Whoop, there it is.

Last night, on the bus, I saw a kid, maybe 8-years-old. He had a whoopee cushion in his hands, and a first aid kit strapped around his waist like fanny pack. He was clearly an experienced prankster.

He was riding the bus with what appeared to be his mother and what appeared to be his older brother. I say appeared to be, because I feel a sense of responsibility to this guy. Maybe it was an aunt and a cousin, maybe just people he knew. The point is, I don't know who these people are, where they were going, or what the series of events were that led to this kid riding the bus with a whoopee cushion and a first aid kit.
I wanted to say something to him, maybe bump his knuckles, ask him his story. I wanted to find out what he was gonna do with the whoopee cushion and why he decided he'd better bring along a first aid kit.
I never had a whoopee cushion of my own. When I was 7, maybe 8--no older because it happened in the house on 24th Street, and we moved from there the summer after my eighth birthday--my sister brought home a whoopee cushion from one of her trips downtown with her friends to get jelly shoes and Rick Springfield albums.
As a child, I was in love with downtown and I was in love with whoopee cushions. How could I not have been, when I read so many comic books?
At that point, mostly Marvel's Star Wars and Indiana Jones mags picked up at the 7-11, but my dad had lately started bringing me along to Westgate Books, at the far end of 22nd, just before Circle Drive, in the same ell-shaped stripmall as Duffers indoor minigolf, on his semi-regularly paperback-hunting excursions. Westgate, those first few trips especially, was the best place in the world (even though it wasn't downtown). It had shelves and tables overflowing with books, but it still managed to feel fairly open, unlike the smaller used bookstores in older buildings, which in their crampedness would later seem to me beguiling and romantic. Along the windowfront, facing the huge parking lot, were two rows of probably a dozen columns of comics. I would make my way through top row and then double back through the floor level boxes. Each comic had its cover-price halved (to the nearest nickel) in black grease-marker on the cover. Forty-cent comics, like the brilliant late 70s Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics--written by Denny O'Neil, with art by Alex Saviuk--were 20 cents, but so were the earlier, Mike Grell-drawn issues with a 35-cent cover price.

I didn't even know, back then, about O'Neil's earlier run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, with art by Neal Adams. Those comics didn't end up in the bins at Westgate, or if they did, they were picked up by keener hands than mine.
At that time, standard cover price for new comics was 75-cents, so single issues at Westgate topped out at 40-cents. You could get a lot of comics for just a few dollars, and I did. Merely from repeat, obsessive visits to the Westgate bins, I managed to secure nearly a complete run of Green Lantern comics, from the 1976 relaunch to just shy of the current issue (along with considerable chunks of the Cary Bates/Carmine Infantino Flash run, Jim Aparo-drawn Batman team-ups in The Brave & the Bold and DC's great anthology "Dollar Comics" of the 70s, Adventure and World's Finest (which often featured Green Arrow in solo action drawn by the dynamic Trevor Von Eeden!). It wouldn't be until 1988, during the Millennium crossover event that I even thought of buying new comics, and about a year after before I realized there were stores that actually specialized in selling new comics.

Our visits to Westgate were hardly regular, though I remember needling both of my parents to take me there much more often than they actually did (the nerve!).
The 1970s were not so distant then, though I had no memory of them. My earliest memories are almost certainly from 1980, just prior to my brother Jesse's arrival. I remember Mayfair Playschool and my grandparents' acreage near Martensville--more than anything, I remember the Sunday night drives back into Saskatoon from the acreage: approaching headlights, the Husky gas station high above the highway near the overpass, a warm feeling sitting in there in the backseat, drifting off to sleep.

The stories in the comics from the 70s weren't that different from the more recent ones, mostly by the same handful of people (some of them still active today), but the ads from those older comics were amazing! Daisy air rifles, Lee Jeans, and Slim Jims seemed quite exotic and alluring. They presented an ideal of boyhood as outdoorsy and violent. Some of the oldest comics I picked up still had black & white ads for Charles Atlas self-improvement pamphlets and backpage, full-colour ads for Sea Monkeys. But the best ads I loved best were those cluttered paste-up jobs with tiny print and crude drawings, promising SEE BEHIND GLASSES, Scary Life-Size MONSTER GHOST, LEARN HYPNOTIC CONTROL, and of course, the fabulous whoopee cushion (occasionally sold as "POO-POO CUSHION", see above). These presented an ideal of boyhood that was urban, puerile and violent.

