The neighbours are drab. Once they all seemed young, energetic, and colourful.  They wore knitted sweaters with ironic graphics, They rode bicycles with flashing lights on the spokes, lounged in sunny yards, played Sublime loudly over the din of their laughter.  They drank mimosas and told hilarious stories of random encounters with homeless people.  Now, though, they *are* homeless people.  They trudge about with swollen ankles rolling out over their ragged tube socks. They push carts whose contents are unidentifiable and mutter obscenities to themselves. “Curb stomp that nigga”, you might hear them say. The neighbors are drab.

The cars parked on my street are drab.  Once, their candy red paint jobs shimmered in the sun. Rims shone with such intensity that one had to squint and turn away.  Shirtless men with hoses and buckets of soap stood bantering on the street and lazily wiping the hoods of their tiny red sports cars. Large black Escalades meandered down the streets, stopping occasionally to allow the drivers to holler at some fine-assed chola.  Parking enforcement was never to be found; cars were parked haphazardly in various alluring configurations: perpendicular, parallel, diagonal. Wheels were turned away from the curb. It was a veritable sales poster of vehicles.  Now, rust and tarnish have replaced the candy red paint jobs with maelstroms of vomit colouring. Groups of day labourers poke and prod under the hoods of sputtering pickup trucks in futile attempts to revive them. The street is strewn with discarded parking tickets – appropriately street cleaning parking tickets – like mounds of misshapen confetti. Meter maids with suspicious expression have replaced the meandering Escalades. The cars parked on my street are drab.

The shops in my neighbourhood are drab.  Once, they offered an eclectic array of products. From tiny purple trinkets to vegan cookbooks to locally-designed women’s jewelry to artisan espresso, everything could be found in these shops. The walls outside were always magnificently decorated – either with bright, Aztec murals portraying fertility and child-birth or with wood-and-brushed-steel elegance.  Now, shops only seem to sell unmarked boxes of Saran wrap and a strange collection of unwanted vegetables: rutabagas, brussel sprouts, and cabbages. Or else they are boarded up and covered in grafiti proclaiming CHEEZ as the king of this clearly unwanted locale. Stalls selling trinkets have been replaced with homeless men peddling stolen Sony Walkmen from their oversized trenchcoats. “4.50 for the lot”, you might hear them say.  The shops in my neighbourhood are drab.

Or maybe nothing has changed, but this emotional numbness has drained the colour from my surroundings.

1. Walk in to a restaurant with an OPEN sign hanging on the door.  Quietly eat your meal, pay for it (tipping well), and try to leave the restaurant. Observe that, from the inside, the OPEN sign actually says CLOSED.  Assume that this means that the outside world is currently closed for business.  Panic.
2. Get in your car and drive. Granted, this might be difficult in your current state of mind, but do it anyway.  Push through the paranoia. Drive around for a while, until you hit a STOP sign.  Wait for the sign to change to GO.  Forever.  Or until the drugs wear off.
3. Sit down in front of your TV. Start hitting the POWER button, assuming that this will cause the TV to become more powerful with each subsequent press of the button.  Become extremely disappointed when the TV doesn’t go Super Saiyan.
4. Grab a cigarette.  Put it in your mouth, backwards.  Wait for the universe to take a drag.  Burn the inside of your mouth horribly.
5. Eat a burrito, with a fork and knife.  Cry uncontrollably when its guts spill out onto your plate.  Rub the carne asada gingerly against your face, sobbing, and repeating the words “I’m so sorry.  I didn’t mean for it to end this way!”  Be confused when you are escorted off the premises by a burly Mexican man who is muttering the words “gringo loco.”
6. Find a chair.  Tell it to get a job.
7. Go to a zoo. Join a guided tour. At the lion exhibit, ask the tour guide if the lion is the least trustworthy of animals.  When she laughs at your horrible pun, jump into the animal enclosure and point an accusatory finger in a lion’s face, yelling “How can I ever trust you?!” Wake up in the hospital with missing limbs.
8. Play the board game “Operation.” You should do this with friends.  Attempt to remove the plastic organs from the body with your tongue.  Continue doing this until your friends become uncomfortable.
9. Attend a slam poetry performance.  Sit in a folding chair.  When a performer approaches you, slowly stand up, fold the chair, and slam his face with it.
10. Find a dog.  Begin to flip him around.  Become frustrated when nothing happens.  When someone asks you what the hell you are doing, respond “I’m trying to find God.  Dog backwards is God.”  Repeat with a sausage, explaining that sausage backwards is Jesus.

