Chapter Eight: It's all the same machine!!

It seems like the world is keeping me down lately. Last night I stayed in by a combination of choice and circumstance. Tonight it's against my best efforts. I'm 22 years old. It's summer. My life should be more interesting than this.

I guess I had this idea in my head... summertime, people will be around, you know, whatever. It would be easier to find people to hang around with. In fact, though, it's harder. People, shockingly enough, have their own lives. I don't seem to. Well I guess not every weekend can be bowling. A few weeks from now is the play. That promises to be big.

Last night, Cary threw a party, one of those do's that everyone on Facebook gets made aware of. Normally I like to go to these events because they provide a mixture of familiar faces and new people to bother. I usually end up spending the night fixating on some female or another, with varying results, usually just shy of public embarrassment. Frankly I'm not sure I have that in me these days, but it'd be fun (and potentially humiliating) to find out. Get some liquor in me and I never know what I'll do. I may not always be very easy to be friends with, but I like to believe I provide entertainment.

Anyway, I didn't go. The official reason for this is that in these cases I'd rather get a ride than take transit to Hamilton, and CB, the go-to guy in this scenario, went MIA until finally turning up in the middle of the evening, admitting to being half-wasted at a Stanley Cup party. By this point it was too late to really consider transit, and I was beat from the (mostly inconsequential) events of the day, so I took it as a sign. Parties that occur the same night as a big hockey game (which is pretty much any hockey game, especially during those interminable playoffs) never seem as lively.

I had taken a Gravol earlier in the day, and while that's never stopped me before, it's like the morning after taking a late-night sleeping pill (which I've only ever done once, with memorable results) where you're woozy and still feeling the effects. The reason for having taken this Gravol was that I was going out to dinner with my dad and brothers and I'm still so socially maladjusted that I get somewhat nauseous at the idea of going out to eat in public. If my family is aware of this issue - which I've never really explained because I don't even know how to approach it - they don't seem to care, and really I don't want them to. I'd rather fight through it because goddamn I do not want to be a victim.

So my solution is this. I go along. We went to a Jack Astor's by Eric's place. We sat outside in the open air and breeze with the oddly comforting (to me) sound of landing airplanes. I ordered a salad with chicken breast - a fairly light meal - and when it arrived I excused myself to the washroom. What I did in there is between me and the autoflush, but I remind you I had taken a Gravol sometime before. I returned, with Dad and Eric having finished their steaks, and dug into the salad portion. I hardly ate the chicken, got it wrapped to go, and ate it at home around 8:30.

It was a decent night. Dad brought us up to speed on the handling of Granddad's estate. I was content with just the hat and the TV, but I got a little more; how much I'll not say, but it's enough. They sold his house extremely quickly; I had no idea the North Bay real estate market was so hot. Go figure.

So tonight I'm left to my own devices. Mom's got the dog at Tim's. Amazing how we were all "This dog is totally dying" last week, and now he's as stable as any 16-year-old dog might be. Whatever the secret is to that dog's longevity, slice me off a piece.

Amusingly enough, Manda and I both got on Twitter the same week - many months after it ceased to be cool. I first became aware people had it plugged into their Facebooks back in November, when I met a girl at Cary's ArtSci Halloween who had me add her on Facebook (which was weird.) People who used Twitter as the Facebook status immediately climbed to the upper strata of my pet peeves, I have to say. Some of my best friends do this, but I find it irritating to get a chain of Twitter-style status updates on my Newsfeed. now that I am actually on Twitter that feeling has increased somewhat. So I don't have them linked. Although that's not because I'm worried about being annoying, because I've never been averse to that. It's because I believe in the challenge of coming up with unique statements for both, and I challenge you to do the same.

So far I do about one to three Twitter updates per day... I use it to advertise what's on SWP, to create random poetry, or legitimately say what I'm up to. If I think it's something someone might want to reply to, it's more likely to be a Facebook update.

This is in the top ten most irrelevant discussions ever on SWP. Anyway, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/scottowilliams. I may or may not still be using it a month from now, although it's sometimes worth it to watch Jeph Jacques talk at himself through his fictional characters.

So I did end up watching the third period of the hockey game last night. It was as interesting to me as any hockey game, which is considerably less than any given Mighty Ducks movie. I'm the only Canadian male who would say that. I feel zero attachment to the sport of hockey; same goes for basketball and football, both the American and European versions (the latter of which is Soccer.) The only sport I care about is baseball, but the Blue Jays are really starting to break my heart, so I'm considering abandoning them for the rest of the summer, unless they start to catch fire again. They started off so strong too. What a waste. They lost 9 games in a row and never recovered, because how the fuck do you recover from that?

My dad once said to me that Toronto was not a hockey town, it was a Leafs town. The Toronto Maple Leafs attract a certain type of cult unheard of in professional sports. I can think of no more devoted fanbase, except perhaps those of the Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, who saw their teams through lengthy droughts, the latter of which is a century and counting. But the Leafs are something else. Year after year Leafs fans watch in heartbreak as they fail to make the playoffs, of fail early in them. Or whatever. And they take it hard every time. They will never lose faith in their team. Toronto Maple Leafs games sell more tickets, I would imagine, than any other team in the NHL, particularly those with records as bad. Wikipedia says they've sold out every game at the ACC since it opened ten years ago. It's like there's no incentive for them to win games because people will keep paying to see them anyhow. A fear of abandonment is important for a sports franchise to thrive. It's what inspired the Cleveland Indians to hire Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn, and the Chicago Cubs to put 12-year-old Henry Rowengartner on the mound.

Well anyway. We'll see what happens if they manage to bring the Coyotes to Hamilton. I think it's a good idea, split up the Leafs nation, and make them work for their fans' loyalty.

My Short Story prof, as he has an amusing habit of doing, wandered into a tangent in the middle of lecture the other day, talking about how when he was young all that was on TV was wrestling, and to this day he was unsure if it was completely fake, or if it was partly a real competition, or what, and if someone who knew could e-mail him. I've been toying with the idea of writing up an essay on The Nature of Pro Wrestling as a Storytelling Medium for his benefit and for my own amusement. I know more on the subject than most people, although it's not hard to learn.

I got a pretty good mark on my midterm. not great, not as good as my paper, but the instructions for the midterm were even more ill-defined so I really had no idea what the result would be. Fittingly, the main criticism of the paper was that I didn't go deep enough into my ideas, which makes sense as I really had no frame of reference as to how deep I should go, as I was writing it. I was mainly just name-checking various stories and writing a brief summary of how they used death and/or failure. It was an interesting experience and if I'd had more time to ruminate on it I think I could've done better. Interesting exercise, and I suppose that's the point innit?

As I bought Lost season 4 the other week, I'm now buying thew other three, one by one. They've dropped the prices on them so it's pretty worth it so that I can really put effort into getting people (such as dad) into it. I was glad to find that my aunts dug it already.

That's all for tonight. My life should've been more interesting. This is why I write fiction; reality is far too horrifyingly tedious to bear.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto