The book sample as otherwise known as:
- Freebie page - The hook, with reader being the fish (as in to catch hook, line and sinker) - Taste of what's to come, although the book tastes terrible without copious salt and ketchup - Preview - Peek (nothing to do with voyeurism, although the fish on the cover looks naked) - Specimen, not what your urologist asks you to do in a little cup Without further ado, here's the first two days of Egg Flounder's journal: |
January 1983
Saturday, January 1st: New Year’s Day. Last night was a story of lust, deception, panic, and one unused condom in my pocket. It began yesterday afternoon when a gorgeous dark-haired girl invited me to a private New Year’s Eve party at Queen’s restaurant bar. Since I didn’t want to be a dork and in light-year far off remote chance I would be driving her to the nearest hotel afterwards, I “borrowed” my sister’s car while she was out with a college turd. I didn’t have a driver’s license and my parents were away at another party.
I managed to remember and use the 2.5 hours of driving instruction from my traumatized father to drive myself downtown at speeds rivaling an ice cream truck. I parked my sister’s car in a way a car should never be parked and waited for the girl inside the smoke-filled restaurant-bar. Three hours, nine glasses of Coke and two blackened lungs later, it dawns upon me: the girl was never going to show up. I left with a heavy heart. Walking across the parking lot, I saw a big empty space where the car had been parked haphazardly. Stolen! I staggered to a corner and several cups of the aforementioned Coke were ejected onto the snow bank. It was 2:30 am and I went home on a special late-night bus occupied by one other passenger: a drunkenly happy disheveled longhaired man with a bright green parka.
A fierce shaking woke me up this morning, and half-asleep, I turned over but the shaking continued. The blanket was ripped away and a beating of fists rained upon my skinny chest. Giving in, I peeped out of my groggy eyes and they snapped open like broken roller blinds: it was the ugly disheveled long-haired man with a bright green parka! No - it was my sister. Close enough. Ilisha was silently screaming at me, mouthing her words in fury. I plugged in my hearing aids and the peaceful silence was stabbed by her shrill voice.
“...My car? What did you do to my car? Where is it?”
Car? The morning light was bright and my mind was dim. As I squinted at my pissed off, the blurry reality of last night came into clear focus and I scrambled for an explanation. I had to be honest. “It was stolen last night.”
“Stolen? My Honda? What? What happened?” Her grip on my sailboat pajamas loosened.
“Uh, I was home all night and right before I went up to bed, I saw a strange man tip-toeing through the living room and once he saw me, he bolted out the front door and sped off with your car.”
My parents, to my alarm, took my story with dead seriousness and drove me to the police station to file a report. A skinny cop escorted me to a small room in the back of the station, the kind they use to interrogate hardened suspects. I sat on a cold chair bolted to the floor and repeated the story I had told Ilisha and my parents, making sure I kept all details consistent. Inconsistent storytelling will invite suspicion. After my story, he began to shoot me with questions. I couldn’t lip-read him through his standard cop mustache partially hiding his lips. He became frustrated with repeating his questions so many times that Mum had to be brought in to translate. I had to be creative in answering one question: “Give me a description of the intruder – his height, weight, hair colour, appearance, distinguishing features?” The chances of him asking this question was the same as finding a broken potato chip in a party bowl.
“Uh, he was an ugly disheveled long-haired man wearing a bright green parka.” Better him than me. He made me look through a thick well-worn mug shot book but I couldn’t “find” his picture. Lots of scary fellows in there; their looks alone would be enough for me to fork over my cash in absence of any weapons.
Back home, we looked for other stolen items, but found nothing missing.
“Thank gawd, nothing else was taken,” Mum said in her American twang.
“Brilliant! And, my rare book collection is untouched,” Father noted in his stuffy British accent.
“They didn’t touch my money on the dresser,” Ilisha mentioned.
After we all settled down, Ilisha was on her way out on a date with the same geek as the night before, and as she was putting on her coat, she frowned at my snow boots, her eyes narrowing. “Egg, if you didn’t go out last night, why were your boots wet?”
My neck felt hot, and I stammered, “I, I, I tried to chase your car after the bad guy drove off.”
“Strange - you didn’t mention that before,” she said before shutting the door. The noose of guilt tightened.
