One Year at a Time

This post is kind of a departure from everything I've done on this blog to date. Instead of writing about one memory that I have of the '90s, I'm going to post 11 pictures (one from each year, plus an extra one in 1994) and tell the story and/or the feelings that come to me when I look at them.

1990
Place: Raymond, Alberta
My age: 12
From left to right, that's Rob, Dad, and me. No, we aren't napping together on Mum and Dad's bed. The newspaper is on the floor, and we're all reading it. Rob and Dad did this a lot, and I joined them just because I liked to feel like one of the men. Rob was a young adult by this time, and I was just revving up for puberty, and I sometimes felt left out of the manly things in my female-dominated family.

1991
Place: Lethbridge, Alberta
My age: 13
This is me and Mum at our ward Christmas party. It's not the most interesting photo I found from '91 (I had some amusing Tae Kwon Do photos), but it's the one I like the best. It's a good picture of me. I'm actually smiling. Maybe it's just my knowledge of what was going on at the time, but I think you can see sadness in my eyes. I was going through hell at school. I really like this picture of Mum, too. You can tell just looking at her that she loves me very much.

1992
Place: Edmonton, Alberta
My age: 14
This is my favourite junior high school picture. I need a haircut (or at the very least, I need to start parting my hair in the middle like I started doing a few years later), but I look good otherwise. I was happier in Edmonton than I had been in Lethbridge, but I was also at my most shy as a result of what happened in the eighth grade. And I'm also noticing, just this moment, that when I smile, my right eye is open a little wider than my left eye.

1993
Place: Prince George, British Columbia
My age: 15
Sorry. This was the only picture from 1993 that I could find in my photo album. It's the house my family lived in on Merton Crescent in Prince George. I also apologize for how off-center it is. nice house, though. Shoveling the driveway was a bitch.

1994
Place: somewhere in the Northwest Territories
My age: 16
I always laugh at these pictures. Sara, Mary, Rachel, Noah, and I were spending the summer in High Level, Alberta, which is where my father works. We decided to drive up to the Northwest Territories. A few miles north of the border, we suffered a flat tire. Not a huge problem, we thought. Duane Oler had taught Rachel, Noah, and I how to change a flat tire mere months ago. But then we ran into a problem: we couldn't get the jack out of the trunk. It was fit snugly into a bracket in the side of the trunk. No matter how much we yanked on it, we couldn't get it to come out. The girls decided to walk back to the information centre at the border for help while Noah and I stayed with the car. As soon as the girls were out of sight, a thought struck me: lower the jack. I stood up, went to the trunk, turned the jack turnie-thingie counterclockwise, and it fell out of the bracket. I set to work to get the tire changed, when I noticed another problem: there weren't any tools besides the jack itself. Thankfully, the girls showed up a few minutes later with some guys who were better equipped, and we were soon driving back to High Level.

1995
Place: Raymond, Alberta
My age: 17
That's me in the chair, Neil Oler behind me, and Rachel's butt to the left. This was a week or so after Halloween. There was only crappy candy left. Some of the other kids decided it would be fun to see how many Rockets (Smarties to any Americans who may be reading) they could fit in their mouths at once. They didn't leave much for me, so I decided to see how many lemon-flavoured Starburst (the worst flavour, by the way) I could fit in my mouth. 21.

1996
Place: Raymond, Alberta
My age: 18
I won't say much about this one, because I plan on devoting an entire post to my high school graduation. This is me and Jake at prom with a plastic monstrosity of a horse pulling a crappy-looking chariot. I'm not going bald yet, but my hair is thinner than it was in high school. I'll often look back on it with fondness, except for when I'm looking at pictures like this. No matter how much I combed, no matter how much mousse or gel I used, I had those wings of hair fanning out on either side of my head. At least I don't have a goofy smile.

1997
Place: St. Albert, Alberta
My age: 19
This was immediately after coming home from California with Sara. On the second last day of our stay there, we went to Huntington Beach. Despite Dad's earnest warnings (he served his mission is southern California), we didn't use sunblock while lying on the beach. I burned pretty badly. I was in extreme pain as Sara and I made our way through various airports on the way home (Mum, Dad, Mary, and Emily were driving home), and I had to work a full shift at work the day after getting home. When I got home and changed out of my Soda Jerks uniform, I almost fainted when I saw a golf ball-sized blister on each leg. Sara took me to a health clinic, where they slathered me up with lotion and bandaged me up. But my arms and face are nicely tanned.

1998
Place: St. Albert, Alberta
My age: 20
It would have been easy to go with a Missionary Training Center picture here, but I decided to go with this one instead. It's me with my paternal grandmother, Thelma MacKenzie. I chose it because I don't have a lot of pictures of just the two of us together. In fact, I can't think of any others besides this one. Too bad there's that dark spot shadowing her. This was the day of my mission farewell/Thanksgiving dinner. We had an interesting relationship. We loved each other very much, but our conversations were very one-sided since only one of us could hear. She wasn't completely deaf (just the natural loss of hearing that comes with aging), but the pitch of my voice, even when I raised it, was perfectly in the range of sound she had a hard time hearing.

1999
Place: Dulag, Leyte, Philippines
My age: 21
This is one of my favourite mission photos. For one thing, I hadn't been so thin since I was 15, and I haven't been close to that thin since I got back to Canada. For another thing, look at those ugly decorations. This was at the house of a woman we taught and baptized. Her family had an ugly rug with those same dogs who are usually playing poker, and the ugliest fish carving I've ever seen. I needed to get them on film.

MT Vibes

Year: 1996
Place: Raymond, AB
My age: 17-18
As I've mentioned in previous posts, I was in a singing group called the MT Vibes in high school. I joined early in 1996, but the group originally formed, without a name, in the fall of 1995. Jake Heninger was one of the original members of the group. They started off singing at church functions and other organizations around Raymond. My favourite story that I heard about the group before I joined was when they were singing for the seniors at the hospital just before Christmas. A senile woman in the audience kept yelling, "Shut up! You sound terrible! You're ruining our dinner!"
I had joined the Raymond High School show choir in September of '95, and I quickly discovered that I did indeed have a decent singing voice and just hadn't known how to use it properly. I sang bass most of the time. In January of '96, Carol Dahl (the manager, teacher, and driving force behind the MT Vibes) told Jake that she should invite me to join them. I was the 11th member of the 12-man group. Cam Calder was the last to join. The twelve of us were: Jake Heninger, Kevin Calder, and Todd Keeler on top tenor; Jared Hardy, Landon Hardy, and Cam Calder on second tenor; Travis Bisset, Scott Parker, and Jay Dee Hall on baritone; Regan Dahl, Ted Holt, and myself on bass.
We continued singing all over southern alberta. Sacrament meetings, weddings, funerals, and other church events for the most part. My favourite function that we sung at would have to be the Alberta Provincial Cheerleading Competition in Magrath. No, we weren't competitors. We were the intermission. We sang for hundreds of screaming (the good kind of screaming) cheerleaders.
We practiced all the time, and we were ultimately working towards a concert in June. We booked the Raymond Community Centre for two nights, and we sold out both nights. Everyone loved the show, and it was one of the funnest things I've done in my life. Everyone who knew me was shocked. Remember, I was the shy guy at school and at church. I was more open around my friends and family, but no one in my family had ever really heard me sing before. My solo was Elvis Presley's "Teddy Bear". I didn't try to sound like Elvis (I can't do it), so I sang it in my own, natural voice. My family was left in shock. The girl I had a crush on was there, too, and she was my loudest fan. (Also, she was the greatest example of failing to seal the deal in my entire life. I didn't talk about her in my "Failing to Seal the Deal" post, because it would have been a post the size of a short novel, and it would have extended past the '90s, and that's breaking the rules.)
After the concert, Carol used the money we made plus some of her own money to buy some time in a few recording studios, and we eventually made our own CD, which we sold to friends, family, and fans around southern Alberta. It was a lot of fun, and very interesting to be part of recording an album.
The MT Vibes were a major starting point for cracking the shell of shyness that I had built up around myself. I had taken a chance and done something very public and potentially embarassing, and I had been received well.

