I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (6 page)

“I've come a long way,” I say. “Just one quick Pu-Pu?”

She gives in and tells me I can have one.To go.

The flaming tray is brought out, I pay the bill, and walk out into the night to catch a bus back home. As I ride through the night, the fiery plate jostles to and fro on my lap. I am nervous and want to tell the driver to slow down, but then it is too late: my lap is on fire.

I awake to find Boosh, curled up, asleep on my groin.

I am becoming more and more like my father. Yearnful for things that no longer exist. But in spite of this, my father and I are happy men—happy that, at the very least, we are not on fire.

It's already morning, but I don't want to disturb Boosh, so I lie still, staring at the ceiling and trying to decide what to do with the day.

MONDAY.

It appears that someone has taken a candy out of the office candy dish, removed its wrapper, sucked it, and put it back in the bowl where it now sits stuck to the bottom, red, wet, and gleaming. Someone who is capable of something like that is capable of anything. There is a sociopath among us. I make a mental note to stop using the communal office dishrag and start keeping my uneaten Melba toast in a locked desk drawer.

FRIDAY.

No one has removed the candy from the candy bowl.

In my teens, when I kept notebooks filled with poetry, the lone candy, tasted but not chosen, might have been the kind of thing that could've made me cry. Back then, pretty much anything did—an old man eating by himself in a restaurant. Songs by Carole King. Commercials for long distance calls. And then one day the crying stopped. Sitting at my desk, it strikes me: I haven't cried in close to twenty years.

When the executive producer of my show, Carolyn, stops by, I share this with her.

“The closest I come is sometimes I dream I'm crying,” I say.

She tells me that her friend had the same problem and her therapist told her that the only tears that are real are the tears you cry in dreams.

Too bad the same can't be said of the Pu-Pu platters you eat.

Two Yarmulkes

(40 weeks)

SUNDAY.

I'm dog-sitting Boosh at my apartment, and when I arrive home I find the kitchen garbage scattered all across the living room. The dog is out of control. In the middle of the night, she awakens me with lavish licks to my shaved head like she's working away at a Tootsie Pop. What's even more unsettling is that the sensation is disturbingly tender and maternal.

TUESDAY.

Before heading out to the store, I make sure to put on some thermal underwear. As I've gotten older, long johns have become more and more important. When I was a child, my father warned against them.

“You get used to long underwear,” he said, “and then you can't take them off. July rolls around and you've still got them on under a pair of jean shorts. And then by the winter, you need two pairs—and the winter after that, three!”

For my father, long johns are much the same as heroin.

FRIDAY.

The laces on my shoes keep snapping. It feels like I've been going through about half a dozen a month. Every time I tie them, I think: “They can break right now. Or even now.” It fills me with
Weltschmerz
, and really, who wants to start the day with
Weltschmerz
?

I'm probably pulling too hard, though maybe I've somehow been endowed with supernatural strength. Maybe the moth I shooed out of my sports jacket last month was radioactive. Perhaps the ripping of my shoelaces is the first manifestation of my superpower—a superpower for wearing away at fabric.

When I stop by Tucker's for a beer, I share this thought with him.

“Your only superpower is for wearing away at people's patience,” he says.

As I'm leaving his apartment and putting on my shoes, again, my shoelace rips.

“You see?” I say, vindicated.

Tucker disappears into his apartment and returns with a bag. A shoelace bag.

Tucker is a man who doesn't have an ice tray, a doorbell, or even a functioning smoke detector—but a shoelace bag he has.

He pulls out a pair of thick laces the length of skipping ropes.

“These won't break,” he says. “They're for hockey skates.”

I lace them through my shoes and still have enough left over to crisscross up my calf like a Roman sandal. As I walk home, I try to convince myself that I am a gladiator. For the first time in a while, I actually feel less anxious about my footwear.

