T-U-R-T-L-E POWER

I’ve always been pretty adorable.  Ask anyone.  Well, some people might not know what the hell they're talking about, but ask most people.  I've never been good-looking in any traditional sense, but it's never really mattered.  I'm charming as shit, and because I look like a giant newborn, people naturally assume I'm a sweetheart.  That assumption is wrong though, and I'm going to tell you a story that proves it.

Back when I was about 9 or 10 years old, my then-teenage cousin (who’s always been a real sweetheart, and that's no assumption) decided that she and her friend would come out to my house and babysit my sister and I for the day.  It was during the summer.  I'm not sure what happened to our regular babysitter, but my Mom told my cousin and her friend that they were welcome to come out and take care of us for a day.

My sister was usually pretty well-behaved, so was I actually, but every now and then I would get this really strange feeling, like I had to do something crazy, silly, ridiculous, and/or just plain irritating.  [I still get this feeling actually, only now fewer people chalk it up to hyperactivity, and more people tend to lean towards it being a psychosis of some kind.]  Anyway, I could feel that weird feeling bubbling up inside me, and before anyone knew what was happening, I went fucking batshit.

Within minutes I was chewing on plastic Barbie-doll shoes while jumping rope on the couch.  I was spiking volleyballs off of the inside of the living-room windows, power-driving Frisbees at the china cabinet, and using a Skip-it (a plastic flail you could wear on your ankle) to try and footsweep my little sister.  I went on like this for a while, and because so much of what I was doing involved antagonizing my sister, she started to throw a noteworthy little tantrum all on her own.

It was a madhouse.

My cousin and her friend were completely blindsided by my peculiar little episode.  Their first little trial-run at the babysitting career they had no doubt hoped to start had failed miserably.  I tore around the house like the Tasmanian Devil for nearly an hour before I started to lose steam.  By that point, the babysitters were on their last legs as well.  When they demanded my sister and I go to our rooms and stay there until our parents got home, we did what we were told.

In a silly attempt to extend an olive branch, my cousin and her friend drew little flowers and hearts on the chalkboard that hung between my sister and I’s rooms.  They wrote “We Love You!” on it in the hopes of burying the hatchet I guess.  I snuck out of my room, wiped the board clean with my sleeve, and drew a large Satan with the words “We don’t love you!” written in a fiery font below it.

Those poor girls were sitting on the couch in the living room, probably feeling all impressed with how well they had handled me with their send-him-to-his-room technique.  No doubt they were talking about just how hard babysitting was, and then congratulating one another on how well they had done.  They hadn't even seen my chalkboard Satan yet, and what they didn't know was that I had about six-and-a-half dollars worth of penny candy in my room.  I was down there, jumping up and down on my bed, handfulling gummy candy into my face, and chanting “T-U-R-T-L-E  POWER” over and over and over while I waited for my blood-sugar levels to lift me up into another manic state.

It was about 30 minutes later when I exploded out of my room.  Those walls and that door couldn't contain me.  The girls tried to stop me in the hallway, but I used all the Turtle Power I had been building up and broke right through them.  They couldn’t stop me when I was like this, nothing could.  I ran loops through the house, dodging them, throwing things, knocking shit over, and wreaking whatever other havoc I could.  I wasn't even a child anymore.  I was like a fucking poltergeist you could see. 

I made a break for the door and managed to get out onto the front lawn.  My cousin tried to chase me down, but I made it to my bicycle and managed to pedal away from her.  It was a close call, pedaling was hard as I could barely breathe through all the hysterical laughter that was coming out of me.  My cousin and her friend stood on the lawn and screamed at me to come back, but I kept pedaling.  I went down the hill, across the stretch, and all the way to “the corner” (which was as far as I was allowed to go).  Then I kept going. 

As soon as I rounded “the corner”, I could hear the girls’ screams increase in pitch and volume.  They sounded desperate.  To listen to them, you would have thought I was pedaling into a live volcano or something.  It was kind of hard to hear them through my laughter, which I still had absolutely no control over.  I pedaled up a hill, and then disappeared into the trees as the road left my neighborhood.  Knowing I was out of sight, I got off my bike and snuck back through the trees so I could see my house.  The girls were standing on the lawn crying.  They thought I had run away.  Hilarious!

