Train in Vain

I enjoy traveling. I enjoy discovering the slight differences in an otherwise generic string of hotel rooms, in spending hours waiting for a flight, in the way the waiting just slows down your thinking and forces you to take a little time for yourself. Why I differ from your average traveler on the joys of waiting, I am not sure, though this one trip may have something to do with it.

See I once spent twelve hours traveling from Belleville, Ontario to my home in Toronto. For those of you unfamiliar with this distance let me just say that normally, on a normal train ride, you could cross this distance in slightly over an hour. I said just slightly over an hour, not just slightly over twelve hours. Through some quirk in the universe I found myself boarding a train at 7pm and getting off at 7am.

So what happened? Well I’m glad I’ve rhetorically asked myself that, see it began as soon as I had boarded the train in Belleville. No sooner I had sat down then the train started to roll backwards. And it kept going. It wasn’t just a “whoops, through that into reverse” sort of embarrassing lurch backwards before correcting it. It kept going.

A half hour later our reversing stopped. And then we just sat there, in the middle of nowhere, the nearby woods all around us just ever so slightly backlit by the moon in an intimidating ‘your screwed if you leave that train’ sort of manner. We sat there in what quickly became complete silence, after everyone on the train car exhausted looking around and going “what do you think is going on?” and the person next time them replying “I don’t know?”

Finally we got some information as the captain… is it a captain on a train? A pilot? I think it’s an engineer who drives a train… well after a quick research session of typing “who drives a train?” into Google I’m happy to report the first search result is “Brazil's president drives bullet train on private leg…” Since this about exceeds the budget for research I have hear at Confessions of a Cidiot, or really just exceeds my interest in knowing, we’ll have to go with this.

So Brazil’s president comes on the PA system, deciding to fill us in, “Hello everyone. You may have noticed we were traveling backwards there for a little bit…” he seems unsure of this statement, as if perhaps without degrees in train driving we might not have caught this little tidbit for ourselves.

“What happened is this,” continued el presidente as he went from unsure to the tone reserved for a man about to explain to his wife how he ended up smelling like stripper. “Another train broke down out here, and so we’ve, we’ve, well we’ve decided to backup so we could hook the other train onto ours and just pull it on into Toronto!” His confidence building towards the end, before adding for good measure, “so yeah, once we hook the two trains together we should be on our way.”

What our good friend the president of Brazil left out was that no one aboard his train, or that of the train behind us, knew anything about hooking two trains together. This was information that probably would’ve been good for the Prez to know ahead of time, before we say started a half hour trip away from our destination, but now it was to late and none of us 400 passengers were going anywhere until someone figured out the correct way to hook two trains together.

Of course being towards the front of the train we had little idea as to what was transpiring, the attendant in our car every few minutes bitterly informing us it would just be a couple of minutes more. For those of you unfamiliar with Canadian train customer service, each train car is staffed with one attendant who is, surprisingly and what one would assume is a physical impossibility, always a little more bitter then your average bitter flight attendant. She, and it seems to be about 80 percent of the time a she, with 15.5 percent of the time a bald man, and 4.5 percent of the time a man with hair, almost always speaks in a thick French accent. This accent always hints at being a little forced, as if in the hopes that if you think English isn’t their first language you won’t ask stupid questions like “why did you sell more tickets then seats on a train?” (It’s happened) or the more timely “why have we spent two hours on a train and are only further away from our destination then when we started?”

Traveling by train in Canada makes you appreciate flying, in ways you thought not possible in this day and age of liquid fearing, pay us if you want your in-flight meal, and we’ll have to run a background check on you before we give you the plastic knife, airline service.

People began to grow restless, our female attendant and the bald male attendant from a few cars up who had come to help her out began fielding questions from every person missing a connecting train, bus or plane, every person who had a special event to go to that night, or just anyone who didn’t think spending the night in a train not built for overnight service was a fun idea.

“What’s going on?” was the standard question. The attendants sighed (forcing them to interact with a passenger is really asking a lot) before launching into the fact we’d only be a few minutes longer.

