NEW BLOG PAGE

Hey, I've decided that "Everything and Nothing" is a horrible name for anything, much less a forum for intellectual masturbation a la...Well this. It would sound horribly pretentious if it wasn't so lame. So lame. Really should have come up with something better...Like mythomaniacs anonymous. Yeah, I like that.

NEW BLOG: http://mythomaniacs-anonymous.blogspot.com/

The Perils of Clerking at a Liquor Store

I got robbed on Wednesday. Not this Wednesday, per se, but it was a Wednesday maybe a couple weeks, a month ago. But for conveniency's sake let's elapse a little time. For the purposes of this blog I got robbed on Wednesday.

I didn't think much of the large, strangely familiar, chappy waltzing into my store with a bellaclava on. It was cold. But then, he was wearing just a T-shirt...At any rate something must have clicked subconsciously, and thank G*d for that because my conscious self is none too quick. I stood at the door to the office as this guy waltzed up to the counter and stopped. He waited, very patiently I must say, as if he wanted to ask me the price of the Glenlivet 18 yr. Double wood oak aged single-malt (Christ, that was like ordering a coffee at Starbuck's).

"Hey," I said, sitting behind the safety of my door, "Why do you got that ski-mask on?" I'm not sure if I expected an answer, but I'm not going to just jump-to for somebody who insists on covering their face, unless they have a valid reason for doing so...Like leprosy, which I could appreciate. Nothing kills over-the-counter small talk like a nose falling on the counter. It's awkward.

This man, possibly suffering from flesh-rot, turned around and promptly demonstrated his expertise with a tire-iron, banging it on the counter and mumbling incoherently about a safe, as he started to drag his considerable heft towards my office. Now I can understand wanting what's in the safe, but why bang the counter? It's not granite or marble or overly nice in the least, but what the fuck did it do to you? People should be held accountable for their bad etiquette, weapon brandished or not.

Well this simply would not do. I promptly slammed the office door shut and proceeded to phone the police. I have to say, the thought of playing the hero and performing a daring and edgy citizen's arrest did cross my mind. It would have involved me dodging this maniac as he swipes recklessly with the tire iron, by jumping onto the counter and grabbing a 60-pounder of Appleton Estate Rum before backflipping onto the half-wall behind the cash register to narrowly miss having my ankle crushed by the heavy steel of the tire-iron, landing nimbly and in plenty of time to deliver a devastating roundhouse kick to the face that would have made my friend Chase proud, before finally jumping down in front of my dazed and now pant-soilingly-terrified attacker and bringing the 60 of rum down squarely on his forehead, laughing as I watched his blood pool slowly around his caved in face as he murmurs for a mercy that is only in my power to give. I thought about it.

Now this tactic of shutting the door seemed to confuse the nefariously large fellow. He stood dumb, dazed unable to decide whether to come and knock on our door (We've been waiting for you. Where the kisses are hers and hers and his Three's company, too!..Sorry. I get carried away.) or attempt to crack open the cash register. This was tempting, but perhaps too complicated.

"How do you open the cash register?" He screamed at me through the window.
"What?" I'm hard of hearing.
"How do you open the cash register, I said." Goddamn that guy sounds like Tyler, the other portly liquor store clerk who mans our counters at night. Strangely effeminate, yet really friendly in a totally placating way.
"Are you gonna split what's in there with me?" I ask.
"What? No!"
"Well then I guess you're on your own." Like the wise man once said, (was he wise? Was I just really high at the time? No one can say) nothing in this life is free. Especially my services as accomplice to theft under $5,000.

He didn't seem to need any help as he proceeded to rip the cash register out of the wall, and sprint like a nimble hippopotamus through our parking lot. Well now that that's over, I thought, I just have the cops to look forward to. Terrific. I knew it was against the by-law, but I lit a smoke anyway. I hate cops.

Part 2 to come.

I'm not scared of God. I'm scared of four letter words.

"I'm falling in love with you."

Ummm. Thanks?

Thanks. Thank God she texted this to me, or else that answer would have fallen right out of my mouth, and oral slips tend to make a helluva mess. This worries me in a very stereotypical kind of way. Why? I'm not sure. The only thing I'm sure of is that my stomach feels three sizes too small all of a sudden and it's forcing all of my stomach acid into my chest. My days consist of running between the rolaids and the bathroom, because my intestines have shrunk with the rest of my insides. This is insane. Why would she say that?

Don't get me wrong. I like my girl. In fact I would say that we've entered a whole new phase of our relationship. I've moved from liking her to really liking her. That's huge, as far as I'm concerned. OK, look. I have witnessed and observed the habits and characteristics of these strange beasts we call "relationships" for some time now. From a safe distance, like my bedroom window across the street (Hi Mrs. McCauley, that's a lovely blouse) and even first-hand, and the only thing that I know for sure is that the utterance of that little four letter word marks the pinnacle of the relationship. You really can't feel much more for a person than love. If you could, they would have made up a new word for it. And I really like my girl. I just want to enjoy the ride a little longer before things get serious and become a whole lot less fun, because the end is marked with a four letter word.