I hung out in the trees for a while, before deciding to head back home.  I got into the driveway when my cousin leaned out the door and told me to get inside.  I could see her eyes were all puffy and red, so were her friend's eyes. 

"We didn't know where you went!" my cousin yelled.

She had started to cry again, and I was almost starting to feel kind of guilty about the whole thing, but for the goddamn life of me I couldn't stop laughing!

"I'm glad you think it's so funny," she said angrily, "because I had to call my Mom and Dad, and they’re on their way here right now to look for you…annnnd they called your Mom and Dad to tell them to come home too."

Shit had gotten REAL!

"WHAT?!" I roared, "You called your parents?!  Why?  I was just joking around!"

"We didn't know that!!" the friend spat at me.

"Call them back, tell them I was just joking" I demanded.

"We tried when we seen you were coming back," her friend informed me, "they already left".

I had to think of a plan. 

I went down to my room and tidied it up, surely that would help.  I did some chores today, that's had to count for something, right? 

"Oh, and we told Mom about your little chalkboard drawing" my cousin yelled down the hallway to me.

GOD-DOUBLE-DAMMIT.  I wasn't supposed to draw the devil.  I was in so much shit!

I erased the Satan on the chalkboard, and then went around the house tidying up the mess I had made.  The girls followed me around with their arms folded, looking all smug like they had beaten me.  I just ignored them, I didn’t have time for their shit.

Once the house was tidy, I went down to my room and waited.  The anticipation was awful.  My aunt and uncle arrived, and my aunt even popped her head in my bedroom door and told me that I owed the girls an apology.  She was pissed, I could tell.  I apologized to the girls and then went back to my room.  I was in my room when I heard my father's motorcycle coming down the road. 

Jesus, even his bike sounded angry.

When he came in the house, he apologized to my aunt and uncle and my cousin and her friend and assured them he would punish me.  When I heard his boots coming down the hallway and I panicked.

"PLAY DEAD MOTHERFUCKER!" my brain screamed at me.

So I did.  I dove into bed with superhuman speed and pretended to be asleep.  To my credit, I think I did an excellent job of having that slack-faced "I'm actually asleep" look, but I guess my Dad figured there was no reason for me to be sound asleep at 2:30pm on a summer day.

"Don't you try to pull that shit with me, get out into that living room, NOW!" he said in his creepy-calm voice.

Like an asshole, I pretended to wake up.

"W-what?" I said sleepily, and followed it with a big yawn.

"Keep pushing....you just go ahead and keep pushing!" said the creepy axe-murderer wearing my Dad's body.

My sister (who was in trouble even though she was innocent of most of the charges) and I were marched out to the living room where a jury of the people I had irritated the piss out of told me how much trouble I caused.  We both apologized again, and then my aunt, uncle, cousin, and cousin's friend left.

My Dad informed me that we were both to be grounded for a month.  We would not be allowed to watch our favorite TV shows for the rest of the summer, and we would have to spend the evening scrubbing the side of the house.

Tough punishment, but when it came to scrubbing the house the joke was on him.  I still had like 3 hours worth of Turtle Power left.

It was fucking easy.

Ski-Trip

The inherent problem with skis, as I see it, is that they slide just as well backwards as they do forwards, which leaves you entirely dependent on having some previous forward motion to keep you moving in the right direction.  If you don’t have that forward motion, or any means of attaining it, you’re screwed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know there are supposed to be little techniques that keep you from sliding backwards down a hill, but they all involve clever little tricks you do with your feet, and unfortunately, when I ski, I can’t do clever little foot tricks because someone has very stupidly attached long wooden slats to each of my feet.  Oh, and the other problem with skiing is that it just really sucks.  It's like sledding, only without the sled or the fun.  I really can’t say enough bad things about skiing, but I’m going to try.  Here we go…

So this story is about the one and only ski trip I ever took in my life, and, like most of the stories on this blog, it ends with me looking like an asshole.  I was in grade school, probably grade 7 or 8, and we were going on a class trip to the nearest ski hill.  We started out early in the morning as the nearest ski hill was still quite a ways away.  The driver of the chartered school bus must have been new at her job or something because I remember she was having a hard time with the manual transmission.  She would screw up and miss a gear, or forget the clutch entirely.

