A haunted house · Posted Jul 8, 07:40 PM by Todd Babiak

I’ve just returned from some northern holidaying. It wasn’t only a holiday. The novel I’m planning and researching will be set in the Yukon, barring some fantastic idea that interrupts it, so I was also busy noticing and note-taking and speaking to a spectacularly eloquent RCMP Sergeant. I was also trying to get a handle on the surprising number of mosquitoes, and the fact that no one complains about them in the Yukon. Here in Alberta, if one mosquito shows up at a garden party, a small festival of bleating, cussing, and hand-wringing is inaugurated.

It was less than two weeks in the land of the midnight sun, but coming home has been eerie. The house smells like someone else’s house. Cereal in the cereal cupboard appears odd, like someone else had purchased it. Crispex, for instance; I can’t imagine the mental state that inspired me to buy Crispex. The art on our walls isn’t new but newly exotic. I hadn’t understood the way the bottom of our arbutus painting is so dark, relative to the rainy sheen of the top.

Why have I allowed our bookshelves to become so crowded and messy? So many trees in the yard, and so much clover in the lawn. I determined that my house and my city had been replaced in my absence by another house and another city very similar to my old house and city but not quite the same ones. Had God done this? If so, God, get to Africa. People are starving! At the very least, allow the Edmonton Oilers to have a better season next year.

Either way, my discovery allowed me to sleep soundly. A logical explanation for a fantastic mystery is always satisfying. But this morning I came up with a new theory. For work reasons, I came home a couple of days earlier than my wife and two small daughters. Our daughters aren’t here, being delightful and needful. So there is a temporary void in my life, which has unleashed my five senses, allowing me to see, to smell, to hear what I normally do not see, or smell, or hear.

It’s becoming a bit creepy. But I’ve decided to make notes, in case I ever put my house in a story.

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Ich Bin Ein Birder · Posted Jun 5, 08:26 AM by Todd Babiak

Last month, we went birding. It was a hot day, 32C at its peak, so many of the birds were lying in the shade somewhere, drinking margaritas and reminiscing about all of those sweet sexual conquests in university. But we’re busy people, and bird day was bird day, so we couldn’t reschedule.

I know some birds by sight: robins, magpies, crows, rock doves, mallards. And we have this CD of Alberta bird calls that I’ve heard so many times I sometimes have nightmares about it. So I’m not the worst birder in the world. The worst birder in the world is my daughter, Avia. For some reason, she was less than willing to look straight up into the sun to try and spot an American goldfinch!

Two-year-olds are also less than thrilled about being outside, on very hot days, from 10:30 to 4:30, with only intermittent shade. Kids these days are so spoiled. When I was two, we didn’t have fancy things like houses and clothes and water. No, we made do with what we had.

Anyway, there was quite a bit of complaining on bird day. To alleviate the complaining, there was also a lot of singing and dancing. So when joggers and homeless people passed by, while my wife looked into the sun with binoculars and I sang Cielito Lindo while performing a fan dance, I can only imagine they phoned child and family services later that afternoon. Fortunately, we never stayed in one place too long. We bagged our chickadee and we moved on, as the saying goes.

The thing about binoculars, for me, is I hate them. They make me nauseous, for some reason, and I can never see what I’m trying to see. “Look up there,” my wife would say, “it’s a yellow warbler.” I would take the binoculars and look up and see a Safeway bag stuck in some branches, or maybe just sky, or the sun. My wife would move me and the binoculars around. “There! See it!” And I wouldn’t see anything new, just branches mostly. However, my inner ear would be deranged by all the funny movements, and I would have to lie down in the bush for a while and moan, waiting for the nausea to pass — which makes my daughter cry. She doesn’t like to see me in a state of fragility and submission.

In the end, bird day was a success in that we saw 18 birds and the state did not seize our children. We’re having another one this month. I’ll be loading up on Gravol and learning a few more Mexican folk songs, just in case.

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The ghost of Bruce Lee · Posted May 23, 01:05 PM by Todd Babiak

One evening last week, I was picking dandelions and waiting for my pal Ron to show up. We were going to a play, and it was easiest for him to leave his Subaru at my house, as it is difficult to park in Old Strathcona.

I heard, in the distance, a pained moan. It is odd to hear a pained moan in my neighbourhood, especially from a grown man. Children skin their knees or fail to convince their parents to spend THE WHOLE DAY at the park. But adults, generally, aren’t moaners.

I walked to the end of the avenue and saw three men, two in the backyard of a rental house and one in the driveway. “I’m sorry, man,” said the man in the driveway, wearing what appeared to be the shirt Bruce Lee wore in Enter the Dragon. “I’m so fucking sorry. I love you, okay? I’m sorry.”

Of the other two men, one was the clear leader. He wore an undershirt, often called a wifebeater. He walked out and met the moaner. I couldn’t hear what he said, but he wound up to punch the man. And held back. He turned toward the house again.

“No, please. I love you. I fucking love you, man. I’m sorry. I’m just so sorry.”