El Nino: Finally. The Truth.

I've been thinking about the demise of my first car lately

I had literally driven my car into the ground by the time I was eighteen. My mom's adopted grandfather had given me a 1976 Pontiac Pariesenne for my sixteenth birthday. It had been my grandmother's but basically sat in the garage for the better part of twenty years. Sparky measured it out at a lean sixteen feet and seven and a quarter inches from bumper to bumper. We took that car everywhere. I would plow through up to eight inches of snow in the winter and the backseat was almost six feet wide which made it the ideal camper in the summer. When there were no parties in town we'd load it up with as much booze (the trunk comfortably fit two bodies) and as many people (it maxed out at ten) as we could, tie a couple of pallets onto the top and the first fallow we saw became the spot for the night. It's what we would have taken into battle. The only problem with it was that it was horrible on gas. It drank it in deep droughts. Oh, it leaked too. That was a big problem. We were on the way home from Lethbridge when I decided I needed something new. We were just putting out a left-hander when Sparky's phone rang. It was Bruce.
“Hey Dad.” Sparky never liked talking to his parents when he was high. I thought it livened the conversation.
“Hey buddy. Is that you and Christie in that big yellow beast in front of me?”
“Uh-”
“Because I'm getting splashed with gasoline.” My gauge had been falling so fast I just thought that it must have been broken. Sparky leaned over to see how much we had in the tank. It was sitting just below a quarter.
“Whaddaya figure?” he asks me, holding his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone.
“I say we can make it.” I look over at him. He gives a concessional nod, and puts the phone back to his mouth.
“Dustin figures we can make it back.” His eyes go wide as he covers the mouthpiece again.
“Maybe we should just call it a day at the Dairy Queen.”
“Why?” He hands me his cell.
“Hi Bruce,” I say.
“So Duster,” he starts, “do you know what happens when that gasoline splashes on your muffler?” Well, this didn't take a rocket scientist.
“It gets muffled?”
“It goes boom.”
“Boom?”
“Boom.”
We pulled into the Dairy Queen in Coaldale. I ran in and told the manager that I'd be leaving my car there. I didn't mention that it was leaking gasoline, but I figured they'd tune into that sooner or later. Bruce laughed at us as we got in his Blazer.
“You two are going to be scary all grown up,” he said, a big smile on his face.
“You two are pretty scary right now,” my Mom said, when we got back to the house. She didn't share Bruce's light-hearted attitude towards my incontinent car.
“You have to get rid of that boat,” she said.
“I just have to get a new gas tank.”
“If a boat leaks, you get a new boat!” And that was final.
Bruce phoned me a couple of weeks later. Sparky told him about my mom's decision and he had been looking around for a car for me. He had a little black sunfire, that brought over to the house for me to test drive. It was a 2002, only 60,000 kilometers on it, most of them highway, and he said he could let me have it for $10,000. It was a sweet deal, and I figured it would be mine until I got into the car. I sat in the driver's seat and stared at the center console with shame and trepidation. He didn't tell me it was a standard transmission. Granted, there were only five gears, but when you have a problem getting out of first there might as well be 24.
“You wanna get going?” he asks me.
“Yeah.”
“Well, let's get her started then.”
“Yeah.”
“Something the matter?” There was. It was something I'd never told anyone before. In a little town like Taber, everyone is pretty much the same. We all wear pretty much the same kind of clothes, hang out in the same arcades and parking lots (it's a small town), hell we even drink the same beer, and most of the time we had the same people buy it for us. Everyone learned how to drive a stick out in the middle of the prairies when they were twelve and their dad's were too drunk to drive back home. Everyone except me.
“I don't know how to drive a standard Bruce.” There. I said it. I waited for the laughter from the passenger seat, and prepared to answer the inevitable 'you gotta be kidding me, right? Right?' But I didn't hear him say anything. I prepared to turn me head toward him, to see the embarrassed blush on his cheeks while he tried to tell me that it was alright, not everyone learns these things. I was prepared for the mortification. So I turned to him. He looked at me through his bifocals and loosened his tie.
“Well, step on the clutch and turn the key. These things only take a couple of hours to master.”
What more can I say? The man taught me how to drive a standard. We tooled around for a bit. In between directions ('you take your foot off the clutch slowly, until you feel the motor catch the gear, then you give it gas, or it'll stall out'), and stall outs ('you didn't think you were going to master this thing in thirty minutes did you?') we talked about how school was going (good), how my mom was (also good), and if I had finally figured out what I was going to take in school.
“Medicine.”
“Dr. Christie eh? Good for you. I'm glad.”
“How's Sparky liking Anadarko?”
“It's going alright as far as I can tell. I don't know why you're asking me, you probably know better.” I did, but silence makes me uncomfortable.
“Yeah. I just have a very limited amount of small talk material.”
“You don't give yourself enough credit.”
“Everyone else gives me too much. It balances out.”
“You're a smart kid, you'll figure things out. Don't ride the clutch. It's a habit that ends up costing a lot of money.” I felt a hint of envy as I pulled the car back into my driveway. I thanked Bruce, shook his hand, and told him I'd think about it. I didn't buy that car.

