Monthly Archives: August 2011

The Good Cougar

The other day I pulled out of my DVD collection the  movie “Alfie,” the 2004 version with Jude Law and Susan Sarandon.  This is one of my new classic Christmas-time movies but I had just seen, on natural television, the other Susan Sarandon cougar movie, “White Palace” with a young, fresh James Spader as her cub.  I know a lot of women take offense to the term “cougar” but I do not.  A cougar, by my specific definition is a Lady of a Certain Age who seeks the company of a man who she could have given birth to even if  she was in Grade 7.  The basic math is her age minus his age should be equal to or greater than the age of her first visit from Aunt Flo.  Both these movies are kind of tragic but I am inspired by my elder cougar mentors.  They blaze through the mountains, with their high heels and Chanel lipstick, and I follow along, eagerly, in my Birkenstocks, smacking my lips with Cherry Chapstick (STILL!).

Without a doubt, Susan Sarandon is the reigning Cougar Queen of Hollywood.   She is a predator though, and while I admire her, I don’t emulate her.  She is a cougar by design but I am a cougar by default.  I would like to date in my age range, but available men in my demographic don’t want to play in my sand box.  Don’t feel sorry for me because I don’t really care.  If a man is single in his forties, he is usually some other woman’s spent piece and he comes with not just baggage but a garage load of odds and sods resembling broken down farm equipment.  The stuff in his “baggage” is moth-eaten, is mismatched and has skid marks.  This is proverbial talk of course.  Like I care about a skid mark.  With the right man, I would find a skid mark down right charming, a little accent of humanity in an otherwise overbleached, Lysoled world.  People are always trying to cover up their smells.  Anyway, those lost dudes end up cleaning themselves real fine and they buy a fancy car and “move on” seeking the company of a younger ho or being a part of the modern and rapidly more ubiquitous coupling:  White guy, Asian gal. This is not something that needs to be fought.  It’s like math sequencing that you learned in elementary school:  40, 20, 50, 25, 60, 30, 70,35, 80…..can you guess the next number?  It’s 40!  Which means, by the force of nature,  I need to date an octagarian!  Or find a niche market and go with it.  Do you know what turns my head?  A Sikh man in some kind of uniform.  My neighbourhood UPS man is a vision of smoldering brown hotness from turban to toe.  And the cop directing traffic this morning on Woodbine had an OPP turban on that matched his uniform nearly made me crash my car.  That stupid movie, The English Patient, started me on this.  It’s all the mystery of the forbidden fruit of conflicting cultures.  But in realty, they have the same skid marks as your balding husband in his Jockeys underneath his Dockers.  And again, just like my dolty douchebag demographic, I wave at them, but they never wave back.

So I have learned a lady has to go where the bone is.  There is no point in fighting City Hall.  Go with the flow.  As it turns out, the only men that ever paid me any mind in the last 6 years, I could have definitely given birth to and had their little brothers, too.  It borders on creepy, for sure.  Like that dude on a skateboard I met on the street a couple of months ago who liked my Velvet Underground tshirt, he turned out to be in high school.  Don’t judge me, I didn’t start it.   6 years ago, when I separated from my same-age ex-husband and moved into this house, I needed a handyman to assemble some Ikea furniture.  Of course I could have done it myself, but there are two types of people:  those who read instructions and those who won’t.  I am the latter.  So I went outside and I flagged the first person I saw walking on the street.  Serendipity.  He was a university student, age 19, and because it was during a July heatwave, he wasn’t wearing a shirt and he all ripped and ready.  He accepted my offer of fifty bucks to assemble 2 dressers for my bedroom.  I know you’re probably thinking I am making this up and have watched one too many Vivid feature films on Friday night Showcase.  But no, it wasn’t intended like that, he assembled the drawers, I gave him money and a beer, and he gave me his number in case I needed him again, for anything, any time.  I put him in my phone as “Handy Luke” so I would remember what he did.  “Handy” being the operative word.  That summer he came by my house a few times, on his own, and always without a shirt.  We sat on my porch and had beers and who would tell me about his girlfriend, who was also 19.  She was really nice and pretty but she wouldn’t do things that he wanted.  According to him, she was worried about how she looked, so she kept her bra on and wrapped up in a sheet.  The paradox of youth, when you have it, you hide it and then you wish you had it back when you are old but by then it’s too late.  Lucky for me, I was never like that.  I will go naked any where, any time.  It’s my claim to fame.