I do not condone any of the above behaviour.  Unless you film it and place it on Youtube, which absolves you of any judgement.

I often ask myself whether ’tis better to dwell
In that mystical half-world of imagination,
Where dreams swirl and rise like a great swell
Of the sea, or to give oneself in resignation
To a cold, harsh reality.

For I close my eyes and see a jaunty figure,
Laughing in delight in a mystical garden.
Where nymphs and fairies flit about, and men no bigger
Than thimbles scurry, shrieking, “Pardon
Me, sir, I am in a hurry!”

Lush, enchanted forests echo with the sounds
Of desperate lovers proclaiming vows
And shepards reposing on great mounds
Of earth eye their ample-girthed sows
As they amble beside them.

And overhead fly great creatures,
Dragons, maybe, with thick brown scales,
While old men with thick beards and ragged features,
Squat by a blazing fire, whispering tales
Of knights and friars.

Black plumes of smoke rise in the distance.
While vast armies of fantastic creatures sharpen
Their blades, their captains shouting with persistence
To always be brave, and true, and to hearken
The call of Hades, should they fall.

And there is a desert, too, cold and dry,
Where dying camels stumble; they are disgraces
To their charges who trudge beside them and squint and cry
And pull their shawls tightly around their faces
And they, too, will fall.

And our figure looks upon all this,
Over this dream landscape, curiously
Pinching himself as if something was amiss,
For you see, the figure is me,
And I must return to my reality.

Sorry kind reader, I don’t mean to snap (snip?) at you. I think I’m upset. Let me explain to you why I am upset.

It was 1990. I wasn’t old enough to know this at the time but The New Kids On The Block were getting ready to release their album Step By Step. Even though it would sell a lot of albums, it would not be well received by critics. I didn’t care. I didn’t know music. I didn’t read newspapers. I didn’t even speak English, apart from that one phrase I heard my father utter once or twice: “sunofabitch.” I was just an almost-five-year-old immigrant Russian boy eating my mother’s reesavaya kasha, sitting atop a phone book and dangling my feet gaily.

The grown-ups knew. There were signs. The men kept yelling merrily at each other, laughing, raising their eyebrows and lifting mock shot glasses of vodka in my direction. The women spoke to each other in muted tones, my mother occasionally shooting worried glances in my direction. Meanwhile, I sat and dangled my feet like the little fucking idiot that I was. I was oblivious; if I had known how to whistle at the time, I probably would have whistled. It was in this state of reckless bliss that my father stomped toward me, thrust his giant leathery hands under my armpits, bumped me against a nearby crossbeam, and placed me on this shoulders. He might have said something like, “Opa – maybe I drink too much. Yan, you drive!”

Being a small child, I loved drives. I loved piling in next to my father in circa-1980 Oldsmobile holding on to the red plush bench seating for what dear little life I had. Seat belts? Never. Adventure was the name of the game. Drives were play time. But not on this day. This day, I was ushered with prods into the waiting arms of my mother in the back seat of the car. A large pile of ragged Soviet towels sat next to my mother on the seat. In the drivers seat sat my uncle Yan, with my tipsy father sitting shotgun. This unfamiliar configuration upset me and I cried out. My mother held me, stroked my little blond curls, and whispered “shhhh” into my ear. She kissed me lightly on the temple now and then. If I had been anything but a stupid immigrant child, I would have recognized this as the classic pattern of behaviour surrounding a sick pet being put out of its misery. But alas, I missed the signs.

We arrived at the hospital. White lab coats and green nurses’ scrubs filled my vision. Then one of the lab coats spoke. He said something in English, but I couldn’t make out what it was behind his operating mask. He kept making snipping signs with his hand. I must have looked confused, because he pulled down his surgical mask so that he could be heard better. As he did, I noticed the pencil mustache teetering along the bottom of his giant upper lip. If I knew then what I know now, I would immediately have identified the doctor as what he was – a child molester. The child molester pointed to his chest and said in his best Russian accent something that sounded like “Teeber Juda” It took me a moment or two to realize that this was his name.

