"Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit"
-Randall Munroe, xkcd- "Connoisseur"
Predictably,
Harp strings warmly waft like wet water drip-dropping down from the nape of your neck to your naughty nether-lands, as here and now dissolves, and we drift through time and space to an older time, a time before the present time...
It was--
Halloween
Remember Halloween? No? Yeah, my memory of it is admittedly spotty, too. But, I do remember going to Fright Nights at the PNE with Sean Fenton and Justin "That's Cray-Cray!"™ Chan.
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| Personally, I think the separation of "Car" and "N" makes it sound like this is some evil automotive Wal-Mart, rather than an evil carnival... |
Some of you readers with keen memories will recall that this is not the first time I've mentioned the PNE in this blog. In "Raising Atlantis," the gang went to the PNE, only to be thwarted at every turn. This was a chance at redemption--nay! salvation.
First came The AtmosFear, the ride that was forbidden: the one that got away. A 218-foot, appropriately phallic monument to blueballs and shattered dreams...
"Somebody! Get them down from there! Man was not meant to flyyyyy!"
I also had Sean Fenton as my ride-mate, who was apparently oblivious to the imminent death that I was inwardly coming to grips with, which meant that while I had reached the 'Bargaining' stage of grief, he was exuberantly swinging his legs, causing the separated-from-certain-death-by-thin-ass-chains seat to pirouette back and forth 50 degrees as we careened around at 70 km/h far overhead. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. We laughed in the face of danger-- ha ha ha ha!
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| Did you see Lion King in 3D? I had forgotten how AMAZING the soundtrack was. |
Playland: 3, Tourist: 1
Perhaps the only thing better than the ride were the post-coital mini doughnuts which we took as the spoils of our victory over the tyranny of lineups and vertigo, as well as Justin's irritable bowels.
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| "Tonight, we feast!" |
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| Slowly developing coulrophobia... |
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| Still not sure how "Awesome Radical 90's Spin Ride, Dance Dance!!" got the rights to Will Smith's likeness... |
Probably the best part of Fright Nights, however, was the Haunted Clown House, and played upon all the classic fears: first, they made you put on recycled 3D glasses (which gave the neon blood speckled on the dismembered clown corpses hanging from the ceiling a very Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feel) mortifying my inner germaphobe; secondly, it was full of dismembered clowns, so the whole fear-of-clowns thing was in full swing; but the scariest/most hilarious part of the house was the part where they tried to prey on your inner claustrophobe.
They did this by having a doorway which was completely obstructed by two black inflatable bags, which you had to squeeze through to get to the other side. Presumably, I thought, this was a typical door frame equipped with giant inflatable black labia. The hilarious part, though, was that, once inside, it was an inflatable hallway that went on forever-- it was like 15 feet of fumbling through suffocating amniotic darkness, only to be birthed out on the other side laughing hysterically.
Come to think of it, despite all of its macabre neon blood and disfigured clowns, Fright Nights was also quite Freudian... O! the horror of ourselves!
Playland: 3, Tourist: 3
Then came Halloween at The Waldorf, with Silverwood and Aldora.
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| Aldora as (a "fierce") Batman, Silverwood as the Batmobile. Insert "riding him" jokes here. |
I dressed up as Johnny Canuck (wearing a beard that was to foreshadow my incredibly manly Movember man-growth) and did my best to conceal my envy as I took this picture with a better-dressed comrade:
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| He had a real beard. And a real missing tooth, I believe. Not actually sure he was in costume, now that I think about it. |
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| Is it just me, or did a giant Cookie Monster walk through this set of photos? |
Past a certain drink threshold, my inner larcenist is awakened, and, accordingly, I woke up the next morning with a pilfered rose and a novelty pair of comically-oversized sunglasses. And also a teensy bit of a hangover.
For those of you thinking, "Max, didn't you say in your last post that you didn't want to write about Halloween in December-- much less 2012-- because that would be super lame? Didn't you just arbitrarily give yourself an extra point in the score against Playland? Isn't this whole entry an extended genitalia metaphor?" I applaud your keen attention to detail. I also will have to be sure to allow for even more time to elapse between future posts to avoid such observations.
Shows
Then Peter and I went to see Death From Above 1979-- one of my favoritest bands of all time-- at the Commodore Ballroom! I geeked out hardcore, and basically spent the entire show key-lessly shouting along to each song, and white man dancing like a marionette wielded by an epileptic.
