Rose's Cantina

Hello. Welcome to 2015, the year of the Angry Inch. I stayed in last night and watched Die Hard. Meanwhile, in communities everywhere in Canada, people were doing this. Grow the hell up.

I got a call yesterday from Doris, one of my oldest friends, the person who has stood by me through thick and thin, the woman who has always been there for us, to lend us a few bucks when times were rough, and offer herself up to the Masterchef as a guinea pig at our tasting table. Doris may be the only person I talk with on the telephone anymore; in this age of texting, she hasn't quite got the touch. So the phone rings at least twice a week with news about doctors' appointments, new medication and her strong-like-bull 85-year-old dad. But yesterday's call took on a different tone. It was ominous. Her husband Bob is what a gerontologist would call "young elderly," a man who spent most of his life grabbing life by the tits and squeezing them. David Sedaris would call him a man "with good time teeth," though he has few of them left in his head thanks to his daily consumption of rum and coke over a four decade drinking career. Is Bob an alcoholic? Doe...

 Photo by Beth Grant, Creative Commons    Over the years, I was subjected to some pretty inappropriate attempts at child-rearing. It was all part of that misguided notion among parents in the 1960s that kids should be taught to do adult things while they still lived at home. Like drinking, smoking, gambling -- those sorts of things. For example, I started drinking coffee at the age of five. By the time I got to public school, I had developed a three cup a day Instant coffee habit. I always tried to fill the coffee cup over the brim like the Maxwell House coffee commercial. It would never work, of course, because the people who make those commercials lie. Coffee spills into the saucer instead not matter how often you try this particular experiment. Didn't matter to me. I preferred to slurp my coffee from the saucer anyway. Hey, I was a kid. As on most farms, coffee was served at all hours and I drank my last cup before...

It may be ironic only to me, but a gigantic liquor barn opened beside my gym at Trainyards yesterday. Right beside Farm Boy, the healthy eating joint. I parked beside Farm Boy, went to the gym and when I returned to my car, the parking lot was bumper to bumper with folks waiting to get their drink on, mostly old folks, all in cars. It was 9:30 a.m. Being the curious sort, I piled my kale and cucumbers into my beat up Subaru then ventured inside. I wasn't going to buy anything; I just wanted to see what the fuss was all about. People were milling around with the same look I've seen at the casino, eyeballing the 65 varieties of beer in the humungous beer fridge, ogling the 45 varieties of tequila and filling their carts with wine. There were lineups at the cash. At 9:30 a.m. In the middle of it all, I found Andre, the kindly LCBO clerk from my local, who had wangled himself a job at this mecca of libations. He seemed absolutely pixelated. "Any freebies?...

Dear Lord: That's right, I'm talking to you. I tried talking to your son last year, but I guess he decided to spend New Year's Eve with Ryan Seacrest. I've been thinking about my resolutions, those pesky things that none of us can ever keep. But being an optimist, I resolve to keep them this year. To wit, I resolve: To stop breaking things. In 2012, I broke my really expensive coffee maker, my Ekornes leather chair which came all the way from Denmark, my tooth, my car, my foot, my heart. And I think, maybe, I might have broke my liver. To stop drinking red wine after dinner. Yeah, right. Let's just say, I'll do the best I can. To get off the damned blood pressure medication which, as far as I can determine, just makes me feel anxious about my blood pressure. To get a full time job that will allow me to enter the bank and have them not laugh at me when I present my meagre paycheques. To stop using MoneyMart. See previous resolutions. To collect ...

That's what happens when you live 10 years alone in Bolivia: you get colorful. Percy in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Colorful, that's me alright. Twenty years living la vida loca in full fucking living color. Last night at dinner with an old friend, I was reminded that he often accompanied me on my one year bar crawl through Ottawa back when I was a music reviewer for the Ottawa Citizen . My job involved going to three bars to listen to three bands twice a week, then staggering back to the newsroom to write my review. Tom reported, with some glee in his voice, that most of that time, I was bouncing off the walls drunk on beer and power, as I set out to destroy the egos of fledgling musicians. I was a nasty little bitch back then. For this nonsense, I was paid $35 a night which pretty much covered my bar bill. Needless to say, if I could rely on the kindness of male strangers, I could get them to pick up the tab. It was just the beginning of m...

Scott turns 14 tomorrow. He doesn't look a day over 45. He's pretty big for his age, standing six foot two and he can drink any 16 year old under the table. And he has a lot of experience in other areas we won't get into. Scott was born on Leap Day, induced by a chain smoking, hard living family doctor who wanted to get away for a golfing vacay a few days early. He was born in the deep chill of St. Boniface, Manitoba to Margaret and Warner Troyer, the second son of, oh, thousands. It's always delighted Scott that he had a special birthday, one that only comes around every four years, so I'm feeling the need to plan something special for the occasion. Sure on Friday, there'll be much beer drinking, oh yes there will, when we gather at Liam McGuire's with some friendly faces. But tomorrow, we must plan something unique, in line with his official status as 14-year-old. Here's what I'm thinking. 9 a.m. Breakfast at McDonald's, something...

I was eating my high fibre toast, just now, when it took a slice out of my palate. Yowzah. Damned cracked wheat. You can never trust it. I'm always getting wounded by food. Coffee scalds my mouth. Soup goes up my nose. A piece of wayward chicken misses the esophagus and ends up in my windpipe. And then I sneeze for twenty minutes straight. And, I am a bad swallower. I would never have made a skilled porn star. So I'm rolling my tongue over the afflicted area, tasting a bit of blood and a little skin flap that may be with me until 2013. It makes me realize the importance of being in the moment, of paying attention to your life. I've spent most of my life in total distraction. Drank too much. Slept too much. Watched too much television. I was a pioneer in the art of living in the unconscious state. Couch surfing? I invented it. Time wasting? Got the t-shirt and DVD rights. For most of my life, I figured, I had it made. I never had to go to work. ...

When the grandparents were finally dispatched to their final resting spots, my mother moved us to a small apartment in the north end of town. It was a big change for us, leaving the six acre fruit farm and entering the world of urban dwellers. I was all for it. I was a teenager by this time, sixteen and in the prime of it, and had finally broken my protective shell. I wanted to put my lips to the world, as they say, and living in the city was just the button I needed to reboot my life. My mother's apartment became a hub of teenage hormones and merriment. Every weekend, there was a crowd of my high school friends who would come carrying boxes of Labatt's Blue and 50 -- my mother's favorite -- and we would sit around, listening to tunes on the eight track and watching dirty movies on Global television. We got our first color television in 1972 and we sat crowded round watching flying boobies on the Baby Blue Movies they played at midnight. I remember fondly a naked...