Later, Carol made formed another similar singing group called Octovox, and one of them (Kyler Rasmussen) was a friend of my roommate's, and eventually became a friend of mine. But that was in 2004, so I shouldn't really be talking about it.

Pictures

Hey, I went back through some of the older posts and added pictures. Check 'em out.

DOOM

Year: 1993-1995
Place: Prince George, BC; St. Albert, AB; High Level, AB
My age: 15-17

I was actually less of a gaming nerd in the '90s than I am now, but I did have my moments in video gaming. I owned a Sega Master System in the early '90s, and Jake had a NES, but when consoles started to be replaced every four or five years, my parents weren't willing to continue buying me consoles. We did, however, always have a PC starting in 1992. I played and enjoyed Wolfenstein 3D and its sequel, Spear of Destiny, but the game that really blew my mind was id Software's DOOM.

Many hours in Prince George and St. Albert were spent at the computer with the lights off and the sound turned up while I crapped my pants as I played DOOM. It may be a very dated and unimpressive game by today's standards, but at the time, it was a cutting-edge game that made the first-person shooter genre of video games what it is today. Wolfenstein may have invented the genre, but DOOM put it on the map. The graphics were amazing compared to any other game at the time, the mood was perfectly eerie, the enemies were legitimately frightening, and the music either got your blood pumping or cranked up the suspense.
I found a website that has all of the music from the game, and I'm actually listening to it as I write this. I can picture the action of the game as I listen to the song from each level. Visit this link to hear the music from the first level of the game.

The first computer I played DOOM on was actually not quite powerful enough to handle it, so the movements on screen were very jerky and a little delayed. It was maddening at first, but the game was too good for me to stop playing, and I gradually learned to compensate for the lag in my computer's processor, and I got to the point that I could finish the game on it's Ultra-violent difficulty level. When we got a better computer, and the movement and controls were fluid and perfect, I was an unstoppable DOOMing machine.
DOOM II came out in either '94 or '95, and I wasted no time mastering that game, too. I spent the summer of '95 in High Level, and my cousin Mark and I would have nightly death match games against each other online. He and I were very equally skilled at the game, and it was a lot of fun to play against him.

There were cheat codes that I learned later which could be used to make the game easier, but I quickly grew bored of them because it took the challenge out of the game. I still remember some of the codes, though. IDDQD was god-mode, making you impervious to damage. IDKFA gave you all weapons, full ammo, and all the keys for the level. IDFA gave you all weapons and full ammo. IDBEHOLD brought up a menu that you could choose from, such as turn clipping off (walking through walls), berserker (super strength when you punch), partial invisibility, and goggles that allowed you to see in the dark.

I bought DOOM 3 a couple of years ago, but it just wasn't the same. I'd rather play Half-Life 2.

My Family in the '90s

As I mentioned in the subtitle of this blog, I turned 12 in 1990. But what of the rest of my family? Here is a rundown of what age everyone turned in 1990:

Mum: 42
Dad: 41
Rob: 18
Jenny: 17
Amy: 15
Sara: 14
Mary: 11
Emily: 4

My parents:
Mum and Dad celebrated their 19th anniversary on March 27, 1990. The '90s were a great time of change for them (hence the many places we lived in during this decade). All of our moves followed Dad's job changes. He started the decade as a customs officer working at the Canada/US border in Del Bonita and Coutts while we were living in Raymond. He also spent three months away from us (visiting every third weekend) in Quebec attending Customs College.
He bounced around for a while in the federal government until he finally ended up with the High Level Tribal Council (now known as the North Peace Tribal Council). Mum and Dad handled having six teenagers during the '90s remarkably well. It's really nothing short of miraculous that we turned out as well as we did and mostly stayed out of trouble, especially since we were constantly being uprooted and forced to make new friends every year or so. They always had our welfare in mind, and they dealt with us fairly and as friends, not just as their children.

We kept them busy. Of their seven children, Emily was the only one who didn't graduate high school in the '90s, and they had two weddings to deal with, too.

I don't have a lot of pictures of my mother from the '90s (she always seemed to be behind the camera), but I did find this one from my high school graduation:
Rob:
I only have one brother, and he is six years older than me with three girls between us. It was hard for us to relate with one another at times, with him being an '80s teenager and me being a '90s teenager, but we had our own unique relationship which I look back on with fondness. In the early '90s, Rob was significantly larger than me (18 compared to 12, remember), and he would use the advantage of his size to play games with me. "The Iron Bolt" seemed to be his favourite. Basically, he would clasp his hand around my wrist and hold on until he got tired of it or until I relented and said the magic word: mercy. I usually ended up saying mercy. Rob has admirable determination. When we lived in Lethbridge, it was one of the rare instances that we shared a room. We had a bunk bed. His bed was, of course, the top bunk. He called it the throne bed, and he would regularly force me to bow down to it. Rob served as a missionary for the LDS Church in Illinois from late 1991 to late 1993. I was 13 when he left and 15 when he got back. Upon his return, I was also as tall as he was and just as big, if not bigger. The days of saying mercy had passed. Not that he didn't still try to get me to say it, but I never again said it.

Here we are demonstrating the inherent problem with having six years between you and your only older brother:
This picture was taken in 1990. That's a blue-suede blazer I'm wearing. In 1990. Sure, when Rob wore this in the early '80s, it was stylish and slick. I wore it in 1990. 1990. See the thin, leather, zip-up tie? Yes, it's definitely 1990. "It's a nice blazer!" my mother always replied to my objections. Yes, Mum. It's a nice blazer in 1983. You made me wear it in 1990. Also, note our stylish footwear.