I could never screw up the courage to clip out the order form and send 35-cents off to obscure New York addresses that you never read about like Lynbrook or Westbury. It wasn't so much that I thought of even one of my comics as a valuable collector's item (despite the fact that some of them had those very words emblazoned across their covers) and didn't want to defile them as that, well, I recognized that these were old comics. There were no whoopee cushion ads in the Green Lantern comics by Len Wein and Dave Gibbons--my favourite era of the character, I might add. Those issues had ads for Dungeons & Dragons sets, primordial video games like Joust and Revell modelling kits, distractions of a very different kind of comic fan than I was or would ever be. These old ads, selling novelties and self-improvements, even by the 70s were throwbacks to the earliest days of comic books. The mighty M.C. Gaines--inventor of the saddle-stitched, four-colour, newsprint comic book, and father of Mad Magazine founder Bill Gaines--was, at the time of his inspiration, an out-of-work novelty salesman.

When my sister brought this whoopee cushion, this most sacredly vulgar item from the back pages of the comics that fired my imagination, I was beside myself.

"Let me try it!"

But my sister and her friend would have none of it. It was theirs and they were under no obligation to share with me.

I waited for them to be distracted by their new Rick Springfield record and then I took it! I held the flaccid pink rubber to my lips, inflated the cushion and threw it down on the nearest chair. My sister and her friend were sitting on the floor.

"Can I offer you a seat?" I asked, failing to conceal even a single manic twitch of zeal. They rolled their eyes.

I waited.

Maybe someone else would come into the living room.

No one did.

I couldn't take it anymore! I needed to see--to hear--the whoopee cushion in action. I sat on it myself.

Nothing.

I stoop up, looked down at it. It was still perfectly inflated. I sat down again.

Nothing.

I stood up. I looked around. I sat down again, as hard as I could.

Tsssssss....

I got up, the cushion had deflated, but had failed to make the appropriately flatulent noise. I brought it back to my lips.

"I hope you're not going suh-lobbering all over my whoopee cushion!"

Even as I blew, I could hear the air being released from the cushion. I looked it over, and, sure enough, there was a big rip in the seam. I had popped the whoopee cushion.

I was a failure as a kid! For generations, kids had been pulling genius pranks with whoopee cushions, eliciting demoralizing fart sounds from the pompous and the strict! Bullies could be brought to their knees with a single blast! But its power was beyond my capabilities. As a kid, I was incompetent.

I stayed away from whoopee cushions for many years after that, confused and saddened by my seeming inability to make use of that most basic element of boyhood mischief. It didn't occur to me until much later on in life that whoopee cushions were simply cheaply-made from flimsy material. I should have been surprised and disappointed if the damn thing hadn't burst.

So when I saw this kid on the bus, with his whoopee cushion (I understand they're self-inflating now) and first aid kit and a barely-contained glimmer of danger in his eye, I recognized him as a fellow traveller. Hail fellow well met, I thought as I passed him on my to the door, and our paths diverged. Me, back into the night toward home and adult responsibilities; him, onto great feats of artificial flatulence.

mp3: "Fields of Green" by Giant Sand

It was the day before Columbus Day, so I discovered America

We drove down to Seattle on Sunday. When I say "we drove," what I mean is Nicole drove. I don't drive. I guess you could say it's by choice. Not my choice, but, rather a series of poor choices in my past.

The Pacific Northwest US in the fall is a lot like the lower mainland in the fall. Only with more Giant Sand. Same amount of Chad Vangaalen, though.

But they were both in the same spot on Sunday night, the Triple Door. It's a reformed supper club on Union Street with a tasty menu and excellent sightlines.

C-van-G was up first, just him and his drummer. "Our bass player left," he said. Mostly C-van-G played one of those electronic electric guitars like Lou Reed played on the Velvets reunion, which is a good guitar to play if you don't have a bass player, because it gives a big sound. Vangaalen & drums played really well, as we noshed on green beans and papaya salad. The only thing was C-van-G sang all of his songs in his falsetto-y voice, which is cool, especially on songs like "Willow Tree" and "City of Electric Light", but I know he has more range than that.

