1939 the Germans got testy and, everyone knows, Adolf Hitler rallied the Fatherland into an armed conflict with the rest of the world that eventually saw the fall of socialism in Germany leaving many soldiers and innocents dead. An unimaginable amount of soldiers were killed. Canada lost 42,000 men, the UK 750,000 men, Russia lost 18 million men, which is 30 times as many and is hard to fathom. The Germans lost 2.5 million soldiers, but in all fairness they did start it. Italy joined Hitler and declared war on the UK in 1940 losing 330,000 people by its culmination. Benito Mussolini sided with Hitler declaring that all Italians were fascists’, which I don’t personally believe since every Italian I see in movies rides around on a motorized scooter saying “ciao”, seemingly loving life.

That is a lot of people to be killed. I personally find it hard to come to terms with the simple quantity of people to be passing away, even in a natural disaster, let alone by another persons’ proverbial hand. I’ll explain further, if you kill someone, you go to court, they find you guilty and you spend the better part of 20 – 80 years in jail. If you kill ten people, they send you to Texas; they hit you with a brick, that’s what they do. If you kill 100 people they put you in a little rubber room and you get your food through a tiny hole in the door. Anything more than that, and I just can’t deal with it. The sheer number of deaths seems to dull my actualization that each and every instance in the count is an actual person. Somebody kills 100,000 people I almost find myself thinking, “Geeze, well done, you must get up very early in the morning. What’s your day planner look like? Wake Up, death, death, death, death, death, lunch, death, death, death, afternoon coffee break”.

And this happens, Josef Stalin killed approximately 20 million people, including up to 14.5 million needlessly starved to death. At least one million executed for political “offences”. At least 9.5 million more deported, exiled or imprisoned in work camps, with many of the estimated five million sent to the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ never returning alive. Stalin died a natural death while sleeping in his bed. It’s interesting that these worst of murderers often don’t even suffer the consequences that begat comparatively small time offenders such as single instance murderers.

Pol Pot killed 1.2 Cambodians and later died under house arrest. That I can kind of understand, he’s under house arrest, we know where he is, he can’t hurt anyone, for Gods sake just don’t go in that house.

In both of these cases the western world didn’t step in and failed to take action to stop the atrocities, sure there were probably gesture type maneuvers such as political pressures and sanctions, but nothing the likes of which we’ve seen lately in Iraq. The reason for this is, you guessed it “Home Field Advantage”. Stalin and Pol Pot killed their own people, and the western world is sort of ok with that. We watch the news over dinner, we sigh and think “Gee that’s terrible”, and then we go back to our food. Hitler made the mistake of killing his neighbors’, a whack of Polish Jews, stupid man. That was a racial deal which I naturally don’t agree with. Being of sound moral fiber I generally try to disempower racial mistreatment and stereotypes whenever I can. For instance, Asians know Kun Fu. That’s a glaring stereotype. I personally fought Asians for six weeks and found that very few know Kung Fu, they do; however, get very irritable. Very irritable people those Asians. Anyway, Hitler killed his neighbors’, after a couple of years the western world stood up and said, we’ll not stand for that. Hitler did die in a bunker, later to be dumped in a ditch covered in gasoline on fire, so I guess that is one example of a tyrant getting what he deserved.

Home field advantage. While the war was in Germany or in close approximation to it Germany did very will. They had their “hard and fast” theory known as “Blitzkrieg” and they swept through most of what we knew as the “Eastern Block”. Here’s what I find interesting, 150 years prior to Blitzkrieg Napolean Bonapart stormed from France across the eastern part of Europe and rode arrogantly into Russia where he was unequivocally and unabatedly obliterated by a cold Russian winter in 1812. Hitler did precisely the same thing. He went racing into Russia thinking, “I’ve got a better idea, I’ve got a better idea, turning around, it’s a bit cold, it’s the same idea, it’s the same idea.” Apparently Hitler never played Risk when he was a kid. Seven extra pieces at the beginning of every game and you could never hold it. Australasia, that was the key, pile all your pieces on Papa New Guinea and just keep building.

1945 the ward ended and things slowly went back to normal. On June 26, 1963 John F. Kennedy, a great man, traveled to West Berlin and he gave a historic speech.