After the summer of  Handy Luke, he went back to school, out of town, and soon out of mind.  Strangely enough, I thought about him last week when I caught of whiff of someone’s soap in a crowded elevator.  He had a definite odour and when I smelled it from a random stranger, I got a wave nostalgia.  Where is he now?  Has he shagged his way to proper manhood?  He’d be 25 now.  He was really handsome.  Sigh.  Cougar purr.  And then yesterday, when I was waiting in line at the butcher, my phone made that nerve jangling glass-ping sound, alerting me to a text message.  Now you’d think I would be a texting-type person but I am not.  That sound fills me with dread.  I’d sooner communicate by Morse code than a text message, it’s just so passsive aggresive.  Anyway, much to my complete surprise, it was a message from Handy Luke.  Isn’t that weird how that always seems to happen?  You think of someone randomly and then they show up out of the blue.  Anyway, as I’m waiting for my chicken to be chopped up in a million pieces, this is how the exchange went:

HANDY LUKE:  How are you?

ME:  I’m good!  This is so weird, I was just thinking of you the other day, how are you?

HANDY LUKE:  I forget what your boobs look like. 

(and then seconds later):  I hope you’re not mad.  lol.

ME:  As if.  They’re still hanging in there.

HANDY LUKE:  Can you shoot me a pic?

And so I hightailed out of the shop with my bag of dismembered chicken parts, a spicy salami, and a new lease on life.  When I got home, I went to my bedroom and and whipped the bra off and assumed position on the bed.  Now I am no stranger to this sort of photography and pretty much by trial and error, I know the right angles and propping to make the boobs seem appetizing.  I snapped a shot from my phone then checked the image.  Oh dear.  The flash had gone off so my rack looked like an all-terrain surreal landscape.  The left boob slipped mostly out of frame except for the squiggly blue vein on the top, it looked like a raging river plunging into a valley of patchy dirt.  THIS IS WHY WE MUST USE SPF99 ON OUR DECOLLETE!  On the base of the second mountain, aka. the right boob, is a giant spider bite that looks like a volcano ready to erupt.  Further on up, another messy waterway of veins and to the top, a jaggedy pink rock that looks could fall over any minute.  That is the nipple with the scar, the one that got bit by a certain 3 year old who shall remain nameless but wanted to try again because her baby brother seemed to like it so much.  I deleted this photo, so don’t you be asking me for it.  Instead I texted him back:

ME:  Where are you now?

HANDY LUKE:  I’m in the hospital

ME:  What happened???

HANDY LUKE:  My girlfriend just got a boob job!  I’m in the waiting room while they take the bandages off. I wanted to see what real ones looked like 😉

ME:  Just close your eyes and think of two Dairy Queen soft serve cones, melting in the sun. 

HANDY LUKE:  LOL!  I’m glad you’re still a funny lady. 

And there you go.  A cougar tale.  And another happy cub with a fond memory.  I just may sit on the porch and wait for another one to come by.  Yawn.

I Got Time, You Have My Number

I had an epiphany this week.  But first I had a dream, not the Martin Luther King Jr-type but the kind where you’re actually asleep and your eyeballs are rolling around all fast and spazzy while you lay there limp, face smooshed into the pillow, drooling.  So much goes on in this state that is more important than the daily grind that you’re in when you’re awake.  Your dreams are your connection with your true self because let’s face it, the majority of your waking hours are spent doing mundane things while you try and keep fear and paranoia at bay.  It’s a balancing act that requires either a tough skin or self-medication of some sort.  We run on auto-pilot, like robots,  we forget to actual feel, and our actions become misdirected into things like road-rage and addictions.  It’s a defense mechanism because modern living is so fucking scary.  Time flies and dreams fade.  If “Being Alive” was a Facebook fanpage, the only people to “like” it would be the ones off their meds that day.  Those are the people that LOL instead of punctuate.  I “LOL-ed” on a text message last week, and afterward I slept for 14 hours.  It’s a good thing.

