The Taken Seat

Some time had passed since 'Kool-Aid Gate' and my girlfriend Amanda thought it was safe to go back to a movie theater with me. She had several drink based conditions but still, she hesitantly agreed to go with me.

Boy, was that a mistake.

Now I am a man of principals, and I don't mean your standard "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shall not commit adultery"... don't get me wrong, I generally adhere to these principals, although come on, who hasn't done something unholy on the Sabbath?

Sure it bugs me when my bike gets stolen or someone lies to me, but these aren't really the principals I fight for.

Here's one that I do fight for: say I have a keen ability to read what time a movie starts and a general knack of arriving before this published time. Say this super human ability allows me to get prime seats in the theater, ones that you yourself may covet.

Now lets say you don't trust what is written on the Internet, in newspapers, what is listed on the marquee and printed up on your tickets. Let's say you don't believe in time. So you arrive just barely before the movie starts.

Naturally I would think your mind would say "I was late, clearly I don't deserve as good a seats as that strapping curly haired Adonis."

Let me stop and explain for a second, by Adonis I am not referring to my manly good lucks, but rather my ability to inspire women to plant vegetables, and ultimately my inevitable future death on the tusks of a wild bore... but I could see how you would make this mistake.

Now continuing with my point...

For some reason a vast number of people don't think this way, they believe that they should have prime seating, and so, even though there are a lot of other sitting options open and available to them, they choose to sit next to me.

When there are other seat choices, I should not be forced to share an arm rest and leg room with you. And yet I sit there quietly, not saying a word.

That is until the other day when I decided to stand up for my principals! To become the Dark Knight of Obscure Social Taboos! Defender of the anal retentive, voice of the neurotic!

I do hope you read that last paragraph with the enthusiasm my exclamation marks instructed you to give it. As the author I am instructing you to go back and re-read it if you failed to properly the last time around.

So like I was saying, this small group of people decide to sit in the row myself and Amanda in, no big deal, until the guy at the end of the group makes a motion for my seat.

Again normally I would let this slide and just be secretly bitter for the rest of the night, but for some reason I felt inspired on this night.

I quickly put my popcorn down in the seat before he could make his move.

Caught off guard he looked at me, trying to size me up.

"Is someone sitting there?" he asked.

"Yeah, yeah someone is," I said before I could even think about the words I was saying.

"Really?" I must've had a bad poker face, he wasn't buying it at all.

"Yeah, really, someone is," I don't cut and run on my lies.

Backing down the guy led his group to one of the wide open rows closer to the screen. Perhaps it was wrong of me to deny this man the seat he sought. Perhaps, but with empty rows why should we have to cram together?

Karma looked like it'd catch up to me in the parking lot after the movie. Throughout the previews the man who had been denied my 'taken' seat looked back at me, seeing if someone was going to sit in that chair.

I should mention that the guy was tough looking, and by tough I mean street tough, not shrunken scrotum needle jabbing weight lifter tough. Admittedly he wasn't the best choice to test the whole 'standing up for principals' policy on.

"He kind of looks like he wants to stab you on the way to the car," my girlfriend whispered to me.

I was starting to get a little worried.

That's when a group of young teenage girls walked into the theater, and naturally, they wanted to sit next to me.

Fearing for my life and needing someone to occupy the 'taken' chair I didn't object.

But now I needed to sell this thing.

Whenever the tough and dejected seat suitor turned back to me, which was far to often, I would turn to the young girl beside me, trying to fake like we knew each other, like we were talking, like maybe, just maybe we were friends.

The only possible logic behind my friendship with this girl would be a) that I was an online predator, or b) that I had fathered her at the ripe old age of eight. Yet I felt my life was riding on me selling this, and so I tried.

"Ehauh" I mumbled in her direction, over exaggerating hand and mouth movements for my audience a few rows up.

The girl looked at me, not sure whether to feel sorry for my apparent turrets, or to ready her mace.

Once the movie got started the seat suitor seemed to lose interest in me, and I breathed a sigh of relief, that is until the movie came to an end.

Practically knocking over my girlfriend I tried rushing to exit with the teenage girls, trying to look like I was following their story about a trip to a mall.

I can't say I sold the role, I can't say my girlfriend was to impressed, but I can tell you Babydoll's are 40% of from now until Tuesday, and I can tell you I'll think twice before defending my principals again.