"If you can't find 'er, grind 'er", we'd all yell.

Then the bus driver would get all red in the face and look like she was going to cry.  When she stalled it out on a big hill, she made everyone get off the bus because we were laughing so hard at her.  She drove the empty bus to the top of the hill and we had to walk up to re-board.  Then she gave us a big speech about not distracting her while she did her job, but our respect only lasted until she missed another gear.  Anyway, this has nothing to do with skiing, I'm just saying we worked this bus driver over pretty good the whole trip up to the mountain.

We finally got to the ski hill, and were all fitted for our big dumb ski boots and poles and skis while I'm sure the bus driver went someplace for a drink or to cry.  The ski hill people directed us to the Bunny Hill to go through some safety courses and beginner instruction.  Most of our group spent about 30 minutes on the Bunny Hill learning the basics.  I, however, spent most of the day there. 

I practiced and repeatedly failed to master the simplest of skiing techniques.  All of my friends had moved on to other more challenging hills, but I remained on the Bunny Hill with all the 4 year olds because the instructors had told us not to try the bigger hills until we were confident we could turn and stop properly.  I could do neither of these things.  What i could do, was the maneuver where you turn your knees inward and point the tips of your skis toward one another.  This slows you down or even stops you at slower speeds, but I was terrified to use that technique while coming down one of the bigger hills.  My fear was that if I tried it, the high speeds would turn my skis too far inward, twist-breaking the bones in both my ankles, and turning the skis all the way around so it looked like I had put them on backwards.

"Nope, my skis aren’t on backwards, folks, my legs are.  Call an ambulance, please."

I had mental images of me coming down one of the moderate hills like a runaway train, screaming in agony, my skis and legs on backwards, broken bones jutting out of both my legs.  

Maybe that can’t happen, I don’t know, I’m not a fucking doctor.  It was going to be the Bunny Hill for me for the rest of the day.

Now, at the foot of the Bunny Hill was a machine called a "pony-lift" that helped tow people back to the top of the hill.  The pony-lift was essentially a long loop of cable with hard plastic handles attached to it every few feet.  This loop of cable was wound around two pulleys, one at the top of the hill, one at the bottom.  You caught hold of a handle at the bottom of the hill, let the cable take you up the hill, then you let go and let the handle made its way back to the bottom.  It was a pretty slick device, and while the handles moved pretty quickly and gave your shoulders a pretty good jolt when you latched on, it sure beat the hell out of walking back up the hill after each run.

In total, I probably made about 11 runs down the Bunny Hill (I was desperate to better my skills enough to go find my friends on the other hills), but with each run it became harder to hang onto the pony-lift on the way back up.  Eventually, while halfway up the hill, my cold hands, wet mittens, and pathetic upper body strength made it impossible to hold on to the hard plastic handle any longer.  When my hands slipped, I started sliding backwards down the hill.  I slid directly into the person behind me who was also being towed up the hill.  The collision caused them to lose their grip on the handle and as they started to slide backwards, I lost my balance and fell over sideways onto the moving cables.  The sharp-eyed operator, probably having already noticed what a lemon I was, killed the motor on the lift immediately.  The cables stopped abruptly, and my weight caused them to dive towards the ground.  All the way up the hill, handles were being yanked downwards and out of peoples’ hands.  I could feel the cables beneath me vibrate and make a metallic "PUH-TOW" sound each time someone lost their grip.  While I kicked and thrashed on the cables like a fish in a net, all the way up the hill it was mayhem.  People were falling over, sliding backwards, running into one another, yelling for help.  It was awful.

