I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow

by Jonathan Goldstein

  “And our next caller,” I say, leaning into the microphone.

  3:10 P.M.

  Laurie from Vancouver wants to know what can be done about people peeing in pools.

  “More poolside bathrooms,” Helen says.

  “Or what about dividing the pool,” Howard says.

  “Instead of a shallow end and a deep end, you have a peeing section and a non-peeing section.”

  “That’s disgusting,” my father says.

  3:45 P.M.

  Rebecca from London, Ontario, wants to know what to do about the tantalizing smell of cooking wafting through the vent from her neighbour’s apartment. It’s making her hungry all the time.

  “I try to fend off the smell by making bread and cookies,” she says. “Since this whole thing started, I’ve gained ten pounds.”

  “Rebecca, don’t try to combat good smells with good smells,” Howard says. “Combat good smells with bad smells. Stop bathing, don’t flush, and sprinkle patchouli oil liberally around the apartment.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Helen says.

  4:00 P.M.

  Steve from Ottawa has just broken up with his very first girlfriend.

  “How do you get over a first love?” he asks.

  “You never do,” Howard says. “It just stays with you and becomes a part of who you are.”

  I ask my father if he still remembers his first love.

  “Of course I do,” he says. “I was still in high school. It was really nice.”

  But when I ask him for details, like what her name was, he starts to blush and get uncomfortable.

  Even though it’s over fifty years ago, he’s still afraid to get in trouble with my mother.

  4:40 P.M.

  After the last message the roundtable is adjourned.

  “We did some really good work,” my father says.

  “Maybe next time we can do it on a weekday,” Helen says, “so I can get out of school.”

  “And maybe next time,” Howard says, “we can get a cheese platter.”

  Unpredictable

  (38 weeks)

  MONDAY.

  I put down the phone, sweating and breathing hard.

  “Who were you arguing with?” Marie-Claude asks. She’s over at my place, visiting with Helen and Katie.

  “My dad—and we weren’t arguing. I was trying to explain that it’s impossible for him to have gotten an email ‘from the internet.’”

  I look over and see that Helen and Katie are reading a book of Garfield comics.

  “I feel bad for Jon,” Helen says.

  “Why?” I ask. “He has a pretty sweet deal. A dog. A cat.

  A coffee mug, as well as a counter upon which he can place his coffee mug.”

  “But when was the last time he had a meal?” she asks. “Garfield’s always eating all his food. It doesn’t make sense that he hasn’t died of starvation yet.” I want to explain to Helen and Katie that it’s not just comics that don’t make sense, that life doesn’t make sense either, but I’m not sure how to put it, so instead I tell them that Jon probably eats his meals between the panels and that, in fact, most of life occurs between the panels.

  We should probably acknowledge life’s nonsensical nature more often, though. I’m not saying it should be brought up a hundred times a day, but maybe once in a while—to keep things in perspective. Like when the president finishes a speech, he could look into the TV camera and say, “But still, we really don’t know anything at all. Life is unknowable, and one day we’ll all die without ever having made much sense out of it. It’s weird.”

  Saying stuff like that should replace “Good night” and “God bless.”

  WEDNESDAY.

  I’m downtown at a remaindered bookstore, browsing through fad diet cookbooks from the nineties, when I come across a book called The Amazing Kreskin’s Future with the Stars, published in 2001. The famed mentalist sent out letters to celebrities asking for their predictions about the future and then turned their responses into a book— even including the letters from celebrities who wrote back that they weren’t interested in participating. I suppose if you’re going to place “The Amazing” in front of your name, you’ve got to have a certain amount of chutzpah.

  Flipping through the book, I see that Ed McMahon envisioned a world where television would one day be projected onto the clouds, and that Roseanne Barr prophesied she would be the greatest television talk-show host of all time.

  Who’d have thought cloud TV would prove a more sane prediction?

  I grab an unauthorized biography of Angela Lansbury and leave.

  SATURDAY.

  “Did you know that Angela Lansbury’s son was in the Manson gang?” I ask Tony over the phone. “Or that she played Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate even though she was only three years older than him?”

  “I’m not a fan of celebrity bios,” he says, “but I especially hate those ones from rock stars where they conclude the book with stuff like, ‘I’d flush all the cocaine and ménages à trois down the toilet for the love of one good woman.’ What a crock.”

  “But you’re a one-woman man,” I say. “You wouldn’t trade Natalie for a Natalie-sized statue of Natalie made of cocaine.”

  “It’s just easy for the guitarist from Aerosmith to sing the praises of settling down when he’s got twenty-eight thousand one-night stands under his belt.”

  Tony considers his own words for a moment.

  “I should tweet that,” he says.

  “Could you imagine our grandfathers tweeting?”

  “From the age of eight my grandfather worked nineteen hours a day milking goats and digging wells,” Tony says.

  “He’d never have had time for social media.”

  I think about my dad emailing up a storm. Then I consider his father.

  “I don’t think my grandfather even knew how to use a fast-food drive-through speaker,” I say. “I was once with him when he tried to order at a Wendy’s. He started yelling for boiled eggs in all directions. Didn’t even bother to roll down the car window.”

  Our grandfathers could have no more predicted this world than we can predict the world of our grandchildren.