We were walking down the crowded hospital hallway, my mom holding my hand while the Doktor and my father strolled ahead of us, seemingly talking shop. “I have Ph. D.,” he probably said, “it is kind of doctor, yes?” My mom, meanwhile, was making up a silly song to distract me. Teeber Juda! On syel chetyri blyuda!, she kept repeating in her motherly falsetto. This roughly translates to Teeber Juda! He ate four dishes! Normally, my mother’s irreverent silliness was comforting. But today I was scattered and overstimulated. Wait, what? I thought. Why? Why is he eating four dishes? And four dishes of what? Is it, like, a four-course meal? Appetizer, salad, entree, and dessert? Or was he eating the actually dishes? How did he do that? What was going on here?!

This was not a productive train of thought. I couldn’t think with all these bright lights. I was in the gurney. My small body was held down by a mountain of rough heated blankets and the casual hands of a large Jamaican lady, presumably (and hopefully) the nurse. I looked around the room. No one seemed to be paying attention to me. Everyone was busy tinkering with this valve and adjusting that reading. The nurse made a tsk-ing sound at a passing coworker, laughed, then yelled something about “disjuboi”. Then the Doktor filled my vision. (Teeber Juda! On syel chetyri blyuda! Teeber Juda! On syel chetyri blyuda!) He signaled that he was going to go to sleep. I was confused (why was a grown-up asking me for permission to nap?), but I was pretty okay with it. I was so okay with it, in fact, that I would to take a nap myself. With all these people around me working and joking, I decided that I was tired and wanted to sleep. So I did.

I woke up to something amiss. The enormous stack of blankets still pressed me down to the bed. The lights were still too bright. The large Jamaican lady smiled at me from nowhere in particular and hummed some happy tropical tune. My parents and uncle were no longer in the room, but I could hear the umistakable din of Russian conversion in the hall – a sound like the crackling of birchwood in an old rusty samovar. The situation had largely not changed, except that I could not feel my crotch. The area between my knees and my hips was a dead-zone, the unlikely site of some tiny nuclear war. My crotch now suffered from post-apocalyptic nuclear winter. I tried to poke myself through the blanket, but felt nothing. Naturally, I understood that they had removed my penis. This was okay. I had never really known what it was for, anyway – just this dangling piece of flesh where my weewee came out. Or, that’s where it used to come out, I thought.

I continued absentmindedly punching the area where my thing used to be until the nurse grabbed my hand and cuffed my ear. “Dontchabedoinat”, she said. My parents walked in. My father grinned and tussled my hair. He kissed me on the forehead, muttering something about being a Jewish boychik, and handed me a small golden star. I held it in my hand, turning it and examining it from various angles. I licked it tentatively, at which point it was taken away from me. My mother made small grunting noises. I was then wheeled into a private room. The afternoon sun shone in through the teal shutters and made vertical stripes along my bed. I swatted at them. This was nice; this was quite, peaceful. A cat or a raccoon plodded along the windowsill and stopped briefly to look at me. It nodded approvingly and dashed away.

Then Dr. Teeber Juda marched in. He presented my father with a clipboard, which he signed, and proceeded to point at a particular spot on the clipboard. My father nodded and said to me in Russian, “We are done! All you have to do is pee in the toilet over there,” he gestured towards the door in the corner of the room, “and they let us leave. So, go pee!” I considered appraising my father of the fact that my peeing organ was no longer available for use, but he was already ripping off the blankets and yanking me onto my feet. I swayed and grabbed onto my father’s pant leg, then slowly shuffled to the bathroom. There I was presented with a unique problem: how to pee? I lifted my gown (when did they put that on me? I thought), and examined my mutilated self. In fact, they had not cut off my penis. It was still there, wrapped in a stained bandage, with its scared and retreating tip poking out the end.

“Pee!” yelled my father through the open bathroom door. Okay, I thought. Pee. But I couldn’t remember how. Suddenly, the only skill that I thought I had perfected seemed impossible. I stared at the gleaming white toilet bowl, willing it to fill with (my) urine, but nothing materialized. Pee, I thought. I braced myself against the nearby sink, scrunched my eyebrows, tightened my malnourished body, and thought, Pee! Nothing came out, but something definitely happened inside. It felt as though a throwing knife had somehow lodged itself inside me and the only way to get it out was through that little hole poking out from the tip of my khui (a naughty word, according to my mother). I sighed in despair and started waddling back to my bed.