The true answer went something more like this: the diligent engineers at the back of the train, with their handy tools for the job, one watt key chain flashlights and all, had finally identified why the concept of hooking one train to another was just so darn tricky. The train from Montreal, the one that had broken down, had at some point along the way collided with a deer. The key clamp that would secure their train to ours was now buried deep under a pile of White Tailed Carcass.

But again we didn’t know all this up in our car. Instead we were greeted with our own personal bad news; the train was out of food to sell us. Well they weren’t completely out of food, but as the bald attendant tried to explain in thick accented English when pressed on the issue, “well, we are not totally out of food, but we do not have enough for everyone, and so we will not sell any of it to anyone. It’s only fair.” The man’s reasoning was not greeted with as much understanding as he seemed to be expecting, perhaps had he explained to us about the mush formally known as deer no one would be quite in the mood for food.

The P.A. system jumped into action again, “hello, this is your president of Brazil speaking (as you can imagine this isn’t a direct quote), what we are going to be doing is pulling forward, then backing into the other train. Thank you for your patience.”

And so we did, for the first time in hours the train began to move forward, then backward. The engineers had decided removing road kill from the front of the locomotive wasn’t in their job description, but perhaps if we backed into the train the force of our train hitting the other would dislodge the deer and we’d be good to go. This line of thinking is perhaps why Hollywood has produced few films where the hero was a brilliant train engineer.

The deer remained stuck, and, as we’d learn later, the engineer radioed up for the train to pull further ahead, then back faster! Nothing, “faster!” the engineer called again. No one ever recounted a story about any crew member wondering if it was such a bright idea to slam two trains together over and over, faster and faster. I suppose possible train derailment is a good alternative to deer guts on the hands.

El presidente took us up to ramming speed on the third pass, and miraculously it did the trick. The two trains were hooked. The funny thing was, in all the commotion in trying to hook our train with good old disabled Train 65, no one thought that once we were hooked up together we’d still have to overcome the mechanical difficulties that plagued the first train in the first place, problems with the brakes.

“We are all hooked up to the other train now; we’ll just be a couple more minutes, thank you for your continued patience.” The PA system ensured us. Somewhere at the back of the train our heroic engineers went to work.

Myself and the girl sitting next to me took this additional couple of minutes to get to know each other. When these ‘couple more minutes’ turned into several long hours we began to find we had learnt more about one another then some family members knew, and we were dangerously low on idle chit chat to pass the time.

Our fellow passengers in the car were starting to get a little paranoid in ways only passengers aboard a train in the 21^st Century could, the best theories on what was really going on it was agreed, were a terrorist attack or a hidden camera reality show.

The reality show theory began to gain steam as a third attendant, this time representing the 4.5 percent young, not yet bald male’s, came aboard our car and informed us every bathroom on the train had been used to capacity, that the septic tanks were full, and that we were going to have to go outside from here on in.

The women aboard our car were outraged, and for the next half hour or so anger over the idea of using the woods as a washroom filled not only our car, but every other car in the train.

Slowly people broke down and gave in, leaving the train they were instructed not to go more then five feet beyond the tracks by attendants who held flashlights on everyone, ensuring no one tried to flee the prison we had all paid to board and make a go of it in the woods.

Every so often a woman would come back in from outside and exclaim “I just urinated in the woods!” and all the other women aboard the car would cheer, as though we had entered a very, very, special edition of Oprah.

I myself eventually gave in and left the train to venture out into the cold January night. Walking past my fellow travelers to a secluded little spot I looked all around at the thick, pitch black wall of forest around us. As I began to unzip I started to do some calculations. I began to run the odds of the fact that maybe I wasn’t a main character in this story; here I was the furthest one away from the door to the car, adjusting the glasses I wore in only the way the first guy to die would. His body mysteriously being dragged into the woods by some unseen force, another passenger, perhaps our hero, seeing me lifelessly disappear into the woods would try to warn others, but who would listen? Not only does the first person to die in a horror movie have the sad fact that he’s dead going for him, his death always goes unnoticed.

I quickly zipped up and returned to the train.

Before long we were finally moving, another half hour we were back in Belleville. Seven hours of traveling and I hadn’t made it an inch closer to home. We stopped well some people were unloaded onto stretchers and the rest of us used the stations washrooms and lone vending machine.

An hour or so later we boarded again. The trip, we were reassured, would not be much longer.