The Girls:
That's right, five sisters. Jealous? Probably not, but you should be. I'm serious. Do you realize how many cute girls I met because of my sisters? But it was more than just meeting pretty girls. I had a lot of fun with all five of my sisters. As I've mentioned before, I was a very shy teenager, and my sisters were a place for me to get some socializing done and have some plain old fun. Jenny, as my oldest sister, was almost like a second mother to me. She was also a writer, so I would often discuss my writing with her. I could always count on honest, contructive feedback from her. Amy was my compassionate sister. She always made me feel good about myself, and she'd comfort me when certain other sisters were driving me insane. Sara was a protective older sister. She'd watch out for my and my younger sister, and was even known to stand up to bullies who were giving me trouble back in the '80s. And, oddly enough, there was never a negative fallout for me after having my sister come to my rescue. Sara was also one of the sisters who would sometimes drive me insane, but she wasn't the main offender. Mary was the main offender. She and I argued incessantly for years. She knew exactly how to get under my skin and didn't often turn down the opportunity to practice. It didn't last, though. When I returned home to St. Albert in 1996 after living with Aunt Joyce for a year, Mary and I didn't fight nearly as often. We basically just grew out of it. Despite the bickering while growing up, she and I were always close, and it was nice (and still is nice) to enjoy the closeness without the arguing. Then there's Emily. I have a unique relationship with Emily that I don't really have with any of my other sisters. She's eight years younger then me, and the only one of my sibling that I clearly remember being a baby (a literal baby, not the figurative kind of baby). In the early '90s, I was her big brother protector. I once threw a dog down a flight of stairs after it had bitten her (inadvertently; it was going for her hamburger) when she was four. After I finished high school (Emily would have been 10) and moved back home, it was just me, Mary, and Emily at home. Mary was a popular high school girl doing her own thing with her friends, so it was me and Emily hanging out quite a bit. As a result, Emily and I developed a lot of the same interests. We both took up bass guitar, we were both interested in writing, we both liked Star Wars, we both listened to similar music, we were both great friends with our cousin Noah. I never had any of that with my other sisters. Not to that degree, anyway.

Anyway, long story short, I loved (mostly) having five sisters. And I'm sure my wife appreciates it now, because it's thanks to my sisters that she doesn't have to nag me about leaving the toilet seat up. Here's a picture of Dad and me with the five girls in 1992 (Mum is taking the picture, and Rob is in Illinois):
And here's a picture of the girls at Christmas in 1998:
New additions:
There were four new additions to the family during the '90s. The first was my first (of many) brothers-in-law, Anders, who married Jenny in 1995. Then came Cindy, who married Rob in 1998. She was my only sister-in-law until I got married in 2004. The other two additions were my first two nephews, Jonah and Sam, who are Jenny and Anders oldest two boys. Jonah was born in 1996. Here he is pictured with me:
I've been in the exact same pose with my own boys so many times it isn't even funny. Sam came along in 1998, just three weeks before I left on my mission. Here he is, pictured with me again:
That's Amy making the cool face in the background.

"Sweet...um...Everyone Else!"

Year: 1996
Place: Raymond
My age: 18

I moved in with my Aunt Joyce and her kids (Jake, Becca, and Noah) in late August of 1995. About two months later, she married her second husband, Duane Oler. Duane had five kids: Julie, Dan, Neil, Andrew, and Caroline. Neil has already made prominent appearances on the blog, and I'm pretty sure I've mentioned Andrew in at least one. Anyway, Julie was married and living in the States when I met the Olers (not to be confused with the Olers on my mother's side of the family), and the rest of the kids lived with their mother in Stirling. The four Olers would come to stay with us every weekend or so. Dan was a year or two older than Jake and me, Neil was Becca's age, and Andrew was Noah's age. And then there was Caroline. She was a quiet, unassuming 12-year-old girl with whom I never engaged in conversation. I mean, come on, it's not because I was jerk. She was quiet and 12; I was quiet and 18. What were we going to say to each other?

In a short time, we all forged attachments to our own particular Olers. Jake, who was always developing man-crushes on slightly older men, connected with Dan. Noah and I really connected with Neil, and we started a long tradition of going to Burger King--just the three of us--after midnight that still carries on today on the rare occasions that all three of us are in Lethbridge. Noah, Becca, and I also connected with Andrew, one of the most lovable and wholesome people I've ever met. Caroline, being significantly younger than us, didn't really connect until later years. In fact, when she was 18 and I was 24, I temporarily moved in with Joyce again, and we became great friends. But back in '96, I didn't pay much attention to her.

Case in point: One day in the late spring of 1996, I was asked to say a family prayer just before the Olers returned home to Stirling. I've always been bad with names. Sometimes they just slip away from me and I can't grab them. This is how part of my prayer went: "Please bless Dan, Neil, Andrew, and...um...everyone else that they'll return home safely." Her name just completely slipped my mind during the prayer, and there was nothing I could do except for the "everyone else" cop-out. I finished my prayer quickly as my cousins snickered, and then full-out laughed at me after saying "amen." "Caroline!" I declared amid the laughter. Her name returned to me exactly when it was too late to matter.

A couple years later, Noah was talking to Caroline, and my name came up. She had no clue who I was. So we're even.

Letters From Jake

From the time my family moved to Edmonton in 1992 until I moved in with Aunt Joyce in 1995, my cousin Jake and I wrote letters to each other regularly. (One of us more regularly than the other, you little bastard!) I don’t think Jake ever realized this, but the letters I got from him were very important to me, and I cheered up whenever I got one. During my teen years, he was my closest friend no matter where I was living. The following are quotes from some of his letters that cracked me up:

“I just thought what to get Travis for his birthday. A brand new fresh pickle that hasn’t been discoloured yet. He is still using the old one. He still bugs me, but he says things after he has passed me and is 5 feet away at least, or if he is at the top of the stairs and I’m at the bottom. He still won’t fight, I guess I’ll just have to kill him. Well maybe not, I might get charged for murder. In court when they ask me something I can just say ‘no recollection’ and then they will say ‘Either you are very stupid and can’t remember or you are lying. We think you are smart, what do you think?’ ‘No recollection.’ Then they would say ‘My gosh’ and leave and the judge would faint and all the witnesses would be nice and let me go and make the jury keep the secret and say I was abducted by a UFO and we would conspire and rule the world.”

Travis Cooper was a kid in Raymond who Jake and I both couldn't stand. In grade 7, he would always call me "Monster Jaw", as if it were the insult to end all insults. After I moved away, Jake carried the torch for me. He and Travis hated each other, and the running joke was that Travis had a pickle shoved up his butt.

“Am I small gnew named Doralynndayman? I sure hope not, because if I am I’m going to be mad.”

I have no clue what Jake was talking about in that one.

“How is it going in the city? Is it an adventure everyday? It sure is here in Raymond. Why, just last week someone broke a Coke bottle on the sidewalk. Then this guy said a bad word and everybody felt sick inside for the rest of the day. Then there are these guys and they were smoking and I said, ‘That’s not righteous’ and they stopped.”

Sarcasm.