On queue, Uncle Yan ran in shouting, “Hurry up! I’m double parked outside and I don’t want a parking ticket!” Back then, the worst thing that could happen to an immigrant was to get a parking ticket. His house could burn, his wife could spontaneously combust, a small child could be frightened to death by his malfunctioning penis, but a parking ticket would still be the worst thing that happened that day. And so I was shoved back into the bathroom and told once again to pee.

I squeezed and writhed and relaxed and jumped and thrusted, but nothing came out. I kneeled down, stood up, shook my shoulders, held my breath and clenched my buttocks, and still the taps remained dry. Finally, after crying and pleading for several minutes, I was able to coax a drop, a single crimson drop, from my insides. Then another, and another, more painful than the last, dripped from the tip of my weewee, and finally a small stream, as from a water pistol that has run out of ammunition, cascaded into the bowl. I dutifully flushed the red-streaked toilet bowl and ambled back out to impatient hands. While my uncle peered out the window and craned his neck to see if he had been towed, my mother whisked me onto the bed and wrapped me in those old Soviet towels from the back of the car. As if I didn’t look ridiculous enough already, she then slipped a hand-me-down Spiderman(TM) shirt over my head and placed me into a waiting wheelchair.

My father pushed me out of the lobby and called for my uncle to bring the car closer. My uncle was busy making obscene hand gestures at an ambulance driver, but quickly abandoned this task (after a final game-winning flourish) and pulled the car up to the curb. Again, I was whisked into the backseat; clearly a lot of whisking was happening on this day. The car sped off. I sat in the back much as I had earlier that day – confused and with my mother coddling me in her arms. I looked down at my crotch, wrapped in a slowly staining towel, and thought, this is very strange. My father kept saying that I had a done good thing, even though it felt more as if something had been done to me. He kept saying that he was very proud. He said that god (who?) was very proud. I found it strange even then that someone was proud of me for having the tip of my penis removed.

I didn’t say anything, however, because at that moment my uncle was walking out of a McDonalds (a McDonalds!) with that coveted of American delicacies: the McDonald’s apple pie. The one that comes in a cardboard wrapper. He handed it to me and patted me on the head.

So there’s that, at least. At least I got pre-packaged pie. Was it worth the trauma of my privates being handled roughly by a child molestor with a funny name and a doctor’s uniform? Maybe?

However, as with all things frustrating in my life, I’d like poke fun at these mini-fibs by turning them into… macro-fibs.   Let’s hyberbolize!

1. “Stop making that face, or it’ll stay that way forever.”  And forget about just looking stupid (because it will), your disfigured face will ruin your entire life.  Your body, in sympathy to your face, will twist and writhe until it, too, is disfigured.  You will be forced to live your life confined to a wheelchair.  You will never be able to hold down a job of any kind.  Retail employers will turn your down because your frighten the customers.  You’ll never be able to lift anything with your crippled T-Rex hands, so Industrial is out of the question.  You may be able to get a job as a filing assistant somewhere, but fellow employees will complain that your presence is “just too depressing,” and you’ll probably los that job too.  You’ll become a dependent of the state, and when they cut off your disability payments  — and they will, because you’re “just that ugly” (it’ll say that on the memo you get), you’ll be forced to resort to begging.  You’ll be horrible at that, too; passers-by will cross the street to avoid catching a glimpse of your mangled countenance.  So uncross your eyes, will ya?

2. “If you sing before breakfast, you will cry before night.”  It’s true.  After breakfast, you’ll be feeling pretty jovial, sure.  You’ll skip off to school, still singing a fancy tune, but by the time you get there you’ll be humming at best.  Then the notes will go flat, and by recess you will have stopped altogether.  As your jolly mood from breakfast wears off, your friends will go off to play handball behind the gym while you watch them seriously.  You’ll speak a few words here and there, halfheartedly, but your friends (who hadn’t sung before breakfast, mind you) will be too engrossed in their playing to notice you.

