Living Here can be Dangerous to One's Health

We live in the most idyllic place.  Seven years ago, almost to the day, we decided to move away from an ultra-cool urban loft in the ultra-trendy West Village area of Ottawa.  Crammed between the gentrification going on in Hintonburg and Westboro, it’s in my opinion the best neighbourhood in the city.

We also had a lake property that we developed through the early years of our relationship.  It was a beautiful, totally secluded lot just inside the Laurentians area outside of Lac des Plages, Quebec.  It was on a tiny pristine lake, no motorboats allowed.  We put a trailer on the property and developed a great little infrastructure around it and for ten years, running off of propane and a solar paneled 12-volt battery, carved out a cool little summer cottage existence.

Suzanne and Jerry Have a Chat

An actual recent conversation in our house:

Me:  Do you think my big fat ego can take me being a cleaning lady?

Suzanne:  What could possibly be left of your big fat ego?

It’s been two years already.  It’s been two years since I really left the corporate world.  Oh I’ve dabbled a bit since but it’s really just been a dabble here and a dabble there.

I'm presently spending a lot of time working on a business but it remains in the pre-revenue stage.  I’ve noticed that the natural habitat of “the dabble” appears to be the pre-revenue stage.  This is a bad stage.  This is a really, really bad stage.  I hate this stage.

Anyway, my big fat guilty conscience could sure use to contribute a little more financially.  It’s pretty interesting how the progressive male mind works.  When you’re on the other side, mired in the fray you think  - I can handle this ego thing.  I’m above it all for I am metrosexualman...mercifully deprived of the ravages of ego (I know, I know, shotty’d from the Time Bandits…AGAIN!  But please bask in the use of such a millennial urban term juxtaposed against a seminal thirty-year-old movie.) Where was I again? Oh yeah...well apparently I’m not so good at handling this ego thing.  My ego is as strong as it ever was; in fact with this whole emancipation exercise I’m going through, I think my ego has turned into a bit of a mind parasite, lurking under the surface just waiting to pounce.

Jackie-san is Gone

So a guy I lived with my second year of college died this week.  Fifty-four, had a massive coronary.  Poof – gone!  I hope he’d walked through the gates of enlightenment but I’m doubten her (Brockville speak).  Probably back for another 5 or 10 or 20,000 lifetimes according to those whacky Hindu hijinks or who knows, maybe just worm food.  Irrespective of ones philosophical beliefs he’s certainly shipped out of this dimension – Gonedy! (more Brockville speak with a little phonetic Hindu twist).

We lived together in a three-bedroom dump in “Da Get-toe” on Morissette off of Merivale in Ottawa.  Funny the things you remember.  One was a yearlong competition.  The rules were simple.  When you went to the can at night, you kept the lights off and sat down to pee.  Once seated you flicked on the light.  The object was to kill as many cockroaches as possible as they scattered in the light.  Apparently I wasn’t much of a Buddhist or Tolstoyan in college.  Kevin, our third roomy held the lofty record of eleven in a single seating by years-end.

Jack was a really solid guy.  He was going to school to study Law and Security in hopes of becoming a cop.  Boy was he living with the wrong dudes.  Anyway, he never became a policeman and I hope he was good with that.  The last time I spoke with him was about five years back.  He was married to a girl I went to high school with and they had a couple of boys.  Life seemed good.

 

I can’t imagine that he’s gone.

I better get busy – time’s short!    

Spirit Y'all Has a New Home.

Hello people.  How ya?  I haven’t posted in a while.  And by a while I mean 505 days.  Crazy huh?  What the hell happened?

I’ll tell you what happened.  What happened was, is that I acquired a new coach.  I’ve tried this “life-coach” thing a couple of times before but I made a fundamental error both times.  I agreed to act as a guinea pig for a really good friend of mine and for my wife.  They both needed a lab rat during the time of their coaching accreditation.  They say you shouldn’t do this and in this particular case they, the generalized other, is absolutely right.  That ol’objectivety thing can really be tough ya know.

I've done it properly this time and the new guy is a real ball-buster.  Can you imagine, he makes me make commitments and things?  You know what I mean, the kind of commitments that he expects you to know enough to meet???  Man, I hate those types of commitments.  Couldn’t I just make commitments that I didn’t really have to commit too?  The guy is obviously a madman.