Things that are scarier than bears

So, I've graduated. Somehow, I feel the same though, only a little more embarrassed, because after graduating, I had a Marilyn Monroe moment on a subway grate downtown. Well, a Marilyn Monroe moment minus the holding it down part. Classy. And I was only afraid I'd fall on stage. Apparently in 22 years of education, I was never taught how to not make a fool of myself. Or I missed that class. Or I was there, but daydreaming about monkey butlers. Actually, that's probably it, because those with monkey butlers need not worry about things like subway grate drafts. Monkey butlers are good that way.

Speaking of monkey butlers, in addition to being a recent graduate, I also became a groupie about a month ago. I wasn't sure that I could actually be a groupie, because I'm pretty tame, but I was told that all types of groupies are needed (all the colours of the rainbow, from skanky to tame). So, I'm a groupie, for a band. A real band. Not in my head at all. The reason I bring this up now, is that they are having a show in June where they have promised dancing monkeys. Although I had already agreed to be a groupie, and thus was obliged to attend, I was also pulled in by the dancing monkeys. However, I'm also concerned about this promise, because, seriously, dancing monkeys? In downtown Toronto? Is that even legal? I'm going to say no.

I'm told that they're working on the dancing monkeys though, which is good, because that's not the kind of promise you should just throw around. People take dancing animals very seriously, and monkeys even moreso. Maybe they have access to a research lab I'm not aware of, and they're going to sneak the monkeys out under a giant lab coat. I hope they've thought this plan through though, because monkeys do not respond well to being shoved in an over sized sleeve, especially if that sleeve contains an arm. It's all the worse if that arm is that of a band drummer, bulked up from excessive drum banging, because lab monkeys like their angry revenge-for-being-shoved-in-a-sleeve meat as lean as possible. Because they've heard about heart health. Overall, animatronic monkeys might be a safer bet. They should try to stick to songs you can dance the robot to.

Today I gained a new fear, one unrelated to terrible bears. Apparently, there were fish going missing in an aquarium and the owners weren't sure what was happening, so they watched nighttime security footage and found out that the octopus in the tank across from it was climbing out of his cage, walking (wait, do they walk, or just sort of shuffle) across the catwalks and eating fish. This is friggin' terrifying, because if an octopus can climb across a catwalk to steal fish, it can climb across a catwalk to drop on my head and suck out my brains (I think that's what they do.) Then, for good measure, a bear will probably jump out to maul me.

In the same conversation where I learned that octopi are evil geniuses, we were discussing the zoo and the degree of awesome that it has. One person mentioned they'd grown up walking distance from a zoo. I thought it was cool, unless a tiger escaped (I believe I may have mentioned this theory in the past). Then, another person said to their mother, "Was it a polar bear that escaped from our zoo?" And I thought, "Holy crap." I don't think I need to add any more to that story at this point, because holy crap.

So that brings me to a happy song. This task seems easier some days than others. To comfort myself about the idea of polar bear escapes, I'm going to go with At the Zoo by Simon and Garfunkel. I don't think it needs anymore explanation than zoos are automatically happy (assuming all the cages are intact) and the zoo keeper is apparently drunk.

I was about to publish this post, when I realized that bear and octopus in the same sentence seemed strangely familiar. Then, I remembered that a few months ago a friend introduced me to the existence of the bear-shark-octopus, but I blacked it out (for obvious, terrifying reasons), until this unfortunate post. Now it's all flooding back, and I'm never sleeping again, which is probably good, because I'll have time to get a lot more done. Of course, most of that time will be spent trying to figure out how to escape a bear shark octopus mauling/biting my arm off/brain sucking. I know that you're supposed to make noise for bears, and hit sharks in the nose, but I haven't heard about octopi. Maybe you just have to somehow confuse them so they tie knots in their many tentacles. It would work in the cartoons, so it would probably work in real life.

From the land of bears

Music is my friend, but also, not my friend. It's very good at bringing me out of my many funks, especially when combined with dancing or walking, but it also will periodically create bad moods. This is due to my inability to listen to a song without believing it to be 100% true. For example, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones. I listen to it and think "How poignant, it is true, I shouldn't always expect to get what I want." Wrong. It's not a matter of not getting what I want, it's about being vague in exactly what that is. You can't say, "I want 8.7 monkey butlers and I want them to all answer to the name Floyd" and expect to get what you want. What you need to say is, "I want some sort of something to serve me delicious Pina Coladas at some point in my future." There is every chance that this second choice will probably happen, but it does not eliminate the possibility that that something is a monkey butler named Floyd. By following this simple strategy, you can guarantee that you will always get what you want, especially if what you want is to prove Mick Jagger wrong.

"Don't Stop Believing" is one of my favorite songs, but it's also a little ridiculous. I mean, why tell me to not stop believing and yet never define what I'm supposed to believe in? It also gives me no clue as to what the feeling I'm supposed to hold onto is. I assume it's some sort of positive feeling, like "happy" or "exuberant", but it very well could be "anger" or "apathy", in which case, it's not actually a very good song at all. Although, to be honest, I've found both anger and apathy to be very useful emotions at times. Regardless, I think that this already awesome song could be far more awesome if it gave clearer instructions. Example: Don't Stop Believing (that leprechauns are going to give you delicious chocolate gold), Hold on to that (somewhat nauseous from delicious chocolate) feeling. Sometimes I wonder if Journey might have been aware of this, but concerned about unleashing a song that awesome on the world.