"GODDAMMIT!" I heard the Pony-Lift Man say as he came marching up the hill.

He lifted me up off of the cables and set me on my feet.  He handed me my poles and put the Pony Lift handle in my hand again.

"Hang on to it!" he said ferociously before heading up the hill to help everyone else.

The lift was re-started, and though my arms shook and quivered, I managed to hang on to the handle to the top of the hill.  Once there I decided that maybe it was time to move on to one of the more challenging hills.  Not that I was ready for a bigger challenge skill-wise. God, no, even I knew I was probably leaving the ski hill on a stretcher, but I just couldn't risk pissing off the Pony-Lift Man again.

I found my best friend, and he convinced me to accompany him down one of the intermediate hills.  We made our way to the chair-lift area, and I studied how people were getting on before I got in line.  It looked easy enough, you just positioned yourself and waited for the chair-lift to pick your ass up.  Easy!  I was nervous when it was our turn to get on, but I managed to do it no problem.

The trip up the mountain in the chair-lift was intense.  I have a phobia about heights, so I tried not to look down and just joked around with my buddy.  As we approached the "landing area" though, I realized I couldn't see how people got off of the lift.  I had no example to go off of, I had no idea what to expect!

When our chair came in, I was panicked.  It came in way too fast.  When the bar was lifted I tried to be brave and just jump out, but I immediately faceplanted.  My skis tripped my friend, and the people coming in off the next chair tripped over us.  A pile-up had begun.

Ever been at a ski resort and had the chair-lift stop for no apparent reason.  You're left dangling dangerously high above the ground in the freezing cold air, and after a few minutes someone gets mad enough to yell, "What the fuck is going on?"

Well, I'm what the fuck is going on.

They had to halt the chair-lift to pull apart the puzzle of people and skis I had caused.  When my friend and I were set free, we bolted as quickly as possible because a LOT of people were really unhappy with me.  We tried to find an intermediate trail, but all we could seem to find were the terrifying "Black Diamond" trails for those with advanced skills.  My friend was more confident than I was, but there was no goddamned way I was doing one of those trails.  I told my friend to enjoy his afternoon, then I took off my skis and I started hiking down the black diamond trail on foot.

As I walked down the mountain, the wide trail funneled itself down into a much more narrow passage through the mountain.  I had been walking for a few minutes when I heard a whooshing sound, and felt a blast of wind go by me.  I heard someone say "WHAT THE FU---" before their voice disappeared down the hill. 

It turns out, being relatively stationary in the middle of a narrow black diamond trail isn't very safe. 

I tried to make my way to the edges of the trail, but it was so narrow, and the snow was too deep to walk in at the edges.  I decided to keep walking in the middle of the trail, and I just tried to keep an eye and an ear out for people coming up behind me.  It didn't work very well at all.  They were moving so fast!  More than once I stood there facing down an incoming human missile. 
 
Imagine being an expert skier, coming down a tight trail in the forest, rounding a bend at like 80km/h and coming up on a terrified fat kid standing in the middle of the trail, kind of dancing from side to side, unsure of which direction to dive out of the way.

This happened like three or four times.  I was a nervous wreck all the way down the hill.  By the time I reached the lodge, I had tears in my eyes because I was so emotionally exhausted.  What a shit day, man. 

I sat in the lodge at a table, staring out at the mountain in defeat.  It was almost time for us to leave, and I was just sitting there waiting for my friends to return from the hills when I noticed the bus driver sitting at another table.  She was sipping hot chocolate by herself.

It hadn't occurred to me that this poor woman we had tormented all the way up here had given up her entire day so that we could go skiing.  She had been sitting down in this lodge the whole time.  I started to feel really bad about having teased her about her driving earlier.  I knew what it was like to suck at something.  This woman and I, we had both had rotten days. 

I decided that I would be really nice to her to try and make her day better.  I got up, walked over to her table, and said, "Hey, thanks a lot for bringing us up here today, we really appreciate it."

