Gettin' to High off Masculinity

I am the type of guy who is very secure in his masculinity, I’ve never been to worried about doing something that isn’t what your typical G.I. Joe aspiring man would do. I am still a man though and we all have our limits before we cave in and must defend this notion of manliness.

One such time occurred at a thing known as the Sky Screamer. Now if anything should have set off warning bells it is my friend Donna turning to me and saying “let’s go on the Sky Screamer, it is so fun!” Perhaps you would think I caught on to the use of the word screamer and tried to avoid the ride. But then again the commercial for the ride that seems to pop up on television every thirty seconds informed me in full on jingle "you're going to love the Sky Screamer!" Now here I was with Donna, one of the stars of the commercial, not thinking to much of their liberal use of screamer as I followed her along happily to the 137.2 metre (450 ft.) tower that you are shot up and fall back down at 96 km/h (60mph) in an action that Donna tries to pass off as ‘fun.’

When we arrived at the ride I had a brief chance to stare up at the surprisingly tall tower before being dragged to an awaiting seat and locked in. In that fleeting moment my stomach began to do battle with my testosterone.

It was all for nothing though, the heavy weight that goes by the name testosterone had a clear knockout in the first round and I found my entire body (minus the stomach which seemed to arrive shortly behind my feet) being rocketed so high up that I was pretty sure any second we were going to leave Earth’s atmosphere and crash head first into some passing telecommunications satellite, our deaths being recognized somewhere in the mid west as angry farmers everywhere curse the TV for cutting out half way through a rerun of Becker.

A little bit of an over-active imagination? Perhaps, but then you try dreaming up your own demise as your being rocketed up towards space and tell me it doesn't in some way involve Ted Danson?

We're moving higher and higher now until suddenly (without any sort of warning) we come to a stop, my stomach catching up before continuing on its journey to the stratosphere. As it passed me by I’m pretty sure I heard the words “I told you so.” Shaking it off I looked over at Donna noticing a big smile on her face, perhaps the lack of oxygen at this altitude was getting to her? No one in their right mind could be smiling at the ordeal we had just been through, nevertheless it was my job as a man to calm her down.

Derek: Well, that wasn’t so bad.
Translation: Please let it be over!

Donna: Isn’t it great?
Interpretation: Yup, altitude has gotten to her.

Derek: The view is pretty amazing up here.
Translation: Any chance we could skip the whole having to go back down part?

Donna: Look over there you can see Niagara Falls.
Interpretation: We’re going to fall to our death and you have time to sight see?

Derek: We should…

Suddenly and again I must stress, without warning, the seats we were strapped to plummeted, my whole life attempting to flash before me. Before it could reach the potty training stage though we had landed on the ground.

“Was that not fun?” Donna asked, the level of excitement in her voice boggling my mind. Before I could answer my testosterone kicked back in.

“Yeah… um… oh yeah, lot of fun… So much fun that I uh… I think we should sit for awhile… a long while and just uh, talk about all the fun we just had.” I said in my manliest of voices as I attempted to walk in a straight line.

“No, lets do it again!” She said as my mind scrambled for a way out.

“But… sit… and talk?” Donna didn’t waste a second after the words had come out of my mouth before she brought out the big guns, my kryptonite, the pouty face.

“Please?” she asked as she demonstrated why she is one of the great masters of the pouty face practice. Logic crumbling before it I gave in and when I finally came to my senses I was gazing down at the Falls again and wondering what I had done.

When we reached the ground I attempted to continue with the tough guy act which lasted about twelve seconds before I broke into a sprint for a nearby picnic bench. Laying there I admitted defeat and wondered to myself if there was any masculine way to spin collapsing onto a table for fifteen minutes.

That night I was over at Donna’s place when her dad asked me what I thought of the infamous Sky Screamer. I told him it was a lot of fun just as Donna and her mum entered. I was met with a questioning glance from Donna.

“Okay well it might have made me feel a little sick,” I conceded.

“Really? I’ve never heard of anyone feeling sick on that ride?” said her mum.

I learnt something 450 feet above the ground, next time I’ll stick to doing stuff more my pace: I hear a store at the local mall has skirts on sale for 20% of this weekend.