I went into my room, sat at my desk and I made 6 New Year’s resolutions:
1. I shall not procrastinate. Writing this resolution list today and not halfway through the year is a start.
2. Since this is my last year of high school, I’ll go to Aviation College this Fall and work hard to achieve my life-long dream of becoming a pilot.
3. I shall find myself a girlfriend before I turn 18. If I don’t achieve this goal, I’ll become sexually enamored with inanimate objects such as telephone poles, if what my friend Luderick says is true.
4. I shall start bodybuilding for real - no more wimpy push-ups. My body resembles a poorly drawn stick-man figure and I must uphold the Canadian image of the burly bearded lumberjack for the world. Pet moose and beer would be optional.
5. I shall write a daily journal of my life and thoughts as a hearing-impaired teen.
6. I shall stick to this New Year’s resolution list like a bug on flypaper in an obscure middle-of-the-road greasy spoon.
This is pretty much the same list of resolutions as it has been for the past three years. This is a do-or-die year, especially the girlfriend part. Turning 18 is a rite of passage into manhood and I want all the ingredients of a real man - a girl on my arm, wide shoulders, and a Beaver bush plane in the driveway to boot. Sexual experience would be a bonus.
Why did the gorgeous dark-haired girl invite me and not show up at the restaurant-bar? Was she serious or was she playing a joke on a hearing aid wearing skinny guy? I must be a damn fool.
Sunday, January 2: After dinner, I walked to Luderick’s house with my hockey stick and orange ball. Before I rang the doorbell, my friend opened the timeworn door with utmost quietness. “Hey Egg, what’s up?” he whispered.
“Hey Luderick, let’s play hockey, eh?” I rasped.
“Cool man, let me put on my goalie stuff,” he said. “Don’t make any noise - my ma is praying again.” He quietly led me through his dark and gloomy home. The heavy shades were drawn, lights were off, and spooky candles flickered upon the holy paintings on the dirty white walls. We crept down the creaky stairs to the damp and musty basement. While Luderick strapped on his goalie equipment among the 1970s decor, I gazed at the religious paintings depicting Jesus, Mary, assorted saints and momentous awe-inspiring scenes hung everywhere along with dozens of rosaries. I’ve once counted 13 different art works of The Last Supper including one made out of macaroni glued on cardboard paper made by Luderick when he was eight. A large collection of dusty vintage Bibles lined along the back cement wall, its titles faded and bindings so weak that a good sneeze would blow them apart. Lined along the back cement wall, a large collection of dusty vintage Bibles, titles faded, and bindings so weak that a good sneeze would blow them apart.
“Good insulation,” Luderick mumbled. “Ok, I’m ready, let’s go.”
Shuffling through the house, scraping and bumping the walls as if he was a suited-up deep sea diver going to the ship’s head, Luderick’s gangly goalie stick swung here and there and knocked over a Mary figurine, one of hundreds of religious figurines carefully placed on the many shelves, steps, and counter tops. Luderick’s mother burst out of her special prayer room with much fury and gave him an earful.
“How many times do I’ve to tell you not to knock over my precious statues? Why do you have to play that violent game? What are you doing with the stick I threw out?” She shrilled on and on, much of which was garbled to my innocent ears. While she was harping on, I peeked into her prayer room and saw a shrine where the density and number of candles was enough to give the Dionne quintuplets a 50th birthday party.
“You gotta forgive my mom,” Luderick said as we shuffled through the snow outside. “She’s getting way too hung up on the Jesus stuff. Christ, I’m her only social life. She spends huge chunks of her time doing religious things. Every day, I mean every day, man, she prays in that room for two solid hours after dinner and cannot be disturbed.”
Mental note: Never visit him again after dinner. Luderick is not so religious. He once quipped, “I never follow the stuff, I’m an agnostic insomniac with dyslexia: I lie awake nights wondering if there is a dog.”
However, his mom still drags him to Church every Sunday morning. He often complains, “At eight in the damn morning! On a weekend no less! Hell, what normal teenager goes to mass so early?”
We played one-on-one street hockey with Luderick in net pretending to be famed Canadien goalie Jacques Plante, and I took slap shots on him as Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion. “Boom Boom” was the sound made when I missed the net and the frozen ball ricocheted off cars, living-room windows, and the garage door. “Calisse, tabernac! Pas encore!” Jacques Plante cursed each time he had to fetch the ball. We played for an hour and shuffled inside after the ball shot on his roof and rolled into the eaves trough.
