More Pipelayin' Stuff from Old Notes

To all da playa hataz
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Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 7:44pm | Edit Note | Delete
Alright, now look. I'm not going to work when I'm injured. Puh-lain and simple. A few weeks ago I sprained my ankle at work, and had to miss part of a Friday...not even the whole Friday. And technically I didn't even miss part of it, because I operated equipment for the rest of the day. This week I sprained my wrist. And the boss said "Jesus Christ cocksucker you're like an old fuckin' woman!!"
So I posted some pics in a new album called stoooopid injuries showing my ankle and my wrist injury, so that all da hataz can see I'm keepin' it real yo.
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More of the story...
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Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 5:38pm | Edit Note | Delete
It's slow going getting this one going, time is a bit of a problem...might be a week or 2 before I write anymore after this.

Quitting time hit, 9 at night and the sun still high and hot and the equipment all shut down and we put all our tools away then headed back to the our vehicles. We were all parked in a line on the shoulder of the road.
"I've got room in my truck if anyone needs a lift bros!" Kelly shouted, fumbling with the keys to a rusted out 86 Chrysler minivan.
Cooper piped up in a mocking sarcastic tone "Uh, hey bro, I don't see a truck. I see a MINIVAN though!"
Kelly shrugged, unlocking the driver's side door of his 'truck'. "Hey bro, it's just what I call it, I'm used to driving big rig, trailer transport long haul, y'know?"
Cooper was baiting him. "Whatever, it's not a truck you fucking crackhead!"
Kelly pretended he didn't hear, but you could see the anger and the fear stiffening his spine as he slammed the door and started the engine. The front tires spun for a fraction of a second before grabbing the gravel of the shoulder and the minivan bounced on to the road and puttered away.
Cooper looked at me with a grin and said "I'll have that fucker swinging at me yet!"
"Whatever ya say bro!" I said, doing my best Kelly impression, and a bunch of us laughed. I opened the door of my car and a wave of captive heat came rolling out, promising a hot drive home. As I climbed in behind the wheel, all the guys were yelling stuff like "See ya bro!" and "Take it easy bro!" and cutting themselves up over it.

Generally the company made it's best effort to put the crew up in a nice place, but there were no places at all in the town we were working in. Alternatively we were being put up in a sparse and stoic hunting lodge in the middle of nowhere-no phones, no cell service, no internet, no tv, no radio, no clocks, no food and no drinks. Just a dozen tremendously uncomfortable beds crammed 2 to a room in a long corrugated shack. There was one shower, and one washroom. We were tired and hot and tensions were high.
Despite having 12 beds in 6 rooms the lodge only had 4 parking spots. I was following Cooper. We pulled up to the lodge to find that Kelly had parked at a crazy angle, taking up 2 entire spots. Cooper didn't even bother to park in one of the 2 available spots. He slammed on the brakes and stopped his car right behind Kelly's 'truck' and stormed into the lodge.
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A new video by me.
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Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 4:00pm | Edit Note | Delete
This is kind of a dull one I'm afraid to say. About 3 minutes showing what my job is all about. I was going to upload it to my facebook videos but their videos have to be under 2 minutes, which is totally stoooooooopid if you ask me. Anyway, the link to the vid is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOWbGWt4-b8 and if you haven't seen them, you can visit my youtube channel (click on the blue toontown88 on the youtube page) and see a bunch of my sillier stuff too.
Peace out y'all.
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My book
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Thursday, July 19, 2007 at 9:54am | Edit Note | Delete
For those of you who might be interested, I've written a novel called Year of the Cock . I can e-mail a copy if you're a reader. Here is a quick synopsis of it.