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In the Navy, Toasted on Whole Wheat

When you are in school you can’t wait to be done, to no longer go through the last half of summer knowing you’re just heading right back to some educational institution, I know I thought that way.

Without school to anchor it though summer begins to become a word similar to fall or winter. It’s a change in temperature and an alarmingly high rate of men who shouldn’t have their shirts off walking around public streets. It’s a time when you’ll get more invites to lay in a tent in the middle of nowhere for the sheer sake of doing just that… but ultimately it’s no different then the other seasons.

This loss of summer as an event, something you countdown to, celebrate, cherish… the mere fact I can look back and miss all this, well it must mean I am starting to get old.

I suppose the one thing I really don’t miss about summers off is the part-time job hunt. Every June as the school year was winding down and I was starting to remember what life was like without trying to figure out the meaning behind a Shakespearian soliloquy and then stretch this half hearted understanding into at least two paragraphs of an essay my father would hit me with it.

“I am not trying to nag you but…” he’d start dragging out the but, letting it follow with a silence, giving me time to think of what it is he could be asking me to do. Was my room clean? Did I have some homework I forgot about that he somehow stumbled upon? Did I owe him money for some reason?

“…don’t you think…” another pause, this time to make me drop the check list of things he could be on me for, this time to give me time to start working up a defense for whatever he may be preparing to get on me for.

“…it’s time to start looking for a summer job?” Somehow I never saw this one coming.

I’d be left turning my wheels.

“Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah. But no, not uh… not yet, I still have some more homework to do and my room is a disaster.”

I’m not sure if this was part of his game plan but suddenly I couldn’t help myself from listing off things I didn’t want to do and volunteering to do them.

“Derek, you don’t want to leave it too late. Remember what happened last year.” This sentence too was a stock quote, one he could use summer after summer.

What can I say? I had some bad luck when it came to summer jobs.

A few years back when I was home in Toronto on vacation from college I had what could possibly be my weirdest experience job hunting.

After weeks of sending resumes out online, faxing, and going door to door to any store that had not already hired me and learnt I was not destined for retail I got a call, well a voicemail to be more exact.

He had a thick Eastern European accent, and a phone that made him sound a little tinny.

“Hello I am calling for Derek Robertson to see if you would be able to come in for a job interview for missile ship.”

Yes! Awesome, I had made it to the interview round, now just a few cheesy “what’s my biggest fault? I guess that I work to hard” and I’d move on to the Showcase Showdown.

My celebration was cut short.

Where was this guy from? I replayed the message.

“Hello I am calling for Derek Robertson to see if you would be able to come in for a job interview for missile ship.”

I stood there dumbfounded, looking at the phone as if it was pulling my leg. As if that recorded voice who informs you to hang up and try your call again was going to come on the line and say “sorry Derek, just screwing with you. Here’s the actual message.”

This did not happen.

But what was a missile ship? And why did they want to hire me? In my hast to apply to any job I saw online, no matter my qualifications, had I somehow offered up my service to some sort of gunship?

I slowly started inviting people over to gather around and listen to my message, to make sure I wasn’t just misunderstanding this man.

Each person heard missile ship.

Was I being recruited by some foreign navy? This may not be a question you would ever in your lifetime ask yourself, but this was my first thought. Was I going to be shipped out to Uzbekistan to serve on some old rusty missile ship circa the Soviet Union? Nevermind that Uzbekistan is largely landlocked, this felt like a very real possibility.

I sat in my dining room contemplating this, wondering if my experience working in a warehouse or gas station had qualified me for military duty. Wondering if maybe my years of volunteering as a baseball coach had shown enough leadership to get me recruited by some far off and (if they really did want to recruit me) backward nation.

Finally I decided to call the number the man had left me in the voicemail.

“Hello this is Derek, just returning your call about a job interview.”

“Ah yes, yes, yes, Derek.” He said in his best Boris and Natasha impression.

“When can you come in for an interview Derek? I think you live kind of far away, hopefully getting here is no problem?”

I said it would be no problem, beginning to contemplate how many stopovers it’d take to get to Turkmenistan.

“What um, what like, you know, how… um, I guess basically… what sort of tasks would be involved in this job?”

