I was once plant life.

Luckily, it was for only around an hour and a half.

See, here in Canada, we have this great product called Robaxacet. It is an over the counter drug for back pain and combines a pain reliever with a muscle relaxant.

I had recently discovered the wonders of this product because I had pulled a muscle working out a little too hard and needed relief from back pain. So when our story begins, I had been taking the stuff for a couple of days and it worked pretty good. The pain reliever dealt with the pain and the muscle relaxant kept my back from spasming. It also made me a little more mellow. Not much, just a bit more relaxed in attitude as well as musculature.

Then, my friend Greg calls me up, announces that he has decided to invest his entire tax return cheque into throwing a kick ass party, and I am invited. Fucking A! I am in my mid twenties and ready to party!

Not for one second did it occur to me that alcohol is also a muscle relaxant and mixing the large dose of Robaxacet in my bloodstream with the large dose of booze I was about to add to the mix might have some unusual unintended consequences.

So I show up, and there is pizza and liquor and snack foods and, interestingly, what claimed to the world’s first and only all anal lesbian porno flick (still in the closet at this time, so… whatever), and I begin to joyously partake. When I arrive, it’s around 8 pm.

Around 9 pm, I become plant life. Not literally (I hope), but subjectively, I was a plant. I could see and hear everything that was going on around me, but I had absolutely no desires, drives, opinions, or thoughts. I simply existed, and was content with that.

I may have accidentally stumbled into Nirvana, actually, but don’t spread that around, because it could get me in trouble in certain circles for religious insensitivity. I mean no disrespect, I am just going by what I know of Buddhism. I achieved a state free of all desire where body, mind, and spirit were one. Whatever you call that, I was there.

In retrospect, it was a fascinating experience. It is the sort of thing that makes me realize why some people experiment on themselves with drugs, because the state of mind this interaction created was unique. I am glad to have had it, even though it was by doing a very stupid thing and not one I would be likely to try again.

At the time, of course, it was not fascinating. It wasn’t boring either. It wasn’t anything. It just was, as I just was. I hate to dip into the hippie talk, but it’s the only language appropriate. I remember physical sensations…. the smell of all the food, the sound of everyone talking around me (though I have no idea what they said), the feel of the warmth from the heating vent I was sitting near, the feel of the carpet beneath me (I was sitting on the floor, back against a wall), the flickering image on the television screen (them chicks sure liked bums), and so on. But I had not a thought in my head nor a desire in my heart.

And I am the sort of guy who thinks deep thoughts during dental procedures.

Luckily, this condition was temporary and only lasted about an hour and a half, until, I am guessing, the Robaxacet wore off and I was merely a little drunk. I was able to enjoy the rest of the part, and the rest of the porno, which as it turns out was quite epic in length and scope (I clearly recall a cinematic “climax” with twenty or thirty ladies in there somewhere), and there were no lasting effects.

I figure I was lucky. An hour and a half as plant life was long enough for me.

Any longer, and I might have turned into a vegetable.

What was kindergarten like?

You see, I don’t know, because I never went to kindergarten. For me, school started at Grade 1.

Why? Well, as it turns out, the year I was eligible to start going to kindergarten, there was a shortage of spaces, and they had to figure out which kids got to go and which did not.

So they decided to take all us little kidderlings who were eligible and gives us some standardized testing to see who “needed” kindergarten and who didn’t.

This testing process was… strange. This was my first ever time in a classroom environment, and as far as I can remember, the testing process involved a sheet of paper with a bunch of standard, clipart style drawings of common objects, and a women at the head of the classroom ridiculously over-enunciating instructions to us.

The one I recall vividly is “Draw a SIR KEL ay round the MEEROR” (draw a circle around the mirror), which she repeated like nine times.

To compound the strangeness, while this was going on, there was another person, a kindly man in his thirties, who was wandering amongst us potential kindergarteners and stopping to help individuals. So not only was this odd woman talking funny at the head of the class, I sometimes had this fellow very quietly and earnestly saying “Now, which one is the mirror? You know the mirror, your Mommy looks in it when she’s putting on her makeup. And a circle is… ”

Now to understand my reaction to this, you have to know just how precociously intelligent I was. By the time this happened, I was already reading at a grade three level. I spoke better than a lot of the adults I knew. I knew addition and subtraction. In short, I was a ridiculously bright child and, in retrospect, a little full of myself.

So my reaction in this surreal situation could best be described as “amused contempt”. Not only was what being asked of me ridiculously easy for me, but they were talking to me (and everyone else) like I was an idiot who needed special handling. And to compound it, there was this guy at my elbow from time to time, giving me advice as to how to do this ridiculously easy thing.

Honestly, I think I was kind of insulted. Nobody talked to me or treated me like this back home. It is important to emphasize this. As far as I can recall, nobody has ever treated me like that, ever. They were treated me, presumably, like they would treat anyone else my age. I am sure the other kids being tested were not insulted by it. But like I said, I was ridiculously bright and a little full of myself, and so to me, the entire thing was stupid and inane. Here were this adults behaving in this completely absurd (to me) manner and not only asking me to do something I found extremely easy, but doing it in such a way as to make it seem like it was this big deal.