At lunch, you’ll  sit quietly in the back of the cafetria, listening to your friends discussing baseball and trading Pokemon cards, but still you’ll say nothing.  You’ll nibble on your ham sandwich, think about its calorie count and lament the fact that it’s made with bleached white bread instead of whole grain.  After lunch, back in class, you’ll sit quietly and listen to your teacher drone on about civics and the importance of voting.  You’ll look at her wrinkled face and think about how close to death she is.  You’ll imagine her lifeless body, blue and bloated, on a mortician’s table; you’ll sense the acrid aroma of embalming fluid and gag slightly.  You’ll start to weep, small sobs shaking your body.  Then you’ll thiink about all your friends dead, and you’ll weep a little harder.  Then you’ll imagine your funeral, all of us clad in black silk, wiping away our tears with black handkerchiefs, and you’ll weep still harder.

Back home, at dinner, we’ll ask you how your day was, but you’ll be unable to respond.  You’ll just nod and grunt at nothing in particular.  At this point your sadness will have blossomed into full-blow depression and you’ll realize the futility of your life and become aware of the darkness that awaits us all after it is over.  You’ll undertand that God is dead, life is empty, and we’re all just worthless particles colliding in a boundless universe.  You’ll understand your insignificance, and you will cry.  You will bawl; tears will stream down your face, until your tear ducts are empty and your eyes are dry and you can’t cry anymore.

So…. don’t sing before breakfast.

3. “Be good or Santa won’t bring you any presents.”  In fact, if you’ve been ghastly enough to be placed on the “Naughty List,” Santa will come to your room and take what possessions you have now.  And it’s not just presents that he’ll take.  He’ll take your ninja turtles t-shirt.  In fact, he’ll take all your clothes, leaving you with a handful of rags and a length of rope just long enough to tie around your waist.  He’ll take your pillows, your bedsheets, and your mattress.  You’ll be left to sleep on a discarded sack full of reindeer dropping. He’ll take the ten thousand-piece model airplanes you’ve been buying with your allowance money and building painstakingly at your desk and feed them to his elves.  It’s a well-known fact that elves’ favourite treats in the whole wide world are the model airplanes of naughty boys.  Then he’ll take us away.  Santa will take us and move us to another city (hopefully not Phoenix), and you’ll be left here, alone.  You might get tossed into the foster home system, meeting other naughty boys who will introduce you to bad things.  You’ll acquire a drug habit, a penchant for crime to accompany that habit, and you’ll be in jail by the time you’re fourteen.  Is that what you want?

… That’s probably enough.  I’ve sufficiently scared the juvenile me for the next several months.  Also, I wonder if having hairy palms would cause it to feel like you’re getting a hand job from a chimpanzee.  Ook.

… like when someone says something to you, and you respond before you have a chance to think about what you are saying.  Happy birthday, someone might say.  You too, you might respond.  Immediately following your response is an awkward silence, and several options arise: 1) laugh uncomfortably and walk away, 2) if walking away is not possible, change the subject quickly (“What are your plans for this weekend? Oh, it’s Monday morning?  Shit.”), 3) Pretend that you genuinely thought that this person had the same birthday as you.  Neither of these options are appealing.  I blame these silly and reflexive responses on our — our in the royal sense –  lowered attention spans and re-wired neuron networks, due to ever internalized modern living.  I blame blundering insensitivity on a world where propogating of personal information is more important that real social interaction.   Admittedly, I blame it on these things mostly because I’m unwilling to admit any specific fault in myself, and also to briefly feel some sort of superiority over the masses.  Sad?  Maybe.

… or like when you spend 10 minutes at a bank machine trying to withdraw some cash; each time the words “Transaction Error:  Please try again later” flash across the screen.  Eventually you give up and let the next person use the machine because you are embarrassed and don’t want to be that guy (the one that the people in  the line will later refer to in exasperated tones when explaining to their friends why they were late for their respective engagements).  Then you look down and realize that you have been sliding your health insurance card into the slot all this time and, since you really need the money, you wait around until you can use the ATM again.  You don’t want to impose, because you are polite that way, and you wait awkwardly by the machine until everyone is done.  Meanwhile, the other users eyeball you, sizing you up as a deadbeat who is about to ask for a fiver after claiming that the perfectly functional bank machine is in fact malfunctioning.  So be it; you’ll probably never see them again — until the next time you see them at that ATM.

