Touch You Last

Alright, here come a couple of microposts throughout the night. I’ll be drinking (and mixing), so this might get sloppy. My reading habits have been for shit over the past year. I used to read like a fiend back when I was still in Georgetown , which I can largely attribute to two hours a day spent on the goddamn GO Train. Over the past few years though, I’d found that movies had taken the place of books in my life, which I kept myself from overanalyzing at first but later chalked up to my being over reading somehow. I’d even semi-convinced myself that I was never that into it in the first place. But lately I’ve been getting back into it, and now that I am where I am, I can see what my problems were. One, I’d been doing all my reading before bed when it turns out I’m really not a night reader (three pages in and I’m out, or if I struggle through more I never remember it.). Two, work has been stupidly busy (this one is more an excuse for the last four months than the pas...

I just finished To Every Thing There is a Season by Alistair MacLeod . It was on sale last Christmas at Costco and sold as if it was a new novella—at least that’s the impression I had. Turns out it’s a repackaged, republished short story that first appeared in As Birds Bring Forth the Sun , his second short story collection put out in 1986. And it’s not even that great a story! It’s well written, but there’s just nothing special about it—nothing that warrants a new special edition published in hard cover and puffed up with ho-hum illustrations. In short, there is a family in Cape Breton waiting for their son to return for a Christmas visit (he works on the lake boats in Ontario ). Son returns, they all go to church, then the family open presents and that’s pretty much it. (Okay, so in the background is the issue of the quickly aging parents, and the second oldest son gets invited to open presents with the adult family members on Christmas Eve, thus rewarding his mat...

I’ve mentioned before that statcounter allows me to spy on how people found my site—either by a bookmark, through a link on someone’s page, or through a google search. Well, recently Statcounter has taught me that I can’t spell. For each person that stops by, the data from statcounter looks something like this: Number of Entries: 1 Returning Visits: 0 Entry Page Time: 26th April 2005 08:11:35 Visit Length: 0 seconds Entry Page: touchyoulast.blogspot.com Exit Page: touchyoulast.blogspot.com Location: New South Wales, Australia Referring URL: www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=Rohinton Minstry interview&meta= What do I learn from this? Location: Hey, I’m popular in Australia. That Naomi Watts seems pretty tech-saavy. She’d like my beard. Returning Visits: Maybe not so popular. Visit Length: Naomi decides she can’t handle this much man. Referring URL: Rohinton Minstry interview? That sort of thing is odd, but not so out of the ordinary; someone once found me by searchin...

I’m in the midst of reading The Dirt: Confession of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band . This is the Mötley Crüe biography, and it’s not for your mom, and it’s not for your grandma, because it’s very likely that Vince Neil has had sex with them both. And he wants to tell you about it. I was never a Crüe fan, but I admired them from afar. Upside-down pentagrams didn’t really fly in the McLean household, so Guns N’ Roses were about as hardcore as we were allowed to get, and even that was only because we’d convinced our parents that Izzy Stradlin was from Harbour Grace. The Dirt isn’t a biography I’d normally think to buy, but lately I’d started to believe that I was the only person who hadn’t read it. Douglas Coupland read it almost as soon as it hit the stores (and describes the book as being “so brutally honest that after a while it becomes art”). A group of writers in L.A. found the book so inspirational that they began a summer of debauchery under the rallying cry “ What woul...

Partly to check another one off the 101 list, and partly because I can’t think of another damn thing to write about, here is my top 50 books list. Let me reiterate that this is not a list of books that I think should be canonized or passed down to generations not yet imagined, it’s just the 50 books that I dig more than anything else I’ve read. I’ll list them in reverse order, for the sake of suspense. And don’t just scroll down to the bottom and blow the surprise: pre-emptive scrolling makes the baby Jesus cry. 50. East of Eden – Enjoyed this more than any other Steinbeck I’ve read. For the record, this was in my library long before Oprah claimed it. 49. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Read the book, watched the movie, and saw the play all in the space of about two weeks. I think I enjoyed the book most, but honestly they’ve all become one gelatinous piece of art to me. Might not deserve to be here, but hey, 50’s a lot of books, people. 48. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – ...

Neither, actually. I thought that might be a witty sequence of titles, but then I couldn’t think of anything firearms-related to write about so that’s the end of that. Instead, here’s a half arsed St. Patrick’s Day entry. If you’re like me, you generally forget about St. Pat’s until about nine at night, and then you’re watching your stories and you’re too lazy to do anything about it. Do I have any Irish in me? Well once, but everyone experiments in college. Actually, we assume that the family came to Newfoundland by way of Ireland but our genealogy gets a little hazy before 1972. I may share the blood of Dutch Albinos for all I know. In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day I’ll share some of my best and worst drinking stories. I might even make a short series of it. It’ll air on CBC. I’ll be played by Paul Gross, while the part of Sarah will be played by a digitally resurrected Bruno Gerussi. Good story – O Snow Day! I took two years off between high school and University. Why? Long story ...

I’m going to go on a bit about Stephen King and the Dark Tower series. I’ll make no attempt to recap what these books are about, so I run a high likelihood of endangering my readership—all two of them (three if I can count Jay .) And Jorge has actually read the series, so it’s just my wife that won’t give a crap. Let me start by saying I was brought up on Stephen King. Okay—not wholly true. I was brought up on fried bologna and the belief that spaghetti in a can is the real spaghetti , but from a book perspective I was raised on King. Misery , IT , The Shining , Different Seasons —these were the first books I read that weren’t school books, the ones that first made me excited to read. And when I first started to write “seriously” my style was a carbon copy of his (which I’m probably still exorcizing ten years later.) When University arrived, I’d grown, matured, become a book snob, and Stephen King got pushed aside for meatier books. I was an English Lit and Creative Writing major, so...