I tried to figure out how to get to the bottom of all this, preferably before I was sliding on a Ukrainian navy uniform.

“Lot of training first of all, cleaning the work station, once training is done you’ll start taking on more tasks.”

This wasn’t making it sound any less likely I’d be saluting the Estonian flag soon.

“What sort of training?”

“Huh?”

“Like what are you training me to do?”

I waited for the inevitable “kill capitalist scum,” but it never came.

“What do we do? Do you not know missile ship?” The man laughed.

“Yes I know, I just don’t know, what to expect I guess.”

“It’s missile ship! Missile ship! Mr. Ship.”

Mr. Ship? I let this slide as a slip up due to accent.

“I’m sorry I just don’t know what to expect, I don’t know what I am getting myself into and I am feeling a little uncomfortable,” I said.

“Look Derek, maybe you just aren’t right for Mr. Sub.”

“Wait, what?”

A click came on the other end of the phone.

“Mr. Sub? Mr. Sub? Were you talking about the submarine sandwich Mr. Sub?”

It was too late.

Once again I had ensured my dad would have at least one reason to say, “remember what happened last year?”

Clairvoyant Annoyant

My friend Garlande asked me to keep her company at something known as Psychic Expo, a yearly event where different people with paranormal abilities get together to sell these talents under one roof. It's a showcase of these paranormal abilities, abilities such as lying to earn a buck, delusions of grandeurs, and the ability to fill a convention with forty year old hippy women.

The psychics were all there in their booths, hawking fliers and vying for business like they were retired midway salesmen. One could opt to have their palm read, their tea leaves examined, or to flip over cards in a game where I imagine everyone is a looser. All this could be yours for the price of $60, that’s right, God gave these people a gift and then told them to go milk it for all its worth.

Now I didn’t get my palm read because I just don’t have a small fortune to spend on, well, my fortune, so I can't go into details on this process. What I can tell you is some of the wonderful services that can be found at the Psychic Expo.

Row after row, every booth Garlande and I passed we’d be greeted by an outstretched hand thrusting a pamphlet on us... I thought they were psychic? Shouldn’t they know giving me these fliers would be a waste of paper?

Each pamphlet must begin with the psychic or mediums life story, as it turns out to have psychic abilities you must have grown up in a Charles Dickens novel. Tragic parental deaths and orphanages seem to be a must when your looking for a psychic. Constant headaches at a young age are reportedly first signs of clairvoyance, and not just the end result of getting beat up for trying to read another kids palm during recess.

I have one flier that was handed to me that begins, and I quote, “I have spent my life hearing voices…” Which is ironic because as I was reading this I too heard a voice, one that said "let's back away from the man in the kilt now."

Some pamphlets offer the chance to get your aura photo taken. Essentially the thinking behind this is that depending on what colour glow there is around you in the photo, the type of person you are. Who knew there was such a lucrative market for poorly exposed pictures?

There is Numerology which says that putting a combination of numbers together will reveal such things as your purpose in life or your soul’s desires. Those mathalete’s always have to find a way to flaunt their knowledge over the rest of us, eh? You’d think that a new age paranormal get together would be a safe haven from math but no, there’s a guy playing with numbered dominos ready to tell you what your birthday is all about (though I am bad at math I’m going to say… cake.)

While Garlande was getting her fortune done I had some time to kill and decided to wonder over to the concession stands. There I found that a hot dog was five dollars. Shocked I ran to the nearest Psychic to find out if it would be worth it, I was told to put my name down for an appointment.

Now you may be sitting there thinking I’m being very closed minded, and for the record I am generally a very open minded person, I just have little tolerance for those who take advantage of the trusting. But if you still question whether I should give these psychics the benefit of the doubt let me leave you with this:

Well at the psychic convention Garlande and I were lucky enough to attend a lecture on communicating with animals. During this hour long demonstration I was distracted by the example, a rabbit, repeatedly trying to run away. What I did hear though is the works of one Eddie Murphy referenced repeatedly, and I learnt that not only do animals telepathically talk but they also change accents and languages depending what part of the world they are from.

One other note, as of next week Rocko the Rabbit will be taking over this column as I’ve been informed he is much funnier then I’ll ever be. Good luck to you Rocko.

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