… or when you walk through a food aisle at the supermarket, and you cannot remember why you are in the supermarket at all, let alone that particular aisle.  A helpful and nauseatingly friendly (and possibly attractive) employee will ask you if they can help you find anything and, instead of a customary “No thank you,” you will reply “I’m… I’m not really sure,” to which, of course the employee could not possibly have a response.  She could try to be helpful, but that would only make things worse, because she could only do so by speaking to you as if you were a special needs child who has found himself impossibly  confused in a public bathroom stall (“Do you have to do Number One or Number Two?”).  You must then fixate on a particular item and dash towards it as if it had been what you were seeking all along.  “Ah!  Chives!”, you will say and hold it up like a trophy so that the employee can pity you and leave.

… or when you are at a bar, and a girl smiles at you invitingly, but you do not approach her because you are a big pussy (pardon the term, feminists).  You smile back, which is a good start, and turn back to your conversation or pretend to anyway.  You will move your hands emphatically, gesturing as if you describing a large black man’s testicles.  Your friends will think you’ve lost your marbles, but this isn’t all that bad.  At least she will think you’re nonchalant and non-desperate and that you have friends and interests, even.  Throughout the night, she will continue to smile at you, and you will smile back (that same, lopsided tightening of the lips), until eventually she realizes that you will not be approaching her and loses interest.  At bar close, you will realize that you have (almost!) squandered an opportunity and you saunter over to her while she is having a smoke outside and try to say something clever like, “cigarettes kill, but so does beauty so, I think, you’ve um, got it covered,” and you will grin pleadingly (Pleas give me second chance!).  She will be confused and creeped out by your lurching advances and ignore you until you go away.  You will thrust our hands into your pockets, square your shoulders, crane your neck as if you’re looking for someone, yell “Jeff! Wait up!” and walk towards the bus stop.

Life is just a string of these awkward moments.  It’s probably best not to dwell.

This applies to many aspects of life in fact.

I want to win, always. But I don’t want there to be any losers. I want everyone to be a winner. I just want to be the biggest winner. I don’t want to win at the expense of others. Maybe that’s the point of winning – to gloat, waving around a giant, suspiciously phallic, trophy in the losers faces, effectively bragging about its overbearing size. Maybe the trophy is simply a metaphysical representation of phallic superiority over other men. I have theories about how far human social behaviour has progressed since the days of pack hunting, but that’s not the point. The point is, I don’t want to wave my dick in other men’s (or women’s, for that matter) faces, neither metaphorically nor literally. I just want to win, but leave everyone feeling pretty okay about themselves.

I want to have a roof over my head, food in my belly, and the comfort of friends and loved ones around me, but I don’t want to do it at the expense of a starving South African child. I want children and, indeed, adults of all geographic locations to be well-fed and comfortable. I want everyone to eat from Life’s cake, though I suspect many would settle for a bowl of rice and some fresh green vegetables. I could do without things. I don’t need a memory foam mattress, high-quality nickel-plated headphones, a Lightning-fast carbon-injected condensed-core snowboard, or localized air conditioning in my car. I don’t even need, dare I say it, the computer on which I tap-out this glib text, if it means that twenty Indonesian children with bellies protruding and flies a-buzzing have to slave away at toxic workstations to provide me with these useful but ultimately unnecessary amenities. The world is a lottery, and I’m lucky that I was brought to the sinkhole of capital that is the Western “civilized” world to live out my years, but I’m uncomfortable with the idea that someone, even one person, must live in discomfort to make it possible.

I want to do what I want precisely when I want without letting anybody down. I don’t want to compromise. I want my desires to sync up perfectly with the desires of those around me. If I feel like eating sushi, I want the idea implanted in the heads of only those with whom I would like to share a meal that sushi would, just then, makes their lives complete. If I want to leave work for a few months and live in an igloo in the Canadian Arctic, I want my boss to spontaneously suggest that, for my professional development , it would be advisable if I took a few months off to life in an igloo in the Canadian Arctic. Somehow, my boss would decide that the ability to build an Inukshuk and to skin a still-living seal is vital to the success of the company. Full pay and benefits, of course, would be included; however, fresh seal meat would be required as proof of skill acquisition.

Is all this too much to ask? Probably.