Giant Sand, which is Howe Gelb and three Danes these days, was something else, man. "So," Gelb gravelled, "did you enjoy dinner? Are we dessert? Are we desert? Are we dez-zert?"

They mostly played from proVISIONS, the new Giant Sand alb, but also culled from other rekkids, including Gelb's 'Sno Angel Like You--maybe the greatest record ever. Gelb played a lot of guitar, but also played some piano--both keys and strings. Sometimes he'd start in one song, and then finish in another. And they skipped all my favourite songs, like "Out There" and "Well Enough Alone" from the new album, but did play a real fine take on "Ain't Misbehavin'" and encored with "Shiver".

Howe bemoaned the malfunction, and the ramifications thereof, of his blue effects pedal, but rejoiced in the ultra-reverb of his yellow pedal. He lit feedback cherrybombs under the soft-cushioned seats of the dinner club crowd, myself included, who'd maybe become a little too comfortable amid the fine food, luxury and sophisticated Americana leanings. It was kinda monstrous, kinda beautiful, all at the same time. Just like America.

We got tunes today from Seattle cowboy band who wear masks. Brent Amaker & the Rodeo's new album Howdy Do! is expected in November, and they'll spend the rest of the year playing shows in the US of A.

mp3: "When Love Gets to a Man" by Brent Amaker & the Rodeo
mp3: "Girls Are Good For Lots of Things" by Brent Amaker & the Rodeo

Belly Full of Fire

There is perhaps no other time in a man's life that he is so plainly shown what a cakeride it is to have a Y chromasome than when he is expecting a child.

Oh sure, payday is a good time to be a man, so's when you have to use the bathroom in a nightclub, or if you'd like to be a Member of Parliament. But skipping out on the rigours of pregancy, well, it kinda makes me want to belch a sigh of manly relief. We get to be a part of Life's Greatest MiracleTM without gaining 30 lbs, suffering wild mood swings, peeing every twenty minutes or losing our taste for green beans (though I suspect Nicole never really liked my green beans and is just using pregnancy as an excuse to put the kibosh on them without hurting my feelings). We're never kicked in the bladder from within, never have to take a break to catch our breath going up the front stairs. All we have to do is raise our game a little bit, be a little quicker to offer foot rubs, pick up a few more household chores, eat two servings of green beans, whatever. Oh yeah, and not brag or complain about how we're a larger portion of the daily things that make life go by--especially when we're doing a terrible job at keeping up with the larger projects like clearing out the clutter (ie, 25 yrs of comics) from the eventual baby room.

Where you run into trouble, though, as an expectant father, is when you're out in public alone. When you're out with your baby mama, at least, people know. Things are going on in your life and you're afforded certain niceties. You can smile at young children with impunity. You can marvel at the souped up Peg Perego travel system and no one bats an eye. Other couples out and about with infants make eye contact and transmit warnings of fatigue--joyous fatigue, but fatigue, don't kid yourself, man. And a pregnant woman alone...forget about it. Nicole has regaled me with stories of walking home (a whole four blocks) with two bags of groceries. Everyone who passed her by looked on with concern and pity. If I'm walking down the street weighed down by cans of refried beans and split pea soup, I better not show any strain or I'll get shanked passing by the D&D store.

It's a sunny afternoon in early September and I'm sitting in the park, alone, reading Dan Fesperman's first novel and drinking a pretty lousy Americano, because Beans is closed on Monday. Despite the sun, I've got a Sarajevo funk on from spending all day with Lie In The Dark. I'm identifying more with Vlado Petric this time around (he's also the lead in Fesperman's second novel, Small Boat of Great Sorrows), because I'm starting to see myself as a father. Like Vlado, I've been separated from my wife and child. He, because they've fled Sarajevo for an indifferent Berlin; me, because I work the nightshift and miss too much time with my growing family. Okay, so it's not really the the same. Not even close. But, y'know, on a metaphoric level... And there's the whole business of how the parts of my family that are not are still contained within a single unit, like a Vancouver Special.