"Oh," she said, clearly taken aback, "Well, you're very welcome, it was my pleasure."

Feeling awesome about myself, I sat back down and waited until the rest of the class came back to the lodge.  When we boarded the bus, the driver gave me a little smile and she was clearly in a good mood.  Both of our days had been salvaged by a simple act of kindness. 

"All aboard!" she yelled with a smile.  The kids, all in happy moods after a day of fun, laughed good-naturedly at her little joke.  She put the bus into gear, and we started for home.  We hadn't even gotten out of the parking lot when she stalled the bus again.  It was a pretty bonehead move on her part, so we gave her shit for it the whole way home.

Ghostbusters

My old elementary school used to be pretty hard up for school events.  Sometimes we would all gather in the gym and watch a cartoon, or we’d assemble to have some old guy tell us how dangerous bears were, or sometimes a dude would bring a bunch of reptiles to school, but, other than that, there really wasn’t a lot happening.  

One of the things the school did to try and spruce things up a bit was to have “Talent Shows” a few times a year.  Now, they were called Talent Shows, but nobody had any real talents.  What this assembly always turned into was a bunch of skits that weren't very funny or entertaining followed by a number of lip-sync/air-band routines where people got up and pretended to play instruments and sing to their favorite songs.  You know, exactly what people do in front of their mirrors at home with their bedroom doors closed, only in this case it was done in front of a gymnasium full of people.

Now, the skits were more just for the really little kids; the Kindergarteners and Grade One kids would come up and act out scenes or songs from their favorite cartoons.  Air-bands, on the other hand, were for the big kids, the cool kids.  Nobody from our school had ever played any instruments, so over the years we had all become air-band connoisseurs.  You couldn’t get up there and just pretend you had an instrument; that’s fucking stupid! No, no, what you did was go to the equipment room in the gym and gather up things that could stand in for instruments.  Mop handles were microphone stands, badminton-racquets were guitars, pylons were trumpets, batons were drumsticks, etc.  Everybody had to have something unless it was an all-girl air-band, in which case there might be a few dancers, but dancers were the only ones that were allowed to be up there without an “instrument”.  After an air-band had performed, it wasn’t silly in the least to say things like, “Oh, man, did you see the way Trevor totally nailed that guitar solo?!” or “Brian’s drumroll blew my mind!”  If the right song was chosen, an air-band could even get a standing ovation.  It was like the entire school suffered from a mass delusion when it came to these Talent Shows.  I couldn’t even tell you what visitors to the school must have thought when they saw the way we went nuts for imaginary musicians.  It must have looked like a rock concert in a mental hospital.

Anyway, I remember attending one of these talent shows when I was in Grade 2 or 3, and seeing an older girl I had a crush on (yeah, I had crushes in Grade 2) doing an interpretive dance routine/imaginary music video to "I Think We're Alone Now" while lip-syncing the lyrics.  She had her "boyfriend" come up and be a part of the scene too.  He sat there, slumped in a chair, looking all cool while this angel "sang" to him.  She looked like she could sound just like Tiffany.  I sat in the crowd, years younger than the two of them, fuming that this guy had the cojones to smirk and laugh and pay attention to his buddies in the crowd while this girl pretended-to-sing her heart out for him.  In my twisted young mind I thought:

"This guy doesn't understand you!  What are you doing with him? Sure, maybe he looks cool in the tight black jeans with the three parallel tears on each thigh, and that black leather jacket over the Metallica T-shirt is pretty rad, I’ll give him that, but c'mon, this guy is just a Slash-wannabe.  If you stay with this Grease-stain you’re headed down a path that that leads to unemployment, Zesty Doritos for supper, dope-smoking, and receiving nothing but cartons of cigarettes in your stocking every Christmas."

I guess she wasn’t the brightest girl around because she stayed with that dirtbag for most of the schoolyear.  It didn’t matter though, my crush only got more intense.  When the next Talent Show came up, I decided I had to get in on it.  I knew this girl was into music and performing arts and crap, so being in the Talent Show was an excellent way to get her to notice me.

