some of this is true

OK, so all indications are that — despite the dozen or so police cars, vans and a forensic identification unit, and the TV news crew — there was no foul play involved in the body found in a house around the corner and down the street, on Halifax’s busy Windsor Street, half a block from the 24-hour (six days at week, at least) Sobeys, but it still made me rubberneck, which I do often, and wonder, What Happened?, which of course I found out when I got into work an hour later.

But still, even the prospect of Major Crimes happened in my adopted neighbourhood is unsettling, much more so than it would have been two years ago in Calgary, and not because I lived in a hotbed of criminal activity but because it was, at least, more common, like when during a visit home we drove by a Law and Order scene in progress — two or three young men on their knees on a grassy knoll surrounded by the police with their guns drawn and the lights of their cruisers lighting up the nighttime drama just a few hundred feet away from the famed Max Bell Arena — and of course we rubbernecked, but it was a different sort of rubbernecking, without quite so much surprise and shock. Yesterday they robbed the fabric store a few minutes away from my house with guns. Can you believe it? Robbing a fabric store with guns. It made no sense. Not as much sense, for example, as when Chris Campbell and I were mugged while walking home from the bus stop after a trip to Westhill Cinemas in Grade 9, when they asked us the time at 2:30 a.m. (I suspect they already knew, at least roughly, what the time was) and then asked us to empty our pockets and then asked us for our jackets and Chris’ hat, though I slyly took my blue Sony Walkman out of my pocket and they didn’t ask for that. The knives in their hands made our decision easy, and then, jacketless, we just strolled home, depressed, and a few minutes later marveled at the police helicopter over our neighbourhood for the next half-hour.

The suspects remain at large.

Once at the cutting edge of all things techie and world-wide-webbie — I had a hotmail account before the days of Microsoft (were we ever so young, Internet?) and a Geocities webpage with lots of animated gifs () — it appears that I have relinquished my status as one of those hip, beautiful people whose inboxes overflow with adoration, some from intimate acquaintances but most from total strangers who, through the miracle of technology and the revealing nature of Internet quizes (“Which bite-sized low-sodium organically produced soup cracker are you?”), have come to know them better than their closest real-life friends, whose identities are far more easy to verify but whose realness is, let’s be honest, boring.

I completely missed MySpace, and by the time I had jumped on the bandwagon (which is an amusing inside reference, don’t you know, because MySpace started largely as a site for undiscovered bands to get their start — hence, bandwagon. Pretty clever, indeed), the novelty of it had, months earlier (an eternity in the post-typewriter world), worn off for the rest of the (virtual) planet.

So I missed that one, but I won’t let that happen with facebook, the wildly popular social engineering networking website that has exploded, it seems, in just a few weeks, for no explicable reason. I already have 35 friends, which is more than I have ever had at the same time in my life. Soon those friends will multiply and the resulting pool of friends will multiply again, each time growing by larger increments like that old tale about the child who bilks an unsuspecting neighbour into paying him a penny-an-hour for painting his fence so long as the hourly rate doubles each hour and this makes the old man happy that he has finally found the stupidest child he has ever met to paint his fence for just pennies, but this feeling of jubilation quickly subsides when after 20 hours of work the rate reaches more than $10,000 and turns into despair a few hours later when the bill passes a million bucks — and, unfortunately, the old man never realizes that this contract was not legally binding and, even if it was, not even this child’s parents would miss him if he suddenly “disappeared” because they, too, fell into the same trap just weeks earlier. The point is that soon I will have more friends than I could have ever dreamed, an infinite number of companions who I can communicate and interact with en masse with the simple push of a button, that pale plastic rectangle on the keyboard marked ‘Enter,’ which has been used to drop bombs and fire missiles and destroy entire countries but will, I firmly believe, one day unite the world.

Some facts about me and my life, many of which are true:

- Our cat, Morgan, rarely answers to her name, but I call her Morgan anyway, and repeat it as she stares dumbly at me, wondering why I keep making this same shrill sound over and over again, sometimes holding treats made out of sawdust and seafood, wanting nothing more than for her to sit on my lap for longer than eight seconds, which has only happened once, and I think it was only because she forgot that, more than anything, she hates the comfort of human contact.

- When I was in the sixth grade, Mrs. Cassidy asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and having recently seen several action movies starring the likes of Bruce Willis, I answered, “Maybe a cop,” to which she replied, “What a waste,” and, embarrassed, I quickly recovered with, “Maybe a writer,” and the devastated look of disappointment quickly disappeared. And here we are.

- I have never won a spelling bee.

- In the fourth grade, a cute girl in class commissioned her best friend and confidant to ask me in a note whether I “liked her,” to which I replied, foolishly, “Yes . . . as a friend,” the latter part of which was of course a lie that betrayed my fragile pre-pubescent heart. If I recall correctly, she went out with Travis instead.

- I am allergic to penicillin, horses, the pollen from the canola plant (or similar crop), and rejection

- My first live concert was AC/DC in the mid-1990s, during the hard rock band’s Ballbreaker tour. That is, if you don’t count the time, many years earlier, that my elementary school class went to see Buckshot, a lovable television cowboy whose daily program on CFCN-TV entertained generations of children with an authentic depiction of frontier-era life with his affable sidekick Benny the Bear.