I’ve been tagged! How exciting! I think I’ll start to respond, suffer a severe bout of depression and then finish the rest of the entry five days later!

Okay, let’s go:

1. My first three-speed bicycle: I remember trying to learn how to move up from three wheels to two, down in the roundabout at the bottom of the end of Riverside Drive in Haliburton. Wobble, hesitate, fall over. Wobble, hesitate, fall over. Finally, my father promised that when I learned how to ride the bicycle, he’d buy me a speedometer/mileometer for it. I was circling the roundabout within an hour and I think I got halfway up the hill under my own power. And he actually did buy the speedometer, too. This probably explains a lot about me. Later attempts to bargain with the Universe on similar terms have not worked out quite so well for all concerned.

2. The old, pink Toyota Tercel that I’d used when I worked at Upper Canada Playhouse in 1990: When I graduated from University in 1994, my father sold it to me in one of those bargain-deal now-you-are-a-man-my-son sort of exchanges. I promptly spent pretty much the entire next year unemployed, unable to buy much food, let alone gas, and when I moved to Toronto, I sold it back to him. Or gave it back and had him sell it to someone else, I can’t actually remember. It worked when I got it, it still worked when I got rid of it, that’s the important thing.

3. The bicycle currently sitting in my kitchen: which my father bought at a flea market and gave to me, and which needed to be taken to the local bicycle shop for a once-over before I could take it out, except that I never got around to it because I usually use vehicle number 4 for getting around and using a bicycle in the city is just a little too inconvenient, so it’s still sitting in my kitchen, four years later, but at least I have a bicycle if I ever really need to use one.

4. My feet. What?, I hear you cry out in the back. Your feet? A vehicle? Boo hiss, we want our money back. Well, shut up, I’ve got the mic. Last July, I woke with a splitting headache and took one of the Tylenol-3 tablets I had left over from my gallbladder operation back in May. A few hours later, I set out to take a walk and test my new mp3 player; I’d already gone south the night before to see the Canada Day fireworks at the harbour, and, looking at the way the shadows were falling on the street, I decided I’d get more shade if I went north rather than west or east. As I started to walk north, it occurred to me that I was walking towards the nature trail and dog park that I used to walk through when I worked at tSc, and I decided that it would be nice to walk along it once again. It then occurred to me to wonder if tSc was still there, so I walked up to the corner of Castlefield and Caledonia, stopping once along the way to buy a Drumstick ice-cream cone. My old place of work was no longer there, and after cheering and throwing rocks at the building, I zigzagged down to Eglinton, intending to walk out west until I hit a pizza place, buy a slice and then catch the TTC back home. I wasn’t feeling tired at all, and it didn’t occur to me that this might be because I’d just taken a pretty powerful painkiller. I did, however, notice as I kept walking west along Eglinton that the stores on the street had been replaced with houses, and then that the houses had been replaced with nothing, and then that the sidewalk had disappeared. After walking for about half an hour without seeing any sign of cityscape, I realised that my legs were pretty tired after all, and I decided to give up on the idea of a pizza and just catch the bus back, at which point I discovered that I’d used up all of my change buying the Drumstick and had no way of paying for the bus until I found somewhere to break a $5 bill. Fine, I’ve come this far, if I turn back now there’s nothing behind me for another half an hour; the city has to resume at some point, I’ll just keep walking until I find something. Which I did, eventually, another five kilometres later, after walking a total of over 16 kilometres in three and a half hours. Feet, vehicles; you want to take this outside?

1. Upper Canada Playhouse: house manager, tearer of tickets, the guy who had to tell the two people who’d driven all the way down from Quebec that, because the performance was sold out and they’d arrived ten minutes late, we’d had to assume they weren’t coming and had sold their tickets to someone else. And then I had to rush out of the theatre to stop them from leaving without their credit card. Later that season, in a one-man show about a teachers’ strike, the actor went bolting off the stage in Act II and through the door to the cafeteria, from whence he circled around backstage and walked back on from behind the scenes; my job was to slip over to the door and shut it behind him so that the light from the cafeteria didn’t distract people during the rest of the show. One night, I did so, started to walk back to my place through the dark, and crashed straight into a big garbage can that the audience had filled with aluminium pop cans during the intermission. Heigh-ho.