Luckily for me, one of the more meek and quiet students in my class had had a sudden burst of confidence, and decided he was going to organize an air-band routine to the Ghostbusters theme-song.  It was perfect!  Everybody loved that fucking song.  Standing ovation for sure!  I asked this guy if I could be a part of the band, and he said it was no problem.  He then very stupidly went on to tell six other guys that it was also no problem for them to join either.

On the day of the talent show the eight of us were discussing our positions.  We’d have two singers with mop handles, two badminton-racquet guitar players, two tennis-racquet bass players, a baton drummer, and a pylon trumpeter.  I was to be a guitar player.  Ladies love guitar players, I was so in.  All I had to do was a real legit-looking solo, maybe play the badminton racquet with my teeth like a real guitar god, and this girl was going to flush the fucking toilet on her current boyfriend and come running to me.  Yessir, I’d be dating an older woman by recess.  A real cougar, now that would be just aces.

While I was day-dreaming about my soon-to-be girlfriend serenading me with Tiffany songs, we were called up to perform.  I was SO ready!  We went to our positions, and suddenly, something went wrong.  There was only one mop handle, so one of the singers grabbed the pylon, which meant that the pylon guy had to grab a badminton racquet, which meant that when I went to grab MY badminton racquet there were none left.  I quickly scanned around for anything I could turn into an “instrument”.  I didn’t care what, I’d turn a vacuum cleaner into a tuba at this point, but everything had been claimed.  I had banked it all on a badminton-racquet and lost.

I had just become a dancer.

Now, when I tell you that I froze with stage-fright, please understand that no one has ever frozen as badly as I did that day.  I mean I froze up goddamned solid.  I went catatonic.  I stood there like a perfect statue, mouth half-open, staring wide-eyed at the entire school staring back at me.  It didn't matter how catchy the Ghostbusters theme-song was.  It didn't matter how realistic the guys with the badminton-racquets looked.  All eyes were on the fat kid having some sort of psychological episode in front of them.  I could see some of the older boys laughing, including that Slash-wannabe motherfucker my future-wife was dating.  My eyes scanned the crowd and when I spotted her my heart split in two.  The look on her face was a mixture of horror and disgust. 

"Jesus, what's wrong with that fat kid," I could hear her thinking, “I would NEVER date anyone that uncool. I’m soooo glad I have my current shit-rat boyfriend”.

A teacher at the back was waving her arms at me, trying to get my attention.  My eyes moved to her, and I could see her pretending to dance and mouthing the words, “Dance! You have to dance!" to me.  Sorry, Ma'am.  I appreciate your attempts to help me out here, I’m sure you’ll go to heaven for that and all, but I think we both know it’s too late for me.  I've been frozen here for almost a full minute.  To unfreeze now would just be even weirder.  If I were to suddenly burst into a dance right now it would just startle these people so bad that they’d probably jump a little.  No, if the alternative to what I’m doing right now carries with it any risk of me looking even MORE crazy, then I’ll just stick with what I’m doing.

Afraid that I was ruining his chances of getting a standing ovation, the geek that arranged this whole thing tried to salvage it by doing a big Corey Hart-esque running knee-slide on the last note of the song.  What he forgot was that Corey Hart didn’t do knee-slides on waxed gymnasium floors while wearing “Where’s Waldo” jogging pants.  This dork crashed into the first row of the audience, a bunch of Grade 1 kids still congratulating themselves on a smashing rendition of that “Chim-Chim-Cher-ee” song from Mary Poppins.  This guy slams into some little kids with a running knee-slide at the end of the Ghostbusters theme-song, and somehow I was still the one remembered as being the jackass that ruined the routine. 

Whatever.

I spent the rest of the year NOT having that cougar girlfriend and hating the guts of the opportunistic arsehole who had jumped from mop-handle singer to pylon-trumpeter and thrown everything into chaos.  To this day I can’t listen to “I Think We’re Alone Now” without getting teary-eyed, and the Ghostbusters theme-song makes me have to go to the bathroom.