So there's me, Vlado, and hell, why not Rebus? Sitting alone in the park with our inadequate coffee, spending a rare nice day with a book full of gray. Quietly, shamefully, more at home in our morose solitude, in our weird otherness. In my fifth-dimensional imagination, writing is the same as sleuthing, and so my brow is always furrowed with the waves of mystery.

But now it's October, and I'm not on the nightshift anymore. Now the days are gray and wet, though my nights are clear. It's a tradeoff, but it's worth it. Now I'm home when it matters to be home, when home is home and not a bunch of rooms full of books and comics that I can't figure out what to do with.

And I've got next week off, which means I'll be out of the country when the election results come in. With any luck, I'll be somewhere without access to the election results. I'll be in some cabin by the ocean, reading by the shine of a lighthouse.

But first, I'll be in Seattle, watching Giant Sand (and Chad Van Gaalen) with my wife and fetus. I think I've already mentioned how my life is nearly perfect.

mp3: "Belly Full of Fire" by Giant Sand
mp3: "Well Enough Alone" by Giant Sand

You Know the Problem with Photocopiers?

Jack Irwin (1916-2008) was remembered on Monday in Saskatoon. He was my grandfather's brother, which makes him my great-uncle. I only met him twice as an adult (as an adult myself; for sure, he was an adult long before I was even born), but he made an impression in the best possible way. Jack was a jokester. I don't know if he had them ready, or if they just came to him. But even pushing 90, which would have been when I last saw him, he was the sharpest guy in the room when it came to jokes. Meeting Nicole, who then worked at a bank, he cracked: "I knew a girl who worked a bank once. I would have kissed her, but I knew she was a teller."
Then, letting a beat go by, "Did you hear about the blind carpenter? He picked up his hammer and saw."
My mom told me that she never heard Jack repeat a joke. In just over 91 years, I've gotta believe he had a few favourites that he told around town. But having spent just a very small amount of time with him, I wouldn't be surprised at all if my mom's claim was true.
He first caught my attention at my grandfather's 90th birthday party. My aunt Laurel (his neice) was happily snapping pictures of what was really a fine and happy day, and he said to her, "Oh, you're into photography? Why don't we go into a dark room and see what develops?"
Nevermind that Laurel was using a digital camera.
I never got the chance--I never made the chance to ask Jack why he told so many jokes. I never got to ask how it started, or where they came from. I can only surmise from what little I know about his life that his humour was a tool of his trade. Like my grandfather, Jack had a shoestore.
My favourite joke of his, one that he told to me specifically, spurred by me telling him what I was doing for a living at the time, is: "You know the problem with photocopiers? They never do anything original."

Jack Irwin was no photocopier. The source of his material is a secret he takes with him (though if you're interested in the secret origins of jokes in general, I cannot recommend strongly enough Anthony Horowitz's The Killing Joke), but the laughter he left behind inspires me daily.

MP3: "Last of My Kind" by Paul Burch
MP3: "Neon Filler" by Howe Gelb

Hey (Moustache) Man!

I'm a little too busy to take pictures and upload them, but BELIEVE ME, the moustache is back--if only for a couple of days. It's as much a fashionable as rhetorical device this time 'round. No matter what all the sensible people I know say, I think it suits me. But on Saturday morning, I'm getting on a plane to Montreal, and there's no way I'm flying with this bizz under my nez.



So this is just to say that there probably won't be any updates until long after Turkey Day, since as soon as we get back, we're moving (marginally) closer to Hawaii. In the meantime, here's a look at this week in YOU, dear reader.

Number of visits from Regina in the last week: 5
Number by which Regina readers has grown: 3
Reason: AWESOMENESS
City from which someone visited that sounds like something you'd expect to see on a sci-fi writer's shelf: Heerhugowaard
Most surprising search term that led someone here (and now will forevermore): "superheroes with moustaches" (let's see: Tony Stark, Vartox, Green Arrow, um, who else? Now I've gotta google that myself!)

See you in October! Be safe! And go see Roger Dean Young & the Tin Cup when they come to your town.

MP3: "Hey Man" by Howe Gelb