So anyway, the other morning, just before I woke up (those are the most vivid dreams and BEAR WITH ME WHILE I RECOUNT THIS), I dreamt I was about to cross the Bloor Viaduct in my car but first I needed money for gas.  I found a TDCanadaTrust conveniently located in a ditch, where I parked.  I put my card in the machine and looked for the numbers to press but they weren’t there.  I got so frustrated that I pulled my card out and started slamming the buttons on the machine.  WHY ARE THERE NO NUMBERS? I hollered, shoving my card in and out of the slot.  In and out.  Frustrated and furious.  Guess what happened in real life?  I woke up in the middle of a massive orgasm.  I think probably it was the biggest of O of my life and my pj’s were in tact and both hands above the waistline.  How did that happen?  What a mind-blowing jumpstart to the day.  I am the man!  Me stick something in hole!  It fits and feels good!  I do it again!  I am preparing to conquer my fears about money!  The Bloor Viaduct represents transition, not death anymore.  People, in the most heightened sense of depair, used to jump off this bridge.  But since they built the safety structure, I think they just whoosh over it, not so much thinking about offing themselves but maybe what they are going to have for lunch.  Which should really be the highlight of everyone’s day, everyday.  I know it is mine.

Before that dream, I had the epiphany.  And I had the epiphany because I saw  “The Help.”  Wait no, first I read the first 127 pages of “The Help,” then I saw the movie.  So when I read and saw the movie, the line that that got me was: “Write about what bothers you but doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.”  I thought, Fuck Yeah.  I’m somewhat slow with reflexes so most things are left for me to marinate helplessly in REM sleep, but what gets my goat is what I will dub as “Urban Zombie Wildlife” (UZW, for short, sorry we’ll think of something better as we go on).  It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and people are so full of shit pie (if you read the book or saw the movie, you will know what I mean), that they are so unaware of their own intuition that they lack compassion.  I had a conversation with an anonymous UZW the other day as I am promoting my social media blabbermouth instincts into a career opportunity.  Here is how it went:

Me:  I’d like to talk to your website.  I have some great ideas that I think can help with your current blog and how to maximize it using Twitter and Facebook accounts to your advantage.

UZW:  We are looking into social media right now.  If we need your services, we will call you.

Me:  Well, I really want to just talk to you about how your blog can help promote your business and be an advertising tool as well as something people would want to read on its own.  For fun.  People actually read them, especially when they are short. 

UZW:  I don’t really want to waste your time right now, we’ll contact you if we need your services.

Me:  WASTE MY TIME?  Are you serious?  Do you want to know about my time?  I have seen every episode of all 3 seasons of Gilligan’s Island every day after school for 6 years.  Do the math there.  That’s just one show, let’s not talk about the others, and all the other time spent in traffic and waiting in doctor’s offices.  I flushed time down the toilet a long time ago.  Me and Time spend long hours in the sewer system, ruminating and masturbating, we are an awesome duo.  I got time, and you have one shitty, bloated, mess of a blog.  I will keep in touch.  Hollah!

Tomorrow is another day!   Scarlett O’Hara tweeted that one out first.  Retweet! LOL.

Desperate But Not Serious

I spent this morning with my soon-to-be official ex-husband and our lovely lawyers going over our divorce agreement with a fine tooth comb, some lint brushes, and finally, a Shop-Vac.  We used his lawyer’s office as our pow wow as it is in an elegant old building in the Annex.  Also she serves cookies and fruit, and coffee if you need it.  It all started out jovial and polite, with some LOLs here and there.  I didn’t really know what to expect before I got there but I wasn’t as nervous as when we started crafting this proverbial quilt a year ago.  Divorces take time and I have had time to think, re-think, and re-master the soundtrack in my head.  It was a long year of some back and forths until we decided it was best just to go over it all together and get ‘er done.  It’s done.  I had only one little mini breakdown which was diffused by my earring falling into my bra. I’m kind of happy I boo hoo’d instead of ranted because I had a whole speech that I practised in my car on the way to the meeting, using the Romanov family as a metaphor.  There’s no point in being an angry bitch.  Did you know that if you make a sourpuss face, it will stay that way?  True story:  I just found out that this wretched, flat-assed “see-you-next-Tuesday”  who I used to play tennis with had a stroke!  And not only is her face in a permanent grimace, it is lopsided and she has to eat her salad from a blender with a straw!  Remind me to send Karma Claus a bottle of hooch for Christmas this year!