Over a cup of hot chocolate, without fail, Luderick reveals a conspiracy he has read about or thought of. This time, he explained the many possible conspiracies behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. It was fascinating but I found it frustrating the truth would never be known given the many suspicious details swirling about this case. Luderick, using his sharp deductive mind, offered a unique theory: he thinks Kennedy’s fatal wound was caused by an imploded sneeze. “You can see in the Zapruder film that JFK had his hands in front of his mouth as if he was stifling a sneeze.” I told him Lee Harvey Oswald was guilty because he had three names as other infamous killers in history such as John Wilkes Booth, Mark David Chapman and John Wayne Gacy.
Luderick is the only real friend I’ve. He’s doesn’t mind my hearing impairment and genuinely thinks it’s cool.
His first words when we met were, “Hey neat-o, those hearing aids make you look like a secret service man for the president.” I think I’m his only friend. Luderick was in my geometry class at Canterbury two years ago and was expelled for refusing to abide the school’s suit-and-tie dress code. To make a political statement, he would arrive to class in Smurf pajamas. He claims that, “Ties are useless strips of fabric that do nothing but finance the fashion industry and choke you when you stand too close to a paper shredder.”
We tend to meet on Sunday afternoons, usually to play street hockey and shoot the breeze. His father ran off with the milkman when he was five and Luderick, an only child, has lived with his mother ever since. He’s paranoid about the government, the capitalist system and the military; a large base of his knowledge is taken up by assorted conspiracies that may or may not be true. He’s a prophet ranting and raving that the world will end on Tuesday but makes an appointment with a doctor on Thursday.
I came home at 10:30 pm, munched on a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and prepared to get ready for bed. While I was brushing my teeth, Ilisha cornered me in the bathroom, “You know, Egg, I’ve been thinking,” her eyes laser-beamed me, “how come you smelled of cigarette smoke yesterday morning when I woke you up? Are you sure you didn’t go out at all on New Year’s Eve?”
“Uh, no,” I took a deep breath. “Luderick came over and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes to celebrate New Year’s.”
“Hmmm, I don’t remember the house smelling of smoke.”
I said nothing and continued to brush. She squinted at me and left. Damn! She’s on to me! The noose tightens more.
Once I finished brushing, I checked my face for any signs of manly facial hair. Nothing. It’s disheartening to know that my grandmother has more facial hair than I do.
Saturday, January 1st: New Year’s Day. Last night was a story of lust, deception, panic, and one unused condom in my pocket. It began yesterday afternoon when a gorgeous dark-haired girl invited me to a private New Year’s Eve party at Queen’s restaurant bar. Since I didn’t want to be a dork and in light-year far off remote chance I would be driving her to the nearest hotel afterwards, I “borrowed” my sister’s car while she was out with a college turd. I didn’t have a driver’s license and my parents were away at another party.
I managed to remember and use the 2.5 hours of driving instruction from my traumatized father to drive myself downtown at speeds rivaling an ice cream truck. I parked my sister’s car in a way a car should never be parked and waited for the girl inside the smoke-filled restaurant-bar. Three hours, nine glasses of Coke and two blackened lungs later, it dawns upon me: the girl was never going to show up. I left with a heavy heart. Walking across the parking lot, I saw a big empty space where the car had been parked haphazardly. Stolen! I staggered to a corner and several cups of the aforementioned Coke were ejected onto the snow bank. It was 2:30 am and I went home on a special late-night bus occupied by one other passenger: a drunkenly happy disheveled longhaired man with a bright green parka.
A fierce shaking woke me up this morning, and half-asleep, I turned over but the shaking continued. The blanket was ripped away and a beating of fists rained upon my skinny chest. Giving in, I peeped out of my groggy eyes and they snapped open like broken roller blinds: it was the ugly disheveled long-haired man with a bright green parka! No - it was my sister. Close enough. Ilisha was silently screaming at me, mouthing her words in fury. I plugged in my hearing aids and the peaceful silence was stabbed by her shrill voice.
“...My car? What did you do to my car? Where is it?”
Car? The morning light was bright and my mind was dim. As I squinted at my pissed off, the blurry reality of last night came into clear focus and I scrambled for an explanation. I had to be honest. “It was stolen last night.”
“Stolen? My Honda? What? What happened?” Her grip on my sailboat pajamas loosened.