“Nanabush will soon be visiting you. You must go to the southwest corner of the world and scream. He will come, you must SCREAM! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!!! IYE IYE IYE IYE IYE IYE! He will then be summoned and you must tell him of the long journey ahead of him, otherwise all is lost. If you do not do this you cannot be forgiven. This is an old sacred Indian chain letter which you must pass on to Nanabush. If you do not do this the birds will peck out your eyes, the wolves will eat your hands, and your head will be delivered to the Sun God.”

Utter nonsense.

“Gentlemen:

“I am shocked and appalled at what was said in the last issue of Uncle Ruben’s House. Such things should not be in print. Your magazine, or so I thought, was considered to be one of the most informative and intellectually stimulating publications on the newsstand. With deep resentment I have enclosed a Canadian nickel and a serious bomb threat. Be very alarmed, and don’t leave home without it. Thank you for you support in advance.”

“I’ve done it again. I can still remember my mom saying, ‘Jake, never drink from the short end of the straw!’ Why didn’t I listen to her d!m*it. Now I have to pay. How come mothers are always right? It just makes me malade. Of course, then again, mothers are the ones that say don’t sip your orange pop in straight order form, and hey, it works just fine for me!”

This one was mailed with a Canadian nickel and a recipe card with "bomb threat" scrawled on it in crayon.

Cam Calder

Year: 1998
Place: St. Albert, AB
My age: 20

This memory isn't funny. Sorry, but you'll understand when you see what it's about. (Many of you have probably already guessed from the title.)

In high school, I had been a member of a 12-man singing group called the MT Vibes (I will write a memory devoted to them at another time). I had already been friends with most of them, and the whole experience brought us all closer together. Cam Calder was the oldest MT Vibe.

In the fall of 1998, my pre-mission life was winding down. It was late September or early October. I had already received my mission call, and I was preparing to report to the Missionary Training Center on October 21, and later moving on to the Philippines. I was working the 9-5 shift at Soda Jerks, a local '50s-themed fast food restaurant. One morning, I was in my uniform and just about to head out the door to walk to work. The phone rang before I left, and I answered it. Mum was calling me from the college she worked at.

"I just got off the phone with Joyce," was all Mum said before she started crying. Joyce's son, my cousin and fellow MT Vibe Jake, was currently serving a mission, and my first thought was "Jake's dead."

I asked Mum what was wrong, and she managed to say that Cam Calder had died.

I was struck by a queer mixture of emotions: I was relieved that Jake was fine, but I was devastated that Cam was dead. I leaned on the counter that the phone was on and said, "How?"

Cam had just purchased a motorcycle, and he was driving it on the highway near Raymond. A grain truck pulled out in front of him, and he hit it. He died instantly.

I don't remember how the rest of the telephone conversation went. After I hung up the phone, I paced back and forth between the front door of the house and the kitchen. I was filled with this intense grief, and I wanted to cry. My body needed to express this emotion somehow, and crying seemed like the natural thing to do. This was in the middle of an eight-year stretch of not crying, though, and I couldn't cry even though I wanted to. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I often manifested sorrow as anger, so I went to the door that lead from the house to the garage and give it a double-fisted punch. The door was hollow metal, and I left two faint dents on it. And then, since, I couldn't think of anything else to do, I walked to Soda Jerks and worked my shift in a daze.

I went to Raymond for the funeral a few days later. A group of 20 or so friends of Cam got together and sang a couple of songs ("Each Life That Touches Ours For Good" and "We'll Bring The World His Truth") at the funeral. Only three of us were MT Vibes. The rest, including Cam's brother Kevin, were all on missions. It was easily the saddest funeral I've ever attended.

Neil Fingers a Truck Full of Hooligans

Year: 1996
Place: Raymond, AB
My age: 18

It was a beautiful spring. Winter was behind us. My senior year of high school was nearing a close. The MT Vibes, of which I was a member, were pseudo-celebrities in southern Alberta. Teenagers were being idiots.

It was a Friday or Saturday night, and I was hanging out with my cousins and friends. I don't remember who exactly was with me, but I do know who was there for sure: Neil Oler, Becca Heninger, Noah Heninger, Andrew Oler, and Cindy Porkalab (I'm not sure if I'm spelling that right; I'm just going on how it sounds. Her married name is so much easier). There may have been others, and to them, I apologize for forgetting. You know I love you.

So we were out pretty much wandering aimlessly about a block away from Aunt Joyce's house. We were a fairly well-behaved group of kids, so we weren't making any trouble. There was a jacked-up, dumb-looking pick-up truck stopped at an intersection across the street from us with a few boys my age inside. They turned on the fog lamps on top of the truck, and it was shining right at us. Neil thought the driver was a friend of his dad's, so he raised his fist and shook it at them. (Yes, the title of this entry is a little misleading. Neil didn't actually finger the truck.) The occupants of the truck thought that Neil had fingered them, and they started yelling obscenities at us, and before any of us could really react, the truck launched forward straight at us. Instead of standing our ground (there were four guys in our group, and a maximum of three guys in the truck), we ran. There's just something about a powerful engine driving a 1/2 ton truck bearing down on you that makes the flight instinct overpower the fight instinct.

Our retreat emboldened our pursuers, and they gleefully chased us while flinging insults in our direction. (I had flashbacks of the pickle incident from the previous summer.) We ran through a neighbour's back yard and climbed over a six-foot fence, which had boards running horizontally to help us up and over. When we reached the sidewalk in front of the house, the truck appeared and came in our direction again, so we turned and headed back to the fence we had just climbed. I was the first one there and saw that this side of the fence had no horizontal boards to act as a makeshift ladder. I didn't let that stop me. Showing an athleticism that only manifests itself when I am in peril, I planted my hands on top of the fence and vaulted over it like an army recruit in an obstacle course. I made sure everyone else was able to follow me, all the while with the occupant of the house yelling at us to get off of his property before he called the cops. If I remember correctly, Becca said, "Yes, please, call the cops" before I offered a hurried apology and ran for Joyce's house. There was a large shop that Uncle Duane used to keep his motorbikes, and we hid out there. The truck hadn't seen where we went, and so we lost them.

The driver of the truck turned out to be Todd Fraser, who I used to hang out with in grade six. He didn't realize that I was one of the people he chased.

Sub Sandwich Tossing

Year: 1997
Place: St. Albert, Alberta
My age: 19

Despite being the greatest year in the history of rock, 1997 wasn't a happy time for me. For a variety of reasons (they aren't funny, so I won't go into them here), I was depressed, and I usually manifest sadness as anger.

Early 1997 saw me working at the prestigious Mr. Sub sandwich restaurant (Like Subway, only it has been around longer, and it's only in Canada). I was privileged to work the glamorous 6:00pm-2:00am shift (3:00am on Fridays and Saturdays). I could maintain pleasantness, or, at the very least, civility with most customers. There were those special customers, however, who corroded my thin veneer of patience in a matter of seconds. The later at night it got, the more special the customers got. They got drunker, too. Bars closed at 2:00, and we were the only restaurant in St. Albert open until 3:00. Guess where all the hungry drunks came.