A half hour past Belleville we allowed a freight train to pass us, how this is possible to allow one train to pass another train I may never know, but needless to say as it got past us is broke down. In all seriousness, it stopped dead in front of us. We began the waiting game again.

And so you see to this day I can stand, no, I might even enjoy a red eye from Los Angeles to Toronto with a four hour stop over in South Carolina. At least there’s no deer.

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An Open Letter From the CN Tower

Dear Torontonians,

I know by now you’ve probably heard rumours that I, your beloved tower, am no longer a candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records.

I know now that there is another tower courting you, a much younger tower, a tower with some fancy foreign sounding name, one which, dare I say, is a little bigger in the freestanding structure department.

Now I’ve never been one to suffer from tower envy. When did I need to? But I know how we’ve sneered at them in the past. I’m thinking of course of the laughably named Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand or the Eiffel Tower in the city of love. I suppose one must be the charming romantic when what you got to offer is a mere 1063 feet.

Sure over the past 30 odd years you’ve always said size didn’t matter, yet somehow I feel when you look up at my 1,815 foot shaft now there’s a little less wonder in your eyes.

Maybe it’s just my paranoid imagination but when you ride my elevator I feel like your mind is somewhere else, like you are imagining what it would be like to be riding a younger tower, a tower full of apartments, restaurants and life.

Yes, in recent years we’ve had our problems but I’m fully willing now to apologize and accept responsibility for throwing large chunks of ice down on you last March. That was my bad.

But we worked through it. That taxi had its window repaired and I can’t recall me doing it since, can you?

That’s what I thought.

I guess what I am really trying to say is for 31 years I have been your tower, and you my city.

Maybe I’m not the biggest out there, but maybe I can be more fun. Maybe I can be more romantic. You’ve just always been so proud of me, even when the other Canadian cities sneered at our relationship, you stood by me.

I don’t want to lose that.

Love always,

CN Tower

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How to Write an Autobiography

A bit of a disclaimer of sorts: Though I pride myself on true life stories here within the column margins of Confessions of a Cidiot, today we step away briefly from that to witness an Imagine-actment of a discussion between myself and my agent who is looking to cash in on the trend of celebrity publishing. Though many of the facts before you, from a learning disability to having met a certain celebrity mentioned below through a party are true, the rest is purely an exaggeration. Of course my agent would never ask me to get addicted to cocaine… it was ecstasy.

The setting, my agent’s office. One of those talks to discuss the trajectory of my career.

Agent: Robertson I’m glad you could come in.

Me: It’s good to see you again.

Agent: Look don’t get to excited son, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

Me: Alright?

Agent: Firstly we’re going to have’ta drop the whole comedy thing; I mean what is this, the 90s? Think you’ll land a few minutes on the talk shows, get yourself an HBO special, then land a sitcom? No, passé. We’re in the… zeros?

Me: I’ve heard the decade be called the double O’s.

Agent: Whatever, the point is we’ve got a whole new career path lined up for you.

Me: Oh?

Agent: It’s called the autobiography, and I know what you’re thinking but no, they’re not just for old people anymore!

Me: I don’t understand, why would…

Agent: There’s big bucks in the thing, and I want my 30 percent.

Me: 20 percent.

Agent: Right, whatever.

Me: Why would anyone want to read my autobiography?

Agent: I asked myself the same thing. Who is this kid who cracks jokes about God knows what? Who wants to read about him? So I had the boys draft up a few ideas.

Me: Ideas abou…

Agent: Well sorry, slip of the tongue, twenty five percent of the boy’s are women, HR says I’ve got to start referring to them as junior associates.

Me: Okay, but these ideas, what are they?

Agent: First of all we need a relationship, gorgeous celebrity, obviously more famous then you.

Me: Obviously.

Agent: From there we can take a number of routes. Pre-marital pregnancy, shotgun wedding in Vegas, you cheat on her with her maid. Whatever, so long as you’ve got intimate moments to dish about and are able to whine about living in her shadow we should have half a book right there, and hey if you can somehow get her to abuse you, even better.

Me: You’re joking right?

Agent: You know Scarlett Johansson right?

Me: Yeah well we met a couple of years ago at this party and…

Agent: Perfect.

