The Grating Outdoors

 
Was' Happenin', Outdoorsy Types?

I've talked at length before about hating this time of year.  As soon as it starts getting dark around 7 pm and the temperatures drop below 20 degrees Celsius (that's 68 degrees Fahrenheit for all you non-Metric types), I feel as if I'm waiting for the winter boot to drop.  Sorry, but I don't care that much about colored leaves.  If it's color you want then just take a hit of acid and break out the Crayolas.      

I already miss being outdoors.  Hiking.  Swimming.  Soakin' up the rays.  Between October and May (or September and June in a really bad year) I feel myself slowly becoming more and more pale and sedentary every day.  Since I've got the circulatory system of a ninety-year-old shut-in and my significant other is deathly allergic to the cold, things like skiing, snowshoeing and sledding don't happen very often (read: at all).  As a result, by the time Spring rolls around, I'm usually more out of shape then your average toll booth operator.

Ergo, I need one of these three things to happen this winter:

1. I need to purchase an alterna-home in either Florida, California or Costa Rica.
2. OR I need an extended vacation in Saint-Martin.
3. OR I need to begin construction on a giant indoor terrarium which accurately re-creates a pristine lakeside environment.

Now, I've since been informed that all of these plans require copious amounts of cash so the odds of any of these things happening soon is about as likely as Paul Ryan tearing up his nude wallet photos of Ayn Rand.

I wasn't always like this.  During my early teens I'd think nothing of frittering away the hottest, sunniest days in July sitting indoors working on my latest D&D magnum opus.  Usually my folks would have to root me out of my bedroom with a rake, which they'd then promptly hand to me with an express order to make the front lawn look presentable.  Remember, this was back in the Mesozoic era when parents had kids expressly for the purpose of procuring cheap labor.

Besides raking, some of my other despised childhood outdoor chores included:

(1) Fence Construction.  Immediately followed by fence painting and a routine schedule of fence maintenance.  Putting this Skull-Island-sized gate together in the first place was traumatic enough, since the raw lumber attracted swarms of these charming critters:
   

"Oh, hai!  Im a horntale wazp an eyed lik to sting youze repeetedlee now, pleez!"

(2) Roofing.  This one was great since it combined my distaste for the outdoors with a stark fear of heights.  As if being perched up on top of the garage wasn't bad enough, often I'd be on top of a ladder on top of the garage.  Hooray for vertigo!

(3) Lawn Maintenance.  When I was first assigned this task I tried the whole "Hey, if I do a really shitty job I'll never be asked to do it again" tactic!  Yeah, that didn't work.  After mowing the lawn like a spider whacked out on PCP, I was soundly chastised and then forced to go out and fix this "embarrassment to the neighborhood".  Eventually I started to enjoy lawn mowing 'cuz at least it produced immediate and gratifying results.  Which could explain my current adult fetish for vacuuming.  Plus, what fifteen year old kid doesn't like to be armed with a weed whacker?

Sometimes basic outdoor chores just weren't enough of a system shock.  So, whenever Dad got the impression that I'd been cooped up for too long or I was getting so pale that I was verging on transparency, he'd stick me on a bike and then force me to chase him all over town.

During one of these Premium Rush outtakes, I was barrelling down Minnesota Drive trying to keep up with him when he suddenly decided to hook an Automan-style, ninety-degree turn right up onto Maryland Drive.  I only had a millisecond to react and by the time my brain told my body what to do, I ended up splitting the difference (as well as my cranium).  

Maryland Drive had just gotten new sidewalks, so the curbs were about as high as the West Bank Barrier.  The front wheel of my bike hit this concrete monolith and sent me pitching head over heels like that crazy mid-air pinwheel / cannonball stunt in The Road Warrior.

Just as soon as I was airborne I knew that I wasn't going to stick the landing, so I took great pains to come down on a non-vital body part: I.E. my face.  Needless to say, it was a real treat digging pebbles out of my cheek and prying my mangled eyeglasses out of my forehead with a flathead screwdriver.

"How bad is it?  It's really startin' to sting now..."

Fishing trips were my alternate punishment.  Before I go any further, I need to establish that I was a really weenie kid.  Even more of a weenie then I am as an adult, which is really saying something.

I was such a pathetically sheltered little dweeb that I'd often use a black felt tip pen to scratch out any "naughty" words that I came across in my sci-fi magazines and replace them with family-friendly alternatives.  I didn't know it at the time, but I seemed to be preparing myself for a high-profile and lucrative career as a prime-time television network movie sensor.  

Anyway, I distinctly remember one particular time when Dad asked me to go on a fishing trip with him.  Actually if you replace the works "asked me to go on" with "auto-enrolled me in", that would probably be a helluva lot more accurate.