One particularly pleasant night, the credit/debit machine wasn't working, which meant people couldn't pay with their ATM cards. In other words, about 50% of people couldn't pay. This alone made my shift awful. So many irritated customers. By the end of the night, I was ready to verbally castrate the first person who gave me an excuse.

About ten minutes before closing, a fine specimen of human being walked in with his buddies. I recognized the guy from my one year at Bellerose Composite High School, but he didn't seem to recognize me. He ordered a foot-long pizza sub, with extra sauce, and loaded with pickles and olives. In other words, he ordered a messy sub.

I forget how we came to be mad at each other, but I remember him goading me and making sure I made his sub just right, and I remember feeling an utter contempt for him that I have never felt towards another person.

As I finished his sandwich, I remembered that the debit machine wasn't working. Before cutting his sub in half and wrapping it, I asked how he was paying. He was paying with his ATM card. Knowing that it wouldn't work, I tried to run the payment through. I didn't want him to accuse me of lying, because, by this point, our mutual hatred for each other had taken physical form and was jumping excitedly on the counter firing two revolvers into the ceiling and yelling, "Yippee-kiya, motherf***kers!"

The payment, predictably, failed to go through, and I told him so. He would have to pay with cash. Since the mid-90s, people my age have very rarely carried cash. Dickface here had no way to pay for his sandwich. I refrained from smiling, but I was chuckling on the inside.

But Dickface was hungry from all that drinking he had done. He suggested that I just give him the sub. I wasn't in the business of giving away free food, so I turned down his suggestion. He and his friends hung around for five more minutes figuring that if they insulted me enough, I'd give them free food. Oddly enough, I tired of this behavior and said, "Look, I'm not giving you free food, so why don't you just get the hell out of here so I can close up and go home?"

Dickface replied with, "How about I wait outside and beat the shit out of you when you leave?"

This threw me into a bit of a rage. I dropped what I had been doing. The following is an exact quote of how I responded as I grabbed his sub in both hands: "You want your damn sub? Here's your damn f***ing sub!" I slammed the sub down--unwrapped--on the counter in front of him. A shower of pizza sauce, pickles, and olives spurted out of the sub and all over Dickface's expensive coat. "Now get the f*** out of my face!" The look on his face was priceless. Almost as priceless as the sauce-soaked pickle he picked off his jacket and threw at me, but missed.

"Well, cut it," one of his friends (obviously the brainy one) said as if I had just politely handed the sub over on a good china plate.

"F*** off," I replied.

"Well, then give us the knife and we'll cut it," Brainy offered helpfully. The knife in question had an eight-inch razor-sharp blade.

"Yeah, I'm giving you assholes a knife," I said. Luckily, Brainy was familiar with sarcasm. Dickface and company left.

They were even worse than the guy from Saskatchewan who told me that Alberta (especially the me part of Alberta) sucks because I wouldn't give him a free Mr. Sub hat.

Music

Year: 1990-1998
Place: Everywhere I ever lived between those years (see sidebar)
My age: 11-20

Looking at the age range alone should tell you that this will be an interesting journey through the world of music.

At the beginning of 1990, I was an 11-year-old grade six student living in the small town of Raymond, Alberta. As a rule (one with very few, if any, exceptions) 11-year-olds have terrible taste in music. I owned maybe half a dozen albums, all of them Weird Al Yankovic cassettes. Having four older siblings, I was exposed to more popular mainstream music (and, in my brother's case, some not-so-mainstream music), but I was, for the most part, a fan of Weird Al and little else.

Music in the very early '90s sucked serious ballz. Seriously, just take a look at the state of music in the period between decent '80s music and the grunge revolution. It made me want to puke back then, and it makes me want to puke even more now. '80s butt-rock (which was never good) was coasting along with no changes, not realizing that it was about to die. AC/DC and Guns 'N Rose were on the top of their gag-inducing games. Roxette had a huge hit with "Joy Ride". Tom Cochrane was singing "Life is a Highway" years before Disney/Pixar made it an international hit with the movie Cars. Alanis Morisette was simply Alanis, and she sang bland teenage synth pop. Seriously, how did we make it through those years without mass suicides? If this era of music had been much longer, I think that's exactly what would have happened.

Thank goodness for Nirvana. Their breakthrough album, Nevermind, was released in 1991, and the single "Smells Like Teen Spirit" breathed life back into the music industry. Being a dumb kid, I didn't really become aware of them until 1992, but once I discovered them, I was hooked. Go back in time to 1992 (I recently bought Back To The Future), go to my house (3519 109 St.), look in my bedroom window (it's the one just to the right of the front step) and you'll see me sitting on the floor reading comic books and listening to Nevermind. Or maybe watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on my crappy portable TV.

Later, Weird Al released the album Off The Deep End featuring the parody "Smells Like Nirvana", and I listened to it more than any other album I had. (Those albums being U2 Rattle and Hum and my Weird Al tapes. I didn't actually own Nevermind. It was my sister's.)

There were two more notable early '90s albums that I owned before I developed my real musical taste later on. The first of these albums was Classic Queen, a compilation of Queen songs. This was during the huge success of the movie Wayne's World, which prominently featured the song "Bohemian Rhapsody", which was, in turn, featured on Classic Queen. The other album, one that I'm not ashamed to still own, is Gordon by the Barenaked Ladies. It is, by far, the best of the Barenaked Ladies' albums. I own two others, but Gordon is the only one I still like.

Grunge was good, but the music that followed in the death of the short-lived, yet important, grunge revolution was the best music ever to have seen the light of day. (That's not just my opinion; it's scientific fact.) Music became truly good in 1994. There were two notable albums. Naveed by Our Lady Peace was the first. I first heard the single, "Naveed", while living in Prince George during 1994. I loved the song, but I never went out and got the album until a few years later. The second album deserves a paragraph all to itself.

My sister Sara gave me a present for Christmas in 1994. It was Weezer's first self-titled album, which has come to be known by their fans as "The Blue Album". (Get over it, Beatles fans!) The album had a profound effect on me that no other album has matched. Some have come close, but none have matched it. The Blue Album completely revolutionized my own personal taste in music. I couldn't stand Queen anymore. The Barenaked Ladies seemed silly. Weird Al was juvenile. Weezer never left my CD player for months. It was the only album I listened to. No other album has ever so completely dominated my life.

After a while, I started listening to more music again. I still listened to The Blue Album on a regular basis, but I listened to other stuff, too. The Offspring's Smash came out while I was still living in St. Albert in 1995. It one of my favourites for completely different reasons than Weezer. This was back when The Offspring was still a band that wrote mostly serious songs, before they started depending on silly songs such as "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)" and "Original Prankster" for their success. A year or two after the death of Kurt Cobain, former Nirvana drummer picked up a guitar and fronted the Foo Fighters. Their first album had some good songs, but we'd see better outings from them later. Green Day released their breakout album Dookie.