My agent pounds a few keys on his telephone.

Agent: Robyn, call Scarlett’s people, tell them we’d like to set up a meeting.

Phone: Please hang up and try your call again…

Agent: Great, consider it done Robertson.

Phone: …this is a recording.

My agent pounds a few more keys on the telephone.

Me: I really don’t think this is a good idea.

Agent: What’re you turning down a chance to date Scarlett? You’re not batting for the other team are you son?

Me: What? No, I just think…

Agent: Although that would make for an interesting plot twist, comedian deals with being in the closet.

Me: I’m not in the closet, out of the closet, or having much to do with closets. In fact I’ve got a number of reliable sources that’ll tell you my wardrobe is really more of a floor-drobe.

I laugh, my agent just looks at me funny.

Agent: So Scarlett it is. But I don’t think we can center the whole thing around that, we need more.

My agent scribbles a number on a post-it note before handing it to me.

Agent: My dealer, tell him you’re interested in a little freebase cocaine. Just make sure you do the stuff and don’t just say you do, I had this client James Frey, train wreck.

Me: I’m not doing cocaine!

Agent: Relax, the agency will pay your rehab bills. Now our research has found you being born in Toronto doesn’t work. Autobiography fans really dig that small town rags to riches junk. We’ve worked up a list of towns that’d play well. Our top choices were Fayetteville, Arkansas, Polson, Montana, or Hazleton, Pennsylvania. I thought you were more of a Polson man myself.

Me: This is all insane.

Agent: We’re also going to need to really play that learning disability thing of yours for tears, milk it. It worked for Albert Einstein; you can be the Einstein of comedy.

Me: I really don’t think I should be ‘milking’ something I worked hard to overcome.

Agent: Great, perfect. Worked hard to overcome. This autobiography is writing itself! Speaking of which, here’s a list of writer’s for you to consider.

My agent hands me a list.

Me: Why would I need a writer to write my story? I’m a writer.

Agent: Uh huh, yes you are. Just read over that list and make a decision by morning. You know I think we’ve really found the career path that’s right for you this time. One more thing before you go though.

Me: Let me guess, you want me to be the butler for the royal family for a couple of years then write a tell-all?

Agent: No, those sorts of things don’t sell in the south.

Me: What then?

Agent: Can you show me how to get my phone off vibrate?

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Derek's Inferno

Somehow I had gone my whole life without ever visiting a chain of Swedish Furniture Outlets, at the time this didn't seem like much of an achievement. I've never been to Polish Car Dealership or a New Zealand Waffle Maker, though I bet the Polish would make some pretty reliable cars.

Last week this all changed as my sister Emily and her husband Chris (experienced Swedish Furniture Outlet shoppers) wanted to take my brother Will, my girlfriend Amanda and a friend of my girlfriends to get stuff for their new places as they prepared to start a new year of university. Being the dutiful brother and boyfriend that I am I agreed to tag along as soon as I got off work.

My instructions were to take the Swedish Furniture Outlet's courtesy shuttle to get there, but when I arrived at the pick up point the shuttle was no where to be seen and I was hardly in the mood to wait around for it. Being born and raised and a big city where you could walk to everything I made a mistake I've made far to often all across the continent, I believed I could walk it.

The thing about the Swedish Furniture Outlet is that the largeness of its building, topped only by the largeness of it's epically flat and barren parking lots, forces it to the outskirts of the city, with all of the other big box stores, a sort of freak show at the edge of the fair.

"Not for the faint of heart but to your right you'll see a store the length of two football fields that sells nothing but bean bags!" Everyone gasps as they take in the freak of shopping nature, "how can such a thing exist?" one would ask in amazement before adding, "man I hope they take debit, I could use bean bags in every room of my house!"

And so there I was, on the edge of Sanity and Suburbia, convinced that I could navigate the streets towards the store in the distance. Why I thought I could do this I'll never know, in my experience suburban streets dip and loop, seeming to want to avoid straight lines at all costs, quite often by the time you reach the end of one long and pointless curve you'll realize the street has no exit. These needlessly long journeys down arching streets are made worse by the monotony of seeing identical home after identical home, your sanity kept only by the fact that some cookie cutter homes have basketball nets on the side of their driveway, some do not.

