Goblet of the Sun Bum

I'm writing from the town of Thorold. Thorold sound's like it would be a common first name like Harold but it's not. Thorold Bonner, with two N's. Mary is working a few feet away so I have to be quiet. You don't have to be quiet when you read it though, she'll be done by then.

Yesterday I did a test run of a speech recording to see how I sound. My voice sounds so much lower than it does in my head when talk normally. It's also a lot more nasally than I when I heard it from within. I've always wondered if people would even be able to recognize their own voice if they heard it played back to them. It would a good experiment: record a few sentences and then have like 20 other people with voices in the same register also record the same sentences and then play them back and see how easy it is to spot you voice. I think Charles has a nice voice, it sounds so clean and new. Probably because he rarely uses it. It stays in it's original packaging like all the toys in his attic. It's a collectible, like Barnyard Commandos or Battle Beasts.


Mary's roommate Amber is from Sarnia. It's funny how excited I still get when I talk to people who are from that region. I think today's post will be about the area. It shall be called:

Sherman Garbagefield: The Chronicles of Sarnia.

In early September, when I was in town from Vancouver to attend Bonnie and Jeremy's weddings, I devised a road-trip to Petrolia. The team was made up of Mary, Olga, Charles and myself and our destination was a business with no name, address and that I had no idea if it still existed.

Petrolia is about 45 mins outside of Sarnia. It was apparently home of the first oil well. According to the town's website it's "Known as The Greatest Town on Earth, Petrolia’s unique and rich history as the cradle of the global oil industry is reflected in its countless lush green parks, grand church spires, colourful gardens and beautiful neighbourhoods."

Let me just pause and say how much I despise the term "countless". Petrolia can't have countless parks or spires. It's a finite amount of space with a finite amount of land and a finite amount of churches. Unless they mean imaginary or metaphorical parks and spires the turn of phrase is wrong. The nerve!

It's a really tiny town whose closest city, Sarnia is also isolated. It's essentially just a few hundred homes and then a strip of "downtown". These kinds of places are all over south-western Ontario: Forrest, Strathroy, Wallaceburg, Port Stanley, Sombra, Turkey Point, Simcoe, Paris, Jarvis, Dunnville, There are fucking hundreds. Petrolia is a little different though in that it's oil heritage made the town wealthy during the end of the Victorian era which made the homes and buildings really fancy. It's like Stratford's toenail clipping.

The drive from London toward Sarnia always feels like hours. I got so impatient while driving that I chose a random exit and began to head in the general direction. Once you get off the highway you enter farm country. It's very easy to get turned around in places like that because you have no frame of reference. In Hamilton you have the lake and the escarpment, and in Vancouver you have the mountains and the smell of junkie. Stink, Stank, Stunk and your now in Deep Cove.

Eventually I managed to figure out where we were and we began to drive into the 200 feet of metropolitan Petrolia. In the center of the strip is a very cool century old train station that has since become the library. Behind that is a large covered parking lot where they hold a farmer's market on days that were not that day. It's to the back and to the right where our destination was... To the back and to the right.

I've been told that the building was once a Beaver Lumber. I want something with the Beaver Lumber logo on it. A sweatshirt would awesome. According the only signage out front, the name of the business is "Closed". We had been about 40 min early, before the business name changed to "Open".

Now to the meat of it.

The store, which we later decided was called Sherman Garbagefield, is essentially where all the stuff goes when a hoarder dies. It's Value Village on meth. They purposefully keep random items and furniture out front to be weathered which can then be sold for much more than if it was just old and gross. There are stacks of old chair's and trunks and tables and bed frames up against the outside walls. It's always reminded me of the real-life version of the Alligator's Trading Post on Mr. Dressup. Was it an alligator or a crow? Or both?

The inside is where the magic really happens. Nothing has prices on it because there is too much stuff to price. There are china cabinets and dressers and wardrobes under mountains of nick-knacks, vases, plates, spoons, dolls, pictures. Inside all the of the dressers and and china cabinets are even more nick-knacks and vases and plates and one spoon. Everything you can imagine is up front, everything you can't imagine is in the middle and everything you think would never be sold in a shop is at that back with the books and "tools". I use the word tools loosely as the shelves back there are pretty much taken up completely by the old jars of Cheez-Whiz from the mid 1970's filled with random screws and washers or more likely... half a cup of motor-oil. It's like they stole your grandpa's garage and are hocking all the loot in an abandoned Beaver Lumber in the middle of nowhere.