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Oh No!

From time to time I make poor decisions a much smarter man would avoid, decisions that almost always lead me to end up on the receiving end of my girlfriend's frustration.

Not long ago my girlfriend Amanda and I were at the movie theater. Now before I go on I am not sure if you know this about me but I'm a sucker for the up sale at the movie theater. You might be asking yourself, why would I know this about you? Well I don't know really, it just seems like every time I walk into a theater every teenage popcorn merchant can sense it.

So I start off saying the word "Medium", medium popcorn, medium drink. Then out of nowhere, the hook comes.

"For just a dollar extra you can get the large?"

Sold.

I arrived wanting a small thirst quencher, I leave with enough sugary liquid to satisfy the thirst of a small African country... and bring about a diabetes epidemic among the locals.

This night was no different, I settled in with my girlfriend, a mountain of popcorn, and a cup that holds ten times more liquid then your bladder. We sat there and watched the commercials. And by commercials I don't mean product placement within the movie, or the trailers for the upcoming movie, or the commercials for products they show before the trailers. I'm talking about the pre-commercial commercials they show you while you wait for all of the other ads to start.

So we're sitting there and it's about five minutes to showtime (showtime: the time the first batch of commercials end and the lights dim for the official commercials) and my girlfriend goes to grab the drink.

Now what happened next was not my fault in any way and even if the video surfaces from the kid in the back row who was playing with his camera phone, even if it comes to light like a grainy Zapruder Film of the incident... there would be no proof to implement me.

Amanda reached for the cup. The condensation causing her grip to slip slightly as she lifted it from the cup holder, sliding straight into the lid. As her hand went up the lid decided it didn't want to carry on this journey. It slid off, her hand lost its grip.... the entire drink, bright red Kool-Aid went splashing down upon her lap, ice cubes clinking to the ground around her feet.

Amanda's face looked like she had just been dealt a Tropical Punch from the Kool-Aid Man himself. The flavour had been Cherry, but my guess from the look of it all over her brand new white shirt, that it wasn't Kool-Aid's 'Invisible Cherry' flavour. I'm sure to Amanda it was their 'Changin' Cherry', though I'd like to think of it as 'Rock-a-dile Red'. Yes, there's no pun to Rock-a-dile Red, but when else will I ever get to say it? Try it, right now, we'll wait to continue the story. Come on, I'm giving you the one opportunity in your life to say Rock-a-dile Red.

Done? Okay, so my girlfriend was soaked, sticky, and stained red from shirt to skin with the stuff. But as you recall it wasn't my fault. So how did I end up in trouble?

The laughing probably didn't help, the "Oh Yeah!" Kool-Aid impressions may not have aided my cause, but it was the next words out of my mouth that probably did me in...

"We've got like two minutes before the movie starts. We'll move down like a seat, you run to the washroom, dry yourself off a bit. I'll go, get us a refill of Kool-Aid."

"A refill?" she asks.

"Yeah, I mean, with popcorn we're going to need a drink."

"Derek, you expect me to stay here? After this?"

I did. Apparently we didn't see eye to eye.

It was a quiet drive home, and not a "Oh yeah!" was heard that night.

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Conversion Conversation

There’s a website called Craigslist which, for those of you whose internet usage revolves solely around Confessions of a Cidiot (and in my mind that is all of you), is a website featuring lists. They are on job postings, personal ads, apartments to rent, junk for sale… basically everything that makes up the chunk of the newspaper you grab first when going to build a fire. Presumably there’s also a guy named Craig, a little less popular then Myspace’s Tom and understandably, when was the high stakes world of classifieds a glamorous place?

On Craigslist in the personals category they have a section known as ‘missed connections’. The idea is that one person sees a person they find attractive, but instead of trying the age old method of going up to said person and saying hi, they run home to their computer, write out the event and hope the other person checks Craigslist, reads it, and contacts them.

I really don’t know what the odds are that two socially challenged individuals connect over a ‘missed connection’, though I am not holding my breath for a wedding invitation.

I’m not really a fan of this process, I mean isn’t part of life that awkward surge of adrenaline as you teeter on the edge of rejection during your well planned out speech that went something like, “so um, yeah, I guess I was sort of thinking, um, like, I don’t know, if you’re not busy or whatever, um, maybe we could do something, um you know, together? Sometime, maybe.”

