April 13th, 2021

The following is a short story I had written for a contest that a local brewery put on.

I didn’t win, but I’m pretty sure the whole thing was rigged anyway.

Enjoy!

CRYOSLEEP 

“That’s right, Blaxnar,” the teacher replied, “and why do you think they opposed CRYOSLEEP in the first place?”

“Cuz they were stupid,” came a shrill voice from the back of the class.

A few of the students laughed.

“One more remark like that Shrblerno, and you’ll be spending CRYOSLEEP Eve in principle Ploarf’s office, you hear me?”

Mrs. Bloflarn was one of the teachers who Shrblerno liked to annoy just to make her glarks stand on end.

“No,” she corrected, combing back her prickling glarks, “the reason why the Awakeists opposed to the Global Rest was because it wasn’t exactly fair, you see, CRYOSLEEP was expensive, and only about half the population could afford it.”

“But didn’t they care about the planet?” inquired a grotesque and hideously deformed Octopus–like creature.

“That’s a great question, Sarah, but back then, they didn’t have the same tools to measure climate change as we do now. It would be like trying to garblow a snook without a glabbin.”

The whole class erupted with laughter. Mrs. Blofarn didn’t joke too often, but when she did it, you could count on it being a banger.

“The Awakeists didn’t view CRYOSLEEP the same way our forefathers did,” she continued, “because they felt that they were being abandoned.”

A husky yellow haired boy with a puzzled look on his face put up his hand. “Yes Gerjinky?”

“Well, what I don’t understand is, why weren’t they happy to have the whole wide world to themselves, like, while the other half slept I mean? They all could have moved to bigger houses and stuff.”

“And some did in the beginning,” Mrs. Bloflarn said, “but eventually, like many Awakeists predicted, the economy started to collapse, infrastructures deteriorated, businesses went bankrupt, and civil war broke out. The half that remained awake didn’t know how to run the world without the other half. Think about it, can you imagine the complex intricacies of an air traffic controller’s job being done by a café barista? Or a construction worker performing brain surgery?”

There was a pause. Mrs. Blorflarn loved these moments; she could see the concentration in her student’s eyes anytime they wrestled with complex ideas.

Finally a hand was raised. “Yes Gerjinky?”

“Well, just because someone didn’t have the money to afford CRYOSLEEP, doesn’t mean they weren’t smart.”

“Absolutely Gerjinky, absolutely 100% correct, and some countries did their best to replace the doctors and surgeons and whatnot, but it took time.”

“Time that our planet needed to heal”

“Exactly, Blaxnar,” said Mrs. Bloflarn with a smile, “and heal it did. But you have to remember; there were only a few viable options at the time. Does anyone recall what the others were? We just went over it last week people.”

“Umm, like mandatory infertility drugs?” whispered a soft voice from the second row. 

“That’s one, good job, Harbanchiaross.” Replied Mrs. Blorflarn, who gave an encouraging wink to the class’s newest student. “What else?”

“Genocide!” shouted Shrblerno.

“Right,” Mrs. Bloflarn sighed, her glarks beginning to rise at the sound of the pre-pubescent voice. “And what do both of those have in common?”

The room was silent.

“They are both an infringement on your rights as a citizen of earth. How would you feel if your mom or dad told you that you weren’t allowed to digfarb your gloobs?” A chorus of boos echoed in reply. “See, just like it probably didn’t feel very good for these people when somebody came along and suggested that half of them didn’t have the right to live, or to give birth.”

The room was silent again.

“But that was the beautiful part about CRYOSLEEP, it didn’t impose on others, and it didn’t force anyone to do anything that they didn’t want to do. Best of all, this happened during the dawn of an impending Socialist revolution, I know that you don’t know what that means yet, that’s grade X3f stuff, but the rich basically said, ‘to hell with you then, see how you do without us,’ and vanished.”

The students listened intently, feeling smarter in the presence of big words which, as the experienced Mrs. Bloflarn anticipated, made them want to prove to her that they were mature enough to ignore the occasionally swear word that, she felt, ‘spiced things up a little.’

“And the rest is history,” Mrs. Blorflarn went on, “half the population had a nap for a few thousand years, the earth got some much needed R&R, the Awakeists were annihilated by the Glarbonacks in ’52…”

A bell sounded in the hall.

Mrs. Bloflarn motioned to her students to stay seated as she hurried to finish, “then the people woke up, made friends with the Glarbos and we all lived happily ever after. Everyone’s glarks as flat as rordpongs, have a wonderful day everyone, see you tomorrow.”

The class hobbled out of their seats and funneled toward the door. “Oh, and don’t forget” Mrs. Bloflarn shouted after them, “you need to hand in your dioramas of ‘President Bleepblarp and the Glarbonacks’ before the CRYOSLEEP parade on Thursday,” 

She watched as the last of the students blended into the busy hall. She had to smile to herself, she’d never felt so hopeful of the future. 