I bought two old recipe boxes with the intent of custom framing the beautifully hand-written cue-cards. I also bought a weird rubber fish toy that I gave to Danny, and a dragon puppet. The scrariest dragon pruppet ever. Mary bought tiny spoons and I can't remember Olgs's catch but I think it involved an old pair of glasses.

"Have you noticed any change in Bart?"
"New glasses?
"No, he looks like something might be disturbing him."
"Probably misses his old glasses."

It's now Sunday. Not in the story, in reality. I was just far too sleepy to upload last night. Before Mary and I went to bed I made a joke about peeing in the middle of the night into the large jar that she had been sipping no-name Crystal Light out of. She thought the idea was hilarious and was unyielding in her insistence that I do this. So rather than upload the first part of this blog I used the remaining awake energy I had to organize the pee jar.

Oh it should be noted that I had gone through a good liter of diet Rootbeer so there was bound to be a very urgent urination at some point. At around 3:30am that point came. Laying on my side I set myself up into what I felt was a good position. I couldn't go. My bladder is far to shy to perform such a stunt. So instead, like I do every 3:30 am I dragged my sleeping body out of bed and went the normal way, in a toilet sitting down.

On the way home from Sherman Garbagefield we sat and had a picnic in the park that involved sandwiches and guacamole that Mary had provided. Actually, we also had Crystal Light then too.

On the way home I decided we should go visit the Jumbo the Elephant memorial statue in St. Thomas. It was semi eventful as the elephant was big and had an anatomically correct vagina. There was also a caboose and that kind of justified the detour but honestly I was a little disappointed. We drove through the town which had some kind festival going on. Then we got lost for two hours trying to get back to the highway. During that time I was able to create a sweet tongue twister:
"Livin' in a Bolivian Oblivion".
The rest of drive was uneventful with the exception that I learned ELO is the band behind the fantastic song Mr Blue Sky. How did I not know what? I was very pleased to aquire that information.

Fries Under The Bridge : The Chronicles of Sarnia II

As I drove out of Sarnia on what was only my second time in the city, my car broke down. Really it was my first trip as the only other time I had been was at night and had only seen the highway and the exit. It was a Mother's Day weekend in May and I had just dropped the ex-wife off at her parents place and began my own homeward bound trip. We had only been dating for a couple of weeks at that point and I had only met her parents very briefly. I had my Sony Discman hooked up to the tape deck with a converter and had Tragic Monsters by Les Savy Fav blasting. Missy didn't like the louder heavier stuff so I was all hyped to get a chance to rock out. It was that time in the evening when the sun was in it's last 15 min before very total darkness. I had just passed the Hiawatha Horse Track and the the large City of Sarnia sign when my car started to breathe heavily before coughing and passing out. I just kind of rolled onto the shoulder and then just sat in the dark for about 10 min trying to figure out what to do.

I didn't have a cell phone, I didn't know how far I was from anything or how to even get into the city. I wasn't scared or upset, just a little cold. I have a bad habit of under-dressing when I expect to be car-enclosed. This winter for example I very rarely wear my winter coat. I prefer this: undershirt ( I no longer require the $100.00 one ), a T-shirt, a long-sleeve waffle/thermal shirt, a sweater and then my dirty black hooded sweatshirt. Oh and a scarf. I was also excited and a big part of me was enjoying the adventurous nature of the situation.

I decided to walk back toward the closest overpass, climb up the overpass and head down the same side of the highway I knew the ex's parent's house was on. There were no street lights out that far so I walked way over to the edge of farmer's field in the unlikely event a car went off the road at the exact moment I happened to be trekking past and plow into me. I was cold but I didn't need to put on an Oldsmobile Alero, although to be fair it would be pretty warm.

Eventually I found myself wandering past a trailer park, The Green Haven trailer park. It's kind of strange name for it as from what I could tell it was neither green nor any kind of haven that I know of. Eventually I found my way to London Line which is a major road that runs through Sarnia. At the time the only streetname I could remember was Exmouth. What the fuck is an exmouth?...googling... According to Wikipedia it's a port town in England at the mouth of the River Exe. For Your Health!

