Some days I don’t want to do anything. I wake up and wish I hadn’t. I hide under my covers and make a small air hole to breathe out of. I am now in stasis.

In this state I cannot go on indefinitely. There is always something that inevitably requires attention and it is more often than not one of two internal organs.

Firstly, my bladder. I can only go so long before I have to pee. I can try and repress it but my bladder will always win. Every goddamn time. Resistance is futile.

Secondly, my stomach.

I get hungry and there is not yet room service to bring me meals to my bed. I wish there was someone that could come into my room and leave a tray with a grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of hot tomato and gin soup outside my bed and then go away perhaps taking my laundry with them for washing, drying and folding. Unfortunately, I don’t yet have a butler, valet, boyfriend, housekeeper, aide or otherwise that does such things for me. Nor do I yet have the privilege of picking up the phone and pressing 0 for any of the aforementioned services.

One and/or both of these bodily needs require me to break out of my goose down cocoon and venture out into the world. The world can be a harsh scary place and my feet get cold easily.

Once I’m out of bed after breakfast I start to think of all the things that I need to do: laundry, gym, clean up breakfast mess (still no housekeeping), emails, phone calls, errands, and all the other day to day things that make being an adult so much fun.

I don’t want to do any of it, I just want to go back to bed. I don’t want to do anything, I want to do nothing. I want to hide in my bed under my covers and pretend that an army of people are going to take care of everything and I can just hide in my bed and eat gummy bears and watch David Attenborough documentaries about insects and the ocean and plants and experience the whole wide world and all of its wonders from the safety and warmth of my bed.

Sometimes I like bite off their little gummy bear heads, and then bite their little squishy fruity bodies in half and after that I smoosh their little sticky gummy bear parts together to form a mutant gummy bear army. Then I eat them all.

I would happily do this if it were not for a part of me that starts to nag. It starts out quietly. It says,

“get up and go to the gym, you need to go”

Then it gets a little louder,

“get up and go to the gym or you won’t get muscles and then nobody will like you”.

And then it’s so loud that I can not ignore it,

“get up you lazy fat peace of shit you are failing at life and you just ate an entire bag of gummy bears. Look you even spilt some in your bed and now you’re in bed with food and you are pretty much one grilled cheese sandwich away from becoming the grotesquely and morbidly obese bed-ridden mother from the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.”

I think to myself get up or you’ll fail at life and become nothing. I get up and go to the gym because even if I’m going to be a nothing I may as well look good doing it. I tell myself “don’t be a big nothing, be a fit something.”

-the end-

I’m 6 or maybe 7 years old and I’ve lost my tooth. My tooth was in my mouth living in harmony with my other teeth and now it is a bloody little white pebble that lives in a cup (for safe keeping, of course). My mother tells me that if I put the tooth under my pillow that the tooth fairy will stealthily sneak in at night and leave me money in exchange for my tooth. I am curious why anyone would want my used tooth, and suspect that the tooth fairy needs it as an ingredient in one of her potions or brews, like the ones I make in the yard with mud and sticks and water and other stuff that I find.

My mother says that the tooth fairy is kind; she is a magic fairy that collects children’s teeth and this frightens me. My mother insists that the tooth must go under my pillow or the tooth fairy won’t come. I ask my dad how much the tooth fairy gives and proudly show him my tooth in a cup. My father inspects the tooth as if it were a precious gem or rare stone. He tells me that my tooth is worth at least two dollars. My eyes grow round with the now real possibility of sugar.

Two dollars is two chocolate bars. or two Coca-Colas or one chocolate bar and one Coca-Cola or 40 sugar berries. I am now very excited and decide that I will happily part with my tooth for two dollars!  I determine that I can’t possibly sleep with a cup under my pillow and must construct a special envelope at once of paper, tape, glue and lots of sparkles. Nighttime seems forever away but eventually it comes and I place the tooth envelope under my pillow and I try to stay awake along as I can. I should mention that I share the bedroom with my little brother and that we live in the woods on a small island.  I awake to a rustling sound on the porch beside my room. It sounds like the cats or raccoons but I start to think that it might be a monster

and as I think that the doorknob to the porch starts to turn very slowly. I freeze. I don’t dare make a sound. My brother is still sleeping.
And then the door opens and cold air rushes into the room and a large black being enters the room. I start to scream, I scream my little fucking head off and then the thing turns the light on. It is all black and has layers and layers of scary looking clothing and instead of hair it has plastic shiny ribbon and it comes over to me and says shhhhhhh shhhhhh shhhhhhha and then I really lose my mind and my brother is screaming and I am screaming and everything is frightening and happening fast. The being takes off its scary plastic hair and I see that it is my mother. She has taken off most of her costume and trying her best to calm me down. Now all the lights are on and the whole family is in the room, my dad is calming my brother down and I have the cry thing and can’t stop crying. Eventually I do stop and my mother explains that there is really no such thing as the tooth fairy and it was her all along and that I will still get money for my tooth and everything is going to be OK.

And that’s how I learned that the tooth fairy was not real.