Year of the Cock (YOC) is an energetic free-flowing narrative. It’s ambition is no less than the defining of a lost generation. The prose is highly stylized, alternating between poetic and pornographic. As opposed to the traditional Table of Contents, YOC’s chapters are laid out in the form of a discography. Each chapter takes it's name from a hardcore punk rock classic of the 80s, the soundtrack that in part shaped the character's lives. It’s written for a culture afflicted with media-induced ADD, and it runs rapid fire from one scene to the next. It’s fast short chapters are targeted to an audience that grew up with 3 minute music videos and channel surfing.
The story follows a year in the life of Andy as he grows from 17 to 18 years of age in the late 1980s. It traces the young Bohemian punk and his friends as they are cut loose from all responsiblity in Saskatoon; the ‘Paris of the Prairies.’ Moving easily through comedy, action, metaphysical ponderings, romance, near pornography and existential asides, Year of the Cock staggers and stumbles the seedy backstreets of Saskatoon. Raw and honest, it's easy to forget that the characters are only teenagers as they struggle with all the issues of adulthood; drugs, alcohol, poverty, racism, casual sex, etc.
The title "Year of the Cock" refers neither to Chinese astrology nor to roosters, but rather to 'the medulla oblangata meridianus'; the 'Southern brain' which is more often than not guiding the decisions of the characters. Taking on any experience that may present itself, Andy and his friends find themselves drifting from one misadventure to the next. In addition to a seemingly endless stream of promiscuous women there is plenty of action. They provoke violent nightclub bouncers in a terribly one-sided brawl. Andy gambles for food in an underground card game that almost winds up in murder and a prison sentence. The group fall into the company of a pathological liar and find themselves posing as foreign nationals in a cowboy bar, where they are taken by Cambodians and fed copious amounts of liquor. Interspersed are moments that question their existence, snapshots of the downtrodden that capture the human condition. Despite the hard edges of the chararcters and their seemingly careless disregard for anything, there are moments of poignant vulnerability that spotlight their fragility.
The book does initially glorify some patterns of substance abuse, but it does so in order to show how a person can find such a lifestyle appealing. As Year of the Cock progresses however, raw hedonism gives way to rapid disintegration. There are graphic accounts of what chronic alcoholism does to a person both mentally and physically. Pulling no punches, Year of the Cock will shake and disturb the reader, at the same time finding a light and wild hilarity. The beautiful and the base alternate from page to page. It's a caustic blend of Bohemian writing, punk lit, erotica and gonzo journalism. There is a naked truthfulness throughout that sets it into a category all it's own.
Year of the Cock finishes where it began, with a young man setting out to begin a new life. Unable to find the will or the strength to overcome his demons, Andy instead chooses to run. He leaves Saskatoon bound for a new life in Vancouver. There is a moving tribute to the prairie landscape that will forever change the reader’s vision of the ‘flatland’. The final chapter not only concludes the novel, but it also challenges Kerouac's claim that Route 66 is the "Mother Road". It offers instead the Trans Canada Highway for the reader's consideration, and in so doing seeks to assert the vastness, the beauty, the differences and the oneness of Canada and it’s regions.
Year of the Cock is the type of novel that comes only once in a generation, perhaps once in a century. It breaks with convention so completely that it establishes it’s own convention. This is in all respects a new novel.
Year of the Cock
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My latest effort.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 11:20am | Edit Note | Delete
This is my latest story so far.