I've been listening to a lot of Dixie Chicks lately. It started with the song, "Not Ready to Make Nice" because I wasn't. Then, I moved onto "Top of the World", which I like for it's dramatic strings, but sometimes I allow it to convince me that I'm a songbird with a broken wing that's never going to fly to the top of the world because of some jerk. Then I feel sad and weak and imagine that someone has somehow broken me. Then I have to remind myself exactly how false that is. If anything, I'm something that eats the little song bird, like a hawk (I just Googled "What eat songbirds" and had a disturbing number of hits). Actually, a hawk is not quite awesome enough. I'm more like a dragon. Want to try to break my wings? Go for it, because now you're on fire.

Today I tried to bike to a river. It went well, by which I mean, I'm still alive and found my way back to the computer to write this. But I couldn't find a river, mainly because, as I learned later, it was to the South, and I was heading due West. Sometimes, when you want to go somewhere, it's helpful if you know where it is first, instead of just hoping that your bike might act as some sort of divining rod and find water. That is what I learned today.

We're visiting Lilliput's family's home, where apparently bears run rampant and eat many apples, then pass out on the lawn in a drunken apple stupor. Sometimes they have bear fights. So, I fear this may be my last post. It's been nice. If I survive the maulings, I'll post again tomorrow.

You Can't Buy Happiness, Even if you Can Buy Monkey Butlers

It was my first day waking up on my BC trip, which means that I was up at 6am due my inability to sleep-in regardless of how late I stay up combined with a 3 hour time change. It was good because I got to see my brother Shamus before he went to work, but bad because then I spent hours waiting for anything interesting to happen. Periodically I would decide to try to befriend Alfred Von Bunnikins, but I think he must have somehow sensed my similarity to Elmyra from Tiny Toons and was smart enough to hide in his igloo whenever I came close.

Since the rabbit clearly wasn't planning on entertaining me, I found a book on baby names and leafed through it until it offended me, as tends to be the case with most books. It had a section on the first impressions that names make with lists of names under titles such as: "Arty", "Charming", "Friendly" etc. I thought, where are the negative adjectives? Then I found it, "Cranky". And what was there, nestled below "Doreen" and "Myrna"? None other than "Sharon". Really? And yet the name "Stormy" is under "Cheerful"? If I ruled the world, I would destroy all copies of this book. Wait, maybe my reaction is a bit cranky. No, I think it's normal, because that book was clearly out to get me. Also, evil.

It also had a list of famous pairs, I guess for those expecting twins. If I had twin boys, I probably wouldn't have much issue with naming them Bert and Ernie. They're solid names. I might call them Robert and Ernest for awhile, just to make it look like I didn't do it on purpose, all the while knowing that eventually someone is going to realize the obvious nicknames and then it will spread like wildfire. I guess it is true that some people shouldn't be allowed to have children, most notably my parents for giving me a cranky name.

So, after thinking about baby names for awhile, my mind drifted to yesterday, when I was at the Edmonton airport waiting for my connecting flight to Abbotsford and trying to steal WiFi to kill time. As you probably know, if you've read my other posts, I have no technical abilities, so I don't know how I did it, but I managed to get a few minutes of Facebook time in before it caught onto me and tried to make me pay. It was just enough time to notice a posting by my friend Birchington Wongstein that perked me up. I hadn't realized that I needed perking until I was perked, but was quite glad it had happened, because I really did need a good perking up, if only to allow me to overuse the word "perk" in my blog today.

When you wake up hours before anyone who might entertain you, it gives you a lot of time to think about things that perked you up (if you're wondering, I am trying to break the record for most instances of the word "perk" and its derivatives. It would probably be easier if I had some idea of what the record is, but I think I'm doing pretty well). Birchington is one of those people who doesn't really need to work to perk up someone's day. Once I tried to tell him this, but it didn't turn out well. First I tried, "You're special.....but not 'special' with quotations," then I went for "No, no, I don't mean it that way, I mean it more like you're precious....but not 'precious' with quotations." So, sitting there, WiFi-less, I spent the time thinking about the number of friends I've been lucky enough to have that can't be adequately described without a word that is also used in quotations when humoring "special" people.

I worry that this blog might be quickly descending towards a rather mushy side today, but I think I need to say that I feel like I spend a lot of time thinking about things that I want, like truckloads of money and monkey butlers. But, even a million monkey butlers could not replace knowing someone like Birchington Wongstein, Yelsel D'Stupid, Neyney Charmin, Byla Rong, Katarina Yashtastico, Bark Montes or the dozens of other magical people that I am yet to create clever pseudonyms for. Even if they were to all suddenly disappear from my life, I was beyond blessed to even know them for 2 seconds, so I should probably stop spending all my time thinking about how I might acquire an army of monkey butlers and appreciate what I already have instead. Yeah, I lied when I said I was worried about getting to mushy, because I totally went there, but I'm going to publish this anyways.

To make up for the mushiness, I'm going to tell you my truck stop laundry story. It begins with: Once I was doing my laundry with friends at a truck stop. There, we met a trucker, who we asked if we could drive his truck. He said he would be happy to let us, but didn't think we could handle the 18 gears. I think it was 18, it doesn't matter exactly how many though, because what really matters is that he then said, "That's more than I can count on my hands and feet." At that point you could see everyone looking at there hands and feet, trying to do some quick math in their head and thinking "Wait...somethings wrong..." After the proper timing for optimal effect he said, "That's right, I only have 2 toes" (or 3 toes or something...it doesn't matter, the point is, he was a trucker who was missing multiple toes and clearly used it as smalltalk on a regular basis.) The strangest part of the story is that I don't think anyone in our group thought to ask him how he lost his toes. Or, if they did, I don't remember it, which doesn't seem like me. I usually remember stories that involve anything being severed. So, like most of my stories, this has a lesson: If you meet a trucker and they tell you they are missing any organ or appendage, ask them how, because you'll regret it if you don't. I know I did.