-the end-

Every summer on Canada Day at the North End Community Hall there is a fair and the whole island comes out and takes part in the festivities. There are many events to choose from: sack races, pie eating, a water balloon toss. However, one Canada Day was a very special one. That year it had been previously announced on posters all around the island that there would be a slug race. This was an island first and my father, curious about this new event, thought it might be a good idea to start looking for a worthy specimen to enter in the race. Cement was the name given to the giant slug he found eating my mothers kale in the garden.

When I was a child growing up on a small island, it seemed we always had someone staying at our house. As it so happened our current houseguest had a doctorate in biology and specialized in shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusks (slugs). He and my father conversed for a while about the upcoming slug race and the good doctor told my father that slugs love the odour of one thing above all foods available to all slugs everywhere on earth. Dog poo.

In the interest of science it was decided that an experiment be conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of dog poo as a slug motivator. We already had the test slug, Cement, who to my mother’s disapproval was now living on the kitchen table in one of her Mason jars now with a screened top. Cement currently did not do much. In fact, the slug did not do anything at all, it was just a dark slimy lump in a jar. I decided slugs don’t make good house pets.

That afternoon my grandparents came to the island bringing with them their beloved dog, Coco, who soon made a big poo on the lawn. My father collected some of Coco’s poo in a jar for safekeeping. The experiment was on. He then dipped a stick in the jar so that there was some poo on its end and put the poopy end of the stick near the Mason jar on the kitchen table.

Cement the slug perked up.

It was like someone had turned on a switch; Cement’s little slug optical tentacles shot out of their dark little slug head and went straight for the poo.

 My father by now is convinced that Cement the slug will be a winner.

The next day was the big race. We all drove up to the North End of the island. I was holding the jar that Cement was somewhere in, I hoped was conserving energy for the big race. When the race was announced everyone gathered around a big table that had been marked like a little race track with lanes down its length and a start and a finish line. Everyone put their slugs on the start line. All the slugs stayed where placed, in one spot, dormant. They looked like black turds on a table.

father stood tableside, holding a stick and the small jar of dog poo. He opened the jar and put some poo on the end of the stick. Someone asked him what was on the end of the stick. He told them that it was his Russian grandmother’s secret slug food recipe. As soon as he waved the stick near Cement all the slugs could smell the poo but Cement knew what was up and went straight for it.

The race was on and everyone huddled around the table watching my father coax a slug forward with a stick covered with dog poo.

Children cheered, old ladies clucked, some men made bets. I was ecstatic and just tall enough to see the race table where I focused on Cement. Cement was focused on the end of the stick. My father was conducting the entire event with a baton of dog poo.

Cement steadily slimed down the race track towards the finish line.

In the end, my father, slug race winner, proudly took home the grand prize–a giant, orange, papier-mâché slug. He would forever hold the title of Island Slug Race Champion and to this day every summer at the North End Hall Canada Day fair he recalls the Great Slug Race and how he and Cement won it and changed the face of island slug racing forever.

After his remarkable victory, Cement was released back into the wild. He was never seen nor heard from ever again.

-the end-

When I am getting ready to go out I more often than not end up forgetting something important that I then need to find. Wallet, keys, phone, something very useful and detrimental to survival. If I were clever I would tie these things to a string and then affix them to my person. I would never lose them.

Trying to find them is where I go terribly wrong, I start by just scanning the visible surface of things, the counters, my bed (often used as a table for clothes and anything else I throw on it). I check the visible surfaces because they are where I would expect to find my lost item.

After an unsuccessful search I move to phase two. The second phase requires me to move things out of the way so I can get a better look. I call this phase “mess management”. I push clothes piles around and look in drawers and pull things out of closets and look under things like the pillows on the couch and check all the places I think I may have left my missing object. At the end of the second phase there are piles of mess everywhere.

The panic stage is the last stage; I become a blur. I am a panicked fear-filled mess machine. I tear things off the wall and tip over anything that comes across my path. I through clothes and dump bags out onto the floor. I do all this while muttering cuss to myself and kicking anything that gets in my way. Sometimes I think that I resemble a caged mouse uselessly pushing wood chips around the cage in a futile attempt to restore order.

In a state of total frustration I inevitably end up in the dark moment where I look around my apartment and it looks like after an act of divine intervention where an all- powerful being physically lifted up my apartment and shook it like a snow-globe. Everything I will be scattered about and every surface covered with everything I own. I will then think that I am failing at life and at that moment of frustration, failure and clarity I will find my missing keys, wallet, or phone. I will then leave my apartment in this hideous state of catastrophic disaster only to return to it at a later point in time and clean it up so I can do this all over again the next time I go out.

-the end-

When you are out at a restaurant and the server asks if you enjoyed your meal (clearly you did your plate is immaculate), if you respond, “No, I hated it, it was awful, send it back”. Your server will force a tight smile and a fake, practiced response like “ha ha ha, I’ll send it right back, yes sir”.

If you knew just how often this happens you’d be embarrassed to open your food-filled mouth in the first place.

Your server now HATES you.

You probably thought you were being original and clever. A regular old wise-cracking smart alec. Lets be honest though, you aren’t funny at all.

In fact, now your server wants to strangle you and watch you choke on your own food.

Instead, you should be honest and genuinely respond how you really feel. “I enjoyed it, thank you, it was delicious”. Be grateful, knowing a team of people worked very hard to make your meal happen. You clearly enjoyed, so say so.

-the end-