Anyway, when I left, I felt both heavy and light, a combination of relief and embarrassment (almost everything embarrasses me, by the way, including this blog).  All the wisdom I’ve gained is empowering but also encumbering.  Now what?  What will I do with all these life lessons?  Am I able to Be A Better Person in another relationship?  Do I even dare try or am I too scared?  Am I just one of those people who should just be single?  I do love animals.  Should I get bangs or just keep growing my hair out?  It’s getting pretty long and I can fit most of the front in my mouth so maybe that is a cue that I should get a haircut or stop trying to eat it.  I am starving!  Should I keep going down Bloor Street, the traffic is INSANE, or should I go down Church and cut across Isabella?  Or is it one way?   It’s 2:00, way past lunch, and all I have eaten was a cookie and a grape.  Ok,, 8 cookies and 4 bunches of grapes that I painstakingly peeled and pretended were my own eyeballs and rolled them around my mouth while we went over a 30 page document, line by line,  LOL by LOL.   Fruit is not a food, it’s a substitute.  Ask Freud.  I also had a banana this morning, in the car, driving up Coxwell in rush hour.  I”m not sure I even bothered to peel it.

Sometimes in times of stress, my stomach gets all knotted up in a nervous knot.  Nothing wants to go in but everything wants to come out, hence my verbal diarrhea blogging impulse.   I think it was a good sign that I wanted meat.  And a cocktail.  Duh.  No fetal positions for me, when I get home.  I picked up a purse sized vodka bottle and a ham and cheese on an onion bun from my favourite band of merry men, The Friendly Butcher.  They do make the best sandwiches, the kind where you’re not having to pick out strange bits of alfalfa and burnt eggplant.  Sometimes that’s all you need.  And a cocktail, and a really song.   With that,  I leave you with this twist on the classic Thelma Houston”s “Don’t Leave Me This Way”  by Black Grass:

 

The Remainder Man

Last night I slept on my daughter’s windowsill on the third floor of our house which looks on to the street.  I had houseguest from the U.K. and I gave them my bedroom because I figured I could sleep with Evangeline up in her room.  We had spent the evening on the back deck drinking beers and reminiscing over our teenage years.  They are one of those couples that I would aspire to be if I had the coupling gene.  They also told me their secret to a successful marriage but I’m not going to tell you what is because my M.O. is to make everyone single again, like in our twenties, so I can level the playing field.  Suffice to say, as a duo , they are actually fun to be around and you never think when is he/she going to dump his/her ass?  Anyway when I went up to my daughter’s room, drunk-ish, there was no way she would have me in her bed.  I was wearing my bathrobe and I left my pyjamas somewhere downstairs.  She made me sleep on the window seat behind the curtains so she couldn’t see me and my snoring would be muffled.  When I woke up at sunrise, my robe had swung upon and my bare buttocks were pressed against the window.  Delicatessen hams for sale!  She didn’t even give me a blanket!

In my hangover-ish state this morning I had pangs of anxiety which is really my Spidey senses on high alert.  Whilst I made us all wild boar bacon in the George Foreman grill, scrambled eggs from the free-range  chicken farm, my guests and I gossiped about a gay couple that we know.  He said: “I can’t even tell them apart, they are morphing into each other!”  I think they have always looked alike, two slightly different versions of Cary Grant, which is why they coupled up, as some kind of extension of their Narcissism.  I read about this coupling strategy in Marie Claire, opposites might attract but they don`t stay together.  My ex-husband`s more simplified theory is that you should marry someone with the same colour hair as your own.  Mine is chestnut-brown and his blond is the colour of wet concrete which was by his estimation, the basis of our demise.  He is happy as a clamdigger with his fiancée who`s blondeness is maintained by a professional.  There`s a punchline there somewhere that you can come up with yourself because I am still slightly hung over.