Shortly after I graduated high school in 1996, Weezer released their second album, Pinkerton. At first, I was disappointed with it because it wasn't just an extension of The Blue Album. I wasn't the only one who thought this way. In fact, I think it was Rolling Stone magazine that called Pinkerton the most disappointing album of 1996. However, I grew to love Weezer's sophomore album almost as much as The Blue Album.

Then came 1997. Homer Simpson once said that rock achieved perfection in 1974, but he couldn't have been more wrong. Everybody knows that rock achieved perfection in 1997. Foo Fighter's second album, The Colour and the Shape, featuring one of my all-time favourite non-Weezer songs "Everlong"; Transmission by the Tea Party; Ixnay on the Hombre by The Offspring; Our Lady Peace's second album, Clumsy; the not-very-well-known Clodhopper by Glueleg; Sammy Hagar's Marching to Mars (HAHAHAHAHA!!! Just kidding!); OK Computer, Radiohead's best album; The Devil You Know, Econoline Crush's only good album (but, man, was it good!); Urban Hymns by The Verve; Underdogs by the Matthew Good Band (note: I wasn't a Matt Good fan until after the '90s). I could go on, but I don't want to kill anyone with an overdose of awesome.

This posting is getting out of hand, so I'm just going to wrap it up. See the side bar for a list of great '90s albums, which is not, by any means, comprehensive. 1998 was another great year in music, although not as good as 97. A sour note in all of the good music of '98 was the start of The Offspring's sad decline into a parody of their former selves. I left on my mission in late 1998, so I wasn't musically aware of 1999. All I knew at the time was that they really liked The Venga Boys and Lou Vega in the Philippines.

Amy Tries to Blind Me

Year: 1990
Place: Raymond, AB
My age: 12

I'm noticing that a lot of these memories take place in Raymond. Interesting place for a small town.

I was at home with three of my sisters. Maybe four. I don't remember exactly, what, with it being 19 years ago and all. Amy was definitely there (see title of this post), and I'm pretty sure Sara and Jenny were there, and maybe Mary. Again, I'm not sure. Correct me if I'm wrong, girls. For some reason, I remember it as being a school day, yet we weren't at school, so I might be wrong about that, too. Maybe I should stop writing about memories from 1990.

Anyway, we were in the room that was shared by two of the girls (Amy and Sara, I think). Of course, knowing my family, with it's ample supply of sisters, it may have been shared by three of the girls. We were sitting on one of the beds just shooting the breeze. Typical teenage sibling talk. Amy had this small metal rod, about a foot long and 3 millimeters thick, that was curved into an unsharpened hook at one end. I have no idea what it was for and why it was in the girls' room. She was holding it by the straight end and idly bouncing it up and down while we talked. One of the bounces had a little to much oomph to it, and it bounced up into my eye, sliding effortlessly under my eyelid, completely concealing the blessedly dull hook. With a collective gasp, we all froze, except for Amy who let go of the metal rod, which was probably for the best. We all sat, unmoving, as the hook dangled from my eye, wiggling slightly. After a few seconds, it fell out and landed on the bed. All of it was completely painless and didn't damage my eye at all, but man, it sure felt weird, and the girls (and me, apparently) still talk about it today. In fact, in a recent meme on Facebook in which my friends were posting memories they had of me, Amy said this: "I once, accidently, stuck a hook in one of Mike's eyes -- he was surprisingly calm about it."

Of course, I wear glasses now, so maybe there was damage done.

The Adventures of SuperAndy and SuperBruno

Year: 1990
Place: Raymond, AB
My age: 12

I say this took place in Raymond in 1990 when I was 12 years old, but that's really just the starting point of something that is still going on today.

In the spring of 1990, I was a 12-year-old boy nearing the end of grade 6. My teacher, Mr. Maxwell, gave the class an assignment: write a story in which children are heroes. Superman: The Movie was released the year I was born, and I grew up watching it and its various sequels. It bordered on obsession. So, when Mr. Maxwell presented us with this task, I took my childhood friend, David Jones, and myself and gave us Superman-like powers. The story was a labour of love, and Mr. Maxwell loved it. "What suspense! You could have a great future as an author!" was scrawled on the last page next to the perfect 10/10 he gave me as a mark. It was a simple enough story: two boys stumble onto an underground lab and are experimented on by the evil scientist, Dr. Zooge (eh? Is that an awesome evil name, or what?). They receive super-strength, super-speed, super-hearing, x-ray vision, blue laser vision, and the ability to fly. Adventure ensues.

Before I go on, let me go back a little way and delve into the questionable decade of the '80s. One day, I was walking to school with my friends. They wanted to play Transformers and started laying claim to which Transformer they wanted to be. I didn't want to be a lowly robot. I wanted to be human. So I was myself, a full-grown adult in the futuristic world of the year 2000, wearing what I called a "power suit", which is basically highly advanced body armor. Over the years, I developed this idea with my friend Adam until I had an entire world in which Admiral Mike MacKenzie was the leader of Earth's military, Earth, in turn, belonging to the Mars Federation of Planets. (I watched a lot of Star Trek growing up, too). When SuperBruno (that was me) came along, I merged his world with Admiral MacKenzie's world. The logistics are complicated, and I could go on for pages explaining everything, so just accept that, in my fantasy sci-fi world, there were two of me.

By the time I was 15, I had written four SuperAndy and SuperBruno short stories in addition to the original one I wrote in 1990. I decided at that point to write a novel based on the ideas that I was constantly developing in my head. The novel rewrote the original short stories (I had matured and developed my writing style considerably since I had been 12) and incorporated them as chapters in the novel. I finished the novel when I was 16. It was ambitious, spanning from 1990 to, if I remember correctly, 2028. It had the early superhero career of SuperAndy and SuperBruno, the dubious side effect of receiving the powers that split the fictional me into two separate people (one with superpowers, one without), aliens contacting Earth, and a long war between Earth and Saturn. The structure of the novel was shaky, and was really a collection of short stories that had a common thread.

I attempted to write two sequels to the novel, and actually got quite a bit of the second sequel written. But something happened: adulthood. When I was 18, I decided a couple of things. First of all, a fictional novel in which I was a superhero was a little too egotistical for my liking, so I replaced myself with Stormy Logan, and I replaced David Jones with Peter Nesmith. Second, I dropped the Super off of Bruno and Andy, and eventually dropped those names, too. Third, I tweaked their powers so they weren't such obvious Superman rip-offs. I got rid of the laser vision, x-ray vision, and super hearing. I also made them a little weaker and a little slower than Superman. The fourth change was the most drastic. I scrapped the original novel in an effort to clean up the story and make it more realistic. This included completely trashing the second Stormy Logan who grew up to be a military leader in an interplanetary war. Also, Stormy and Peter were 18 when they received their powers instead of 11 and 8 respectively.

