I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (12 page)

A Still Shark Is Still a Shark

(20 weeks)

SUNDAY.

In my parents' living room, my father reads a book on the couch beside me while my mother exercises in the other room.We are having a visit.

“Two hundred twenty-five,” my mother calls from her bedroom. She's been giving my father and me an update on the calories she's burned riding her exercise bike.

“She's cycling herself into non-existence,” my father says, getting up from the couch to use the washroom. He's gone for twenty calories, and when he returns, he is distraught.

“Instead of sitting down on the toilet seat,” he says, “I sat on the closed lid. Did you close the toilet?”

I confess that I did, and my father is outraged.

“This has never been a closed-toilet-lid family,” he says.

“I really feel part of a rich tradition,” I say.

I explain that closing the toilet lid is something I started doing after reading an article in a science journal about the molecules of toilet water that escape with each flush.

“Your toothbrush might as well be a toilet brush,” I say.

“Two hundred forty-five,” my mother says.

“This place is a nuthouse.” My father picks his book back up, and we continue our visit in an easy silence that will be broken only by the next chime of calories.

MONDAY.

Five hundred. According to the McDonald's website, there are five hundred calories in a McRib, half of which are from fat.

I'm studying up on my prey in anticipation of dining out with Josh. Though I have never eaten one, the McRib is a sandwich that's fascinated me for years. For one thing, if it's popular, why not keep it on the regular menu? And if it isn't, why keep bringing it back every few years? Either people want it or they don't.

On the drive to McDonald's, Josh explains his theory.

“The McRib is fleeting, and its ephemerality stirs anxiety in the hearts of men. Any day one might walk into McDonald's and the McRib will no longer be there. One must seize it before it is driven back into oblivion. It's like the green Shamrock Shake, but without the stabilizing tie-in of a St. Patrick's Day.”

“Maybe the McRib could be tied in to national heart disease awareness week.”

Josh thinks that might be the stupidest thing he's ever heard.We argue the point passionately.

Another point of fascination is that the McRib is composed of meat that's been shaped into the form of rib bones. In terms of its immanence and use of self-guise as disguise, the McRib is probably the most postmodern item on the McDonald's menu.

At the restaurant, the cashier tells us that they stopped serving the McRib a day earlier.

We are both a little crushed.

On our way to Chinatown for dumplings, we cheer our spirits by rolling down the windows and arguing over the difference between dumplings and kreplach. We do so intensely enough to make passersby stop and stare.

THURSDAY.

While watching a documentary about sharks, I become saddened that sharks don't seem to be scaring me the way they used to.When I was a kid, about eighty percent of my time was spent worrying about being eaten by sharks.This was during the seventies, and with all the movies—
Shark!
,
Jaws
,
Jaws 2
, and
Jaws 3
in 3D—everyone was. Going to the beach was an act of daredevilhood. I remember dropping a hard-boiled egg into the surf to see if a shark would come and get it—to see if it was safe to swim—and my dad
yelling to never mind the shark, he was going to murder me for wasting eggs.

But nowadays, or at least on some days, being eaten by a shark doesn't seem so bad. I mean, it would be bad, but after the first couple bites, I suspect no worse than missing out on McRib season or listening to someone talk about their RRSP contribution.

I've financial matters on my mind this evening because I've promised myself, despite its being a major anxiety, to get a head start on my taxes. But instead, I continue to watch the documentary on sharks, nostalgic for old fears and still unwilling to confront new ones.

A Place to Hang One's Cape

(19 weeks)

FRIDAY.

While reading
The New Yorker,
I tear out a poem and slip it into my wallet. It's where I keep the things most dear to me, but as I keep my wallet in my back pocket, I must be economical in my curating, for too much dearness will damage my spine. The rump of a Greek god is one thing; the rump of a centaur is another.

I get up to go to the bathroom when I realize that my bathroom door hasn't been able to shut all the way in God knows how long. I guess I've been living alone too long. Maybe someday I'll become the kind of classy older bachelor who's comfortable buying himself flowers on the way home from work—a man who takes calèche rides through the park with his poodle while sipping cognac from a flask. In this scenario, I'm seeing a cape featured prominently. And an apartment suited to my
station in life—with doors that close and hooks to hang one's capes.

