Alpha to Omega

It's hockey playoff season. This means that, because I am Canadian, I am expected to converse about the progress of the home team, engage in wearing obnoxiously bright coloured clothing, scream obscenities and tear my hair out when something 'bad' happens, drink bad local beer, repeatedly chant a clever slogan (i.e. Go {insert home team name here} Go! YAAAAY!) in unison with mentally challenged roid-monkeys, and basically (and this is the most intrusive expectation yet) to like it all. It’s asking too much.

The funny thing about conformists is that they are not content with just being their conformist selves. They find it impossible to comprehend how anyone could lead a healthy, normal life without being exactly like everyone else. In other words, they like to proselytize. My first experience with this came in the eighth grade. The principal at my school was a staunch conformist who liked to fancy himself ‘fun’ but ‘professional’ at the same time. This meant he was on a first name basis with all the students and would talk up the parents as well. He wore bad suits. He probably watched a lot of TV and attended church with his wife on Sundays. I knew from the moment I met him two years earlier that I didn’t like him, but I wasn’t really sure why. He tried too hard I guess. My dislike was justified one afternoon as I sat quietly in class (I was always quiet back then. No one liked me because I kept to myself too much and this seemed to them to be some sort of flip off…go figure) writing in my notebook. The aforementioned ‘hands-on’ principal strolled in and started hanging over some of the students shoulders, watching them work (a most irritating practice. Someone tried to do this to me the other day as I sat reading The Brothers Karamazov and I shot them a clear “I’m going to throttle you” look). I was one of these unlucky students, but when he got to me, he not only felt it necessary to breathe on me but also to critique my handwriting (I’ve developed quite a complex about people who breathe too loudly or too close to me. It’s become so bad that I find it enormously stressful to sleep as the inside spoon because the outside spoon might breathe on my shoulder, neck or back. It’s even worse when I have to take public transit to go to work during rush hour. I had the painful experience of encountering a thirty something man the other day who, though we were packed in like sardines, felt that it was somehow to everyone’s advantage to wiggle about incessantly, and that sharing his bad breath and germs with me was somehow to my advantage. I spent the rest of the ride bug-eyed and obsessing about germs and having trouble breathing. I managed to get off before the panic attack set in, but I’m pretty sure if you had asked me what my one greatest wish was at that very moment I would have said “A shower”). This was annoying, and at the time, embarrassing enough, that two days later when he handed me a photocopied page of handwritten letters from a penmanship book (circa 1950 I can imagine), I was astonished at his persistence (my penmanship is not really so bad. Since I stopped trying to write exactly the way they taught me in school, it has suddenly become legible, even attractive). Naturally, I tossed the sheet of paper in the first available garbage receptacle.

I had only lived in that town for two years, and would only live there until the end of that year. I hated it, mostly because of the absurdity of the place and the absurdity of the people living there. They were ignorant, and felt their little town to be something special, when it was in fact just a suburban hell with neither the money and class nor the culture they somehow convinced themselves they had. Like so many small cities, the livelihood was a factory that was dangerously close to shutting its doors. Blue-collar strife though, was never apparent, and the kids in my classes would come to class curiously outfitted in brand name clothing and with a ridiculous collection of ‘stuff’, (I don’t like stuff. I prefer to refer to ‘stuff’ as ‘useless shit’). All of the boys played hockey and all of the girls took dance and figure skating lessons. The women walked around like blue blood New Englanders, as did their daughters. The homes were set up very traditionally, with the wives at home eating chocolates (and getting fatter…they were all so fat) and watching soap operas while the husbands paid the credit card (debts) and nursed their mid-life crises with their garage projects. No one in the town liked outsiders, and they would never let me forget that I was weird because I wasn’t obnoxiously popular and ostentatiously (ostentatiously is an ostentatious word) materialistic (a sure sign of discontentment; I find the most materialistic people to be those who either have or have had the least). I can’t think of anything terribly cultural about the place (I don’t think there was an art gallery, and there was only one movie theatre) except that everyone got really excited when a Chinese food restaurant opened up. This was a big deal, as it was very exotic compared to delis and Italian restaurants (I don’t think the Atkins diet would have much success there). This lack of culture was emphasized by the fact that the only thing the community had to bring them together was the junior hockey team, who played in a small rink that was used for public skating in the off-season.

The other day when I was out, passing a bar where the hockey game was playing, I saw a sporty chicken who reminded me a lot of a girl who used to live in that town. She had blonde hair, fake nails, overly cancerous looking tanned skin, and was wearing skintight black pants, a hockey t-shirt balled up so that her midriff was showing, and excessively too much makeup. Normally, I encounter this kind of chickenhead everywhere, and it only elicits a small amount of bile, but this time it produced quite a bit more. This is because the chickenhead was glaring at me with a most distasteful look on her ugly leather coloured face. The reason for this was that I was wearing a skirt and her two little jock chicken boy friends were looking at me and making what I can only assume to be lewd and inappropriate comments. Having had a few (justified) jealous moments (one of these occurred when I met the ‘girlfriend’ of someone I was having an affair with. I hadn’t known of her existence until that moment, but she clearly knew who I was, as did everyone else in the room. My reputation can often precede me, both to my benefit and detriment. I swallowed all pettiness, and, noticing she had almost the same shirt on I did, said lightly “hey, I have that shirt”. She looked at me blankly and answered, “Ya, a lot of people do”, and walked away. I haven’t seen her since, but I will not be swallowing any pettiness when I do, and she will be swallowing her teeth), I had to be taken aback by her complete lack of integrity in the matter. Gouging out her two boys eyes would certainly not be justified, but it would be more justified than giving me the death stare (actually, she wasn’t really capable of this. It looked more like “Oh, my god…you are like, a total tramp”) and muttering voodoo curses under her breath just because I was walking down the street. But, that’s chicken for you.

Once I got to High School, I encountered the people who tried very hard to separate themselves from the conformists. These were the rebel conformists. They were living on the edge, but the edge of what I’m not quite sure (oblivion, triviality?). You all know these people. They are the ones that walk around with a permanent scowl on their faces and make valiant efforts to object to just about anything anyone says. There are the “I’m so deep and complicated” ones, the “I’m so punk” ones, and then the ones that sit in doped up silence at parties as you attempt to speak to them out of some kind of imagined obligation to be polite (fuck polite, I won’t do it again). The funniest attempt at rejecting conformity though, comes from those chickenheads who constantly say stupid things like “I’m so weird”. Once ‘weird’ becomes an asset to these people, they will make any and every attempt to be ‘weird’ in the most mediocre sense. The only problem is that ‘weird’ doesn’t constitute having a style of their own or an original idea in their heads. All it means is that instead of Tommy Hilfiger, they sometimes wear Roxy, and instead of listening to the bad rap/pop radio station, they listen to the bad rock station and instead of settling down at 24 with a husband, children and little suburban bungalow, they do it at 30.

In conclusion, I hate fucking hockey. Why won’t you all just go away (though, the image of the screaming crews coming from the bar on game night, keeping somebody I know awake, really appeals to me. Ha ha ha…)?