My walk became longer and longer and just as tiredness was letting me have it for choosing to walk I found I had looped right back to where I began, the courtesy shuttle waiting for me like some cruel joke.

It's tough to say anything bad about the courtesy shuttle, for had I not gotten aboard I may still be wandering the streets right now, but all the same the small bus had wooden 'seats' running down both sides of it, forcing passengers to sit face to face with their fellow travelers, our knees practically touching. It felt more like we were being shipped off to some sort of war, my fellow travelers and I prepared to do battle against the insurgents in bedding and linen.

When we arrived at the parking lot for the Swedish Furniture Outlet I fought the urge to storm the beaches and instead met up with my party.

As my fellow shoppers began loading up on things for their dorm rooms I wandered along amazed, the store was carefully crafted so that one had to wander down a path through each department, never missing one. Windows and clocks were non existent, unless they were for sale in the windows and clocks section. The store was beautifully crafted to ensure you'd see see every object that was for sale without ever having a concept of how long you had been in there or that there was a world beyond this windy path of 'Swedish' goods. I was finding myself throughly impressed and appalled all at the same time by these manipulative tactics.

Then there was the Swedish. Every product had it's own Swedish name. If you wanted to buy a rectangle bowl you were buying the Rektangle tm. As far as shopping experiences go with the girlfriend this one was looking up, at least I could learn the Swedish word for over priced - poorly constructed lamp (that's " över kosta - torftig anlägga lampa " I believe). If I could learn the Spanish name for mini skirt my easily distracted mind may be more tolerable on some of her other shopping ventures.

But then, as any outing with me seems to do, things took a turn for the worst.

I had the sudden and unrelenting need to go to the washroom. This was no big deal at first, I split off from everyone else and began to follow the signs to the restroom. At first I expected it to be just around the corner, when this was not so I figured it would just be another turn or two on the Swedish twisty path, but it was not.

Suddenly as I found myself wandering from rugs to bathroom accessories (a cruel irony if ever there was one) it occurred to me I was trapped in the nine circles of Swedish hell.

As I darted through the first circle I couldn't help but think how tempting several show toilets looked, but I had to say strong, surely another bend or two in the path would lead me to salvation.

I arrived in lighting, our second circle of Swedish hell, where one is convinced by the charming name and reasonable price to buy a paper bag over a light bulb and set it up within their home proudly, for reasons their friends will never understand.

Another sign with an arrow towards the washroom lay ahead, and either hope or wishful thinking filled me, I bounded around the next corner and straight into the circle known as Prints and Frames, where one could buy I concede some beautiful paintings, but with so many of the same print for sale you just know someone would come over to your house and go "oh, Swedish Furniture Outlet, I saw that on sale a few weekends ago".

I continued my journey deeper and deeper into Swedish hell, finding myself bombarded by Swedish words like Vildbar or Smyekn as I searched desperately for the 'toalette' as Swedish hell may call it.

As I passed through the end of Home Decoration I seemed to be getting close, the maze of paths and shelves of things were coming to an end, the building was changing around me, surely this must be where the washroom would be found.

It wasn't.

In fact I was in Self Serve Furniture, a warehouse where customers could grab pieces of furniture off racks upon racks. I contemplated how one would self serve themselves some furniture on the top shelf, wondering if letting Joe Suburban use a forklift would end well. My concern for the safety of the people trapped shuffling around this circle of Swedish hell passed quickly as my own needs took center stage again.

I ran through the checkout, passed the Swedish Foodmarket, finally arriving to where the signs had began leading me to several hours or days ago. There were two individual washrooms, individual... individual. For a store of such massive size there were two washrooms that could be used for a maximum of two people at a time. Nearby there was a sign cheerfully telling me if these were in use I could find additional washrooms at the front of the store.

I pulled out my cell phone, prepared to call my brother and tell him to avoid Bathroom Accessories for the next little while, as something bad was about to go down.

My cell phone had no service, I was cut off from the rest of my party, lost and still desperately searching for my salvation. Lost in Swedish hell I began my journey all over again.

If you ever find yourself traveling through the nine circles of Swedish hell my one piece of advice for you is this, check out the Cooking and Eating circle, they've got some fantastic deals on bägare's!

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