SATURDAY.

I turn on my computer to search Craigslist for apartment listings. The wireless window pops up, and I realize with some regret that all I know about my neighbours is their wireless network names: Krypton, Space Balls, Couscous, and Scarlet. From this I can tell little else than that they're fans of Superman, Mel Brooks, Middle Eastern cuisine, and the colour red. I look out my window, wondering whose house is whose and what private food and entertainment consumption occurs in each and how I will never get to know.

SUNDAY.

Gregor comes over to help with my apartment search.

“I'm thrilled about this move,” he says. “I intend to keep monetizing you long after you're dead, so we need a place people can continue to come visit and celebrate your memory—a Canadian Graceland where European tourists can say, ‘It's so much smaller and stinkier than I imagined.' As your manager/real estate agent, I'll find you a proper home by nightfall.”

“Nightfall?”

“We Ehrlichs are a persistent bunch. My uncle Perry
Ehrlich, armed with only a dessert spoon, was said to have once chased a canned peach all around the bowl, across the length of the table, and along the waxed pine floor of the dining room. He eventually trapped the renegade fruit slice two hours later under a basement armoire.”

“And then what? Did he eat it?”

“I believe he had a stroke.”

“That would make some canned peach commercial.”

MONDAY.

With Gregor having turned up nothing but a refurbished school bus and a ten thousand square foot loft in Chelsea, New York, I pick up a newspaper to comb the classifieds, old-school. When I return home I find Boosh on the kitchen table. It appears she has eaten half my flowers.

She gives me a meaningful, almost soulful, look.

If only Boosh knew a few words. I'm not saying enough to explain her obsession with squirrels, or the meaning behind her howls when the theme to
As It Happens
comes on the radio, but a couple of words. “Good morning.” “What's up?” “Nice to be sitting here with you.”

I return her look, gazing at her searchingly, looking for answers—if not for where to live, maybe just what to have as a mid-afternoon snack.

“Canned peaches,” I imagine her saying. “Use a fork.”

Medium Is the Message

(18 weeks)

TUESDAY.

I'm on the phone with Tony.

“Ever feel slightly off?” he asks. “But only slightly. Like your T-shirt's on backwards or something.”

“I often wear my T-shirts backwards on purpose,” I say. “It makes me feel like with each step I'm travelling back into the past. Ah, the past! That's where regrets are born.”

“Plus with the tag in front, you can dip your head under the collar and contemplate your own mediumness.”

“Speaking of being medium,” I say, “I recently read that in experiments involving cockroaches and aggression, it turns out that aggressiveness is a quality most valuable in medium-sized cockroaches. Evidently, this is because they have the most to lose.”

“What can a cockroach possibly have to lose?” he asks.

At this, we conclude our conversation. Having achieved a difficult Zen koan, what is there left to say?

WEDNESDAY.

Howard calls up to see if I want to go out for seafood.

“One of my goals this year is to eat more lobster,” he says. “And wait until you see me in a lobster bib. It's a very handsome, slimming look.Well worth your paying for dinner just to behold me in it.”

“When you were ten,” I ask, “did you ever think you'd one day be in your thirties hustling lobster?”

“If, at ten, I'd gone to a palm reader who told me I'd one day be living in a cardboard box, subsisting on gobstoppers, and able to watch
The Twilight Zone
five days a week on cable, I'd think the future was looking pretty good.”

“Can we blame our public school education for breeding in us such lowered expectations?” I ask. “Maybe we'd have made more of ourselves if we were home schooled.”

“Depends which home the schooling was taking place in,” he says. “In my home, our encyclopedias were used to prop up windows. My dad kept the whole set in a cardboard box in the garage beside his tool box.”

“How does fish and chips sound?” I ask.

“Pretty good,” he says.

Never underestimate the power of medium expectations.

As Elusive as a Peach Slice

(17 weeks)

SUNDAY.

I'm sitting on the couch playing video games with Tucker. As he plays, he tells me about a conversation he had in a bar the night before with a woman who was taller than him.