2. The cafe at Upper Canada Village: It’s located just east of Morrisburg, Ontario, and I worked there in the summers while attending university in Kingston, Ontario. I was studying for a Drama/English B.A., and before determining that there were no jobs available for me in Kingston, I auditioned for, and got, a role in an amateur company called the Renaissance Stage Company. I worked at the café from 9:00 to 3:00, drove down to Kingston to rehearse from 5:30 to 11:00, and then drove back from Kingston to Finch, arriving at 1:00 a.m., and waking at around 7:00 in order to get to work at 9:00. Or at least I did until the management decided to fire the cleaning staff and have us come in two hours early to clean up the café before it opened, after which I still did everything listed above, except that I had to be awake at 5:00 to get to work at 7:00. For some reason, the woman in charge of the café felt that I wasn’t focussed completely on the job in hand at the time. This was the summer I decided that even though there was no God, he still hated me.

3. The Shopping Channel: Did I mention that when I went back to look at it and it wasn’t there, I cheered and threw rocks at the building where it used to be? When I went back to look at it and it wasn’t there, I cheered and threw rocks at the building where it used to be.

4. Transcriptionist in the ChumCity closed-captioning department: and later, closed-captioning editor. When I first started working here as a transcriptionist, we used to do our work directly off the common network drive, the S: drive; one day, the S: drive went down, and all the transcriptionists could do was twiddle their thumbs and then go home early. Some time later, when the network was being reorganised, the head of our department suggested that it might be easier to organise things if the CC editors did all of their work directly off the common X: drive rather than their local drives. I sent her an e-mail in response, which started off, “Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad bad bad bad bad bad BAD idea.” And I didn’t get fired. And she listened. And we didn’t start doing our work directly off the X: drive, but kept doing it on our local drives and just using the X: drive to share files between computers. And I’M STILL ALLOWED TO WORK THERE. It’s a beautiful, magical place, the ChumCity closed-captioning department. I believe I saw a unicorn there the other day.

1. Haliburton, Ontario: not all that far from Algonquin Park, but we only visited the park once or twice, and then only the trails along the Highway 60 Corridor. I was not an Outdoorsy type of child. I remember swimming at Head Lake, I remember rolling down the hill at Victoria Street School; I remember my first best friend, Edward Brohm, or I think I do, although I’m now horrified to realise that I’m not entirely sure as I type this whether that really was his last name. I remember meeting the kid from up the hill after we moved in and how he told me he was 9 and I thought, “Wow, that’s old.” I remember trying to run away from home when I was still single-digit age, getting two houses away, running into a friend, starting to play with him and forgetting that I was supposed to be running away and going home with my parents when they came to get me. I remember NFB movie nights in the basement of the town library, seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Molou theatre, almost starting a collection of Iron Man comic books, watching Charlie Brown while waiting for my piano lesson, my first and only paper route, the back room of my mother’s health-food store; pizza with anchovies, pepperoni and green peppers; Jeff Francis, Kelly Bird, David Emmerson (not the same one) (I assume); PET computers, the cenotaph on the corner, Boy Scouts, playing Scrabble with the lights out while a tornado hit downtown one and a half kilometres away…

2. Finch, Ontario: we moved to Ingleside at the beginning of 1984, which even at the age of 12 I realised was probably some kind of omen. We spent six months there, renting a small house that had been converted from a barn, and then moved north to Finch, where my parents still live. We were right on the edge of the school districts, so to avoid too much upheaval, I continued going to school in Ingleside. Which meant that during my formative teenage years, all of the kids I lived around went to a different school, and all of the kids I went to school with lived nowhere near me. This probably explains a lot.

