Choking in the Big Game
Where are the artichokes in this town? You show me a produce store in downtown Montreal and I’ll show you a place that sells heartless, gutless artichokes. All choke and leaves and no heart. These ‘chokes are losers. Sort of a sports metaphor. I’m the Vince Lombardi of artichokitude. Montreal’s artichokes will lose every sporting event they’re expected to win when the chips are down. They won’t give 110% percent, or even a clean hundred.
When wandering the front section of Mourelato’s grocery store I nearly passed right by the artichokes. It was late on Saturday afternoon, and I was shopping aimlessly. Earlier in the day, I’d bought a tiny hip flask, a mixing bowl, and a set of funnels. But the artichokes seemed like a good idea. I’d never prepared them and I rarely eat them, and I have fond memories of family friends, people my parents care about, preparing them for me. They were musky and buttery and delicious. I picked up a palm-sized artichoke and the leaves squeaked when I firmed my grip.
Later, I sawed them in half and noted their inner purple sheath. I feathered out the soft, spindly choke. It’s called the “choke” because if you eat it, the feeling is like that of choking, even though you are not. But here’s where I hit a snag. The recipe for the sauteed artichoke quarters said “pull off all the leaves”. I looked at the artichoke pieces I’d just quartered. What was to remain after I pulled off the leaves? The leaves were the entirety of the vegetable. A leafless Montreal artichoke would be a mere nub of earthy fabric and a chewy stem. If I were to keep plucking, my dinner would disintegrate. This was a problem. There was no heart, no moral centre, no constitution to these feeble florets.
All other variables held constant, the ‘chokes had the makings of a winner. They discoloured when I cut them. Their scent, as they braised in stock and tarragon, took up blissful residence in my soul. The few morsels of edible flesh were tender and succulent. But oh, those leaves, they were everywhere and everything, and the whole sorry edifice crumbled to bits.
They say if you’re going to do something, do it well and with purpose. Treat the task like the universe depends on your doing it. Success is success, it is its own reward, it amplifies experience by compounding itself over the course of your life. A good and earnest man leaves a trail of finished business in his wake. Always, before you start on any act, large or small, say to yourself: “Until it is done, and done well; no sooner, and no worse.” To Montreal’s artichoke purveyors, your task is unfinished. Please try harder. When the artichoke truck shows up in your loading dock, why not inspect the merchandise? Why not look at your wholesaler with a stern gaze and say “I will not accept these cowardly little plants, and why don’t you take these pitiful ‘chokes back to where you found them, re-bury them, and hope they grow a pair this time”? I don’t care if they’re 3 for 99 cents when they’re not worth a dime. I’ll never cheer for these losers as long as I live.
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Waking up to Biscuits ‘n Gravy
Rue St-Catherine, you are not a beautiful bride to wake up to. Fact is, you have a bit of a problem with your upkeep. You emit the quality of being a stain, an oozing wound on the body of mammalian Montreal. And yet, you are its frenetic artery, pulsing with current, with dank and perfume, and I think I love you.
I used to drive to work, a twenty-minute drive along the Gardiner highway in Toronto into the industrial parks of East Mississauga. A commute with absolutely no beauty, it was memorable only for being so imprinted in my memory that I could drive all the way home without conscious awareness that I was in the car. The traffic began to coalesce into patterns that I was able to recognize and navigate mindlessly. I took the same shortcuts, dodged the same potholes and poorly paved offramps, seethed over missed parking spaces using the exact same expletives. My commute, she was a woman without an ounce of mystery left. She was a dinner of beans and rice for twenty years. Two lifetimes, one in each direction, spanned the duration of these daily drives to oblivion and back.
Now, I walk past Iranian and Lebanese, Chinese and French, and a few flavours of Homeless. To your south, staid, corporate Rene Levesque, to the north, purposeless, meandering Maisonneuve. Ste-Catherine, you are a corridor of bleak decadence and dirty neon, filled with human beings stripping each other with their eyes. You are a three dollar whore inside a raging beehive wrapped in Douppioni silk and dipped into a bucket of beef gravy. It doesn’t mean I can’t love you.