That day we peeled off the highway onto a dirt road and drove for what felt like two-hundred and forty-six kilometers.  Then, with absolutely no discernible cue, he suddenly pulled over by the side of the road and declared with one-hundred percent certainty that "this was the place".  After descending a precariously steep rocky bank we plunged into a thicket of woods that made the Black Forest in Germany look like the Montréal Botanical Garden.

As if navigating through this Amazonian underbrush wasn't bad enough I had to contend with  ravenous clouds of miniature, winged, bloodsucking stirges.  And let me tell you, Kind Reader, black flies and mosquitoes consider me to be nothing less then a "nummie treat".   Although I was "lucky" enough to inherit my Dad's protuberant, bullet-deflecting knee caps I certainly wasn't born with his blood type, which appears to be lethal to insects.  In fact, if I ever make the mistake of wandering too close to a copse of trees or a tiny puddle of still water I tend to get swarmed.  To these marauding midges, I must smell like a bucket of KFC in a trailer park.  

"OMMM...NOM...NOM...NOM..."

Arms flayed by thorny branches, boots half sucked off by boggy sinkholes, and marinated in enough DEET to poison the water supply of a half-dozen Vietnamese villages, I forged on, struggling to keep up with Dad, who was drifting through the woods like a wendigo.  It was then when I realized, to my horror, that my fishing line had gotten caught up on a branch about a half-a-mile back along the non-existent trail.  By the time we located the source of the snag we could almost see the car.

During this interlude all of those verboten and previously-excised magazine swear words all came back to me in a gloriously cathartic rush of unadulterated profanity.  My Morman-like moratorium was over. Honestly, I probably would have made Louis C.K. blush.

So, yes, I didn't have a great track record with the Grating Outdoors, but being a Canadian (not to mention a Newfoundlander) I knew that, deep down, I must have some affinity for the wild.  This hypothesis was eventually proven correct when a tentative series of successful camping excursions as an adult proved to be both relaxing and enjoyable.

But the thing that really turned me around was when a former co-worker asked me: 'Hey, did you ever check out all those lakes that are up around where you live?'  At the time I had no idea what he was talking about but I never forgot the question.  Then, a few years later, I did some Google map research and spent an entire day trying to find these mythical places.

The first site was rife with teenagers and broken glass.  The second place was cleaner but still overpopulated.  But then, just as soon as I crested the rocky apex of the third spot, I knew that I'd discovered a little slice of Paradise mere minutes away from home.  Bonus points: there were barely any miniature flying vampires anywhere in sight!

I quickly made up for lost time.  If the forecast was sunny and temperatures in excess of twenty degrees were predicted, I'd work feverishly all morning to electronically transcribe the previous day's longhand and then spend the rest of the day ensconced in my unconventional but tastefully decorated exterior office.  No cubicle.  No recycled air.  No oppressively claustrophobic ceiling.  No sickly florescent lighting.  It was the perfect environment for inspiration.

Subsequently, I fell madly in love with Mother Earth.  The only problem is that I'm completely addicted to this ritual and when I can't be with her I become sullen and depressed.  Like Lancelot in Excalibur; I've come to rely upon Gaia to heal my spiritual ills.  The long, dry, dull, monochromatic days of winter days do absolutely nothing to assuage me.

So, how's this for a deal?  If I can get enough people to buy my book I'll funnel the profits directly into constructing an indoor, all-season pleasure dome which every one of my sponsors can visit!         
 
Fine print: sufficient copies of the book must be sold in order to finance the construction of the preciously mentioned Xanadu.  One visit per customer per proof of purchase.  Offer void for douchebags.         
      
EPIC POEM  One of my all-time favorites.

EPIC STUNT  Wanna see a re-creation of my infamous bike crash?  Check it out at the 2:24 mark... 

EDITED FOR T.V. FAIL  Man, am I ever glad that I dodged that particular career path.  Half of this is gloriously NSFW, the other half is spectacularly lame. 

Ode To A Tech-Free Childhood

Hello, Virtual Play Palz!

I read recently that American kids spend almost eight hours a day watching T.V., playing videogames, surfing the net, and presumably typing 'LOL' a hundred times in a row.  I find this statistic to be supremely troubling.

But before I start getting all self-righteous ("Too Late, Gramps!"), I must confess that we really didn't have the sort of sophisticated and compulsively addictive diversions that wee ones now have access to.  If I'd been born in the past, say, twenty years, I'd probably be checking new texts every ten seconds like a rat on cocaine as well.

Nowadays kids have all kinds of cool shit at their disposal: streaming video, smart phones, iPads, and Blu-Ray players.  Cripes, even their friggin' eyewear will soon become leet.