“Uh, I was home all night and right before I went up to bed, I saw a strange man tip-toeing through the living room and once he saw me, he bolted out the front door and sped off with your car.”
My parents, to my alarm, took my story with dead seriousness and drove me to the police station to file a report. A skinny cop escorted me to a small room in the back of the station, the kind they use to interrogate hardened suspects. I sat on a cold chair bolted to the floor and repeated the story I had told Ilisha and my parents, making sure I kept all details consistent. Inconsistent storytelling will invite suspicion. After my story, he began to shoot me with questions. I couldn’t lip-read him through his standard cop mustache partially hiding his lips. He became frustrated with repeating his questions so many times that Mum had to be brought in to translate. I had to be creative in answering one question: “Give me a description of the intruder – his height, weight, hair colour, appearance, distinguishing features?” The chances of him asking this question was the same as finding a broken potato chip in a party bowl.
“Uh, he was an ugly disheveled long-haired man wearing a bright green parka.” Better him than me. He made me look through a thick well-worn mug shot book but I couldn’t “find” his picture. Lots of scary fellows in there; their looks alone would be enough for me to fork over my cash in absence of any weapons.
Back home, we looked for other stolen items, but found nothing missing.
“Thank gawd, nothing else was taken,” Mum said in her American twang.
“Brilliant! And, my rare book collection is untouched,” Father noted in his stuffy British accent.
“They didn’t touch my money on the dresser,” Ilisha mentioned.
After we all settled down, Ilisha was on her way out on a date with the same geek as the night before, and as she was putting on her coat, she frowned at my snow boots, her eyes narrowing. “Egg, if you didn’t go out last night, why were your boots wet?”
My neck felt hot, and I stammered, “I, I, I tried to chase your car after the bad guy drove off.”
“Strange - you didn’t mention that before,” she said before shutting the door. The noose of guilt tightened.
I went into my room, sat at my desk and I made 6 New Year’s resolutions:
1. I shall not procrastinate. Writing this resolution list today and not halfway through the year is a start.
2. Since this is my last year of high school, I’ll go to Aviation College this Fall and work hard to achieve my life-long dream of becoming a pilot.
3. I shall find myself a girlfriend before I turn 18. If I don’t achieve this goal, I’ll become sexually enamored with inanimate objects such as telephone poles, if what my friend Luderick says is true.
4. I shall start bodybuilding for real - no more wimpy push-ups. My body resembles a poorly drawn stick-man figure and I must uphold the Canadian image of the burly bearded lumberjack for the world. Pet moose and beer would be optional.
5. I shall write a daily journal of my life and thoughts as a hearing-impaired teen.
6. I shall stick to this New Year’s resolution list like a bug on flypaper in an obscure middle-of-the-road greasy spoon.
This is pretty much the same list of resolutions as it has been for the past three years. This is a do-or-die year, especially the girlfriend part. Turning 18 is a rite of passage into manhood and I want all the ingredients of a real man - a girl on my arm, wide shoulders, and a Beaver bush plane in the driveway to boot. Sexual experience would be a bonus.
Why did the gorgeous dark-haired girl invite me and not show up at the restaurant-bar? Was she serious or was she playing a joke on a hearing aid wearing skinny guy? I must be a damn fool.
Sunday, January 2: After dinner, I walked to Luderick’s house with my hockey stick and orange ball. Before I rang the doorbell, my friend opened the timeworn door with utmost quietness. “Hey Egg, what’s up?” he whispered.
“Hey Luderick, let’s play hockey, eh?” I rasped.
“Cool man, let me put on my goalie stuff,” he said. “Don’t make any noise - my ma is praying again.” He quietly led me through his dark and gloomy home. The heavy shades were drawn, lights were off, and spooky candles flickered upon the holy paintings on the dirty white walls. We crept down the creaky stairs to the damp and musty basement. While Luderick strapped on his goalie equipment among the 1970s decor, I gazed at the religious paintings depicting Jesus, Mary, assorted saints and momentous awe-inspiring scenes hung everywhere along with dozens of rosaries. I’ve once counted 13 different art works of The Last Supper including one made out of macaroni glued on cardboard paper made by Luderick when he was eight. A large collection of dusty vintage Bibles lined along the back cement wall, its titles faded and bindings so weak that a good sneeze would blow them apart. Lined along the back cement wall, a large collection of dusty vintage Bibles, titles faded, and bindings so weak that a good sneeze would blow them apart.