In the distance I could see a series of neons and bright lights. I could tell I was in the outskirt section of every city, where the dying restaurants from the 1960's were open and empty and waiting to be put down and become a furniture liquidation store. Every sign is over-sized and over-lit. I passed what looked like an abandoned water park which was actually water park, just a shitty water park that probably should have been abandoned. One waterslide? What's the point? I also passed a series of tree nurseries and places to buy hot-tubs and patio stones. Ontario is so predictable sometimes that I get nauseated thinking too long about it.

As I got closer to the bright lights I saw that one had the familiar "SLOTS" sign that are all identical throughout Ontario. It's part of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation rules. I learned a lot about the OLG when I worked in the yard of an event-tent company. Boy do I have stories from there. I cleaned the pope's carpet! It fuckin stank. Speaking of horse shit (the pope) I was now at the Horse Track that I had passed on the highway which meant I now had some bearing of where I was. I eventually made it to some kind of "Saloon" themed restaurant/dirt-bar that had a motel called The Dusty Rose or something similar. The dusty rose must be in reference to the genitals of the old-hookers who work out of it (I have stories about that too). I entered the lobby of the motel and found a payphone. There was no phone book so I had to go ask the guy behind the counter who seemed very skeptical about my presence.

Once I had acquired the phone book it occurred to me that I had no clue what Melissa's parent's last name was. I knew she had a different last name because her dad was actually her step dad even though he had always been her dad. SIDENOTE: After her dad, who was my father in-law at the time, had a heart attack where he was dead for over seven minutes, I told Missy that she should change her last name to his as a birthday present. When I told her that I immediately thought of the moment in The Dusty Rose when I was looking randomly through a phone-book for a name I didn't know. I remember remembering.

I remembered eventually that her mom worked as a waitress at a restaurant in town. I couldn't remember her name or the name of the restaurant but I knew that if I flipped through the yellow-pages at the restaurant logos I would remember the sign from when it was pointed out to me earlier. The problem now though was that I couldn't remember her mom's first name either, only that she worked there. Simply calling CAA or any towing company was out of the question for me. This was years and years before I started any anxiety meds so there was no way I could do that. Instead I swallowed hard and called "Rizzo's" and said the following: "Um, I'm looking for the daughter of someone who works there but I can't remember her name. her daughter's name is Melissa."

The person on the phone kind of laughed and said "hold on". A few seconds later Melissa was on the phone. It turned out that her mom was working when I dropped her off so she and her dad went to visit her mom at Rizzo's and hang out at the bar, something they did normally. The shear fucking luck was amazing although now I felt like a complete ass not only asking for them to leave their family visit but also the fact that I couldn't remember her parent's names.

Eventually they came and picked me up and I went to their house. Her dad, Tim, is the kind of guy who likes to make sure everything is taken care of so he made all the calls and arranged everything for the towing and the mechanics without me asking. I felt like I was 11 and had a bike with a flat tire but I was also relieved that I didn't have to ask for someone to call for me because having to do that would result in a panic attack that would leave me dead for about seven minutes.

I remember he made Melissa sleep on the couch and gave me the second bedroom. It was easily the most awkward sleep of my life. Eventually I would end up living in that bedroom which just seems weird to me now.

The next day I ended up going with the family and grandparents to a special Mother's Day Brunch. Yep!...I was now having an amazing brunch (paid for by her parent's) to share in a mother's day celebration when not less that 10 hours earlier I couldn't remember her mom's first or last name. Later in the afternoon I was able to pick up my car from Canadian Tire, which was the only place open on the Sunday. The air-filter was completely clogged so they had replaced it. It was a 10 dollar fix, but what I paid in embarrassment, awkwardness and anxiety was easily up into the thousands.

Before we drove back to London, we had fries under the bridge. This was some kind of Sarnia tradition that involved eating at one of two chip-trucks under the Bluewater Bridge. The view is nice and the fries are good, but the insane hype of the fries under the bridge legend is greatly exaggerated. It's like Hutch's at the Beach or Cupcakes in Vancouver (they're responsible for the current cupcake-bakery trend). They're all ok places but they ain't Voodoo donuts!

There, now you have my first and last experience with the Sarnia region.

Eventually I'll get into my experiences as head of Sarnia Cabinet's drawer department in my previous life as an aspiring carpenter/woodworker. I was the drawer department, literally. This is where the hooker stories start to come into play... Oh Tyler.