I wasn’t the only neighbour watching. The man in the Bruce Lee shirt had a deep and powerful voice. It became louder when the man in the wifebeater waved him away and walked into the house.

“Please! Please! I love you. Please.”

This wasn’t romantic love. It was a different sort. The third man, who had been acting in a sort of supervisory role, turned his back on Bruce Lee.

“Well fuck you, then!” he said. “I hate you. I hope you die. Go to hell.”

The gentleman walked away, then, and all was quiet in the neighbourhood again. Ron still had not shown up, so I went back to picking dandelions. Until … like the unexpected climax of an opera:

“I love you so much!” Even louder this time. He was back, against the fence. “I’ll do anything. Please. I’m sorry, man. “

Nothing. No response from inside the house. And finally, with a near whisper, he repeated, “I’m sorry.”

He walked away, for good this time, and my friend Ron arrived. We walked past the house, on our way to the theatre, and I told Ron what I had just witnessed. And I’m not sure he believed me.

When we arrived at the theatre, I realized I had left the tickets in my manpurse, which I had placed on the sidewalk in front of my house — for dandelion picking. The writer of the show, the great Stewart Lemoine, who also happened to be selling licorice in the lobby, let me in anyway.

Exit the dragon.

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Living Ain't Easy · Posted May 16, 08:35 AM by Todd Babiak

And today we learn, again, that Canadians do not get enough vitamin D.

This causes no end of consternation in the Babiak household. I’m terrified of skin cancer, on account of my never-wearing-sunscreen-until-quite-recently. Yet now I’m also afraid of a vitamin D deficit; cancer, rickets, male pattern baldness, colitis, the shimmies, encephalitis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, dropsy, self-loathing, sore knees, multiple sclerosis, blindness, and the shits are now attributed to a vitamin D deficiency.

Much obliged, various ancestors, for settling in Canada!

At the park, where we learn most of what we have learned in recent years, one of our neighbours declared that several common ingredients in sunscreen also cause debilitating and humiliating cancers. Not to mention blood poisoning and schizophrenia. And taking too much vitamin D, through unregulated supplements, can destroy your liver and inspire murderous thoughts.

This is the modern condition.

Recently we learned from Epcor, the utility company that provides our water, that the pipes leading to our house are made of lead. In the helpful material provided by Epcor, the company suggested it’s a good idea to run the water for several minutes every morning to flush out any impurities that might cause gross deformities, learning disabilities, and severe mental illnesses in our children.

Yet we had paid a premium to buy water-saving appliances. We had stopped buying bottled water, because it’s plasticky and encourages the privatization of depleting water sources. And I’m still trying to get over all the Bishphenol A my family consumed through Nalgene bottles and baby sippy cups. We threw it all away recently, in favour of stainless steel containers that, like the lead-filled Tickle Me Elmo doll, were manufactured in China — where lead apparently falls from the sky, like rain or perhaps fairies. No, we didn’t throw it all away. We recycled the Bisphenol-A, so it can make its way into freezer bags and Lipton microwaveable meals in a tub.

Today, the forecast is 26 degrees. I’ll go out in my short-shorts for as long as I can. Until I am paralyzed.

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Optimism Pessimism · Posted May 13, 10:25 AM by Todd Babiak

I finished a draft of my latest novel late last week. For about ten minutes, I was happy. Since then I’ve been feeling nauseous, worried about sending it to my agents, who will then send it to publishers. People who AREN’T ME looking at the novel… it’s terrifying.

It’s also the whole point. Why else would I get up ridiculously early, staring at a computer every dark morning, my heart thumping with caffeine and fear, my wrists aching with various syndromes.

People tell me they’re working on a book, on a cycle of poems, even on a screenplay. Many of them say, “It’s just for me. I’d never show it to anyone.”

I try to be polite in these circumstances, but I’ve never really understood what the hell they’re talking about.

If I didn’t want to show my writing to people, to strangers, I wouldn’t write. I’d sleep instead; I’d open a bubble tea outlet in the suburbs of Montreal instead of having my characters do it. My friend Thomas Trofimuk recently sold his novel for plenty of dough in Toronto, New York, and London. Given that he worked on the thing for something like fifteen years, on and off, even the good-sounding advance probably works out to something worryingly less than minimum wage.

CBC Radio News is on as I write this. Energy companies and Research in Motion are up. Manufacturing concerns are down. David Beckham is in town, to play a soccer game. A devastating earthquake in China. State of the City address. Hilary Clinton is looking for a big win in West Virginia. An economic slowdown or a recession? Did the murderer of a 13-year-old girl on a golf course also kill a prostitute? City councils give the boot to bottled water.

There are plenty of stories in all of this, but no stories about stories. Literature is neither up nor down on the Dow Jones. I’m not even sure what the Dow Jones is. A novel COULD be news, if it were made into a Hollywood movie set in Canada. But even then: only if Johnny Depp is in it. So really, I shouldn’t be unhappy or nervous. The stakes are too low. It’s just for me.

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