“Good insulation,” Luderick mumbled. “Ok, I’m ready, let’s go.”
Shuffling through the house, scraping and bumping the walls as if he was a suited-up deep sea diver going to the ship’s head, Luderick’s gangly goalie stick swung here and there and knocked over a Mary figurine, one of hundreds of religious figurines carefully placed on the many shelves, steps, and counter tops. Luderick’s mother burst out of her special prayer room with much fury and gave him an earful.
“How many times do I’ve to tell you not to knock over my precious statues? Why do you have to play that violent game? What are you doing with the stick I threw out?” She shrilled on and on, much of which was garbled to my innocent ears. While she was harping on, I peeked into her prayer room and saw a shrine where the density and number of candles was enough to give the Dionne quintuplets a 50th birthday party.
“You gotta forgive my mom,” Luderick said as we shuffled through the snow outside. “She’s getting way too hung up on the Jesus stuff. Christ, I’m her only social life. She spends huge chunks of her time doing religious things. Every day, I mean every day, man, she prays in that room for two solid hours after dinner and cannot be disturbed.”
Mental note: Never visit him again after dinner. Luderick is not so religious. He once quipped, “I never follow the stuff, I’m an agnostic insomniac with dyslexia: I lie awake nights wondering if there is a dog.”
However, his mom still drags him to Church every Sunday morning. He often complains, “At eight in the damn morning! On a weekend no less! Hell, what normal teenager goes to mass so early?”
We played one-on-one street hockey with Luderick in net pretending to be famed Canadien goalie Jacques Plante, and I took slap shots on him as Bernie “Boom Boom” Geoffrion. “Boom Boom” was the sound made when I missed the net and the frozen ball ricocheted off cars, living-room windows, and the garage door. “Calisse, tabernac! Pas encore!” Jacques Plante cursed each time he had to fetch the ball. We played for an hour and shuffled inside after the ball shot on his roof and rolled into the eaves trough.
Over a cup of hot chocolate, without fail, Luderick reveals a conspiracy he has read about or thought of. This time, he explained the many possible conspiracies behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963. It was fascinating but I found it frustrating the truth would never be known given the many suspicious details swirling about this case. Luderick, using his sharp deductive mind, offered a unique theory: he thinks Kennedy’s fatal wound was caused by an imploded sneeze. “You can see in the Zapruder film that JFK had his hands in front of his mouth as if he was stifling a sneeze.” I told him Lee Harvey Oswald was guilty because he had three names as other infamous killers in history such as John Wilkes Booth, Mark David Chapman and John Wayne Gacy.
Luderick is the only real friend I’ve. He’s doesn’t mind my hearing impairment and genuinely thinks it’s cool.
His first words when we met were, “Hey neat-o, those hearing aids make you look like a secret service man for the president.” I think I’m his only friend. Luderick was in my geometry class at Canterbury two years ago and was expelled for refusing to abide the school’s suit-and-tie dress code. To make a political statement, he would arrive to class in Smurf pajamas. He claims that, “Ties are useless strips of fabric that do nothing but finance the fashion industry and choke you when you stand too close to a paper shredder.”
We tend to meet on Sunday afternoons, usually to play street hockey and shoot the breeze. His father ran off with the milkman when he was five and Luderick, an only child, has lived with his mother ever since. He’s paranoid about the government, the capitalist system and the military; a large base of his knowledge is taken up by assorted conspiracies that may or may not be true. He’s a prophet ranting and raving that the world will end on Tuesday but makes an appointment with a doctor on Thursday.
I came home at 10:30 pm, munched on a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and prepared to get ready for bed. While I was brushing my teeth, Ilisha cornered me in the bathroom, “You know, Egg, I’ve been thinking,” her eyes laser-beamed me, “how come you smelled of cigarette smoke yesterday morning when I woke you up? Are you sure you didn’t go out at all on New Year’s Eve?”
“Uh, no,” I took a deep breath. “Luderick came over and smoked a whole pack of cigarettes to celebrate New Year’s.”
“Hmmm, I don’t remember the house smelling of smoke.”
I said nothing and continued to brush. She squinted at me and left. Damn! She’s on to me! The noose tightens more.
Once I finished brushing, I checked my face for any signs of manly facial hair. Nothing. It’s disheartening to know that my grandmother has more facial hair than I do.