I.B. Singer writes of a Hassid who is so religious, he wears two yarmulkes—one on the front of his head and one on the back, just in case. Whereas the Hassid is anxiously devoted to his religion, I am religiously devoted to my anxiety. And to long johns. I'm sure the overzealous Hassid and I both appear ludicrous in the eyes of God, but at least I am not cold.

Knights of the Roundtable

(39 weeks)

SATURDAY, 1:15 P.M.

As a change in the regular format of the show, Mira and I set up a line for people to call in with their personal problems, and today we've convened a roundtable of advice-givers: my father, goddaughter Helen, and Howard.

“It's always been a dream of mine to be part of a roundtable,” Howard says, sitting down at the studio microphone, “but I somehow always imagined there'd be a cheese platter involved.”

2:35 P.M.

We listen to Stephanie from Montreal's phone message. She's a self-described nerd looking to meet a boy nerd.

“How can I help her?” my father asks, sounding genuinely stumped. “I know nothing of nerds.”

“Me neither,” Howard says.

“How can you say that?” I ask Howard. “You are a nerd. You collect
Star Wars
dolls, for crying out loud.”

“They're from
Star Trek
,” he says. “And they're collector's figurines.”

“I think that except for in the movies, there's really no such thing as a nerd,” says Helen.

“Just a lot of lonely people looking for someone to hold on to,” says Howard.

“And our next caller,” I say, leaning into the microphone.

3:10 P.M.

Laurie from Vancouver wants to know what can be done about people peeing in pools.

“More poolside bathrooms,” Helen says.

“Or what about dividing the pool,” Howard says.

“Instead of a shallow end and a deep end, you have a peeing section and a non-peeing section.”

“That's disgusting,” my father says.

3:45 P.M.

Rebecca from London, Ontario, wants to know what to do about the tantalizing smell of cooking wafting through the vent from her neighbour's apartment. It's making her hungry all the time.

“I try to fend off the smell by making bread and cookies,” she says. “Since this whole thing started, I've gained ten pounds.”

“Rebecca, don't try to combat good smells with good smells,” Howard says. “Combat good smells with bad smells. Stop bathing, don't flush, and sprinkle patchouli oil liberally around the apartment.”

“That's disgusting,” Helen says.

4:00 P.M.

Steve from Ottawa has just broken up with his very first girlfriend.

“How do you get over a first love?” he asks.

“You never do,” Howard says. “It just stays with you and becomes a part of who you are.”

I ask my father if he still remembers his first love.

“Of course I do,” he says. “I was still in high school. It was really nice.”

But when I ask him for details, like what her name was, he starts to blush and get uncomfortable.

Even though it's over fifty years ago, he's still afraid to get in trouble with my mother.

4:40 P.M.

After the last message the roundtable is adjourned.

“We did some really good work,” my father says.

“Maybe next time we can do it on a weekday,” Helen says, “so I can get out of school.”

“And maybe next time,” Howard says, “we can get a cheese platter.”

Unpredictable

(38 weeks)

MONDAY.

I put down the phone, sweating and breathing hard.

“Who were you arguing with?” Marie-Claude asks. She's over at my place, visiting with Helen and Katie.

“My dad—and we weren't arguing. I was trying to explain that it's impossible for him to have gotten an email ‘from the internet.'”

I look over and see that Helen and Katie are reading a book of Garfield comics.

“I feel bad for Jon,” Helen says.

“Why?” I ask. “He has a pretty sweet deal. A dog. A cat.

A coffee mug, as well as a counter upon which he can place his coffee mug.”

“But when was the last time he had a meal?” she asks. “Garfield's always eating all his food. It doesn't make sense that he hasn't died of starvation yet.”
I want to explain to Helen and Katie that it's not just comics that don't make sense, that life doesn't make sense either, but I'm not sure how to put it, so instead I tell them that Jon probably eats his meals between the panels and that, in fact, most of life occurs between the panels.

We should probably acknowledge life's nonsensical nature more often, though. I'm not saying it should be brought up a hundred times a day, but maybe once in a while—to keep things in perspective. Like when the president finishes a speech, he could look into the TV camera and say, “But still, we really don't know anything at all. Life is unknowable, and one day we'll all die without ever having made much sense out of it. It's weird.”