“It's not that I'm short,” Tucker told her. “It's just that I'm far away.”

It's my turn to play, and Tucker watches the screen.

“Even as a Pac-Man, your personality really comes across,” he says. “The way you run away from things while still pausing to look back.”

“I guess I always try to make time for regret,” I say. “I wonder if the ghosts are Pac-Men who've died in games past.”

He hands me another beer. The more I drink, the less afraid I become of getting caught by ghosts, but the more attractive a nap starts to feel. In sleep things are simpler.

No regret over the past. No worry for the future. Only the present. And as bad as a dream gets, at least you get to sleep through it.

MONDAY.

In the dream, I am able to fly. I haven't had a dream like this since I was a kid.The only problem is that I'm only able to fly half a foot above the ground. Also, I can only fly about a quarter of a mile an hour. Still, I am flying. I head to Montreal's Olympic Stadium, but after several minutes of tedious, unspectacular flight, I decide that it'd be faster just to take the metro.With this thought, I am suddenly awake.

FRIDAY.

After a large, tasty Chinese meal, I lean back and decide to just enjoy the moment.

“What's the matter?” Tony asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “Why?”

“You suddenly look like Charles Manson trying to remember where he parked.”

“I was trying to be in the moment,” I say, angrily and no longer in the moment. “This is why I can't relax—because whenever I do, I end up looking like an antisocial lunatic.”

When I'm finished my whining, I realize I'm still hungry. I've been trying to watch myself, and so I debate whether to top things off with a fortune cookie.

“You just ate three egg rolls and a family-sized plate of General Tao chicken,” Tony says. “Go for gold.”

I crack it open and read the fortune. “Spoil yourself a little.”

And so I decide to eat half. And as I continue to eat the other half, I'm not exactly in the moment, but somewhere adjacent to it.

Timing

(16 weeks)

SUNDAY, 10:30 A.M.

Marie-Claude calls to invite me over for dinner. A five o'clock dinner.

“What're you, on Honolulu time?”

“It's called having children,” she says.

“Are your children in their seventies? Eating dinner this early takes planning—lead time. I need to retool my whole digestive clock. I'd have been getting up at 4:00 a.m. for the past two weeks if I'd known.”

“Go out and paint a fence,” she says.“Work up a healthy appetite.”

“When was the last time you heard someone tell a grown man to ‘work up a healthy appetite'? In this day and age, it's just not done!”

1:30 P.M.

In an attempt to work up a healthy appetite, I nap on the couch while watching TV. Boxing is on and it's making me nostalgic. As a child I watched the sport with my father while punching the couch cushions. I was a cocky kid and thought that if Muhammad Ali agreed to fight me on his knees, I might have a chance.

I wanted my father to think of me as a hero of some kind. Little did I know that, as far as he was concerned, my single greatest act of heroism would only arrive in my thirties, upon losing my wallet in a Chicago taxicab and continuing to lead a relatively normal life.

“You handled that courageously,” he'd repeat whenever the story arose. “After something like that, they'd have had to put me away for good.”

During a commercial, I head to the kitchen and stare at a shelf full of cereal boxes, uncertain as to whether I should be having lunch or a pre-dinner snack. Cereal as a snack means throwing in marshmallows, while cereal for lunch means slicing in a pear.

If the early dinner was a sporting event, I guess this would be like some kind of warm-up.

5:30 P.M.

After dinner, I sit on Marie-Claude's couch, depressed. So much of my time is spent thinking about what I'm going
to eat next that, with dinner behind me so early in the evening, I've nothing left to look forward to.

7:30 P.M.

At home, I try to calculate how much of my day is taken up with thoughts of food. If you were to break down my thoughts on a pie chart (and what other chart could possibly be more suited to the task?) it would look like this: 30 percent on what my next meal will be; 10 percent on who'll show up at my funeral; 10 percent on sexual fantasies; 20 percent on revenge fantasies; 15 percent on what I should've said to various security guards and receptionists in verbal altercations from decades past; and 10 percent on hair loss. This leaves me with 5 percent for contemplating the “big picture” stuff like what movies I'm going to see next.