When my guests were packing up to leave around noon, we sat on my front porch to gather our wits, when a man on a motorcycle pulled up in my driveway.  And from what I could see, he was cute!  And then he took off his helmet and it was Bob!  Who is Bob?  You might wonder.  Bob is my soul mate.  No, I am not some delusional single gal, projecting fantasies on to some poor sap and why, if he is my soul mate, do I sleep alone with my ass in the window?  Because Bob is my Remainder Man.  I know it’s not quite as panty-creaming as The Notebook but the concept of a Remainder Man is actually quite romantic.  Let me explain.  But hold on, I need to get a beer first.

I met Bob 11 years ago, when my kids were little but not hanging off my teat.  I was hot stuff, in my prime.  It was a hormonal thing beyond my control.  My previously dormant mojo had taken its nursing bra off and was acting like a 16-year-old boy on Chatroullette.  We went to the same gym and he would take care of his girlfriend’s two little kids so we be became acquainted in the daycare.  The very first time I saw him, I felt like I had known him for a hundred years.  And because he is the most gregarious man on the planet and I, the horniest  lady, we hit it off immediately.  We would have beers together at the gym restaurant.  His girlfriend eventually dumped him for a ginger man!  At the time, that was unheard of.  Gingers, in the pre-Prince Harry era, were perceived kind of wimpy and Bob is the opposite.   He is burly, muscle-y, walks with a jaunty gate, and when he smiles he has dimples and his eyebrows move back.   In case you were wondering, his hair is the same colour as mine, chestnut-brown, but he buzz cuts it and has the best widow’s peak ever.   His hands are good too (clean fingernails) and he can fix stuff.  She was stupid to dump him, I remember thinking back then, and she actually married that ginger dude and moved to country.  And Bob became my Remainder Man. 

The most important thing about the R-Man is that it is kept strictly platonic.  His role in your life and your role in his is to be there when you are both too tired or disgusting to bother to get in the game.  You must have a certain amount of sexual tension with your Remainder Man but do not act upon it, otherwise it will complicate everything!  You need to be kind of proud your R-Man because sometimes you need to prance him around the village like a show pony so that people will see you together and wonder if you are an item.  The humiliating image of you sleeping on a window sill with your bare ass pressed against the glass will be erased when they see you riding on the back of a motorcycle with your R-Man.  Sometimes the reason the R-Man is not your actual boyfriend is because his flaws are deal breakers. Bob likes country music (shudder).  In theory, when the timing is right,  those things won’t matter.  And by the way, when we get old, pretty much everyone ends up with white hair.  The nursing home becomes the most level playing field of them all!

When Bob got another girlfriend two and a half years ago, he kind of disappeared out of my life.  She is an introvert and disapproves of his party-animal lifestyle.  As it turned out, Bob bought a motorcycle last week.  And he and his girlfriend broke up last night.  She doesn’t get his nature and is tired of his camel-toe staring ways.  Her loss, my gain.  For now, at least, my Remainder Man is back but there is no way I`m going for a ride on that motorcycle!  Too scary!  And with that, I leave you with our song:

See Me, Feel Me, Beer Me

This girl has it going on.  Kate and Pippa could take a style lesson from her.  Did I not say that the fascinator would be big this summer?  I made one out of an old bike pump but it’s not nearly as chic as this Steam Whistle one.  I ran into her last night at The Beer Festival at the CNE, which goes on August 5, 6, and 7th, click here for the details.  If you can’t make it this weekend, then mark it on your calendar for next year because this was probably the funnest night I have had since I have been old enough to drink beer.  Which is younger than some of you because I grew up in Quebec where the legal drinking age is a state of mind that doesn’t require a birth certificate, just a pair of tight jeans and an attitude.  And between you and me, I have always loved beer, even as a little kid I would beg for a sip from my dad’s glass.  My mother thought (and still does)  that it’s trashy to drink beer straight from the bottle or can and I can get behind that because it’s easier to keep inventory what you left.  And  have you ever been to a party and picked what you thought was your beer bottle when in fact, it was the communal ashtray?  Gross!!!