The noble Inukshuk, aka Stacked Rocks

Photo credit: Rolf Hicker

Things were different, he says. People were different; people cared about what you had to say. They paused and listened, sometimes cocking their heads in interest. We sat and talked long into the night over steaming glasses of black tea, pausing only to refill the samovar, throwing kindling into the stove pipe, he says. For me this conjures an image of old men in rags hunched over charred wooden tables. Old men with sweaty brows and bushy mustaches, speaking quietly, with the occasional sounds rising above the still night air. Old men, speaking of important things. But they could not have always been old men. He could not always have been an old man; I suppose he was once young like me, and, indeed, he often reminds me of this unlikely truth. For some reason I picture him and his brothers as perpetual old men, growing old into their lives, as I know them now. I imagine a widow-peaked head crowning out of his mother’s womb and his tiny wrinkled hands emerging, clutching an ebony pipe. I imagine him calmly asking for a box of matches. I imagine an elderly infant rolling miniature dice onto a backgammon table and yelling “Penge!” at a frightened neighbourhood child.

Still, I enjoy sitting with my father and reminiscing. This usually happens after birthday parties – his, mine, or my mother’s. The gifts would be piled up in a corner, unopened, and my mother would be in the kitchen washing dishes. We would be sitting quietly at the table – he at the head of the table and me just to his right – and drinking some post-tea Brandy. He has a handful of events that he recalls fondly. My father smiles and stares at some point just beyond my left ear when he speaks of his post in the Soviet Army, patrolling the mountains along the Iranian border. He doesn’t speak of the training. He doesn’t speak of the brutal conditions. He mostly speaks of silly details, like how he taught himself to cook in the large vats the army provided and how the troops loved him because his cooking was much better than the expired canned cabbage and rancid meet slabs they were accustomed to. He speaks of the views – the wonderful views of the unforgiving rocky terrain. He likes to pull out this blurry black and white photograph. The photograph is taken on a hilltop. There is a small cluster of huts below and the faint outlines of distant hills in the background. He points to it and says proudly, “This picture was taken at midnight. This is most amazing thing I have ever seen. Up in the mountains of Guba, it’s the only place in the world where the moon can be so bright.” I usually squint at the picture and nod in approval, but my eyes are accustomed to megapixels of image data and I cannot feel his wonder at this vague outline of a city.

Other times he speaks of growing up near the Bazaar and how, before he was sent to school, he would venture to the many shops and stalls with his mother, nervously clutching at her skirts and cowering from the booming voices of the market sellers advertising their goods. Again, I find it hard to imagine my father as a small child, but mostly I find it hard to imagine my father cowering. I think it is difficult for anyone to do this. Even as my father grows old and his fragility makes him seem almost child-like, it is essentially impossible for me to imagine this powerful figure, the protector of the family, shying away from anyone. So instead I picture myself, hiding behind my grandmother’s shawl and shuffling my small feet to keep up with her long and purposeful steps. I imagine the gruff shopkeepers with their leathery skins, smiling at me and handing me fresh wild pomegranate. I imagine my grandmother laughing, her stomach rising and falling in jerks, as I try to bite into the hard rind. My father tells me how he used to help my grandmother carry the bags of food, meant to feed him and his six brothers and sisters, so I imagine this too. I imagine my arms growing tired, but my heart being filled with the sense of duty that only a child can feel.

His favourite memory is probably of the time that he and his friends swam to a tiny island in the middle of a cold, clear lake in the mountains near his ancestral home. Ten meters by ten meters, he says. He’s always using numbers to describe things. He really wants me to understand that things really happened, so he often gives me specific metrics. I guess he wants to make sure that I believe him; I believe him anyway, but I appreciate the gesture. Anyway, when he is feeling particularly nostalgic, he relates the story of the rabbit that he and his friends found on the island. After an evening of sitting around a fire on this isolated island, drinking cheap homemade samagon, and telling jokes about the Russians they loathed (my father still loathes them, in all honesty), the group of friends heard a rustling in a nearby bush, and immediately trained their flashlights on the spot. There, frightened, stood a fat gray rabbit. “Juicy,” as my father describes it. What ensued seems to me like a frantic, drunken skirmish – an impromptu game of flashlight tag. I imagine laughter and as the group of friends hurried to surround the rabbit. In the end, they caught it, skinned it, cooked it over an open flame, and ate it. To this day, my father doesn’t know how that rabbit got on to that tiny secluded island. He shakes his head, his eyes widened, and asks, “Why was the rabbit there?!” I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that the rabbit is no longer there.