SuperAndy and SuperBruno were a huge and mostly private part of the entire decade of the '90s. The fantasy of it enthralled me. Whenever I was alone and not occupied with something such as reading or video games, I was mentally in a world in which I was a superhero. There are so many stories those characters have gone through that will never be put to paper. There are just too many of them. Even today, I'm coming up with new ideas for Stormy. In his current incarnation (consisting of a novel that is complete in my head but not on paper), Stormy works through legal means (he's a special officer for the RCMP) rather than vigilantism, his secret identity proved impossible to maintain, and the experiment went horribly wrong with Peter, physically deforming him, shattering his sanity, and making him Stormy's greatest enemy. Oh, and the evil Dr. Zooge is now the misguided Dr. Trevor Sinclair.

Failing to Seal the Deal

Year: 1994, 1995
Place: Prince George, BC; St. Albert, AB
My age: 16, 17

This is actually two different events that illustrate the same theme, hence the two different years and places. These aren’t the only instances of this happening, but they are two of the best examples.

Puberty, as it usually is, was unkind to me. From ages 12 to 14, I went through a very awkward physical transformation that saw me grow horizontally more than vertically. I had been a skinny, athletic child, and my first few years as a teenager were the opposite of skinny and athletic. It didn’t do much for my confidence, and made my childhood shyness seem mild in comparison. I drew inward, and melted into the background. I went mostly unnoticed in junior high school (instances of being noticed will be featured in future postings) while living in Edmonton in ’92 and ’93.

When my family moved to Prince George in the summer of 1993, things changed. I started coming out of the awkward stage of puberty. At the time, I still thought I was an ugly fatso, but upon review of photographic evidence from the time period in question, I now realize that I was hunky beefcake. I give credit to three things: 1) I spent the summer living fast-food-free with my grandmother in rural Nova Scotia; 2) I was riding a bike everywhere; 3) Record snowfall in Prince George that winter saw me shoveling snow over a pile that was a good two feet taller than me every day.

The change was more than physical. My social life was different, too. There were two wards of the Church in Prince George, and the youth in these wards were very tight-knit. They accepted my sisters and me into their group of friends immediately, and I was forced out of my withdrawal. Somewhat, anyway. I was still known for going in my room, turning on crappy music (this was pre-Weezer), and reading for hours on end. But when I wasn’t reading (or playing Doom), I was hanging out with friends. It was common for us to play basketball, which should probably be listed as a fourth factor of my weight-loss, but I’m too lazy to go back and change it.

Wow, I really need to get to the point. The important facts from the rambling you just finished reading: I was shy, I was good-looking but didn’t realize it, and I had a healthy social life.

I had a huge crush on a girl (note: I’m not going to use the real names of the girls I write about in this post. I doubt they’ll ever read this, but if they do, I don’t want them to be embarrassed). We’ll call her Wilma. Wilma was a chronic flirt, and she had big boobs, so it’s no surprise that I, a shy 15-year-old raging with hormones, developed a crush on her. Nothing ever developed with her, mostly due to the missionary who started dating her, so my eye wandered whenever she wasn’t around, which was often. By “wander” I mean that I had a minor thing for every pretty girl in northern British Columbia. There was one girl, though, who stood out. She stood out so much that I am absolutely positive that I could have made her my first girlfriend if I had only tried. Let’s call her Angela. (By the way, I use a certain logic coming up with these names, but for me to explain it would give away their real names, so I’ll just appreciate my own cleverness on my own. Also, you would have had to read the novel I never finished writing for one of the names.)

Angela was a year younger than me, so she didn’t really show up on my radar right away. She was cute, and I always thought so, but Wilma had most of my attention for those first few months in Prince George. After the whole missionary fiasco, Wilma didn’t come around as much. She wasn’t a member of the Church, and her boyfriend had been one of the missionaries teaching her. (Thumbs up, Elder! The cynical saying is “flirt to convert” not “enter into a romantic relationship to convert”.) Anyway, enough about Wilma. In the spring of ’94, Angela and I actually became friends instead of just two random people in the same group of friends. When our friends got together, we’d gravitate towards each other. There was never any big moment when everyone else would turn to us and say, “Wow, look at those two flirting!” Instead, there were a lot of little things. At a church activity during dinner, we splashed some water on the table and had a low-key water fight that involved us getting our fingertips wet and then flicking the water at each other. At a service project, we sat down in the grass facing each other, each grabbed a short stick, and had a very unenthusiastic sword fight. Little things like that. Most importantly, we made each other laugh, and we were very natural with each other. All I had to do was up the flirting just a little bit and put forth the slightest effort and I could have started dating her. Instead, I inexplicably did the opposite. The quality flirting we had been doing stopped abruptly, and I was the one to blame. One memory that stands out in my mind happened shortly after the sword fight. I kept catching Angela looking at me from across the room with a look on her face that seemed to say, “What gives? Why isn’t he talking to me?” I don’t know, Angela. I don’t know.

I saw Angela again years later when we were both living in Edmonton in 2001 or 2002. She was looking hotter than ever, and we made eye contact at a dance. She smiled at me, and I started over to strike up a conversation, hopefully pick up where we left off six years ago. I got within a few feet of her when my ex-girlfriend intercepted me and started talking to me. I never saw Angela again.

In the summer of ’94, my family moved from Prince George to St. Albert, Alberta. The St. Albert ward had a tight-knit core group of youth not unlike Prince George that accepted me right away. I kept losing weight in St. Albert, too. Since my school was far from home, and I didn’t have a car, I rode my bike every day. I spent roughly an hour on my bike every weekday. I also grew to my full height somewhere around this time—an impressive 5’8”. I was at my best-looking in 1994 and 1995 (see picture on the right). However, I was still pretty shy. Case In point: in the winter of ’95, one of the girls in my group of friends (we’ll call her “Beatrice”) started to go out of her way to be near me. Instead of sitting with her family, she’d sit with me at church. When a group of us were at Tim Horton’s, I stole her cousin’s seat next to her while said cousin went to the washroom. When the cousin came back, I was going to be a gentleman and let her have her seat back, but Beatrice refused to let me leave. And, just like with Angela before, we made each other laugh. The obstacle here was my shyness. There was a second guy involved, another one of my friends. He and Beatrice had a past together, and they were still on good terms and there was the chance of them getting back together. It came to the point—and I realized this as it was happening—that she seemed to be waiting for one of us to make a move. I kept chickening out and chickening out, and on the day that I decided I was going to make a move, Beatrice and, oh, let’s call him Conan, had started dating again a few days previously.

Beatrice and Conan got married a few years later while I was on my mission. The mission where I didn’t date any of the teenage girls that I taught. Also, now I’m married to the best woman in the world, so none of my missed opportunities as a teenager matter.

Shopping Cart Tossing

Year: 1998
Place: Raymond, Alberta
My age: 20

Highway 4 south of Lethbridge was undergoing major construction at the time, and was therefore rarely used by the residents of Raymond, since it was easier to head west on highway 52 and then north on highway 5 to go to Lethbridge instead of going north on highway 845 and then northwest on the ripped-up highway 4. As a result, highway 845 was virtually deserted late at night.

