I Prefer Syrup
First is the coleslaw, followed closely by the sweet pickles, beets, and celery spears. The Vegetable Agenda. These items are placed silently at our table in brown ceramic bowls by the staff. No sudden movements made. The table, filled with my coworkers, nods and looks at one another. We pick at these offerings tenatively, for the purposes of laying down in our stomachs a layer of solid food matter which will soon absorb as much pig, egg, and sugar as humanly possible. Under the shadow of the huge milk bottle full of maple syrup at the head of the table, we wait for the main event.
Next: split-pea soup with ham, and bowls of baked beans. Now we are off, with a clink of the ladle in the bottom of every bowl, and a drizzle of Canadian maple syrup on top. There are few opportunities to put syrup on soup, except at this, the Cabane à Sucre, the yearly Québecois celebration of gluttony, shortening, and nitrites.
The procession moves on. Women in pioneer sunbonnets bring out glazed ham, baked ham, smoked ham, ham fat, ham fritters, ham cakes, and ham and eggs. Heaps of scrambled eggs on microwaveable yellow trays and bowls of feves au lard drift pass our bloodshot eyes. The undeterminable glue of créton, some kind of pork-based gunk, spreads across torn bread. We nibble on oreilles de Cris (”Christ’s ears”), fried pig skin which turns so crispy that it could probably break your teeth if you bit down too fast. Their flavour is so overpowering that I break them with my molars and then eat the broken bits off my plate. There is nary a thought to calories or sodium; this is a ceremony of sin, an excursion into the basest corners of the human appetite. We go on a Sunday, in order that we may pray for our souls afterward.
After stuffing ourselves with this most unholy quantity of swine, we progressed to the tarte a sucre, the souffles de sucre, les beignes frites, everything encased in sugar and fried dough, and subject to a stream of syrup. Drizzling seemed apropos. One does not pour syrup. The technique is to compress the pastry with a fork, then fill the space left by the displaced air with syrup.
Then, coffee, to counteract the meditative pig-daze. No sugar provided; use syrup.
Cabane à sucre represents a deliberate lapse of health, a retort to the perpetual rumble of guilt. It is important to accept what you are eating as a once-a-year binge and abandon pretenses of eating light or opting out of the more arterially demanding dishes. Flush the thought of picking at your food with suspicion, weighing the cost of eating it with the ensuing penance you must pay. We have become a nation of birds, fishing through the bounty for the vitamin-rich or politically neutral bits. We don’t like feeling fussy, but what choice do we have? Eating a balanced diet, boring as it may be, beats the alternative. Studies, clinical trials, the evidence from our own two eyes: we’re sure of it. On this day, you will forget all these formulae, these punishments, and just eat pig until you pass out.
The staff pegs us as Montreal types immediately. Locals do not show up in the Quebec countryside wearing dress pants and stepping out of carpooled Hondas. Locals do not care that they must use the same mug for milk, water, and coffee. I ignore the possibility that the cleanliness of the kitchen might also uphold this rigorous commitment to hygiene.
After the meal, we walk down a short staircase into a small sunken enclosure. Against the wall is a trough containing fresh snow, curious, since the snow outside has been melted for weeks. An old Frenchman in a smock pours some maple syrup on the snow with careful tips of a tin can. He hands us each a stick, tells us attende trente secondes. Each of us rolls a strip of syrup onto the end of a stick, like a frozen lollipop. They are surprisingly good, perhaps better than anything we’d been served at the table. Our day is done, and we waddle back to the cars in full acceptance that our evening is lost to the couch, a pitcher of water, a movie, and a fruit smoothie made with low-fat frozen yogurt for dinner.
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Summer is a Diseased Affliction On Us All
Summer is upon us and we are poorer for it. Our world shifts to a different purview during these months, one of communal indecency and alienation. Exhibitionism runs rampant. Breasts and ridged biceps are being taken out of storage and placed in their estival display cases. In these months, we walk the streets for no reason at all. Summer is the great nomadic season, that time when our instincts become divorced from pursuit of our basic needs, and towards the upper tiers of Maslow’s great pyramid. I am talking of course about that scourge to our world, fun.
I am against fun in all its forms. Walking about the neighbourhood, among callous students who don’t know any better, I am immersed in the pungent stench of amusement, of levity and leisure. These “fun-lovers”, they cavort and shuffle, and look at things, and admire their reflections in storefront windows from the brilliant sun. Smile flash against smiles, a carnival of glazed grins. In the street atmosphere on a hot day, joy pervades and pollutes with its stridency, its everythingness. It is shrill in my ear. The sandal types sit on cedar patios and drink into a blind rage, watching me walking past.
A car horn shrieks at a passing girl, the driver a coarsely shaven twit showing his whimsy, the slatternly girl’s eyes glancing back over her shoulder through faint-tint sunglasses, a glance of acknowledgement and of dismissal. Between them a synergy of playfulness that, while amounting to nothing in physical terms, benefits and invigorates both. His car blares the latest Swiss beats. Her gait is a comely strut, meant to solicit pheromones. His apartment, a catacomb of chemical additives and product placement, is where he hopes they both end up through this meaningless transaction. She, meanwhile, is off to get her nails painted and hair done, to mask and deny her human features, her flaws, and her own mortality. She is the walking undead, and he is a jabbering, musky ape, and they are meant for each other.
This is summertime.
