IT’S FREE TIME
CHAPTER 1: FRANK DOESN’T LOOK UP
The front door opens and Frank doesn’t look up.
CHAPTER 2: GOOGLE MAPS
“It smells like a salmon run in here, what have you been doing?” Ann looks into the sitting room. “How long have you been on that thing?” Frank is slouched over in his chair staring at the computer screen. “Are you still hung over?”
“Fuck this guy” he says to the computer screen. “…still?” he thinks to himself in response to her question.
“What?”
“This s.o.b. wants me to buy a house.” She walks into the room and looks on the screen. There are two browser windows open. One has a picture of the state of California with all the counties shown, separated by thick black lines. In the other is a realtor’s listings for properties in the county of San Mateo. “His name is, CJ de Heer. C-J-de-He-er.” In the top corner of the screen is picture of a young man with combed hair, grinning like he doesn‘t know that he’s an ivy league wuss grinning, wearing a grey suit with a canary yellow tie.
She says, “what?” again.
CHAPTER 3: EENEE MEENEE MINEY MOE
“If you had a dog and you wanted it to have a middle name, what name would you pick? Monterey? Ventura? San Bernardino? Santa Barbara?”
CHAPTER $: PROBLEMS
From the kitchen there is the obnoxious clang of the garbage can lid hitting the floor. Ann rushes in, “Hey! What are you doing! Bad! Bad!” The little calico makes a b-line across the sitting room and into the bedroom carrying something in her mouth. “What did she have?”
He thinks to himself, “If its eating it I guess its cat food” but says aloud, “two point five million.” How am I supposed to have that money. What a son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER 5: OPTIONS/FIN
“Did you eat yet? Can you get that from her?” She’s tying up the garbage bag and walking out the door.
“Leftover salmon” he says but she can’t hear. He walks over to the cat on the bed who has put a piece of salmon skin on the pillow and is huddled over it half licking and half chewing. Ann closes the front door, “and why are you looking up real estate again?” He takes this question very seriously as he looks up at the cat he’s picked up over his head. He walks into the kitchen staring into the cats eyes that are looking down at him. He flicks the light switch off, on, off, on and so on, turning the cat into a kind of disco ball in his miniature strobe-lit disco. Then he takes the lid off the empty garbage can and tries to put the cat in. Its legs shoot out in all directions but he manages to get it in oblivious to all the scratches he‘s incurred. Ann had stocked the fridge with his favourite beer for his friday yesterday. He cracks one open - PapsssssstT - and sips; the cool beer tastes like carbonation, he smells the aroma of microwaved salmon lingering in the kitchen, the cats meowing, stuck inside the garbage can. “I was just weighing my options” he says.
“Just drink a beer” says Ann from the other room.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
SINKING LIKE A SUNSET
PROLOGUE
I had to move from the highest hill in Idaho, that was not a mountain. Now I live in a small cabin that is just one room in the Washington desert. Everything smells like sage. I have a picture of the smell - It’s of my lawn chair.
CHAPTERS 1-4
I am the son of a Canadian caribou farmer. I am also the son of a remarkably ambidextrous table tennis player. My mother began to play doubles ping pong by herself after my parents bought separate cars. She would play with two paddles, two balls against herself. My parents bought separate cars after my mother revealed her ambidexterity by being able to shake hands with both our neighbour and my father at the same time. My father and the neighbour had always been at odds, but my mother levelled the playing field, in a way, and saw them as equals. My father thought otherwise.
‘Don’t get out your guns till Goose’ is a series of sixteen dramatized images depicting the brutal death of our neighbours dog. It was murdered. Our neighbour made the photos and they were published in a Sunday paper. My father loved property lines and decorated ours with multi-colour 2x4’s spiked at the height that had only 10 percent of the plank visible and the other 90 percent underground.
“Like a photograph?” I asked my father.
“No” he said. “Like your mother.”
My mother Iris, was terrible at playing table tennis against anyone. She was fine with the wall, two paddles, two balls at the same time, but she could never beat anyone in a match.
“Table Tennis kept me out of radiation” she tells me every time I visit her. She also collects vintage lipstick which she thinks looks particularly good under all the neon’s at the table tennis gymnasium. My father told me “the inspiration for all my trouble” comes from my mother. I told that to my grade 5 teacher when she asked, “…and what makes you think you can drop out!”
They called my father who was on a six-week migration of the herd at the time and had to be contacted by smoke signals that rose up from nearly a days ride away. Turns out I couldn’t drop out of school, but I acted like I did thereon. I stayed up every night to watch all the late night talk shows eating canned soup and canned soda gone flat. I slept only about three hours a night worried that my dreams were where my mother would punish me. My father punished me in real life by making me prepare my own supper, (which was the soup) and not taking down all the pictures of my mother with her table tennis ribbons.