Interrupting the Flow

The walls are lined with pale tiles. They aren't exactly white, more like teeth that only get brushed periodically white, a very soft yellow. I'd say mother of pearl, but every time I hear someone say that I think about that movie Little Giants with Rick Moranis and Rick Moranis depresses me. There's a crack winding its way through the grout that holds the off-white tiles in place. At eye-level the crack crosses the grout and splinters into the ceramic squares. It looks like someone has bashed their head into the wall here. I imagine something like that would have been messy. There's an advertisement for a truck just below where the crack starts. I look at it, but I don't really read it. There's no half-naked woman sitting on top of the black truck so my attention starts to wane in a matter of seconds. Yet, I stare at the shapes of the letters, big and blocky, a stark white against the black background, the colour that the tiles framing it can only aspire to now. I feel tense for a few seconds, but like always, it unexplainably disappears and the release comes. For some reason it reminds me of natural light and Chinooks in the summer time. It's just soothing. I let myself smile.

How's it going man?

I try my best to pretend that the voice is directed at someone else who might be staring at the wall, but there are only two of us in here. There's a part of me that is compelled to answer. It feels like an obsessive compulsion, like people who have to wash their hands eighty-seven times before they can leave their house. It's redundant to have a conversation here and further more extremely uncomfortable, yet there's that unreasonable little voice in my head, and its resemblance to my mother is chilling, telling me to speak when spoken too. Maybe like the nag in an OCD'd head that keeps telling it's owner that there are still germs in between their fingers.
But there's another part of me that is disturbed and even insulted. This part of my head demands a privacy that our society has conditioned us into. I'm in a private space, and the only voices I should be hearing are the ones inside my head. The one's that tell me to kill people like this. I'm joking, the voices in my head mostly just talk about the weather. It's not what most people think, that conversation is stunted here because of homophobia. It's not like that at all. There's a vulnerability in the situation that makes conversing with strangers awkward. It's a vulnerability that I would like to dismiss as soon as possible and therefore I must fully concentrate on the task at hand (no pun intended).

Having a good time man? Nice shirt.

I try to ignore him. First of all there's no really good answer to the question. I'd have a better time if I was back upstairs, drinking beer with my friends, trying to talk to girls that are too pretty to listen and not yet drunk enough to dismiss such a crucial fact. I take my beer off of the top of the urinal and take a drink. It's cold, it's tasty, and it gives me an excuse not to talk. Nice shirt? Who says that in a bathroom. I can feel his eyes on the side of my head. He's staring at me. This is worse than not talking.

I'm doing alright man. Thank You.

His head turns around mercifully and I feel the tension start to slip away again. I have a shy bladder. Finally, the flow simpers, and after a few shakes I step down from the urinal. I tuck in and go directly to the sink. Under the circumstances I feel that I can ignore the custom of buttoning and zipping at the urinal. I give my hands a rinse, (after all I didn't pee on them), and take the last sheet of paper towel. I wrap it around my hand and open the bathroom door. I hear him as I leave.

Right on, right on.

No. Not really.

I'm officially looking for a new job

Monday, October 22, 2007

Condom manufacturer seeks Canadian volunteers to test products

THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO - A condom company is looking for 1,000 volunteers to test its products and report back on their findings.

It opened the job competition Monday and will continue accepting applicants until Nov. 4.

"Applicants will be asked a series of questions to make sure they are a good fit for this dream job," the company said in a statement.

"Questions include how often do you use condoms? And why do you want to be a Durex condom tester?"

To get the job, the company is looking, in particular, for creative responses to the question about why they want to be a condom tester, Mare said.

"That'll be the primary way that we differentiate applicants from each other."

From www.durexcondomtester.ca

Name -- Dustin Christie

E-mail -- dustinc@ualberta.ca

City -- Edmonton

Province -- Alberta

Postal Code -- T6H 2N7

Date of Birth -- 11 January 1985

Gender -- Male

Tell us why you want to be a Durex condom tester?

I've had a lot of dreams, and, concurrently, a ylot of dream jobs. Most of them revolved around women. I wanted to be a gynecologist. I found I wasn't exactly smart enough for that. I wanted to be a gigolo. But I'm definitely not pretty enough for that. I wanted to be a hockey player. At first, just for the hockey. When I found out how much tail those guys get though, I was sure that this was the career for me. But I'm not very good at hockey.

I can't do any of these jobs, because I'm not good enough. However, I know my dick very well. We've been through a lot together. I consider it my best friend, and know that it's the only one I have that I will never lose touch with. We share a lot of common interests. This is important, because I think we have a common cause, Durex and I: We want to do whatever is best for my dick, and by extension all Canadian dicks. We have the same goal in mind, to make the best product out there; you guys do it for the money, I do it for my best friend.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I really hope you pick me, it'll be a dream come true.