How to have fun while embracing decrepitude

My old pal Kipling gave a ring the other day, so we could coordinate the next breakfast at the Teviotdale truck stop. We got around to comparing notes on the toll the years are taking. He recently fell off a storage bin he was filling with firewood. Hasn't been able to lift his left arm over his head since. Time to let go of the dream of operating a muffler shop, I guess. For my part, between the eye surgery and the shakey hands, my bathroom reno looks way different than the last bathroom reno I did 30 years ago. It's taking three times as long too. You mighta been a git-r-done kinda guy somewhere in the past, if only in your imagination, but once the get up and go has got up and left it seems to take forever to get nothing much done. So where's the fun in all this? "Fun" is perhaps too glib a word. But you can get a lot of satisfaction out of staying the course, never giving up, learning from your mistakes, keeping your nose to the grindstone and the pedal to the metal, and 101 other cliches. Point is, at our age we win just by being here, so let the fun times roll... Savor and celebrate! Just book your hip replacement early.

That was a close call

I was motoring down to Teviotdale this morning for a breakfast appointment with my old pal Kipling. I'd been behind a white VW Atlas for at least twenty kilometers. He'd felt the need to overtake me on the passing lane just south of Durham. Then he got stuck behind a pickup moseying along at 85 or so, and he stayed there... and stayed, and stayed. Thanks to my years of experience driving a first gen VW diesel, I plan my passes carefully. After noticing nimrod hadn't passed that pickup in half a dozen road-wide-open opportunities, I made my move. Into the oncoming lane, signal light on, gaining fast, the dolt must have had a good ten seconds to see me coming. Just as I'm drawing alongside, the oblivious imbecile pulls out to pass! Wellington County Road 6 doesn't have much of a shoulder, and then drops off steeply. I've got two wheels on the shoulder and two in the ditch, there's a hydro-pole coming at me fast, I feel the car going over, cut to the left of the pole and regain the roadway in a giant dust-cloud. Nimrod was long gone, but the pickup driver was so impressed with my masterful wheelsmanship he gave me a big thumbs-up. Wheelsmanship my ass; it was sheer dumb luck I didn't barrel-roll through that pole and cut my Toyota in half. My immediate impulse was to catch up to Atlas boy and share my thoughts while the adrenalin was still pumping, but on second thought, the irony of having a heart-attack while beating the crap out of the guy who just ran me off the road would have been too rich. Ten minutes later I slide into my booth at the truck stop, only to learn my breakfast appointment was the second Monday of the month, not the first.

Implosion or explosion, America is primed and ready to blow

Had breakfast with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop today, because you can do that again.

Kipling is one of those rare souls who has been blessed, if you can call it that, with the magical powers to cross the closed Canada-US border. That's because his cargo is deemed essential to national security, on both sides. He's one of the few contractors fully licensed to haul machine guns and mortars. Apparently national security considerations trump covid any day of the week.

In his stateside travels, Kipling has the opportunity to take stock of the country he's been doing business in for fifty years. He doesn't like what he sees.

He talks about "food deserts." I've read about that. He's seen it. There's neighbourhoods where you're miles from anything resembling fresh food, where people do their food shopping at the local gas station. There's entire neighbourhoods where people get by on Doritos and pop, with once in awhile gas station hotdogs for special occasions. Is it any wonder everybody in the Dorito zones is obese?

The only healthy industry in America today is the one providing hyper-processed fake food to fat people.

The infrastructure is third world, public health care is non-existent, the government is bankrupt, guns and despair are everywhere...

But, take your pick of Fox or CNN or MSNBC; all of them talk as though America remains the "indispensable nation."  

The wake-up call is long overdue. 

Cobble Beach

I played golf for a few years in my youth. At one time or another I played most of the courses around the Guelph area, but my go-to place was Victoria Road West, owned by the DeCorso family. One of the DeCorso kids actually played some minor pro golf for a few years; I played a round with him when he was about thirteen. He beat me handily.