And old people laughing at the bus stop, under the shadow of the roofed shelter. Who can laugh when they’re so unfeignedly old? Teeth barely hanging on amidst the gales, and diapers in need of voiding, probably. Their feet itch and so do mine, I tell you what.
Fun is to be avoided this summer! The pursuit of fun is a rotten disease of youth. To live like a clam does, in a hard shell at the bottom of the river, closed to all contact with its surroundings, is the life of virtue. The clam lives in algae and stink and thinks nothing of it. A happy clam does not fear the sun, or even face it, except in the shimmer of the light breaking the water’s surface at certain hours of the day. Clams do not go to the beach except by accident. Exchanging the off-white walls of my apartment for the inner membrane of the clamshell, amity and oneness can be cultivated alongside contempt. Just hire a courier to deliver me vegetables and booze at scheduled intervals—my algae—keep your coconut-scented SPF lotions, and let me alone.
Had a little talk with Jesus just now. Tells me that fun only makes sense if you’re pulling a return. According to J.C. fun is calculated using formulae conceived with the profit motive in mind, and expressed as a function of net gain over a period of time. Say, what are you on about, Jesus? Fun is not a commodity to be traded. Fun is a prison, the whiling of one’s time in Western bounty, the hum and click of our urban leviathan, in the pursuit of waves of elevated body chemistry. To consciously seek fun is to inhabit a sagging husk of an existence, propped up by a chain of diversions, each diversion ending right as the next is set to begin. Finding meaning in the fun-seeker’s life is like swinging back and forth on the monkey bars and ending up in Lotusland. Pure illusion.
This city, Montreal, great writhing nexus of fun. I am at the sphygmic center of this hive of hedonism and moral ruin. I will bunker in my apartment and try to withstand the spill of sangria and the ensuing crash of a hangover, the slouching, the purchasing of low-cut shoes and golf shirts, long grazes in the park, the slinging of feet across a St. Sulpice chair, and the meeting of other human beings. My fortifications will be sparse—a curtain, a steely militaristic gaze through binoculars, a back alley for quick escapes. I will check for fun at the door, including in your bags. Penalties will be created and enforced. Fun shall find no sanctuary here.
Close the door and kick my clamshell a little further downstream, won’t you? Down with fun! Here’s to the summer of solitude!
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Serendipitous Porn: A Timeline
1989
Over lunch recess, a schoolmate at Carleton Heights P.S. finds a paperback-sized porn magazine behind (or in) a dumpster on an adjacent lot. Brings it to the far end of the schoolyard, where we all sneak a quick look at it. The photos are all black and white. Many are captioned with cartoon voice bubbles, and every section seemed to feature the same two women and mustachioed man. The print was ‘zine quality and infused with ads for prophylactics and mail-order schemes. Nobody gets to hold the magazine for more than a few seconds before a recess monitor scattered the pack. The mag was shoved down a pair of jogging pants, and was never seen again.
1991
Walking home from the corner store, a scrap of pink-kissed paper catches my eye. It’s a page from a magazine, depicting a “France Fuck-Fest”. The page is wet from the rain. 1-976 ads on the back side. I put it in my pocket, but chicken out when I get home, and stuff it down a sewer grate.
1992
On a bike ride with a friend around the military base area of South Ottawa, on an unused road in the middle of a construction site. A crinkled Swank magazine next to a plastic bag. Inside the bag are two tubs of margarine. We are aware of what that margarine might be. Undaunted, we take the magazine to a nearby sandpit, where we sit in the wilting sun and pass it back and forth, studying it like it’s on loan from the research library. The sandpit is infused with the warm stench of skunks, and grasshoppers buzz amidst the wobbling weeds. Jamie, an older kid from the neighbourhood, finds us, and wants to take a look. “Awesome,” he says, “you guys found porno. Hide it in here, OK?” We stuff it into a plastic bag (not the margarine bag), and tuck it under a log. Getting late, so we go off on our bikes quickly, silent with excitement. Jamie takes one more look to make sure it’s safe. This was big.
1992 – same summer
Away at a summer camp, one of the other kids in my cabin gets his hands on a magazine, another Swank, but this one from the 1970s. He also gets cigarettes somehow. The origin of these two items is mystery to this day, but my suspicion is that an older brother brought them as gifts during Family Day. The magazine depicts the carefree hazy lazy dazy 1970s in all their wide-lapelled, big-haired glory. Hot tubs were the new thing it seemed, and porn was just becoming an industry. There were ostensibly sexy captions. “I don’t even wanna know your name…I just wanna fuck you.” Early pornographers honing their craft, perhaps. The magazine is so-so, but I am entranced by a woman in a leopard-skin suit with an Amazonian porn name who would, in my estimation, still be considered quite attractive by today’s standards. Sometimes we take the magazine to a sunken platform of moist terrain right below a huge cedar tree. The space offers a beautiful view of Lake Vernon, and a chance to smoke without getting caught. We hide the magazine in a crumbling log away from heavy traffic, but a few rainfalls later and it starts to disintegrate, and by the time we got back from our three-day group excursion to a nearby island, it was gone.
1995
I find a High Society amidst my collection of old computer, hip-hop, and wrestling mags, with no idea how it got there. I suspect a neighbourhood kid who had last been allowed in my home three years prior, after my mother caught him sneaking around in the top drawer of her dresser, where the jewelry box was.
2000
On my way back to university from Xmas holiday, in side pocket of luggage, two Playboy magazines, and a Post-It that says “Enjoy — Dad”.
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