In the morning I open the sluicegate and wade out into this churning chute of human depravity. I dodge redolent trails of tossed water trickling towards the street, and I weave past hordes of blank-faced teens on cellphones, ogling the Louis Vuitton shopfront. I drift on past the homeless man outside the Scotiabank, who nods humbly to passers-by, monklike. He carries a found bank card for swiping you into the lobby. He is grateful to even be noticed, an admirable quality.
Thank you, Ste-Catherine, for Sexe Cité, which reminds me of the greatness of other people’s sex lives from its snug display window between a used bookstore and a take-out shawarma restaurant. Pleather-clad mannequins, sex-themed board games, and tubes of personal lubricant start a fire in my heart every morning. It fizzles out after a second or two. Excellent.
Thank you Club Super Sexe, for being you, and thanks for your dirty little brother Club Super Contact, who inhabits one of the more interesting buildings on the street. You make worthy homes to Rigaud’s finest, and to the shills who stand outside barking the beer prices. Thanks for the cavernous Peel Pub, which I can safely ignore, much like the entirety of Rue Crescent. Thanks for 3 Amigos and both locations of Reuben’s. Thanks for turning the act of walking six blocks into sensory overload. Thank you for compacting the best and worst, the tackiest and the most subtle of Montreal into twenty minutes of sidewalk and two underground tunnels. And while I can offer no thanks to the batallions of awestruck human road cones blocking my path every day, maybe it’s just as well that they are learning to love you too.
And no thank you to that fucking Spoon Man.
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The Alpha Splash Club
I am not one for crackpot theories, but bring me an armchair anthropological study any day.
Where I work, the men’s bathroom is a kind of thoroughfare. Bustling as it is, one is privy to certain usage patterns in the citizenry, such as the drippers, or the chronic spitters, or even the cell-phone talkers (they exist, trust me on this). No habit, callous or not, goes unnoticed in such tight quarters.
We share a floor with a sales firm whose male personnel can only described as relics from a bygone era. They resemble early prototypes for the chauvinistic salesman. Brusque and belligerent, these guys whip in and out of the bathroom, talk shop, comb their slime-slick hair, snort and sniffle, and crack ex-wife jokes. These are the men for whom toilet golf and the butt-face towel were invented. They wrestle each other in the elevators, and drive home to their wives expecting a baked ham on the dining room table by the time they walk through that door.
I go out of my way not to interact with these gentlemen, but I do, behind the guise of a straight face, study their behaviour. And I have noticed a habit that, while inconclusive, definitely holds clues to the salesman condition. And that habit is this: when employees from their company use the urinal, they tend to pee directly into the little pool of water at the bottom of the urinal, in order to make the most noise.
This is no accident. To hit that spot, they have to aim, deliberately and intently. They pee to relieve their bladders, but also to alert neighbouring tinklers of their continuing presence. Their behaviour is universal across the company, and they make no efforts to hide it.
The employees of my company are a different bunch. Tech workers, too immersed in code, introspection, and anxiety to think of strutting and preening in an irrelevant place like the bathroom. They do their business and get out, taking care not to pee into the water, not even once their stream has begun to sink into a dribble. This behaviour, too, is a universal, even moreso than the first.
These sales guys are also among the most likely to walk in pairs into the bathroom mid-conversation, enter one stall apiece, and keep on talking. Stand-up peeing in a stall with the door open is not uncommon, nor is whistling a ditty at unacceptable volume during the act. We are clearly dealing with parallel universes of decorum. One group of people tries to treat the bathroom like a quiet home, the other group like a roadside ditch on the Trans-Canada highway situated approx. at Gananoque, ON. But the sociological aspect—the need for enormous, sweating apes to assert their presence among the smaller males—is the more interesting puzzle.
Could there be an alpha-male tendency at work here? To paraphrase, if a salesman is alone in a bathroom and nobody’s around, does he make a sound? Conversely, if a tech worker pees alone, does he pound that water like a Bergereault glockenspiel? Vital questions, these.
I have no answers except what my gut tells me, and that is a leader-of-the-pack mentality, possibly reinforced by years of sales school. In any case, I am proud to have contributed this nugget to the collective wisdom, and hope that whether noisy or nice, your tinkles always hit their mark. Godspeed.
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In Search of The Elusive Estonian Rageflea Extract…
Psychology on the brain lately.
There was an incident at work, a mild one, wherein a loose “if-I-can” deadline agreed upon for a large and unwieldy task became without warning a “must-do-today” deadline of another nature entirely. This transformation of duty took place at 6 PM on a Friday, as I was preparing to go home for the weekend.