I drive out Victoria Road from time to time to this day. Victoria Road East appears to yet be in business, but the West course has long been subdivided into residential development. That's kinda what's happened to the sport of golf; it's become the plaything of real estate developers.

Had breakfast today with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop. As usual, we traded notes on what it's like getting old. We are in agreement that it ain't fucking great.

But what can you do?

Kipling is an accomplished herbalist, and at the conclusion of our get-together we transferred a couple of plants from his van into my Toyota. Although the back windows of my car are heavily tinted, when you looked in the back you could see the unmistakable profile of the weed 'o wisdom. Although the shit is allegedly legal now, I figured that profile was just asking for a hassle in the event that an OPP cruiser happened to pull up behind me.

So we rigged up a little curtain out of my lumberjack shirt, and I stuck to the back roads as much as I could on the drive home.

Once you get up into the Grey-Bruce area, it's home turf for me. It's an interesting part of the country. We have a lot of poverty, but we also have reasonable real estate prices and a lot of interesting folks living on those back roads.

There's a guy on the 24th Concession who recently put up a home shop big enough to park a Greyhound bus in. While he doesn't seem to have one, he does have a vintage AMC AMX parked in there, as well as a couple of Harleys. I owned a AMC Rebel Machine once in one of my past lives, so eventually I'm gonna have to stop in and get the downlow on what makes this guy bother with an AMC hi-performance car. That's a pretty small club.

A concession north of that lives a guy who used to be an economist at a big-shot US university. He packed it all in to live up here with his aging mother. He rides a bicycle into Wiarton to pick up his necessities. That's got to be a good seven or eight miles, but its gotta seem a lot farther when he's riding his bike into town in the winter. That's another character I'll have to get acquainted with.

My journey passed through a goodly swath of Amish country, and it being Sunday, I passed a lot of Amish folks in their Sunday best and their black buggies. Seems the young lads in that cult get to ride their bicycles to the Sunday meeting, so the shoulder of the road had a whole lotta guys who looked like they were pedalling to a Blues Brothers reunion. Black fedoras, white shirts, ties... and dark glasses of course.

Don't laugh. That's a culture that'll survive after the assholes who run the planet succeed in destroying what we think of as "civilization." I'm keen on staying on good terms with them.

Nearly home, I thought I'd take a meander through Cobble Beach. I drive by it all the time, but I don't often drive through it. Cobble Beach is a high-end golf resort/ real estate play by the McLeese family.

The McLeese family have extraordinarily deep pockets, but you never hear a thing about them. I suspect that's because they're the opposite of the kind of people who lobby Forbes to get put on the Forbes "rich list." These folks are more likely to threaten Forbes with legal action if they were to be put on it.

As near as I can tell, and it's really hard to get solid info, McLeese the elder was an engineer who specialised in coal-plant construction. He at some point branched out into financial engineering, and made a fortune selling turn-key coal-fired electricity generating plants to American cities on a no-money-down basis. No money down, but you can pay for this with municipal bonds for the next hundred years, etc.

Cobble Beach became a retirement project for McLeese the elder, may he rest in peace. He got all the approvals for a high end golf course, designed by Doug Carrick, and a couple of thousand housing units around it. He spent a fortune putting in the infrastructure and building the clubhouse and the golf course, and then the 2007 recession hit.

By my estimation, at least $50 million had been dropped into this project by that time.

From what I surmise, and I've got some pretty good feelers into the business, aside from jettisoning some peripheral properties, McLeese never ever offered discounts or had fire sales for any Cobble Beach properties. They went years without having more than one or two new homes built on the development.

It takes very deep pockets to sustain that.

Now the place has exploded. Cobble Beach is a thing. They host by far the best car show in all of Canada every September. Where else have you ever seen an authentic, first edition Bugatti?

They've had more new builds this year than in the last ten combined. And prices are going up. A 1200 foot townhouse clocks in at $400k plus, and things only go up from there.

As much as I applaud McLeese and his deep pockets, here's what bothers me. I drive through the place in the middle of a sunny Sunday afternoon, and nowhere in this very pretty community do I see a single soul sitting on their porch with a drink in their hand.