October 30th, 2020

Monday

I’ve decided that Monday is my favourite day of the week.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the weekend, but come Friday evening, I become someone else, someone I don’t even recognize. I lose all discipline and I treat the coming days as if they were vacations; shrugged and carefree and synonymous with alcohol. It’s never on purpose either, I tell myself, at least on the surface. My intention runs away from me as my hands move faster than my head. My rational self surrenders to the chemical flood that sedates my anxious mind. I go to a place without consequences, at least temporarily, when a briefly euphoric moment admits only the present, ignorant of the fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch, that there is always the post-prandial paying of the piper, that the next day is always just around the corner.

When the morning light comes, it takes me aside and tells me that the jokes that I laughed at weren’t funny, whispering with each ray the laughable fragility of my commitments. The whole evening, which I could have sworn I enjoyed, and even gave myself permission to enjoy, has the life slowly sucked right out of it. It becomes dry and opaque. And as the day progresses, I treat myself with more hate than I realize I’m capable of. Shame, guilt, and aggression turn inward. I know my weakest points and I exploit them. My mind is so poisonous that it takes every ounce of my soul, and whatever’s left of the dwindling shards of my ability to reason, to convince myself that I’m not a total fuck up. Even thinking about the slightest bit of responsibility makes my head spin. It throws me into a panic, a dread, like that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. Like everyone is watching you, waiting to laugh at you for whatever screw up you’re bound to make. I don’t even like to look at myself. I’m like the anti-narcissus, throwing rocks at the water, the ripples of which create an image more analogous to my mental state.

The severity of these days varies depending on how many embarrassing scenarios are on repeat in the back of my head, or how many people I think about getting in touch with to apologize for something. I never do though, that always seems to me worse than suffering through it alone. At least I know it will pass, whereas my unguarded vunerability might weaken me in the eyes in another forever. All this, despite knowing my true friends would understand anyway.

The thing is, I never want Monday to come. I’d rather have another Sunday instead. A re-do. But at the same time, I know it has to be Monday. It’s like being sick, but being scared of the cure. The new week opens up its arms to me and reminds me that I belong, that I’m never as bad as I’ve convinced myself to be. The new beginning brings old routine, it provides structure, and it gives my life order. It gives me some control that my head gets lost without. Its familiarity irons out the creases of my mind, flattening the peaks and valleys of too much thought into a palatable hum. And regardless of how far I might wander from myself, from the who and what I am, and the who I hope to be, Monday always reminds me. Its obligations take me to a place where I’m needed, to where people treat me better than I do myself, even if they don’t say anything at all. Monday is never what I want, but it’s always what I need.

October 24th, 2020

A Bus Ride In Kenora

A few summers ago, Carly and I drove to Ontario to attend our friends wedding in Kenora. The reception was at some campground 20 or 30 minutes from the city. At the end of the evening, the bride and groom arranged for a bus to come and take the remaining guests back to their campsites or motels scattered throughout the surrounding area. It turned out that a mini-van would have been enough, there was only 4 or 5 of us left. We made our way onto the the school bus, some of us still mingling and laughing, others more quiet and reserved. We sat scattered apart from one another, as if we had enough socializing for one night. I don’t quite remember how much I had to drink, or if I had been drugged, but I remember starring out of the window of that bus, lost in a revery that I’ll never forget.

As we rolled through the narrow winding road, surrounded by trees, a bright white light on top of the bus would light up intermittently, so as to capture for a moment everything around it, like the flash of a photograph, only remaining long enough in your mind until the next flash, and the next, and so on. Occasionally, the road would open up into the vast empty space of some lake, and it would be quieter as the bus’s noise shot away from us and out into the open air. The trees would disappear and only the lake would remain, dark and faintly glimmering. A sort of calm out of the chaos that allowed your mind to adjust to the soft silver of the moon draped over the evening. Then darkness again. Followed by more flashes. Vividly displaying, one second at a time, an eye full of beauty, of sleeping Nature. A canopy of a green clusters, logs, branches, and leaves. Then darkness. Then a new thick dense of bark and brush, not blurred, but sharp. No symmetry. Not of a flower or snowflake, but of a frenzied mess of beauty. Our thundering metal giant spoiling the solitude of this otherwise silent world. The noise reverberating from the the shrinking distance between the forest and our ears. Every flicker of the light, every transient sketch, revealing to me Natures beauty, Her truth. What was I but a hinderance to Her. Jarring Her awake.

I remember thinking, mesmerized and exhilarated, is this not all of life? Is life nothing more than these momentary flashes of consciousness burned into our memories, eventually to be lost into nothingness? What if someone else was on this bus tomorrow, on this same road, looking out this very window, but it was day instead of night? This curious watcher wouldn’t see what I saw. There would have been too much light, the aperture too wide, too much happening around them to flood their senses. Without my ephemeral sight, a day time spectator would only be able to see a blur of green and earthly colours blending together, literally missing the forest for the trees. During the day, we’re forced to look ahead or behind us to fully comprehend what we’re looking at; an act of reflection and contemplation, of apprehension or evaluation. Many of us are trapped in the day of our minds, unable to sacrifice novelty for nuance. Living in the present means to not look back or ahead for truth, but to look into the flickering darkness of incomplete and fragmented reality. We don’t need to see every square inch of this world to realize that our small fleeting observations are more than enough to fill our life with meaning. We’ll never be able to see all of life at once. So why try? I only had a fraction of the light of day, but I was able to see everything. The world wasn’t changing around me with each illumination. The change was in me.