All this makes me wonder (and how can it not?), if all that will be left in the future will be a handful of random memories. Not even the important ones, it seems, are stored – only the ones that trigger something in the mind, the memories that contain some important but tragically indecipherable kernel of universal truth, whatever that is. Perhaps when I am old and my brain is a patchy tapestry of still photos, all that will be left will be the image of my elementary school’s side wall, where we used to play handball, and how the French teacher Madame Dorn (Doorknob, we would call her, but never to her face!) would pop her head out of a second story window and yell, “doucement, mes enfants!” Or maybe all that will be left will be my Army memories. Like the feeling of rocks digging into my palms as I performed pushups on the crushed stone walkways while NCO’s rather rudely informed us all of our worthlessness. I suppose thinking about the past fondly, or even ambivalently, is better than the bitterness of regret. That’s why I can’t help but feel some fondness for my quickly aging old man; I guess I am grateful for his memories.

My father is nostalgic, and I am bound for the same fate. I think I’m okay with that.

I’m not feeling particularly prolific at the moment; I can’t seem to eek out a insightful or even substantive sentence. But I still want to write: quite the conundrum. So I thought to myself, self I am forcing you to write. No, I said emphatically. But you must, I thought. Fine, I replied, I will write a piece of fiction, but it shall be the bare minimum of what is considered fiction. As such, here is my attempt at some six word novels. Six, in fact. It’s more elegant that way.

Don’t, said God. Do, said Satan.

Stole my girl. Killed his dog.

Speedy murderer arrested. Radar gun found.

Glass ceiling shatters; fatal bleeding ensues.

“I didn’t know she was gay.”

Think, said Satan. Obey, said God.

Here are some better ones. Please read mine first so that they don’t seem so limp in comparison.

They say that life is like a lot things.

They say that life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. (Forrest Gump)

They say that life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding. (Samuel Johnson)

They say that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. (John Lennon)

But those just seem like clever puns, comparisons that could be made with anything. I could make a pun about life and cats that would be just as clever and equally as meaningless. In fact, I think I will: Life is like a cat. Sometimes it’s important to paws meow and then, lick your wounds and scratch your head. Or like a dog: you can spend all your life chasing cars, but then you’d never have time to bury bones. Or like semen: it’s disgusting, unwanted, but, if you’re lucky, you’ll make a baby. You get the point.

They say to live your life and not concern yourself with the lives of others. Done.

They keep telling me to get a life. I wasn’t aware life was a video game, and there were 1UP’s floating around. I’ll keep my eyes peeled.

They keep telling me that I have life worth living, but that seems circular at best and deluded – borderline psychotic – at worst. Life isn’t worth living. Life is living. Those idiots.

They tell me to live life to the fullest. What does that mean? This vague speaking in proverbs is infuriating. Maybe for me, drinking whiskey and chain smoking until the day I die is living life to the fullest, while prolonging this miserable existence by eating healthy and staying fit is what others consider living life to the fullest. Both are valid options. Mine is more fun.

They say the value of your life is measured by how you’ve affected those around you. This is stupid: you will die, then there will be a (very short, cosmically speaking) period of time, and then they will die. And then the next generation will die. Then the next. Pretty soon, there will be no one left to remember you, let alone care about what impact you may have had on the physical and social world you left behind. Eventually, we will all be dead – the collective human race – and we will be replaced by another sentient life form that has equally deluded and arrogant ideas about the importance of legacy.

All these billionaires who bequeath obscene sums of money (fractions of their fortunes, mind you) upon charities, or make broad philanthropic gestures as they become aware of their mortality and the futility of their fortunes, are idiots. No one will remember them in a hundred years, which might as well be the blink of an eye. It seems that the only way to ensure that you will be remembered for any length of time is by starting a major war, enslaving a population, or being a fictional character in some archaic book where you get crucified by a lynch mob, which is sort of the same thing.

In the end, life is just the period of time between when we are born and when we die. I think read that somewhere recently. Probably Philip Roth. Possibly in American Pastoral, a thoroughly mediocre novel with that singular sliver of wisdom. Fill the period of time with whatever metaphor you wish, but in the end, you will die. Like everyone else.

Except Zombie Jesus. And Mick Jagger.