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Diaria Anxiety and apprehensiveness in Canada

I saw the semi-impressionable minds of my generation deterred by their love for pancakes, starving hysterically in jumpsuits, lunging themselves through the Canuck streets at dawn looking for an angry fix of smoldering bacon, thickheaded scenesters melting for the ancient link to breakfast sausage and the syrupy dynamo in the diners of the night.

“As your nutritionist, I suggest you order the number five platter with a side order of hash browns and take as much from the all-you-can-eat salad bar as you can handle.” That was Sergeant Kabukiman NYPD from the Troma movie of the same name, my comic relief, foil and confidant in my journey to Canada. He sat drinking his Diet Coke, the fiend, staring poetically out the window into nowhere, or maybe to the sign across the street that read in bright neon lights Inside – The Night of 400 Lesbians! I’d learn to trust his advice over our aesthetic travels together – I knew his insight burrowed into the heart of every matter and I also knew that I love a high-protein diet that’s low on fiber.

So I took off my bowler hat and made a fox trot over to the salad bar. Because the only places for me are the salad bars – the ones full of goat cheese and Italian dressing, the ones that never have thousand island sauce or any other commonplace thing, but rutabaga! Rutabaga! Like fabulously sliced eggplant overflowing on an endless buffet line that reaches to the sky.

I sat there stewing with my vegetable ensemble for a few minutes, the most recent edition of my inner journalistic demons metaphorically sprawled before me like a salty catcher’s glove, my mind’s most recent constructive criticisms burning mine soul like so much wet oatmeal. My adlib formula’s washed out, I grimaced in my mind. The strings of adjectives, nouns, verbs I use to make a column were stale, hackneyed at best. A verb following a noun! An aforementioned adjective describing a noun! How low could I go? How utterly bourgeoisie of me! How conceited, how trite, how clich, how ignoble. In a world where whales explode in marketplaces, Janet Jackson has a pierced nipple and the Red Sox almost make it to the World Series, I thought I could pass off the ultimate lie to the masses: grammatically correct sentences. What a sham, an utter shambling shampy sham I was. I realized what I’d been missing all these years, in my dreams of becoming a two-bit cub reporter with one of those index cards in my hat – I was missing mojo, grok, pep, sizzle and a zesty sauce like never before seen on any salad or condiment bar in this universe of universes.

Suddenly it hit me, like Paul Newman himself had come down from the sky and slapped me with his seal of quality, nourishment and commitment.

“We can’t eat in here – it’s Grue territory!” I barked at Kabukiman, referring to the mythological creatures of Zork that only come out when you’re peeing yourself in some cave deep underground and you forget to bring that blasted coconut of Quendor. Kabukiman started grunting but in a masculine way and bolted with me outside, where the fine Canadian air tickled my nose hairs and cleared my sinuses.

“I’ve found it, Kabukiman,” I yelled at the clown, who was freezing so much he’d turned a sickly white. “I must find the new yen of words, the next twisting and contorting of letters, to make a new breed of art in my unpaid position as featured weekly columnist! Sure, I don’t get paid much – or anything really, but the faithful rendering of my mirthfully pretentious mug beside the words is good enough for me! I’ll start right away, concocting a new form of expression, where consonants make sentences devoid of vowels, where the true freedom of speech is in everyone having names with exclamation points in the middle, like that guy in The Gods Must be Crazy 2!

“You mean the one with Stacy Keach and the chick from Dr. No?”

“No that’s Slave of the Cannibal Gods, you theatric knave!” I snapped back. “I’ll do it, damnit! By the ghost of Saint Bono, I’ll do it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow … maybe not the day after tomorrow, or next Tuesday, but somewhere down the line … I’ll draw the line and do it!” Kabukiman sort of shrugged back at me and pointed to the neon light. We both did some things that night neither of us were sure of. It was almost as if he knew the end was coming, or as if there wasn’t enough pancakes in the world to satiate his hunger.

We came to Canada searching for the American dream. But all I found were French-speaking bums, curling reruns and Shaggy’s “Strength of a Woman” stuck in my head. I guess that’s probably because we weren’t in America at all. But every once in a while, when the sun goes down over the last pancake I’ve ingested and I sit and watch the last syrup drip off the dinner plate and sense all the raw vegetables I’ve yet to try and in Canada, I know by now the buffet lines are getting longer in the land where they let the buffet lines get long, I think of 400 lesbians, I think of old lesbians – the kind I’ve never known. I think of 400 lesbians.

Patrick May, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.

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