One day, I looked too long at one of her pictures. The contrast of her 1971 Macy’s sunset peach lips and the valiant blue of her participants ribbon crossed my eyes. I lost my balance and fell to the floor. As I sat myself back up off the caribou skin carpet. “I should try dropping out of school again” I thought. “Those pin-sitters! If only I could drop out of school!” I looked at the picture again. “That French teachers ugly skirts!” My jaw clenched, “Participant!” I grabbed the picture off the wall, collected a few things and headed for my mother.
EPILOGUE
During this complicated time of pre-adolescent transience, Canadian rock music came to me in a roundabout sort of way. I in fact am indebted to it for helping me to realize that I was not in fact a wild party, but rather was sinking like a sunset. This is an understanding I will take to the grave. With all nine lives still intact I got dropped off on the highest hill in Idaho that was not a mountain. This place I have only just recently had to move from. Now I spend my time doing mostly honest and mostly boring things like listening to Chopin on repeat and playing Tetris while sitting on a lawn chair in front of my cabin in the deserts of Washington unable to ignore the scent of desert sage.
I guess when you say it like that it’s a pretty ugly picture.
photo by cynthia ann broderick
PROLOGUE
I had to move from the highest hill in Idaho, that was not a mountain. Now I live in a small cabin that is just one room in the Washington desert. Everything smells like sage. I have a picture of the smell - It’s of my lawn chair.
CHAPTERS 1-4
I am the son of a Canadian caribou farmer. I am also the son of a remarkably ambidextrous table tennis player. My mother began to play doubles ping pong by herself after my parents bought separate cars. She would play with two paddles, two balls against herself. My parents bought separate cars after my mother revealed her ambidexterity by being able to shake hands with both our neighbour and my father at the same time. My father and the neighbour had always been at odds, but my mother levelled the playing field, in a way, and saw them as equals. My father thought otherwise.
‘Don’t get out your guns till Goose’ is a series of sixteen dramatized images depicting the brutal death of our neighbours dog. It was murdered. Our neighbour made the photos and they were published in a Sunday paper. My father loved property lines and decorated ours with multi-colour 2x4’s spiked at the height that had only 10 percent of the plank visible and the other 90 percent underground.
“Like a photograph?” I asked my father.
“No” he said. “Like your mother.”
My mother Iris, was terrible at playing table tennis against anyone. She was fine with the wall, two paddles, two balls at the same time, but she could never beat anyone in a match.
“Table Tennis kept me out of radiation” she tells me every time I visit her. She also collects vintage lipstick which she thinks looks particularly good under all the neon’s at the table tennis gymnasium. My father told me “the inspiration for all my trouble” comes from my mother. I told that to my grade 5 teacher when she asked, “…and what makes you think you can drop out!”
They called my father who was on a six-week migration of the herd at the time and had to be contacted by smoke signals that rose up from nearly a days ride away. Turns out I couldn’t drop out of school, but I acted like I did thereon. I stayed up every night to watch all the late night talk shows eating canned soup and canned soda gone flat. I slept only about three hours a night worried that my dreams were where my mother would punish me. My father punished me in real life by making me prepare my own supper, (which was the soup) and not taking down all the pictures of my mother with her table tennis ribbons.
One day, I looked too long at one of her pictures. The contrast of her 1971 Macy’s sunset peach lips and the valiant blue of her participants ribbon crossed my eyes. I lost my balance and fell to the floor. As I sat myself back up off the caribou skin carpet. “I should try dropping out of school again” I thought. “Those pin-sitters! If only I could drop out of school!” I looked at the picture again. “That French teachers ugly skirts!” My jaw clenched, “Participant!” I grabbed the picture off the wall, collected a few things and headed for my mother.
EPILOGUE
During this complicated time of pre-adolescent transience, Canadian rock music came to me in a roundabout sort of way. I in fact am indebted to it for helping me to realize that I was not in fact a wild party, but rather was sinking like a sunset. This is an understanding I will take to the grave. With all nine lives still intact I got dropped off on the highest hill in Idaho that was not a mountain. This place I have only just recently had to move from. Now I spend my time doing mostly honest and mostly boring things like listening to Chopin on repeat and playing Tetris while sitting on a lawn chair in front of my cabin in the deserts of Washington unable to ignore the scent of desert sage.
I guess when you say it like that it’s a pretty ugly picture.
photo by cynthia ann broderick
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