Regardless I have written my own ‘missed connection’, though I am not sure old Craig will run it. It goes like this…

You, late 30’s – early 40 year old balding scientologist, me 22 year old non-believer. Should I have taken you up on your challenge to fight?

I’ll explain this in a moment.

From time to time I am greeted by people who want to stop by my house and see if I am familiar with Jesus. Apparently there is a deep seeded feeling amongst the religious community that my house lives in such a vacuum that even a Mel Gibson movie hasn’t come to my attention.

“Like Jesus Christ Jesus? Or are you talking about a Mexican who just moved into the neighbourhood?” I ask, because I clearly have nothing better to do in life.

“We speak of the Lord and Savior.”

“So that rules out the Mexican?”

They’ll always ask me if they could come in for a few minutes and tell me about their beliefs. This is a strange notion, and I wonder how many people say, “oh yeah, come right on in!” I mean half my friends haven’t even seen the inside of my place, why would I invite someone in who the minute I excuse myself to go to the bathroom they might be spiking my Kool-Aid?

“Try new Kool-Aid mystery flavours! The Kool-Aid where you don’t know what you’ll get till you’re drinking it! Now in Cherry, Grape, and new Jonestown Valium & Cyanide^TM! Oh yeah!”

I did once allow someone to enlighten me on their door to door religious beliefs, but she was very attractive and so I figured, you know, it was only polite to listen.

She told me that there was a prophet on Earth and that once a year he speaks to everyone via satellite. When asked if I would be interested in being a part of all this I replied, “No, but do you know if your prophet is hiring anyone to shoot his next video?”

What? In my industry you always have to be on the look out for the next job.

And then there’s Scientology, a group who I haven’t interacted with much. Once, while I was waiting on a friend, I was asked to sit down and be tested by an E-Meter. Bored and looking for amusement I agreed. Sadly there were no attractive women in the equation this time around.

The man told me to think about different things in life and his little meter went up and down over and over, very theatrically. He took some notes and told me my life was filled with a lot of stress and that he had a ‘cure’ for this. He pulled out two thick books written by one L. Ron Hubbard and told me I should buy them.

A machine to justify you buying over priced books? Genius, why didn’t Amazon.com think of this?

In fact I was so inspired I have been thinking of sitting outside of bars, comedy clubs and theaters I perform at with a ‘C-Meter’ designed to tell you your life lacks comedy and you should probably buy a ticket and come inside.

I’ve never wished any of these people whose beliefs did not go hand and hand with mine any sort of ill will, and up until this weekend they too have treated me with the respect you’d expect from people secure of their place in the afterlife.

So back to my ‘missed connection’, I was walking at the time with my sister and my girlfriend as we passed a tent full of Scientologists selling, yes, books by L. Ron Hubbard.

As we walked by, having our own conversation, the bald man must’ve misunderstood something, or maybe he was just suffering from overexposure to the E-Meter, because he lost it.

Threatening us he demanded we come back and say it to his face. That we didn’t walk away like chickens.

I don’t really know why, or what it was he wanted said to his face, but he was on the verge of becoming a cartoon and erupting in a cloud of smoke.

I guess it must be tough being on the fringes of belief, I guess sometimes it must make you just want to lose it.

So maybe I don’t give my money to your organization, maybe you’re not attractive enough to be invited in for a good old converting session. But can’t we all be friends?

I’d like to leave you with a song I’ve written as inspired by the classic 1970's Buy the World a Coke song, for frustrated pilgrims and prophets everywhere.

On a hilltop in Toronto
I’ve gathered door knocking converters
From all over the world
To bring to you this message
From religious fringe sects
From all over the world
It’s the real thing – Flavor Aid
And they sang…

I’d like to buy the world a temple
And furnish it with love… and life savings
Exit our human vehicles and board a spaceship
And self-immolation

I’d like to teach the world to chant
In perfect harmony
I’d like to buy the world a Flavor Aid
And wash it down with cyanide
That’s the real thing.

I’d like to teach the world to chant
In perfect harmony
I’d like to buy the world a Flavor Aid
And wash it down with cyanide
That’s the real thing.

What the world wants today
Flavor Aid
Is the real thing

What the world wants today
Flavor Aid
Is the real thing

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