500 clicks from home and the heat was hot like Saddam Hussein in a hole and the sun beat down Southern prison guard hard. I was in the hole myself, 4 meters in the ground, shovel in hand and sweat pouring from my hair and down my face all gatorade touchdown wet. I'd been in the hole for 30 days. 30 days in the hole, and sure maybe it wasn't prison and maybe I was there by choice, but it was a choice that circumstances forced and that really is no choice at all if you ask me. We were laying water and sewer pipe, all across Northern Alberta, eating hamburger steaks in greasy spoons and getting short cardboard pillow motel sleeps. We were all putting in more overtime than regular and the money was good but the work was hard and it was dangerous and there was no one that we loved within 300 miles and there was no one that loved us within 300 miles and it would have been awfully lonesome if we hadn't been so damn busy and so damn tired. Maybe that's why we were a little harder than we should have been on the incompetents and the new guys. Or maybe there was an ugliness inside of us that needed a way out, that needed a target. Maybe there's an ugliness in every man in every group of men towards the weak and stupid and the lost. And maybe it can get out of hand at times.
It got out of hand with Kelly.
Kelly came on about 3 weeks into the season and when he did he claimed that he had 13 years of experience and that he knew what he was doing, and he was aggressive; untrained friendly Rottweiler aggressive. He wasn't mean, but he was in your face, jumping all over you, wagging his tail, knocking things over, incapable of understanding the simplest social cues and body language that say 'fuck off go away and leave me alone'. It probably didn't help that he was an Easterner either. As Warren said, "I fuckin hate these east coast immigrants..." and then he motioned to me and Sorge fresh from Saskatoon and he said "these grasshoppers I can handle, but that's about it."
Kelly was full of wild unchannelled and uncontrolled energy. On the first day he was jumping around jacked up jackrabbit quick, barking out orders at the rest of us in the hole with an overly eager overly enthusiastic brightness.
"You need a pipe down here bro'?! Okay, C'MON 'BRO! Let's get a pipe down here!!" and he'd make a big flamboyant 'over-the-top-lads' kind of gesture with his arm and be scrambling up the ladder at a run.
On the first day we didn't know that he didn't have 13 years of experience and we were new and didn't know any better and so we did what he asked. But it quickly became evident that something wasn't right. He was doing things wrong and we knew it, and so we started refusing to do the things he asked. That didn't stop him though.
Stefan was holding a gas powered circular saw, the engine running and ready to cut a length of 8" plastic pipe. Kelly came bounding out of the hole, told Stefan he needed the saw, and grabbed the running machine out of his hands without warning. Stefan swore at Kelly and Kelly gave a shout "Sorry Bro', I need it." and disappeared back down the hole in a hearbeat.
Stefan was a tough guy, a 'scrapper from way back' as he put it, and his nose had been broken 3 times and he wore his scars like badges of honor. He came up to me and said "That fucker just about got himself knocked out, did you see that?" and I nodded and I said I saw that and he said "He's gonna get a shot to the head next time..." and he stared at Kelly's retreating back with
a cold thundercloud meanness about to spawn lightning and hail and darkness and winds of great force.
Later on Cooper came up to me and he was agitated too, but in an eager and excited manner. Cooper was 19, maybe 20 and he was sports star cocky with a quick mouth and a quick manner and a bloodlust for passive opponents. He wanted to be thought of as a scrapper, and he had to be handled with care because it was pretty clear that he would scrap with little provocation, but his friendly outgoing joker nature lacked the cold dark undercurrent of pure unclouded violence that seemed to lurk just under the surface in a guy like Stefan. "Has that new guy been trying to order you around too?" he asked and I nodded and said yeah he has and Cooper's head gave a little shake and he burst out with a Pfff! and said "If he does it again just tell him to fuck off. He doesn't know shit, keeps talking about everything was different when he worked in Toronto."
And later still Cooper came running up to me all smiling conspiratorial confidential and said "Dude the new guy's a fucking crackhead, no word of a lie. He's coked right out! Just watch him."
So I just watched him for a litte while and Cooper was right. The guy was wired. Standing off on his own waiting for a job he'd be muttering away to himself, leaping off the ground and running after mosquitoes trying to kill them. Stories began flooding in from everybody, "That Kelly guy is whacked..." so on and so forth.
We had our supper on the site in the dirt every night, a big box of takeout containers, and the food was cold and the sand and the dust and the loneliness and the fatigue managed to find a way into every bite so we all talked and joked and tried to keep the emptiness and the ugliness at bay.
A conversation is a harmony of ideas, a symbiosis of neuroses and when it's natural and warm it has a flow and a life of it's own. Kelly was a conversation killer.
We would all laugh and talk and share a story or an experience or two, and Kelly would jump in, LITERALLY jump in between the speaker and the listeners and blurt out completely irrelevant
facts from his history. It was as if no one existed but himself.
Cooper was in the middle of a story about his weekend. He'd gone to the bar with a friend of his that was a 'total balla' and he had his first big paycheck in his pocket in cash and he was throwing bills around pretending to be a partner in the company and hitting on every woman in sight. As the night progressed he managed to hook up with 2 absolutely beautiful girls and he got them back to his friend's house and he dared them to start making out with each other and they did. "So I figured 'hey no guts no glory' and I started to wiggle my way in-"
At this point Kelly jumped in smacking Cooper on the back with a big overly appreciative laugh that drowned out Cooper's own voice. "These Edmonton girls are crazy eh Bro? Back in Toron'o
they're all snobs. Can't get a smile out of any of them. You ever been to Toron'o?"
Cooper scowled at Kelly and ignored his question to continue with his story. "Yeah, so they were making out HARD on my couch and I kinda just waltzed on-"
"You ever been to Toron'o Bro?" Kelly pressed, tugging on Cooper's sleeve.
Cooper was 20 and cocky and he sidestepped away from Kelly and squared off and said "I'm talking here, like what the fuck? Can you let me finish?"
Kelly raised his hands up apologetically and said "Sorry Bro, go ahead and finish."
After supper we were back at the hole digging away and Cooper came up to me and said "I can't stand that fucker. We're going to have at 'er, I'll knock him out." and he said it with a
hungry growl.
It was at 8 that night, hour 13 of the day, and we were digging hard trying to locate a gas line . We'd dig a trench a few feet across and if we hadn't located it the track hoe would scrape a
layer of earth away with it's bucket, and we'd dig even deeper. We'd gone through this cycle a couple of times, and it was a lot of hard digging and the hoe was moving in again so we moved out of
the hole and stood leaning on our shovels waiting for the machine to finish.
Kelly came bounding up and he leaned on my shoulder and asked "What's going on bro?" and I don't like strangers leaning on me so I moved away a foot or 2 and leaned on my shovel again and
told him in as few words as possible what was happening.
The hoe took a scrape and the bucket moved off to the side indicating we could jump back into the hole. I grabbed my shovel and Kelly grabbed it too. "Can I use your shovel." he said ( he didn't
ask) and he pulled forcefully trying to take it from me. I had heard about him doing this shit and so it pissed me off a little more than it should have and I ripped it back from him and said "I'm using it, get your own fucking shovel." and I thought I was pretty clear and so I loosened the grip on the shovel and he grabbed it again and this time he got it out of my hands and was gone and he said "I'll give it
back in a minute." and he jumped down in the hole.
Now let me tell you something about shovels. In the ditch your shovel is your tool; it's your tool and you learn to tell the differences between one shovel and another with the discerning eye of an antique weapons appraiser. Generally you have to walk a kilometer or 2 over rough ground in hard heat or trudge through the mud in the rain to find just the right shovel. There is a sense that you somehow earn your shovel. Had we been soldiers then our shovels would have been our guns, had we been cowboys they would have been our Winchesters, and a man learns every grain and nuance of the wood and the steel and grows comfortable with an implement to the point that it becomes an extension of his being. And when that fucker grabbed on to that extension of my being and took off I had a rush of adrenaline and testosterone fueled rage that set my hands to shaking and left me speechless.
Stefan was standing there when it happened and he was looking at me and laughing. "You look like you're ready to kill him!" he said and I was and I said to him "The next time he does that he's going to pull back his arm with nothing but a bloody stump on the end."
That was Monday night.
Tuesday came early and the sun broke over the horizon tequila sunrise technicolor spill and the air was cool but the dust and the dirt were warming and it was going to be hot again and we all knew it.
Five to seven in the morning and five minutes of quiet until the machines would fire up and break the silence with steel blades and diesel and iron clanging and air brakes and hydraulics hissing and rocks crushing and dirt tumbling and spilling and crashing to earth.
Mike was the pipelayer and he had been the one to hook me up with the job and I followed him 4 meters down the ladder into the ditch where he was having a last serene silent smoke before the destruction and reconstruction began.
Mike was for all intents and purposes the boss on the site, only 1 or 2 people above him. But 'boss' didn't sit well with him and he preferred to be thought of rather as a friend offering guidance and direction.
"That Kelly fucker is getting to me..." I told him and he laughed and said "He's getting to everyone." and I said "Yeah but I'm going to hurt him if he doesn't watch out." and Mike's brow furrowed with some genuine concern and he said "Yeah?"
I told him about Kelly taking the shovel and that the next time he did it I was going to threaten him with physical harm and if it escalated from there so be it.
"Stefan and Cooper are saying the same thing..." Mike smlied, "But they're going to hurt him sooner or later no matter what he does. I told them no more than one hit while he's down, same rule for everyone, and then I step in and break it up." and he smiled a peaceful easy smile.
In this note: Mike Holliday, Cooper Cowan (notes), Andrew Sorge (notes)
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Updated over a year ago