So I not only did the exercises, I did them with a distinctly dismissive and contemptuous flair. While the other kiddies were concentrating hard and very slowly and carefully drawing circles and things, I was laughing and doing the same thing in a heartbeat, unable to believe what was happening.

In fact, I have a terrible feeling that I was quite rude to the nice fellow going around helping the kids. Basically, I think I told him something like “I don’t NEED your HELP” and he went away looking a tad disgruntled and perturbed.

I know what you’re thinking. What a smug little shit! At least, that is what I am thinking as I recall it. I know my reactions were just the natural reactions of someone who was, despite the brightness, just a little kid, no more than three or four years old. But I can’t help but imagine what a little prick I must have seemed like to those adults.

And, honestly, the other kids too, I would imagine. I wonder if any of them went on to be my classmates in the regular school system? Logically, it would make sense for most of them to have done so, as we were all the same age, and lived in the same area. If so, I must have made a pretty horrible first impression.

The upshot of all of this is that I smartassed my way right out of kindergarten. Presumably, when the time came to decide who needed kindergarten, the people doing the testing said “Well, certainly not that cocky little redheaded kid. ” and that was that.

I have often wondered if my life would have been different if I had gone to kindergarten, if there had been no shortage of spaces so I went to kindergarten like every other kid my age.

Looking back, I have a feeling that it would not have gone terribly well. I have a basic idea of the kinds of things that happen at kindergarten, based on depictions in popular culture, and I am pretty sure I would not have enjoyed them. I wanted to read and learn, not finger-paint and play with blocks. In fact, I had a sinking feeling that my reaction to kindergarten would have been a lot like my reaction to the testing, only more so, because I would be there all day. My attitude problem might have gotten far worse.

But who knows? Maybe I would have learned a little humility, and how to get along with the other kids and relate to them. It might, indeed, have been the best thing for me.

I suppose I will never know. But when assessing the turning points in my life, the points where I came to a fork in the road and picked one, that day in a random classroom somewhere, when I was a small but absurdly bright for my age kid.

I chose the path of the smartass.

I think I am still on it, honestly.

Bicycles and I have a colorful history.

My first bike was a hand-me-down. When you’re the youngest of four kids, hand-me-downs are a way of life. I never resented them much, but then again, the sibling closest in age to me is still four and a third years older than me, and the other two were girls, so by the time I “grew into” something they had “grown out of”, a lot of the time the item had been stuffed into the back of a drawer somewhere or otherwise mislaid. So in terms of clothing, mostly what got handed down was winter clothing, and that wasn’t too bad.

The bike, though…. looking back, I’m glad I was not a more socially clued in child, because if I had been, I probably would have been mortified by that bike. We nicknamed it The Banana Bike, because not only did it have the “banana seat” typical of girl’s bikes of that era, it was bright banana yellow. (That had been my sister Catherine’s choice, the same person who’d later paint her room’s walls bright sunshine yellow. )

Add to that the fact that it was actually too small for me by the time I got it, so that sitting on the seat my feet were flat on the ground, and this was not exactly a ride to make the girls swoon and the boys envy.

But I was a total dork and didn’t know and thus didn’t care.

Of course, first you have to learn to ride the thing. That was… an experience.

One day, it was decided Today Michael Shall Learn To Ride That Bike. I think it was not long after it had technically come into my possession. It was a nice warm summer day, perfect for lessons. But I’ve never been any good at learning physical skills by instruction. The part of the brain that turns what people are saying to me into physical actions for my body is very weak.

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This song has been stuck in my head for 28 years and counting. It’s the song that plays in my head every single time someone says “Cadbury Easter Creme Egg”, or anything close than that. This song is burned into my brain that deeply. It’s totally involuntary.

There’s a bit of other stuff at the beginning, be patient, it’s there.

Yes, before the more famous ad that made so many of us wonder “Are they saying these eggs are shit out by a bunny?”, there was this amazingly dorky ad.

Hip, it was not.

But it was 1982, and there was still a lot of 1970′s left over, and roller skating was HUGE in the late 70′s and early 80′s. My sisters went EVERYWHERE on their roller skates. You’d see whole swarms of roller skating youths glide on by, risking life and limb by roller skating in a huge clump down the middle of the mostly-empty suburban streets. Then a car would come along, confronted by this bizarre assortment, and all the skaters would part like the Red Sea onto the sidewalks, then the group would form again and roll on.

If there was enough of them, it actually made the ground rumble a little.

And it’s since that long-ago era that the above song has been lodged firmly in my mind. Sometimes it sucks to be as highly retentive as I am. Then again, that’s the main reason I never had to study in school, so who am I to bitch?

But there’s a much better song related to roller skating, and it’s this one :

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The article I wrote recently about The Forgotten Inmate has really set me to thinking about my own shyness and all the complications it causes.

It’s more than just social phobia too. On a deep down level, I feel like I don’t deserve to exist. Part of me wants to disappear completely… after all, you can’t get much more “out of the way” than not existing at all. And I’ve felt like I am always in the way, always a burden, always an imposition, and that in many ways people would be better off if I was not around for a long time now. It’s probably been there since childhood.

You see, as a kid, I was…. a surprise. My parents had three kids, my mother got her tubes tied, then four and a half years later, I loop the loop and show up.

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