Fashion alert!
With my keen eye for cutting-edge style, I noticed this au courant trendsetter, who was wearing a trim, seasonal reflective safety vest with dazzling pastel colours and and a bold, lustrous 'X' design that at once loudly proclaims "I like to shine!" as well as "Please obey all posted speed limits."
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| This guy just lights up any room he walks into |
Is this really a hipster thing now? Surely there must be a line somewhere between "finding lost treasures" and "having no sense of style"; between "being ironic" and "literally wearing trash." Gahhh, people are the worst.
"Going Steady" (with ironically unsteady camera work):
In keeping with the dichotomous character of my life/this blog (because I don't believe in labels, man), Saringer and I followed DFA by seeing their diametric musical opposite, The National, at The Orpheum.
Lo! Pitchfork-- look at my trendy music taste! Look at the grandiloquent vituperation I use to repudiate hipsters! Look at the deftly-captured lens flare in my concert photography! Plus, when I was a teen, I listened to, like, a lot of Pavement and Sebadoh-- can I have a job, please?
(M/N)ovember
For some optimistic/delusional reason, I decided to give Movember a try. It wasn't even a dirty 'stache, really-- more of a "you-could-wear-that-two-or-three-more-times-before-putting-it-in-the-wash" 'stache. I got lazy towards the end, and within a week, the rest of my facial had caught up to my moustache growth from all of November, morphing it into a they-didn't-allow-razors-in-rehab scruff:
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| Of course, if I did grow this, they probably wouldn't let me work with children anymore |
In one of the more unlikely segues ever, if there's anything I've learned from Movember, it's the value of taking a running start. Who, after all, had the best Movember mustaches? The guys who began growing them in September, of course-- it's not cheating, really, just Spring training.
The same goes for a lot of things, I guess. Imagine if we all got started on our New Years' resolutions a month early, instead of waiting until January 1. That way, by the time the new year began, people would be so impressed with how well you were doing with your goals (I had planned to start smoking the week before New Years, so I could successfully quit smoking at the stroke of midnight December 31, and wake up on January 1 saying "year accomplished!" but I ended up settling on "tweet more").
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| My second resolution was "be cool." |
Since I started this blog, I think I've been quite adept at defining and achieving my goals: I wanted to write more than one blog post: done; I wanted to unequivocally establish my FIFA 99 supremacy: DONE; I wanted to find old-style Domino's pizza: done; I wanted to return to Playland and accomplish all over its face: emphatically done.
"Achievement-oriented individual with
a strong record of setting and accomplishing goals"
My sterling résumé practically writes itself.
In a sense, I began this blog as a sort of "running start": I wanted to write, and a blog seemed like a great way to get going. Sure, it's not a novel, or a Field of Screams-caliber screenplay, but it does use lots of big words and accent aigus.
Plus, I occasionally try to throw in some acerbic social commentary--
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| Take that, Establishment! |
I also want to travel and explore, so why not start while still at home? Sure, perhaps that whole Movember thing was a tenuous metaphor, and sure, maybe I devote a disproportionate amount of this blog to Domino's pizza and mini doughnuts, but I am exploring. Sometimes, you just have to begin doing something, maybe before you even know exactly what it is you're doing. Not everything in life can be meticulously planned, or done perfectly the first time.
Sometimes, life is an alien mask haphazardly slapped on a skeleton with a peg leg and a bat-fringe cape. Or a shoddy metaphor.
Or watching perfect sunsets--
Or completely throwing caution to the wind and eating a can of olives from a vending machine at a bar--
The eventuality, of couse, is that wanderlust eventually becomes a fully full-on wander-boner, and the whole "staycation," travelling-is-a-state-of-mind mantra stops sounding convincing (man, this whole entry really is an extended genitalia metaphor, isn't it?). In a way, it's a premonition you never didn't have-- it's a constant, dim awareness you can never quite shake, like the suspicion that when you're not around, someone goes into your bathroom and rubs off a couple of their pubes onto your bar of soap, because you checked, and it was totally clean after you used it.
That's why I've decided to go traveling this summer. Because, as cool as it is to explore home, there's an inescapable sense of stasis that my late-onset teenage ennui is dying to escape. Like this entry, I really need a little more direction, and I can at least believe that I'm closer to finding it if I'm not standing still.
But anyways--
Then came Christmas.