Just as an example, look at how far video games have come.  Here's a dragon as depicted in last year's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:

And here's a dragon from the Atari video game Adventure from 1979:

In the immortal words of Thor, God of Thunder: "Verily, I shit thee not." 

And I had to wait ten or eleven years before I encountered technology like that.  When I was really young, like seven or eight, this was my idea of a video game...

And for comparison's sake, here's what a hockey player looks like in NHL 13: 

And here's what that same player looked like in Mattel Electronics Hockey (magnified 300%):

That's right, kids!  Imagine not being able to tell the difference between Sidney Crosby and a friggin' price sticker?

Despite our clearly primitive graphics capabilities, I still had the best childhood you could ever imagine.  Any given day during the summer was a new and exciting adventure.  First off, you'd get up at the crack of dawn and watch Star Blazers while eating a mixing bowl filled with cereal...  

  

Nutritious breakfast consumed, you'd hop on your bike and pedal furiously down to your best buddy's place.  In fact, the better part of your day would be spent astride your one-speed crotch rocket.  Often we'd ape adult behavior by selecting a destination and pedaling there at a drunkenly neglegent rate (sans helmet, natch!).  Once we got there, we'd deploy our kick stands and "hang out" (I.E. loiter), leaning on our seats like motorbike-riding teenagers and taking care not to stray too far from our "rides" lest we invite a case of "Grand Theft Bike".

Then we'd pester the bejesus out of some poor shop-keep, buying penny candy in batches of one or blowing our wads on one of these lurid and colorful titles:

 
En route back home we'd encounter the neighborhood spoiled rich kid who's parents could afford to buy him a Green Machine or Big Wheel.  This moron would brag that he'd be doing a "crazy jump" in the dirt lot across the street from our apartment building at 2 pm so we'd "better be there" 'cuz it's "gonna be just like Evel Knievel".

So naturally we'd all show up at the appointed time to gawk and make fun of this dumb f#@k as he tried in vain to pedal up a flimsy plywood ramp on a plastic bike.  Fast forward a few months later and Richy Rich would still be trying to kill himself for the sake of some "respek", perhaps this time astride a heavy, oversized motocross bike that would flip him off into the woods after he invariably lost his balance half way up the ramp.

Later that same afternoon a rumor would begin to circulate that THE ASSHOLE KIDS WHO LIVED UP ON THE HILL had greviously insulted someone's neighborhood / mom / bike and challenged us to a rock fight a 4 pm sharp.  Speaking of sharp, the traditional arena for this tilt was the empty lot (hey, what can I say, we had a lot of lots back then) at the bottom of THE HILL behind our apartment, which was nicely stockpiled with shale, I.E. the WMD's of the Grade Two-set:

Mercifully there was also several large boulders to take cover behind so this often went on like a protracted, low-rent version of laser tag until the first kid got clipped and the battle was decided.  Even these early experiences served to delineate a clear line in the sand between childhood fantasy and painful adult reality.  

FANTASY: "My newly acquired Spider-Man web shooters will surely be the deciding factor in the coming battle!"    

  

REALITY: "Ze web shooters, zey do NOTHINK!!!"

Knowing full well that we still had at least three solid hours of daylight left, we'd scrarf our dinners down like pythons eating a capybara.  We were soon back outside again, either leading a platoon of stormtroopers in a futile search for droids or creating our very own Sim City for a fleet of dinkies:

Which brings me to a quick aside.  One time while me and my buddies were playing dinkies, the resident ruffian Alan came along and kicked apart all of our painstakingly elaborate civic planning.  That particular day I'd spent most of the morning reading Batman comic books, so I decided to do what Batman does to every villain: I stood and tried to punch the bully square in the mush with a haymaker.  Unfortunately my quarry ducked and I ended up punching the brick wall that he was standing behind.  Yowtch!    

Then, just before dusk you and your team of pint-sized Steve Irwins would catch a grass snake, sparking off a heated U.N. style debate about which lucky big game hunter would be allowed to take it home.  One time when I was the "winner" I had to spend hours lobbying to keep the beast in my room.  Eventually my poor long-suffering mother let me seal it up in a disused aquarium with an entire set of encyclopedias holding the lid down.  The next morning my room stunk like the gorilla cage at Granby Zoo after a week-long maintenance strike.

Yeah, it goes without saying that releasing the snake back into his natural habitat was my first action item in that particular day.

Honestly, every summer day would be like that: a constant rinse, wash and repeat of outdoor adventures.  I know that kids today posses vastly superior diversions but frankly I'd never trade it for my own low-tech childhood.

EPIC   Go ahead...live the adventure that is, um...Adventure.

FAIL   And we wonder why there's a health epeidemic in North America.