No chance of that at the Beer Festival.  Upon admittance you are given a clear plastic 8 ounce cup that is yours for the night and if you lose it, you have to buy another one for 20 bucks or share.  I am sure people are more likely to lose their cell phones than their plastic cups.  Lorraine and I got to the grounds around 6, I was like a kid on Christmas Day waiting to open presents and Lorraine was dying to unwind after a stressful work.  We had a special passes thanks to her ex-husband Lido and got in lickity split but the shock and the horror set in when we saw the line up for beer tokens.  Every 4 ounces of beer was worth a dollar token.  I had enough time to wait in line to figure out 40 dollars would be worth around 5 pints in a standard Toronto pub.  Or so I thought.  I don’t even know how many ounces in a pint and am unsure if they are on the same measuring system, is one imperial and the other metric?  Are their enough toilets in this place for all this beer to go at some point?  As I inched my way toward the front of the line, I smiled smugly to myself knowing that my Tena pad would save the day in case the answer to the last question was no.

Once we got our tokens, I have to say, the rest was a blur.  A super fun blur, I might add.  It was like a giant frat party.  Everyone was young and really drunk.  There were bands, interesting beers to choose from (my favourite was called “Dead Elephant”), and really great food including Edo’s 7 dollar Kobe hotdog that I had at The Ex last year and raved about, Oyster Boys shucked by girl shuckers, AND the beacon, the star of my summer, the object of my affections:  The Caplansky Truck.  I don’t really know how many ounces of beers we drank, I do know that I have a bunch of leftover tokens so my math is not so good.  And then I realized when do I actually drink 5 pints of beer?  Never!  Or hardly ever! Lol!  More ridiculous math and geometry:  A 26-year-old guy asked for my phone number and I gave it to him in the correct order because why not? Cougars rule!  I think the perfect weather and the crescent-shaped moon put everyone in a great mood.   A few more fun things happened but I can`t say because my mother reads this but at least I still have my plastic cup.  All I have to say is there is something about copious amounts of beer that  gives you license to lose your dignity and not feel bad about it the next day.  It`s the Canadian way!

 

 

Murdoch Mysteries: Bachelor Sharks That I Would Hoard

I know my way around a television set.  I know that you put it on a table or a dresser or hang it up in your bathroom, and then you plug it in.   I am aware that cable comes from heavens above, and that through a special tube when inserted in the back of the tv itself binds you to a contractual agreement with Satan and his minions who shall remain nameless (but rhymes with “Shmogers`).   I hate the way they sell their juice, the life blood, and they know they have you by the short and curlies when you are too old to understand that how to put your laptop on top of your tv and magically stream in a world of entertainment far beyond your imagination.  Young people seem to know how to do this and they are so entertained by the mind-numbing stream of reality shows including Shark Week, Bachelors, Snake Charmers, Tree Men, Hoarders, Shut-Ins, Makeovers, and Real Estate Transactions (don’t get me started on this one).    I am slightly bitter that I pay for cable especially considering the fact that I watch the same tv over and over and over again. 

I put in DVD’s of my 2 favourite shows and I watch them in order and in a rotation like a round of antibiotics.

“What’s up, Peterson?”  Neighbour might ask, nonchalantly, on the front lawn of our homes.

“Oh, not much, just kind of wondering about that notice the city sent out that we have to redirect the downspouts from the eavethroughs so that our roof water doesn’t end up in the sewer?”  Real life details like this totally stress me out and make me want to run inside and TURN ON THE TELLY and watch Dick Van Dyke!  And eat crackers while I watch my mother iron tea towels.

So yeah, now I am old and tv is my teat. And I have two favourite tv shows that I over and over again in rotation: “Gilmore Girls”and “Sex and the City.” I get it, Freud.  Don`t judge me.

But I have discovered a third nipple from the TV Tit and it`s Murdoch Mysteries.  It is an awesome show and established so I can get the DVD`s and include them in my round.  It`s kind of like CSI: Turn-of-the-Last -Century Toronto.  There`s murder, mystery, intrigue, sexual tension galore.  The men all have crazy handlebar moustaches and toast-wedge size sideburns which probably made them the douchebags of their tyme.  However, in order to give us a modern-day panty-creamer, Murdoch himself is clean- shaven and impossibly handsome.  He has palpable chemistry with the woman doctor from the morgue which is so fantastic because it is CHASTE.  And let`s not kid ourselves, the sex in your head is always better than the sex in your bed, but the sex under a bunch of petticoats is probably mind-blowing.  Just saying.  Take that, Shark Week.  Sigh.