“I am not pleased,” I said.
I put my head down, alone in my cubicle. There I was, my weekend sacrificed to some broken link in a chain of managerial duty. When faced with the new reality of my weekend evaporating before my eyes, I felt a fury slowly overtake my body. My thoughts, five minutes ago thinking of the walk home, became uncontrollable and curt, the stuff of revenge, of betrayal, of quitting right there on the spot. This idea was ridiculous then as it is now—quit a job over one bad day?—but blind rage pushed forward, knowing nothing but retribution, confusion, and fear.
Physically, I became agitated. If I held my hand or arm at a certain angle, say by cocking my wrist back to a half-tensed position, I could feel my muscles shuddering. My nervous system was a blast furnace. Staring at the screen and the task ahead, my lymph nodes felt like they might start swelling out of my body like balloons. A vein throbbed in rhythmic shrieks at the very top of my head.
I rested my hands on the wrist guard at the base of the keyboard. Others chatted nearby about their weekend plans, packing up their bags, summer jackets rustling amidst the creak of chairs. Sensing the distraction, I put my headphones on and cranked the worst music I had, something heavy and noisy and infused with adolescent mythology. Before long, while my rage refused to subside, my sense of reason came back, and the haze was swept away. Still furious, I began slowly to enter a state of flow. All physical distance, all false barriers, fears, hesitations, and psychological detritus that previously sat between myself and my work, crumbled away. I had channeled my anger into my quivering hands, and put them to the keys like alligator clips to the contacts of a battery.
My manager came back a while later to find that the task which was expected to take another half-day of work was almost finished. She stood at the wall of my cube, watching me. Scarcely aware that she was even there, I bored in deeper, furiously task-switching and hammering dialogue boxes, the pallid Windows XP landscape becoming terra cognita, its cursor becoming almost a physical extension to my body. My manager missed half of what I was doing because it happened so quickly.
The second it was completed, packaged up, and sent off, I hit Windows-L on the keyboard to lock the screen, picked up my jacket, and walked out. I didn’t even wait for the automated confirmation email. My anger was gone, forced out by a beaming pride.
It is more obvious than ever to me that productivity is a direct function of one’s physiological state. Fight or flight responses in humans are strong and potent even though the padded walls of our comfortable society often cause us to forget they exist.
More interesting to me: can this physiological reaction be invoked at will? I am not prepared to accept that in order to work as efficiently and single-mindedly as I did on Friday, some external agent will have to incite in me the same ire, the same infernal heat and noise and crashing, blinding mania. I am not willing to lean over a building ledge or be attacked by carnivorous apes every couple of hours to get through a productive workday.
But can I simulate the adrenaline state with a perceived stimulus? Or is adrenaline always beyond our grasp, left to external forces?
I have been reading about Martin Seligman’s theories of Learned Helplessness, whereby we are conditioned to believe falsely, but instinctively in the nullity of our actions. By severing the relationship between cognition and its consequences, an erroneous or malformed belief about an action’s outcome reduces our motivation to act, making us prone to anxiety. We learn to disbelieve the causality of our actions, which teaches us not to bother trying.
I crave the opposite condition: a hyper-awareness of the causality of my actions, where I taste every consequence on my tongue before it happens, the forces set in motion by my neurotransmitters growing outward in jagged vines before my eyes. I want to see a clean line connecting a task—washing a dish, writing a paragraph, slicing and uploading a digital image—with its reward, no matter what manifestation it should ultimately take. Today, these rewards satisfy my rational mind, but not my physiology. The highs are diminished, grey, flattened-out. Worse still, there is a tendency to fall into the easier and more sustained highs of passive action, TV and movies and video games, the kind that end once you turn off the screen.
At times, it feels as though a distant word like physiology represented something practiced only in labs or universities, away from the safety of our daily lives. There is likely no non-chemical solution to the problem of willfully causing uninhibited concentration in your average subject. In any case, we are rewarded whenever life makes us aware that we operate on the basis of synapses forming networks, into which are poured habits, motivations, and beliefs, connected to our spinal column and our extremities, and blasting out of this pulsating evolutionary slag heap, like magma bubbling forth from the earth, comes the red-faced fear of having to work a late weekend.
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