Sens

Sens a photo by Rob Hoey on Flickr.

Ah, the season is over for the Ottawa Senators, the lights are slowly fading, and the team can look back on this year and proudly say to themselves: "We couldn't suck enough." They came in last place but finished with a flourish that could only be described as a sports-tease--giving us hope that perhaps next year, they will suck enough. There were enough injuries on the team to give one pause and ponder the question as to whether or not they should have taken up curling instead of hockey. Let's face it, there's a lot less hitting and far fewer injuries in curling than one faces in the NHL. (For the Sens, NHL stands for "Need Help Ladies?").

But who am I to talk? I have no hockey skills. I have so little time in Canada that maybe I should keep my stupid keyboard shut and pretend that coming in dead last is no big deal. Heck, someone has to be last so that being first is just that much sweeter, and being the penultimate team doesn't quite suck as much.

The only good thing that came out of Canadian hockey for me was my learning the National Anthem, which, by the way, I plan to parody.

This photo is blogged

This photo is blogged a photo by Rob Hoey on Flickr.

You're laying in bed. All you hear is the sound of your spouse asleep, breathing and dreaming next to you; a ticking clock on the wall, and if your hearing is really good, the sound of melted snow in the process of refreezing from the cold night air. You ask yourself philosophical questions like: "if a clock ticks in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it, does time stop?" Or: "did Tim Horton ever sleep?"
Yes, you realize it was that late night cup of coffee that is causing those neurons to fire like a Donald Trumpathon on steroids. And you lay there and the clock's ticking seems to get louder and all kinds of new thoughts enter your mind like: "when the hell am I going to get around to hanging that freaking light in the dining area?" Or: "if god exists, why did he make bedbugs and maggots?" Or: "what if they never give me permanent residency in Canada?"
Then I try to relax and take a few deep breaths, which is a little like white noise but it still doesn't drown out the ticking of the clock and the refreezing of the melted snow.
Did you know that the number 8 is the brightest digit on a digital clock?

Eh?

cloud4
Originally uploaded by Rob Hoey

It snowed yesterday and my childhood flashed in front of my eyes. I remembered how I played in the snow in the mornings and my toes would get so cold that they'd itch. I'd come into the house and Dad would put Noxema on them and the itch would go away. Magic. And then I'd go out and play again, only to repeat the cycle.

It's November and it already snowed twice; maybe we'll get a white Christmas--if we do, it'll be my first one in many years. I think it has been so long since I've actually had a white Christmas that Bing Crosby's song about it just came out. Well, okay, I'm exaggerating, but it must be at least 20 plus years.

My favorite Christmas as a kid was getting my first set of electric trains. Lionel, of course, with the smoke pills and the whistle and the little houses and the tracks that fit together. Once I got too old for them, I put the trains in a box and forgot about them. Then, one day I came across them while going through my stuff. I had no use for them anymore, or so I thought, so I gave them away to my nephew, Michael. I wonder if he still has them; I doubt it.

Trains had a way of being a catalyst for the imagination; today the imagination of the young is fed by computer games, cell phone games, X-Box, and things I'm not even aware of, but I know it's out there. The trouble is, we tend to spend all of our time, lately, on our computers (as I'm doing as I write this), on our phones, in our games, and less time in our real world. George Carlin had a theory about this--he believed that this was the way for those in real power to distract us from what's most important in the world, which is how our leaders (most of whom are not visible to the public), are screwing us.
I don't know if he was correct, but I do know we need to spend more time in the here and now.
What's your favorite childhood memory, eh?