What is wrong with those people? Is this a place I'd want to live?

NO!!!

Then again, maybe the reason I'm not seeing them on the front porch is because they're all on their back decks. Either way, having a front porch and/or a back deck is rapidly becoming something of an unattainable dream for a lot of our next generation.


Best moment of the day; I'm barrelling down Wellington Road 6 on my way to Teviotdale at a good turn of speed. There's a Amish black buggy on the shoulder with an Amish family aboard on their way to their Sunday meeting. I veer wide to give them lots of room, and just as I'm passing, a little girl about three years old sticks herself out the back window and waves at me.


There is hope for humanity.

Life and death and the Teviotdale Truck Stop

 Me and my old pal Kipling have been getting together at the Teviotdale Truck Stop for quite a few years now, ever since I moved to the sticks up here. Teviotdale is kinda sorta half way, although my half of the drive is a little longer than his.

Not that I'm complaining; I get a pretty good price on Kipling's primo home-grown. In fact, if he's in a particularly expansive mood, I don't pay a cent, as was the case today. Thanks buddy!

The three-egg "Big Breakfast" is still only $10.95. Amazing how they can do this after that massive job-killing hike in the minimum wage. The "Breakfast Special," where you get peameal instead of regular bacon, is still $12.95. If you're ever in Teviotdale, check it out.

So we get together every few months, and the first order of business increasingly becomes comparing notes on funerals we've been to since our last breakfast. The conversation goes something like this...

Remember what's his name? His daughter died. Killed herself. Thirty-eight. Nobody seen it coming.

That's fucked up, man. Remember what's her name? Ya, her... I worked with her a few years. Had a boy, only child. Went off to college. Offed himself before the end of the first semester.

Aw, fuck man.

Ya, that's fucked up. And remember my pal what's his name? Took a package. Full pay and  benefits for two years. He was gonna sell his place and move up to Parry Sound and go fishing every day. Kidney failure. He's got a dialysis machine in his house now...

Aw fuck man... if he can't go fishing his retirement dreams just went for a shit.


And on and on in that vein... it could get seriously depressing if you let it.

But here's why it doesn't.

We've both, quite independently, come to the conclusion that there's no logical explanation for life's vagaries. One guy falls off a motorcycle at 20 mph and dies. Another guy falls off a motorcycle at 100  mph and walks away.

One guy goes to the gym five days a week and drops dead jogging at 50. Another guy goes to the bar five days a week, smokes two packs a day, and dies in his sleep at 90.

You can call it the luck of the draw. You can call it fate. You can call it random happenstance.


I call it the grace of God.

Pot-addled hillbilly comes up with fool-proof plan for retirement income

The best job I ever had was when a pot grower of my acquaintance hired me to prune buds one October many years ago. Ten bucks an hour, cash. Me and half a dozen other "employees" sat there with scissors all day, cutting the buds off the stacks of plants piled up throughout his rented farmhouse, and at the end of the day I had a really good buzz, plus a hundred bucks, plus whatever amount of bud happened to fall into my pockets in the course of the day, plus the cannabis resin I was able to scrape off the soles of my shoes when I got home.

Best job I ever had. Too bad it only lasted one day.

Fast forward twenty-five years or so, and I'm sitting at the Teviotdale Truck Stop this a.m. having the Teviotdale Breakfast Special (three eggs easy over, two generous slabs of peameal bacon, a nice thick slice of ham, a couple of sausages, and a generous serving of stove-top fried potatoes, all for twelve bucks) and getting caught up with my old pal Kipling.

We're both at an age where sooner or later you gotta talk about retirement.

So I share my plan with Kipling. I've got a pickle jar half full of pot seeds, I tell him. I've also got a hundred acres off the beaten path. What could go wrong?

Well, he says, if those pot seeds are more than two or three years old, they're no good.

Huh?

That's kinda bad news for me. I've been counting on that seed stash as a supplement to my retirement income. So I mention this story to him.

