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"The Best Of…"

I’m going to have a “Best Of…” set of links in one of these sidebars sometime soon, but after having received a couple of email requests over the past few days, I’m going to post a few right now.

In reverse chronological order…

Worst Date Ever

A multi-part story that I haven’t finished telling. The story takes place in 1999; I’m telling it because I promised I would if I were nomianted for a Bloggie.

What’s been told so far:

1. Begin near the end. In which your humble accordion-playing author violates the laws of the space-time continuum and starts the story after the fireworks are pretty much over. Most of them, anyway:

If life were a cartoon — and it often is — there would be two miniature versions of me sitting on my shoulders. One would be dressed in white with wings and a halo saying “Do you think this is such a good idea, Mr. deVilla?” while the other would be dressed in red with horns and a pitchfork, doing pelvic thrusts and saying “British Invasion! FWOOOOOAAAAARRRR!”

2. A little background. How I met The Waitress during the Worst Year Ever, while attempting some sort of detente with the Then-Worst Girlfriend Ever:

Hers was a dysfunctional family, and the fact that my family was close — we are Filipino, after all — she alternately saw as a sign of immaturity, a sick dependency or a threat. As revenge against her parents, she one day (and remember, this is after our breakup), decided to give me power of attorney.

A year earlier, she’s decided to switch to a sort of made-up religion: a muddle-headed mishmash of wicca, crystals, aromatherapy and eye-for-eye karmic point-scoring (from the way she carried herself, she seemed to be exempt from karma accounting). Naturally, anything Christian — the religion of her parents — was by definition bad. She was doing a lot of flying that year, and like any superstition-prone fool with less rational scientific thinking skill than a bed of kelp, she was sure that she was going to die in a fiery plane crash. She told me that she had faith that I would honour her burial wishes because I was nice to her even when she was “being a total bitch.”

All that did was fuel dark power of attorney fantasies. I imagined a funeral theme that could only be described as “Maximum Jesus”. I wrote a script in which I would visit a hospital immediately after an accident. It went something like this:

Doctor: Mr. deVilla, she…she’s…

Me: Tell it to me straight, doc. No sugar coating. I can take it.

Doctor: She’s scraped her knee.

Me: I HAVE POWER OF ATTORNEY! I KNOW HER WISHES! NO HEROIC MEASURES! D.N.R.! PULL THE PLUG! PULL THE PLUG!

I remember saying to my sister: “I don’t even have the luxury of wishing she was dead, because I’d be stuck with all the paperwork.”

3a. Meet The Artiste. I introduce the waitress’ boyfriend, a sculptor who doesn’t sculpt:

I call him The Artiste with the extra “e” not out of any disdain for artists, but he was more a graduate of art school using his artist status for street cred rather than someone who say, actually created any art. He had the image — the perma-stubble, the drab clothing, the Elvis Costello glasses and especially the 16th-century personal hygiene. Although he sometimes talked about his works in progress, we never saw any sketches nor did he tell us where we could see his works. He ran around with the small “shock value for shock value’s sake” clique from Ontario College of Art and Design, a group who counted among their number post-post-post-postmodernist Jubal Brown — the prat who vomited on paintings as a some kind of performance-art/artistic-statement/cry for help sort of thing.

3b. Meet Crabs. C’mon, you can’t resist a story that has this line near the beginning:

“And it dawns on me, while I’m doing it,” continued Crabs, “I think to myself: ‘This guy has offered to give me a ride home and I’m peeing on his face.'”

4. Date #1: My fault. I accept full responsibility for the way this one fell apart. Mind you, Date #3, which hasn’t yet be chronicled, is totally her fault. This one’s got it all — cheesy foreign accents, adult situations, violence, butterscotch schnapps and ABBA! Besides, how many dating stories have gripping narrative like this:

I pressed my hand on his Adam’s Apple with more force. I wanted him to remember this. I wanted to him to wake up in the middle of the night from Joey-induced night terrors for the next week in a vile puddle of his own sweat and urine.

Bring it on. Why I take crap in stride.

The Girl Who Cried Webmaster (a.k.a. The new Girl Story)

Accordion boy meets New Girl. Accordion boy gushes about New Girl on weblog. Accordion boy gets contacted by Whistleblower, who tells him that the New Girl is not who she claims to be. The strangest story ever posted on this blog, complete with drama, detective work, a child-abandoning drug-abusing mom posing as a webmaster, the kindness of strangers, inspiration by Columbo and Encyclopedia Brown and computational complexity theory. This entry put this blog in the number one spot on Blogdex, Popdex and Daypop, and is now the holder of the record for most — and nicest — comments.

Last Night

Striking out, thwarting a pickpocket, coping with bad poetry, dealing with the Gap ninjas and other minor diappointments. At least when things suck for me, they suck in novel and interesting ways.

Mandatory “Cheese Sandwich” Entries

Part one and part two of a two-part story chronicling one particularly good day.

A very good Wednesday, indeed

Successful job interviews, helping out on the set of a film, chatting with cute girls, and sticking it to a telemarketer. I’m the King of Rock.

Naked News throws a party

…and I got invited!

The best Christmas present ever

A tale of friendship, crab lice and the true meaning of Christmas. Not likely to be turned into a TV Christmas special any time soon.

The big three-five

Happy birthday to me! 120 of my closest friends get together to celebrate.

Not-so-smart mob

Conversations and observations from the 2002 Reclaim the Streets party in Toronto. Their hearts are in the right place, but their heads might need a little work:

Bible-thumper: Please, take one (proffers a pocket Bible).

Man: (looking at Bible and recoiling, as if he were being handed a severed human head) Yiiiii!

Me: It’s not toxic. (To Bible-thumper) I’ll take one, I lost mine (I take it and put it in my pocket).

Really, I can’t find my copy. Some fundie friends of my parents gave them a gold-leaf trimmed copy of the King James version (“the only true version”, they said), which my folks then gave to me. It usually sits on my bookshelf beside the Bhagavad-Gita and for extra-flaky contrast, the Urantia Book. Did I lend it out to someone? I can’t recall.

Man: Not my scene. I’m a Buddhist.

Me: That doesn’t rule out reading the Bible. Buddhists consider the teachings of many other religions valid. They consider Christ to have been enlightened.

Man: No shit?

Me: Ever read Living Buddha, Living Christ?

Man: Um…never even heard of it.

Of course not. I decided to adminsiter the “Are you really a Buddhist, or are you doing the religion-as-fashion-statement thing” test.

Me: You know the Four Noble Truths, right?

Man: Uh…I’m still new at it…life is suffering, um…

Me: There’s the one with desire…

Man: That it! Desire sucks…then the eight paths…

I can see Siddhartha himself saying, “Yo! Desire sucks, dawg!”