I was actually living in St. Albert at the time getting ready to go on my mission, and I was in Raymond visiting my cousins who lived there. One night, Noah, Neil, and I went to Lethbridge, probably for a late night trip to Burger King. We saw a shopping cart abandoned in a ditch. It had been there for days, and Neil had earlier remarked that if it was still there the next time he drove by, he was going to steal it. Since it was still there, we decided it was time to steal it. We were, however, riding in a car at the time (probably Neil's Hornet, or maybe his Gremlin), and the shopping cart wouldn’t fit. Instead of doing the sensible thing and saying, “Shucks, I guess we won’t steal it” we drove back to Raymond, got the family truck, and drove back into Lethbridge to retrieve the lonely shopping cart. Great. Now what do we do with it? We weren’t homeless, so we didn’t need it to transport all of our earthly possessions. So we must have realized the futility of stealing a useless object and left it in the ditch, right? That would make this a pretty boring memory.

I don’t know which one of us thought this up (when the three of us got together, our collective IQ dropped, even though we never even drank), but we decided it would be cool to get the truck up to a speed of 120 km/h and throw the shopping cart out of the back. It was 2:00 am, and we figured the safest place to do this would be on the practically deserted highway 845. (A-ha! So there was a reason for that first paragraph about the state of southern Alberta highways in the late '90s!)

There must have been a new moon, or close to it, that night, because it was pitch dark in the country. We made sure we couldn’t see even the hint of headlights approaching from either direction, and then Noah and I got in the bed of the truck with our new toy. When Neil was going 120 km/h, he shouted at us that we were good to go. Noah and I pitched the cart out of the back of the truck. I was expecting some sort of lame result. A few small sparks if we were lucky. Instead, what we got was a spectacular fireworks-like display of sparks lighting up the highway as the cart struck asphalt and tumbled to an eventual halt. Noah and I laughed the uproarious laughs that only teenage boys (okay, and 20-year-old man-children) up to no good are capable of. We drove back to retrieve the cart and repeated the stunt at least two more times, each of us taking a turn driving so that we all could be filled with the Word of Wisdom-friendly intoxication of cool-looking, illegal destruction. Who knows how long we would have kept doing this if we hadn’t noticed headlights approaching in the distance, at which point we retrieved the battered and broken shopping cart and went home.

Neil put the cart in the neighbour’s garbage bin, and we saw the delighted neighbourhood children playing with it the next day, effectively making Neil some sort of bizarre, twisted Santa Claus.

Pickle Tossing

Year: 1995
Place: Raymond, Alberta
My age: 17

My cousin Rachel reminded me of this memory recently, and it was such a ridiculous situation that I've decided that it will be the first of my Memories of the '90s.

It was late summer just before my senior year of high school, and I had just moved in with my Aunt Joyce and her three kids, Jake, Becca (who is now Rachel, but since she was Becca at the time, that's how I'll refer to her in this memory), and Noah. It was night, maybe around midnight, and we were bored. Joyce had a large restaurant-sized jar of pickles that had been around for months, and Becca thought they had gone bad. Who knows, maybe they had gone bad. Point is, she was tired of eating them and decided that we should dispose of them creatively.

The creative method of disposal we decided on was to climb onto the roof of Joyce's store on Broadway (Raymond's coincidentally-named main street) and throw the pickles at passersby. Don't worry; we threw them one pickle at a time, not the whole jar at once. We may have been dumb teenagers, but we weren't homicidal. Also, by “we threw them” I mean “Becca threw them.” She was the lightest one of the three of us—Becca, Noah, and myself—so she was the first one on the roof after climbing on my shoulders. Noah and I weren't as spry as she was, and we weren't willing (and possibly not able) to lift each other up. As we looked around for an easier place to climb onto the roof, Becca proceeded with her pickle-bombardment of Broadway. I don't recall how many victims she pickled before deciding to throw a pickle at the windshield of a passing car. The car stopped, and a teenage boy (one of several in the car) got out and examined the object that had defiled his white sedan. “Pickle,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion. He looked up and spotted Becca despite her attempt to hide behind the parapet.

The car started to go around the block. Becca deduced that they were coming around to the alley Noah and I had yet to successfully climb out of.

The car came into the alley. Noah and I were completely oblivious to what had transpired on the roof. But still, I didn't want anyone to find me in a back alley trying to climb onto the roof of a store, so I stood around leisurely facing Noah. Just two dudes hanging out in an alley at midnight. No shenanigans going on here. Nothing gay either, you perverts, so just keep on driving. Geez, we're cousins! Gross!

The car slowed as it passed, the boys inside inspecting us, but it didn't stop and continued on to the end of the alley.

I looked up to the roof as Becca arrived holding out the pickles for me to take. She was hurrying and obviously scared, so I figured that the car had been looking for her and her cohorts. “Oh, crap!” I thought, “those guys are gonna jump us.” Being a non-violent person who had never (and still has never today) been in a fist fight, I joined Becca in her urgent fear as I took the jar of pickles from her.

Handing the jar to Noah, I eloquently (and, in retrospect, hilariously) said, “Noah, takethepicklestakethepicklesTAKETHEPICKLES!!!!” Noah complied, and Becca used my shoulders as her own personal ladder again. She jumped down, took a stumble, got back to her feet, and we started walking away. We didn't get far before we heard a car speeding down the alley towards us.

One of us, most probably me, advised, “Shit! Come on!” I sprinted away, Becca and Noah right behind me, and the car on our tails. I ran through a vacant lot between two businesses and was disappointed to find a fence between us and a not-a-beating. But, ever a survivor, I didn't slow down. The fence had partially collapsed and was leaning towards us. It was maybe three-and-a-half feet high in its drunken state, and I vaulted over it as if I wasn't 20 pounds overweight. Becca and Noah followed me, and, if I remember correctly, Becca fell and scrapped her leg, or something.

I heard the commotion behind me and turned back, but Becca got up on her own and continued running, so I returned to fleeing. At this point, Noah (with, what I can only assume was a silent utterance of “F*** this”) tossed the jar of pickles into a nearby bush.

Our pursuers had to find another way around since their car wasn't equipped with fence-jumping capabilities, and this bought us enough time to dash past the ice arena, the pool, and, under Becca's direction, to her father's house, leaving their brave calls of “You better run, bitch!” behind as they tried to find an alternate route to drive instead of getting out and chasing us on foot, which would have probably resulted in the beating they so anxiously wanted to bestow on us. Instead, we hung out in Larry Heninger's house until it was safe to go home.

Noah retrieved the abandoned pickle jar the next day, and we ate them for another few months.

What, another blog?!

I know, I know. Five months ago I didn't have any blogs, and now I have three. Here's the thing: I was making a list of memories from the 1990s that I was going to blog about on MiKenzie Inc. The list started getting really long, and the memories of my teenagehood threatened to take over the blog. So I figured I'd start a new blog specifically for reminiscing about the greatest decade in the history of time. The first memory will be up later this week. I'm trying to decide between "Pickle Tossing" and "Neil Fingers a Truck Full of Hooligans".