If scientists can resurrect a 32,000 year old Silene Stenophylla seed discovered in the wilds of the Siberian tundra, a jar of pot seeds that's been in my pantry for twenty years should be a piece of cake!

Kipling isn't buying it. He's way better informed about weed science than I am, so I tend to defer to his expertise. Then he tells me that the seeds he had the best luck with last year were seeds he bought over the internet for $18.

Each...

He paid eighteen dollars PER SEED!

WTF?!?!

Needless to say, a lightbulb went off in my head.

People pay eighteen bucks a seed over the internet? I bet I've got 20-30 thousand seeds in that jar!

I'll maybe undercut the established seed purveyors by a couple bucks per seed, just to get the jump on them. And maybe institute a twenty seed maximum for any seed order, mainly because nobody's gonna bother driving all the way up here to demand their money back if they're only out a couple hundred bucks.

If the seeds germinate, I'm golden!

But if they don't, I'm still golden!

It's a classic win-win!


One way or the other, I figure there's enough cash in that pickle jar to put a decent Grady-White on the water!

So this is how it ends...

2018, that is.

The Farm Manager and our one kid who couldn't come up with a better plan for New Years Eve are watching a doc about the life of Polish artist and all-round wack job Stanislaw Szukalski.

I'm on the internet, boat shopping.

Almost bought one this year. A '92 Doral with under 500 hours on the Merc big block. I was pumped till I figured out it was gonna run five hundred bucks to fill the gas tank. No matter how good the deal appears to be, that's not something I can justify when I've got kids paying off student loans.

Maybe 2019 will be the year of the boat.

Around the home hearth it was a good year. Aside from our dear Lucy, everyone came through with good health. In fact, the fourteen year old dog and the twenty year old cat are perkier than they were a year ago. Amazing what they're doing in vet medicine!

And thanks to an Arab immigrant and our lovely public health care system, I can see like I've never seen before!

Hope it was a good year for you too.

The outside world is a little fucked, though. Mainstream media throughout the Western World has become a 24/7 Trump reality show. If they hate the guy as much as they claim to, why do they keep on with the free publicity? As near as I can tell, this president has one accomplishment to his credit. He gave America's one percenters a nice tax break.

Here in Canada we're celebrating the legalization of the weed 'o wisdom... and what a shit-show that's been. PM Fluffy managed to hand the entire industry to the Bay Street greedbags instead of the folks who have been successfully cultivating the stuff forever. Nice job, Justin!

How sadly ironic that guys like former Toronto police boss Bill Blair have jumped into the business, when guys he put behind bars are still... behind bars, and in some cases will be for years to come.

It's a fucked up world...


Anyway, my reminiscences were interrupted by a call from my old pal Kipling. Like me, he's at once pleased and befuddled by the fact that guys like us are still here, guys once voted as most likely to die before 30 in the high school yearbook. He's spending the New Years Eve working on his VW van out in his shop. It's a mere ninety thousand clicks shy of turning three million kilometres on the odometer. You need to spend a lot of time in your shop to make that happen.

We're gonna have breakfast at the Teviotdale Truck Stop next year. Like on Wednesday.

Continuity is good...

Family picnics and a note to Bibi

Drove down to Waterloo yesterday for the annual family picnic. They used to have it in Bellwood but the Waterloo contingent considered that too far a drive, so for the last few years it's been held at the Laurel Creek Park in Waterloo.

That shortens their drive down to about ten minutes, but adds another 45 to mine, and I was having the longest drive anyway, absent any outliers from Montreal or New Jersey.

But these family picnics are a get-together I hate to miss.

What's way cool is how the next couple of generations are faring out. The third generation offspring of a bunch of DPs who got off the boat with nothing in their pockets are generally busy with masters or doctorate studies. It's the classic immigrant tale; the first generation digs ditches, the second generation manages the ditch-diggers, and the third generation, the Ph. D. crowd, produces studies that prove ditch-diggers are no longer required.