Saying stuff like that should replace “Good night” and “God bless.”

WEDNESDAY.

I'm downtown at a remaindered bookstore, browsing through fad diet cookbooks from the nineties, when I come across a book called
The Amazing Kreskin's Future with the Stars
, published in 2001. The famed mentalist sent out letters to celebrities asking for their predictions about the future and then turned their responses into a book— even including the letters from celebrities who wrote back that they weren't interested in participating. I suppose if you're going to place “The Amazing” in front of your name, you've got to have a certain amount of chutzpah.

Flipping through the book, I see that Ed McMahon envisioned a world where television would one day be projected onto the clouds, and that Roseanne Barr prophesied she would be the greatest television talk-show host of all time.

Who'd have thought cloud TV would prove a more sane prediction?

I grab an unauthorized biography of Angela Lansbury and leave.

SATURDAY.

“Did you know that Angela Lansbury's son was in the Manson gang?” I ask Tony over the phone. “Or that she played Laurence Harvey's mother in
The Manchurian Candidate
even though she was only three years older than him?”

“I'm not a fan of celebrity bios,” he says, “but I especially hate those ones from rock stars where they conclude the book with stuff like, ‘I'd flush all the cocaine and ménages à trois down the toilet for the love of one good woman.' What a crock.”

“But you're a one-woman man,” I say. “You wouldn't trade Natalie for a Natalie-sized statue of Natalie made of cocaine.”

“It's just easy for the guitarist from Aerosmith to sing the praises of settling down when he's got twenty-eight thousand one-night stands under his belt.”

Tony considers his own words for a moment.

“I should tweet that,” he says.

“Could you imagine our grandfathers tweeting?”

“From the age of eight my grandfather worked nineteen hours a day milking goats and digging wells,” Tony says.

“He'd never have had time for social media.”

I think about my dad emailing up a storm. Then I consider
his
father.

“I don't think my grandfather even knew how to use a fast-food drive-through speaker,” I say. “I was once with him when he tried to order at a Wendy's. He started yelling for boiled eggs in all directions. Didn't even bother to roll down the car window.”

Our grandfathers could have no more predicted this world than we can predict the world of our grandchildren.

“Hush up, Grandpa,” they will one day tell us. “I'm trying to watch
Vomiting with the Stars
.” And then they will go back to staring up at the clouds.

Space and Mass

(37 weeks)

SUNDAY.

On my way to the CBC cafeteria for lunch, I stop into the men's room to wash my hands. The hand dryer is so weak that every time I use it, I can't help closing my eyes and pretending that an asthmatic old man is blowing on my hands.

In this flight of fancy, the man's name is Doc and he sits on a stool dispensing old-timey wisdoms while lamenting the good old days of steam blimps and ankle-to-forehead muslin underwear.

“I'm the last practitioner of a dying profession,” Doc laments between huffs and puffs. “With all these modern continual-cloth towel dispensers, I'll soon be going the way of the elevator boy and the seltzer lad.”

After close to a minute, I give up and wipe my hands on the ends of my shirt.

I return to my desk with Salisbury steak only to realize that I've forgotten the cutlery. I search my desk drawer for a fork and knife, but succeed in finding only a teaspoon.

Eating an entire steak dinner with a plastic teaspoon proves an interesting challenge. Halfway through the meal, I become curious about the Salisbury steak's etymology. After consulting Wikipedia, I learn it was invented by a Dr. James Henry Salisbury, an MD during the Civil War. The doctor believed that vegetables were responsible for “heart disease, tumours, mental illness, and tuberculosis” and that his steak dish, when eaten three times a day with coffee, could be healthful and also serve as a cure for battleinduced diarrhea.

Finishing the last spoonful, I hope that, at the very least, it's cured me of my desire for dessert.

Ten minutes later, back in the cafeteria, I see it has not.