“I am proud to come to this city as the guest of your distinguished Mayor, who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of West Berlin. And I am proud to visit the Federal Republic with your distinguished Chancellor who for so many years has committed Germany to democracy and freedom and progress, and to come here in the company of my fellow American, General Clay, who has been in this city during its great moments of crisis and will come again if ever needed. Two thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum.” Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

Don’t get me wrong this was a great speech, this was a great time in history, and peace was on its way. I asked my mom (a very bright woman) and she vaguely remembers this and it was a stirring and moving bit of history. There is; however, one glaring inaccuracy which I’ll come back to.

They say 70% of your communication is what you look like, 20% of your communication is how you sound and only 10% is what you are actually saying. I’ve noticed this, of all places, ironically, the American National Anthem. You see people at sporting events hand over there chest singing in those boastful confident American voices, and sometimes in the middle you’re not quite sure what they’re saying, it might be a bit muffled, but they continue to belt it out confidently and genuinely, and that’s enough. It helps if you keep gesturing your hand toward you in a ‘number one’ fashion with your index finger then away from you in a palm-down ‘no way’ type fashion. Keep confirming and denying things, that’s the ticket.

The reason I bring this up is that when those proud Roman soldiers shouted “civis Romanus sum” they were saying “I am a Roman”, fair enough, very noble, very patriotic. When JFK proclaimed “ich bin ein Berliner”, he actually said “I am a donut”. “Ich bin ein Berliner” translates directly into I am a donut, “ich bin Berliner” translates to I am a Berliner. The absolute beauty of this is that nobody cared. When he made this statement the crowd when friggin’ wild, even though people in the back must have been whispering “did he say he was a donut? Ya, it’s an American thing he’s a donut, he’s a friggin’ donut”.

Do you know why he made this Freudian slip? He didn’t have home field advantage. It’s just a good thing he wasn’t traveling all over Germany giving his speech in Hamburg and Frankfurt.

Cafe Danse Open Mic Night

One small step for man, one giant leap for a fatter man.On the Writers’ front, I am happy to say this mailing list is now reaching more than 50 people. It seems to be popular with everyone and I have single handedly witnessed it rescuing a small boy from a mountain goat. I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, but if there is someone you are forwarding the updates too and you would rather just have them added to the mailing list, feel free to shoot me their email. As they say in a gay bar, ‘the more the merrier’. Likewise, I don’t expect you to remain on the list if the writing causes you to break out in a severe rash, so you may also email me if you’d like to me removed. Please provide proof of said rash.

I submitted three more short stories to Coteau Publishing in Regina a couple of weeks ago (http://www.coteaubooks.com/). They enjoyed the first story in the Bunitzki series that I had sent months ago and requested these additional stories. If they like these last three stories they would require 16 more (20 total) for publication in a set. It may get busy around here. I’m not getting my hopes too high; there are still quite a few ‘ifs’ that need to swing in my favor. Special thanks to Nikki Fenrich for all the hard work on the editing. If I have to pay to have it published on my own, Nikki and I will receive the only copies ever printed. Will keep you posted.I am also reading to the kiddies or ‘chitlin’ at the Wheatland Regional Library on Thursday nights. Last night was the inaugural gala. The kids were decked out in their best Pajamas and night caps. I did notice kids are a totally different audience than adults, if you’re the least bit uninteresting, they just get up and walk away. It’s the funniest thing ever. The highlight of the night was when one mother asked her 3 year old daughter to say thank you. The little girl came up to me and very sincerely stated “Thank you Marilyn”. I guess for the song portion we shouldn’t have sung “Happy Birthday Mr. President”. Will keep you posted.

I am still an avid member of the Pearls of the Prairies (POTP) Writers Group here in Kindersley, which brings me to the point of this email. December 2nd 2005 is an open microphone night at the Café Danse (115 Main Street Kindersley). The POTP chair just emailed me to inform me that I’ll be headlining the evening (look out). There is no cover charge; however, they have many fine coffees and snacks for you to enjoy while you listen to me spout (tip me over pour me out [coffee joke]). I know the POTP is looking for a good turn out to this event, so if you don’t have any hair that needs washing (uh Kipp), It would be a personal favor if you could make it. I promise you wont have to walk away part way through and you can call me ‘Marilyn” all you like. Please RSVP so I can relay to the owner.