And while those master's and Doctor Phil kids have my utmost respect, I have to say there were a couple of kids there who I give even more. Nephew Sam found himself some kind of college course where he get's qualified to be a fishing and hunting guide.

Say what?

You can go to college for that?

Apparently you can.

Sam's got a gig at a hunting lodge in the North West Territories for three months, then he's got a fishing guide gig lined up in Algonquin Park, and after that he's eyeing some opportunities in New Zealand.

And nephew Isaac just got his Red Seal as a truck and coach mechanic. Isaac went the apprentice route instead of signing up for gigantic student loans. No student loans and making fifty thou a year doesn't sound too bad to me.

Especially when you compare him to all those schmucks with MA degrees in English Lit trying to pay their rent, not to mention their student loans, by driving for Uber.

But the family picnic is a tradition that goes waaay back. I think it had it's origins in the late 50's when they'd all decamp to Sauble Beach for a day in the summer. Then we moved it to the Elora Gorge Park for a few years, and then it went to Bellwood, and every year you'd see the same folks being just the same but a year older.

After fifty or sixty years, you can imagine they look quite a bit older...

Me included.

So the family shindig was six hours of driving for a three hour visit with the extended family, and today I drove half way back to Waterloo to have breakfast with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop.

Kipling is a larger than life character, and for reasons of national security I can't really tell the whole story till he kicks the bucket, and since he's looking hale and hearty I imagine that'll be a few years yet. Suffice it to say he's made his living in the transport business most of his life.

Kipling's got a bee in his bonnet about self-driving vehicles. Seems Freightliner or somebody recently ran a driverless truck all the way from California to Detroit without an accident.

Great!

Kipling points out that about 20% of the workforce is engaged in transporting goods from point A to point B.

He further points out that once you disemploy that 20% of the working population, there'll be 20% less people able to buy the shit those trucks are carrying.

I guess the AI robots who are taking over the driver's seat and a lot of other jobs in what's left of our manufacturing sector are gonna have to pick up the slack.

Not sure how that'll work out.


While I'm out breakfasting with Kipling, the Farm Manager is on the horn with the Bubbinator, and somehow, in their weekly exchange on all matters political, they get on the topic of dehumanizing the "other" and how that leads to genocide.

Canada as a British Colony dehumanized the native Canadians.

Germany under Hitler dehumanized Jews.

Israel today is dehumanizing the Palestinians. That's why it's A-OK for Israeli snipers to shoot unarmed Gaza protesters in the back.

To my surprise, Bubby agreed with this line of reasoning.

I was surprised because, as long as I've known her, she's been a staunch supporter of Israel, no matter what. This is a departure.


Note to Bibi; when you're losing the Bubbies of the Diaspora, you'd best have a long think about where you're heading.

The beauty of it all

Will God smite Mar-a-Lago?

Or will God spare Mar-a-Lago?

If God is indeed dead, as has been hypothesised by deep thinkers since the time of Nietzsche and beyond, will Mother Nature or Hurricane Irma spare or smite?

Allow me to speculate for a moment; what use is the death of God if Mother Nature and Hurricane Irma are rushing in to fill the void?

These were the questions I was pondering when there was a sudden knock on the door.

A knock on the door is a novelty in these parts. There's a reason folks like us live off the beaten path. We don't appreciate random knocks on the door. That's why our welcome mat has "naff off" embroidered into it.

I see where the Wynne regime has charted its own course on the legal weed journey. They'll grow a whole new bureaucracy called the "Cannabis Control Board." I'll bet growing that bureaucracy is gonna be a whole lot more lucrative than growing weed.

But that's how things play out when you let politicians run the show. Somewhere along the line those folks forgot that they were public servants, ie, servants to the public.

Hahaha... that's a good one, eh!?

A few days ago I breakfasted with my old pal Kipling at the Teviotdale Truck Stop. He's knee-deep in grandchildren these days, so it's hard to get together, but Kipling has an old-timer's perspective on this whole legal weed question. He figures the entire legal weed thing is a scam to put pot profits (triple alliteration!!!) into the hands of Bay Street wankers and their attendant bureaucracy sycophants, while cutting out guys like himself who have been growing quality organic shit for forty years.