Ode to Elk Point
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Monday, July 16, 2007 at 11:18pm | Delete
Tonight I'm in a town called Elk Point Alberta. It's in the heart of Alberta lake country. First, let me tell you something that no Albertan would believe without seeing for themselves first. Alberta lake country blows compared to Saskatchewan lake country. There is a distinct lack of geological scenery here. When you're up in Northern Sask, gawd dammit you know you are up north because trees have to fight their way out of the rock and there are animals that will kill and eat you all over the place. Alberta may have the Rockies, but on the lakes we pwn them. Anyway, this isn't about slamming Alberta, which is a land with more than it's fair share of beauty. No, this is an ode to Elk Point. So here goes. Ode to Elk PointElk point you have no great big elk on the highway. The only Elk is the one in your pointy name. Elk Point you may not be a lot of things. And that is at once your failing, and your virtue. And Elk Point....E.P....Can I call you E.P.? E.P. by far your greatest virtue is indeed a failing. And this virtuous failure is that you are not Plamondon. Because, seriously...Plamondon blows dick. E.P. I have only tasted your beef and cheddar wrap and your teriyaki chicken burger. And I suppose I have also tasted your precosciously misspelled "ministroni' soup. (Did I spell misspelled and precosciously correctly)? And it has already washed away the horrors of the Pelican Grille for me. (But for some of us there are Plamondon horrors that no soap will ever wash away) E.P. you have enough high speed internet floating around in your piney air that I'm able to plug in and steal it. No phone cords or 28kbps speeds here. E.P. Apparently I don't love you I'm just really happy to be out of fucking Plamondon. fin
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Just a test
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Saturday, July 14, 2007 at 12:06pm | Delete
Facebook apparently allows you to import your blog. I'm testing it out to see if it works or not. Sorry for the false 'new post' alarm. If this works I'll be back to posting here regularly.
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importing my old blog
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Saturday, July 14, 2007 at 12:04pm | Edit Note | Delete
I'm trying out the facebook "import blog" feature and I've imported all the posts from my old poker blog "flatland grinder" here. Most of it is dull poker content for card nuts only, but if you get really bored and need to be lulled to sleep it could be just what you need. Searching flatlandgrinder will take you right to my msn space where you can see the posts in the original.
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Synchronicity
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Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 10:41pm | Edit Note | Delete
I'm going to reprint some excerpts from the wikipedia article on synchronicity (because it's damn creepy!!!) here for you. And just one more coincidence to mention first, it was just last week that I first heard of the 'Dark Side of the Rainbow". Okay, so here's a quick definition, followed by some creepy examples:

"Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally inexplicable to the person or persons experiencing them. The events would also have to suggest some underlying pattern in order to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung."

Now the examples;

* During production of The Wizard of Oz, a coat bought from a second-hand store for the costume of Professor Marvel was later found to have belonged to L. Frank Baum, author of the children's book upon which the film is based. [6]

* One night during production of the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here, the band was working on the song Shine On You Crazy Diamond about their former bandmate Syd Barrett, whom they had not had contact with in several years. They did not pay any special notice when during the recording a bald-headed stranger came into the studio and started watching them. They later found out that this stranger was Syd Barrett, whose appearance had changed dramatically.[citation needed]

* The The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd are also part of the alleged Dark Side of the Rainbow synchronicity.
Thought I would share that with you all :)

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Inspiration is the Lazy Man's Excuse
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Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 10:13pm | Edit Note | Delete
I heard Gene Simmon's from KISS say something along those lines, in reference to getting up everyday and going into the studio to cut tracks. With that in mind, I actually have no inclination whatsoever to write anything at this moment, but feel that I should just to keep the channels open. Thinking back over the events of my day, there was really only one noteworthy happening. I found an old horseshoe buried in a road known as the 100 Year Old Trail. Naturally I kept it, and all the guys started telling me about the different caveats to the luck it would bring, the main one being that I have to hang it upside down or all my 'luck will run out." Well, as the great master Obi Wan Kenobi once said; "In my experience there is no such thing as luck."
Still, knowing this, and having made a living for years off of the disciples of fortune (i.e. talisman-kissing luck blinded gamblers), I'm surprised to find myself paying close attention to the rules to maximize my luck with this discovery. But I'm trying to use my logic and reason to combat any urges to test my luck.
What I find far more interesting than luckiness, are some of the coincidences involved with this finding. For instance I'm currently reading a book called "The Promised Land" by Pierre Berton, and it talks about the settling of the west from 1896 to 1914 or so. A lot of the book focuses on horses and trails etc, and finding this horseshoe was like having a piece of the past fall into my lap simply to illustrate the chronologic and geographic closeness of the history. I'm also eagerly anticipating a return to the poker tables in the next few weeks (as soon as I get back to a burg with high speed internet), and the horseshoe has long been a favorite icon amongst poker players (who profit very much from propagating belief in luck, talisman's and superstition). There are a lot of other coincidences (2 or 3 anyway) that also accompany the find, and I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say, that it makes a guy think. While I don't buy into the idea of luck, I do sorta buy into the idea that there is an interconnectedness between all things, events, places, times etc, and that coincidences tend to be signposts along the road to our true purpose. (urrrr, okay, the guy's a cornflake). Easy there, I'm not talking in any stooopid kind of Celestine Prophecy sort of way, but more of a Jungian synchronicity/Jedi sort of way. Anyhoo, the point is that when a string of such coincidences occur, I tend to step back and dig a little deeper for what it is that the pattern is trying to tell me...again, not in a Beautiful Mind Schizo secret code kind of way, but in a subjective introspective Yoda zen sorta way. And I think I have figured out what it is I'm supposed to be reading from this horseshoe and it's timely arrival. But I'm not going to tell you. Because then you'd think I was REALLY nutz.