Touch You Last

Sarah has smartly captured most of the details of this trip , so let me just add a couple of notes. I am young, fresh-faced, beautiful. I say this because I was carded three times trying to buy booze on our trip. Carded . THREE TIMES. For those of you who don't know or have forgotten: I'm a few months shy of thirty-four. But apparently, I'm the picture of youth. Oh beard-dye, is there anything you can't do? Speaking of booze, we're sneaking a fair bit of it back with us. It's not like prohibition era smuggling--we're not bring back a truckload of whisky in boxes marked "maple syrup"--but we've got a few extra bottles in tow. We picked up Cruzan , which is this delicious and cheap rum that's nigh impossible to find in a non-flavoured variety. I've also got delicious Imperia , Russian vodka that's become an old Vermont liquor store standby. But what I'm most excited about this is other bottle of vodka we picked up, and I can't...

The Fall season of our All-Sort-of-Sport league launched on Tuesday, and it’s a pretty busy time, what with all the kicking ass and taking names. Sport One was floor hockey, which I went from dreading, to being ambivalent to, to anticipating, and then (after we won our back-to-back games) totally loving. The first team was good, and they owned us in the beginning until we got our act together. The second team was really quite terrible--to the point where every member of our team got a goal, even yours truly. After wiping the floor with team two for the first short while, I think we did a very good job of letting them sneak in a few goals without letting them know we were letting them sneak in a few goals. It was 20 – 10 by the end, so kudos to us. Two observations I come away with from that game: I’m a wuss – At the onset I thought everyone was being hyper-aggressive. I remember thinking, “Geez, guys—dial it down a notch!” As the game went by, the feeling total...

“Barry,” my cousin Mike said, “I think it’s time.” It was clear that my brother didn’t feel the same way, but he only shrugged, which Mike took as agreement. “Dave,” he said, giving the words as much gravity as he could muster, “Go get the dictionary.” I was nine years old, and a tag-along. I’d walked in on my brother telling a story about how—during school that morning—a girl he knew got her period in the middle of French class. And I laughed like the dickens. And then they called me on it. After I’d lugged the dictionary down from the spare room, Mike told me to look up the word period and read out the definition. “The end of a cycle, a series of events, or a single action?” “Keep going,” he said. “The full pause with which a sentence closes?” “Not that.” “An interval of geologic—“ “Gimme that!” He yanked the book towards him, read down the page, and pointed me towards the definition he’d found. Menstruation: the monthly discharge of blood from the uterus of nonpregnant women from pu...

Let me tell you about the phenomenon of Poppy Legs. Poppy 1 McLean used to go for a lot of walks. He wasn’t an epic walker—the guy was seventy-five years old and maybe five feet tall—so he went to the mall, or to our house: trips that amounted to less than half a kilometer in total. This was typically followed by a two hour nap. One afternoon, on the short trip from his house to ours, Poppy found himself walking faster all of a sudden. Just a little quicker at first, so not too alarming, but it wasn’t something he was consciously trying to do. Then he found himself going faster still. Of their own volition, his legs were making him speed up. He started getting scared, because the farther he walked, the faster he was going. Poppy decided he had to stop himself. Maybe he was afraid he would end up sprinting through traffic or he’d eventually trip and sprawl onto his face. So he did the only thing he could: he threw himself down. On a rock. Right n...

I’m bitter right now, and this is the worst kind of mood to blog in. You just come off as one those ranty, pissy, nothing-to-say types; it becomes a high school blog all of the sudden. At the same time, I’m feeling a bit of pressure because I haven’t posted in a long time. So, sorry in advance, but this is what you get. There’s a contest going on right now, which officially starts tomorrow. It’s called Ultimate Blogger , and it’s pretty much a Survivor-style blog competition. Twice a week, the hosts give a challenge, the winner gains immunity, and someone gets voted out by the collected contestants—and after six weeks someone is crowned the Ultimate Blogger (said person also receives a decent pile of swag). Why am I bitter? The fuckers didn’t pick me. I’m coming off as awfully entitled right now—and deservedly so—but it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. The folks at Urban Honking (the producers, if you will) said there were around three hundred applications submitted. Of those, here’s h...

I think I was nine or ten years old at the time. A friend of mine offered to take me to a wrestling match at Maple Leaf Gardens. This wasn’t lame local wrestling, this was the bigs: the WWF. And it was back during what I like to think of as the Golden Age of wrestling—with the Iron Sheik, Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka, Kamala, Big John Studd, and all the rest. Before Frankie and his family came to get me, my parents gave me a quick lecture on manners, and then handed me a ten dollar bill. Then I was off, packed in the car with Frankie, his parents, his uncle, and his cousin. Can’t say I recall much about the drive up, or who was on the card that night, but here are the things that I do remember: -- Instead of urinals in the bathrooms, the Gardens had long, metal troughs. I tried to pee once, standing arm to arm with a very short dude with a very tall afro. I’d never really seen a urine trough before, or for that matter, a black guy (I grew up in Georgetown which, to this day, is 99.9% white),...

Oh, actually, NO I DON’T. With every day that goes by, it seems to get colder and colder and it make me want to hurt someone. I want to kneel on some dude’s chest and give him the beating that Edward Norton gave Jared Leto in Fight Club . Why? Because for some reason, THAT’LL MAKE IT NOT WINTER ANYMORE. We had that fake Spring, and then Superman must have spun around the world backwards or something because now it’s mid-January again. And I seem to be going through the five stages of grief in reverse, I was accepting, I passed through fear and denial, and now I’m in the stage that involves great flaming anger. When my brother, my cousin and I were in grade school, we would spend mornings and lunches at my Nanny’s house, and whenever it was raining or about to rain my grandmother did this thing. She would place a statue of some saint (it’s lost to me who), and this saint was supposed to keep away the rain. At the time, it was sweet and it made us feel all loved and stuff, but it was...

It was October and my last year of University. Four or five of us were hanging out on the front steps of our apartment, probably drinking and probably waiting for our hot neighbours to walk by. For whatever reason, we got on the topic of martial arts. We’d all, to some degree, taken karate, or tai-kwon-do, or judo, or knife fighting, or some frigging thing over the course of our childhood, and so we started sharing stories about the cruelties visited upon us by our respective senseis. I told the story of how, for the week I’d taken karate, I always had to be wary of surprise crotch-kickings. Whenever we did our kata (standing in a line, punching the air, and screaming) our sensei demanded that we keep our thighs rock-solid to prevent an attack from behind (because when you’re walking down a dark alley doing your kata, that’s something you have to worry about.) To keep us wary at all times, he would walk up and down the rows of students and occasionally hoof people without warning....

I’ve advertised this blog to all of two people. A readership of strangers seems better than a readership of friends because then I can make fun of my friends and still have them. For those of you who have wandered here by accident, here’s the back story to my title. First, you should know that Touch You Last is not sex thing, however it might sound. I googled myself to see if this site had been indexed yet (it hasn’t) and was instantly sucked into an irresistible black hole of pornography. If you’re looking for South Florida Dominatrix Mistress Poison or Erotic Buffy Fanfic, I can show you the way. On a side note, googling myself might be the most masturbatory thing I’ve ever done. Second most, actually. Touch You Last is a game that my brother and I have played for at least fifteen years. The rules of play are very simple: be the guy who has touched the other guy last. If you were sitting beside me right now, and I were to poke you in the arm, I would be winning the game of Touch You ...