Seeing friends back from the four corners of the world, drinking copious amounts of egg nog, and watching all the classic holiday films-- National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, Jingle All The Way, Die Hard 2...
...and Angels with Filthy Souls:
And of course, putting Mariah Carey's "Merry Christmas" album on infinite repeat.
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| Also, Randy Travis' "An Old Time Christmas"... |
The festive season reached a dangerous level of jollity when Dave Yew and I headed to the German Christmas Village downtown, which was incredibly charming. It was full of ornate, German artisan Christmas dioramas--
Hand-carved ye-olde yuletime toys--
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| Too cool for yule. |
And my favorite, a toy that depicts a young Teutonic lad violently peeing himself in excitement over St. Nicholas' imminent arrival--
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While I liked the Christmas village, I spent a large amount of our visit violently convulsing at the repulsive stench of burning gouda-- apparently used to cook everything at the Christmas village-- inspiring this:
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| One cheesy pun after another... |
Then we paid a visit to the Vancouver Public Library--
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| "A whole new wooooorld... of knowledge." -Dave Yew |
Dave insisted I pose for this photo. Then I went in and got a library card. I'll be writing a memoir about the event forthwith. Jesus, am I actually blogging about going to the library? This is starting to feel like an "Adam @ Home" strip...
Oh God...
I'd like to think I've made some progress on the whole "curing my touristiness" thing since I began this blog. For one, instead of continuing my academic studies and book learnin', I enrolled in the school of hard knocks, gaining worldly knowledge by getting a job in the real world... which happened to be at a school.
Moreover, I'm slowly getting a better grasp of the geography of the city, and I usually have an idea of what people are talking about when they name a place to go out to at night (karaoke Thursdays at Mosquito Creek! [or 'Skeet Creek, as those in the know refer to it]). But there's still a long way I have left to go: I still don't know all the city street names, I still don't know which buses run where, I still never know when it's garbage day...
Lastly, there was New Year's in Whistler with Baxter, Cyrus, Dara, and Karl.
Skiing with Cyrus and Dara is like trying to keep up with your older cousin when you went biking as kids. Their bike is bigger and cooler and has way more gears, and, since you can't go as fast with your training wheels, they have to stop every hundred yards to wait, casting a tolerating, but inwardly resentful gaze back towards you as you laboriously wheel up, the plastic beads on your bike spokes click-clacking slower and slower in shame. And you say to yourself, "Why wouldn't Mom let me take the training wheels off?! I could totally bike without training wheels..."
Being expert skiers, Cyrus and Dara quickly grow bored of my insistence on going down blue runs, and getting sweet air in the Sugar Bowl. Their idea of skiing is like something out of that terrible Devon Sawa movie Extreme Ops: "Oh come guys-- we just need to inch along this cliff-side escarpment, then hike over Dead Man's Ridge, take the rope swing over Widow's Pass, and then we'll go for a leisurely ski down this sheer-faced volcanic glacier. Through the trees."
I tried to follow them along such an escarpment, but I face-planted, and was forced (gladly) to ski down a slightly less lethal part of the mountain. Brave Sir Karl, however, followed, and almost died. True story. By the time we had all finished our delicious conciliatory Splitz burgers, however, all was forgiven. I think.
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| It was totally like this. |
I mentioned in my last post that we had cracked 500 views of this blog, which seemed like a potentially impressive milestone. Then, the views skyrocketed, and I've since cracked 1300 views! At first, I was flattered, thinking I had achieved some sort of notoriety-- that word of mouth was spreading, or perhaps that Cyrus' attempt to make my blog "go viral" had finally extended beyond e-mailing our old high school English teacher that one of her ex-students was "doing something 'literary.'"
However, I then looked at the traffic sources, and noticed they were mainly from Google image searches for this stupid Starsky and Hutch photo I used in my last post.
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| This one. |
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| Tags: Tebowing, Blue Ivy Carter, Kim Kardashian's ass |
Get in the van,
Max
Twitter: @MaxSzentveri
Dramatis Personae
People in this post:
You can't take this guy anywhere.
A way better Batman than George Clooney.
Osoyoos.
He almost killed me.
He almost died. For real.
His New Years' resolution: quit doing that 'eyebrow thing.'
Beer pong champ.
Is Afraid of Everyone.
Parties 'til the wheels come off.
"You're a woman, I'm a machine" is his favorite pickup line.
Loves the smell of burning gouda. And terrible, terrible puns.