3. Kingston, Ontario: or at least the south part of it, below Princess Street. Home for five years, four of which I spent at Queens University, discovering that there were things I actually was good at; discovering, much to my great surprise, that I was actually a social animal, if a rather shy and private one given to bouts of melancholy. Discovering that I preferred acting to writing. Discovering that walking for an hour and drinking lots of water can, for a while, take your mind off the fact that you don’t have enough money for food. Discovering that it is possible to drink alcohol without making a fool of yourself, although it’s occasionally more fun when you do. Discovering that if you play the character of Polonius in Hamlet at University then you’ve got a perfect excuse to say “I played him once, i’ the university,” if anyone asks, which they never have. Bastards.

4. Parkdale, Toronto, Ontario: when I first moved to Toronto, a friend of the family put me up, and put up with me, in the area where King Street meets Queen near Roncesvalles. Apparently, it’s greatly improved since I lived there, when there was a man who walked around the neighbourhood for two years with his hands over his face, when bleeding people came up to me twice on the street at night and asked if they could borrow money to catch the bus to the hospital, when a hooker once mistook me at a distance for one of her colleagues the day before I ran out and got my hair cut, and, in general, when a number of things happened that really seem a lot funnier in retrospect, or did until six weeks ago.

1. Jamaica: my aunt once befriended a bicycle repairman from Jamaica… and you really don’t want to know the rest of the story. However, the family did benefit from it in the winter of 1988, unless it was the winter of 1989, when we all went down to a tropical resort. Being 17, unless I was 18, I was desperately hoping to meet nubile girls, and I bet you really do want to know the rest of the story, if only there were any, dammit. I remember night not so much falling as plummeting with an almost audible thud; and the aluminium pennies that you had to be careful not to fold in half; and the real Jamaican meat patties. You think you’ve tasted a real meat patty? You haven’t tasted a real meat patty.

2. Expo ‘86: the school band takes a field trip to Vancouver, Ontario. The best photograph I’ve ever taken, of the big buckminsterish dome which is probably named something I can’t be bothered to look up because I should have finished writing and posting this days ago. Striking it lucky with the otherwise very, very poorly planned billet system, and ending up housed in one of the richest parts of town. (Apparently two of the girls ended up in a house where they felt the need to bolt the door closed with a chair under the doorknob.) Taking the ferry to Victoria and coming back through the rain. The little kid staring, amazed, at the Robot of the Future. The black-and-white photo in the school yearbook with Laurie and Becky in the foreground, Becky giving the camera a look that says she’s just realised someone is taking her picture, while I’m standing behind them, pointing off at something in the distance as if I’m hailing a taxi.

3. Florida, over the Christmas holidays of 1982: not just Disney World, but Florida. Busch Gardens, and the first white-water theme-park ride we’d ever been on; watching the spray of water get closer to me, and closer, and closer, and then just as I was about to pass under it, the “raft” hit a bump and circled around and bam, Dad got soaked. I was still recovering from breaking my leg three months earlier, and after spending one day walking around Disney World, my parents decided to get me a wheelchair for the next two days, and we ended up getting bumped ahead to the front of the lines for each ride. The air in America smells different, for some reason; not bad, not weird, just… American. Visiting a wax museum, walking through the chamber of horrors; my mother reaches out to press one of the display buttons, and a man dressed as a vampire stands up from behind the counter, says “DON’T press that button” and sidles off to the side, while my mother dies of a heart attack and the museum staff quickly replace her with an exact copy before we notice so as not to spoil our vacation.

4. London, England, 1991: very, very important lesson in life: if you’re going to spend a week in London, England, for the first time in your entire life ever, take more than 100 pounds’ spending money. I saw a lot of streets. And bridges. And I saw a brilliant production of the play The Woman in Black, more about which some other time. Then more streets. And the village of Bath, which had far more interesting streets. One day, I shall go back, yes, I shall go back; until then, there must be no tears, no regrets, no anxieties.

And now I have to tag four people myself, don’t I?

I tag Owin Lambeck, and Brandon Laraby, and Rebecca Dowgiert, because I know them…

and I tag Adrienne Smith, because it’s long past time she got her own blog.

Yes, I tagged someone who doesn’t have a blog yet. Shut up, you in the back. The four are tagged, the mic is now off; la commedia e finita.