I suspect he's right.

So there's a knock on the door.

The hounds go ballistic.

The Farm Manager wants to run for the gun cabinet.

Relax!

It's just a couple of local kids who hunted our property last year and repaid the favour with some mighty tasty goose summer sausage.

I gave them the thumbs up.

Conditional on another round of summer sausage of course.


The beauty of it all...

Small farming in the 21st century

Back a few lifetimes ago, I was eyeballing a failed "estate development" a couple miles north of Guelph. Some wannabe developer had done all the dirty work and had all the approvals for an estate subdivision carved out of Wellington County farmlands.

Twenty-five "estate lots" on fifty acres of prime agricultural real estate. Our wannabe developer had enough money to rough in the road and build the model home; the one he lived in.

That's where things stalled out.

So after a couple of years of no takers on these estate lots, the entire development came up for sale, which is when my squinty eye appraised the possibilities. I figured let's rethink this "estate" shit and market this as a "market gardening" opportunity. After all, it's sitting on prime Ontario agricultural land. Instead of 4000 sq. ft. McMansions, we'll promote this project as an ideal location for a modest home, plus an acre or two of prime black soil.

A market gardening subdivision!

Drew up a business plan. Presented it to a few of my colleagues in the business. Presented it to my dear daddy, who had been in the business forever. Presented it to my friends at the bank I owed a million dollars to...

They unanimously agreed that I was obviously fucked in the head.

Fast forward thirty years or so. I'm having lunch with one of these kids who are the new face of farming. While she may have a P. Eng. in her back pocket, she lives and breathes organic farming. She tells me she just ordered her seeds for the coming year; a thousand bucks.

So what kind of a return do you figure you'll see on that thousand dollars?

Around forty grand.

How big is your garden?

I've scaled back this year; I'm down to one acre.

She's scaled back this year because she's so pregnant I was half expecting she'd calve right there in our booth at the Teviotdale Truck Stop.

Thankfully she didn't. But she is the face of small farming going forward. There's a generation of really smart and well-educated young people who have a passion for growing stuff. They want nothing to do with big agro-chem.

They are the future!

Which proves yet again that I wasn't a failure; I was merely ahead of my time.

Waiting for "the big one"

Redd Foxx was one of the funniest guys in the history of funny. His Sanford and Son sitcom was must-watch viewing back in the day.

His guest spots on Flip Wilson's show were piss-your-pants funny too. Who can ever forget those times when he showed up as a guest at the "Church of what's happening now."

Timeless and unforgettable shit!

But what's got me going about Redd is that schtick he had when he was Fred Sanford, where about once per episode, on cue, he'd be having "the big one." He'd stagger around clutching his chest proclaiming "I'm coming to join ya, Elizabeth... this is the big one..."

Well, the other day, I was staggering around clutching my chest, and all I was saying was "something's wrong." And something was wrong. I'd taken the hounds out for their morning romp, and by God, I could hardly summon the strength to get home.

But I got home, staggered to the couch, and ten minutes later I was fine.

False alarm!

You'd think that'd be the end of that and we'd all celebrate by hoisting a few and firing up the bong!

You'd be wrong, wrong, wrong...

Instead, the Farm Manager is all over me going in to get "checked out."

Ya right...

First of all, I've got shit to do. Tommorow I'm taking Junior to the airport. Next day I'm gonna meet my pal Kipling for a lovely bacon and egg breakfast at the Teviotdale Truck Stop. Never mind bacon and eggs; if ya go for the "Hungry Man" you get bacon AND sausages...

And I have a sneaking hunch that after I am "checked out" both the bacon and the sausages will be verboten.

Maybe even the eggs...

See why this getting "checked out" shit isn't something I'm keen to rush into?

To say nothing of the beer and the smokes...

Anyway, I'm hoping to make out like Fred Sanford; have the false alarm once a week and continue with business as usual.