  “Hush up, Grandpa,” they will one day tell us. “I’m trying to watch Vomiting with the Stars.” And then they will go back to staring up at the clouds.

  Space and Mass

  (37 weeks)

  SUNDAY.

  On my way to the CBC cafeteria for lunch, I stop into the men’s room to wash my hands. The hand dryer is so weak that every time I use it, I can’t help closing my eyes and pretending that an asthmatic old man is blowing on my hands.

  In this flight of fancy, the man’s name is Doc and he sits on a stool dispensing old-timey wisdoms while lamenting the good old days of steam blimps and ankle-to-forehead muslin underwear.

  “I’m the last practitioner of a dying profession,” Doc laments between huffs and puffs. “With all these modern continual-cloth towel dispensers, I’ll soon be going the way of the elevator boy and the seltzer lad.”

  After close to a minute, I give up and wipe my hands on the ends of my shirt.

  I return to my desk with Salisbury steak only to realize that I’ve forgotten the cutlery. I search my desk drawer for a fork and knife, but succeed in finding only a teaspoon.

  Eating an entire steak dinner with a plastic teaspoon proves an interesting challenge. Halfway through the meal, I become curious about the Salisbury steak’s etymology. After consulting Wikipedia, I learn it was invented by a Dr. James Henry Salisbury, an MD during the Civil War. The doctor believed that vegetables were responsible for “heart disease, tumours, mental illness, and tuberculosis” and that his steak dish, when eaten three times a day with coffee, could be healthful and also serve as a cure for battleinduced diarrhea.

  Finishing the last spoonful, I hope that, at the very least, it’s cured me of my desire for dessert.

  Ten minutes later, back in the cafeteria, I
see it has not.

  MONDAY.

  The local repertory house is playing 2001: A Space Odyssey. While watching, I notice three things of interest:

  1, while Hilton Hotels and Howard Johnsons are shown to survive forty years into the future, neckties don’t;

  2, there is precisely one joke in the entire movie. One of the characters, about to use a space toilet, is confronted by a placard containing complex Ikea-like instructions regarding its operation; and 3, the monolith looks an awful lot like an iPhone.

  The person in the seat in front of me is eating McDonald’s, and as a result I’m unconsciously experiencing outer space as a place that smells of Big Macs. This kind of thing has happened to me before. While watching Das Boot, the person beside me was wearing Polo cologne, which made the submarine smell like a sports bar.

  When the movie is done, I find myself in the mood for something only slightly less sublime than outer space: a Big Mac. I will eat it with thoughts about space, the future of man, and the curative power of ground beef rattling around my head like empty soda cans on a late-night metro car.

  THURSDAY.

  Tucker and I are sitting on my couch, passing a container of Häagen-Dazs back and forth.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if the Canadian dollar and the Canadian calorie were somehow linked?” he asks.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Like when the American dollar is weak, American calories would also become weak. So when a hundred Canadian calories are the same as eighty-two American calories, the time would be right to go over the border, rent a motel room, and spend the weekend eating pizza and doughnuts.”

  “And then the moment you cross back into Canada, you instantly get fatter?” I ask.

  “Yes, but since we weigh ourselves in kilograms, we can still believe ourselves fit.”

  Whatever happened to those 2001 moon colonies we were promised—a place where we could eat ice cream all day and still bounce around as light as lunar dust? Sometimes I just can’t stand the unbearable fatness of being.

  Real Tears, Finally

  (36 weeks)

  MONDAY, 7:00 A.M.

  I’ve decided to spend Christmas vacation in New York City. During the course of the eleven-hour train ride, I pass the time eavesdropping. The best thing I overhear is a large man in a Miami Dolphins cap explain how, in the middle of writing a cheque for a Jacuzzi down payment, his pen ran out of ink. He saw it as a sign from God not to buy a Jacuzzi.

  “When the Almighty raises a hand, I obey,” he said.

  1:00 P.M.

  As people on the train begin to doze, I throw It’s a Wonderful Life into my laptop, and by the end of the movie there are tears streaming down my face. Success! With my cheeks still wet, I run down the aisle to the washroom to see what I look like crying. Not bad.

  I believe that the world breaks down into two groups: those who want to see what they look like crying and those who do not. For some reason, most of the people I befriend seem to fall into the former group—a group that never fully throw themselves into the moment, but always hold on to a little bit of narrative objectivity, even at their gloomiest.

  7:00 P.M.

  The train arrives in Penn Station, and I set off to meet Starlee, who I’ll be staying with. When I get to the bistro, she is standing by the bar talking to a semi-well-known comic. Shortly after introducing us, the semi-well-known comic leaves and I take his seat. I order a scotch and water, and after several sips, notice the drink tastes rather watery. This is because it’s the glass of water the semi-well-known comic has left behind. In a panic, I blot my tongue with cocktail napkins. While an entertaining bunch, comedians as a group do not impress me as adhering to the highest code of hygiene.

  Starlee continues telling me a story, but I’m not able to pay much attention as I’m distracted by the thought that I may now have hepatitis—or at the very least a bad case of the cooties.

  11:30 P.M.

  I read the semi-well-known comic’s Wikipedia entry and there is no mention of contagious diseases. I tell myself everything will be fine.

  TUESDAY, 3:00 A.M.

  I awake convinced that I’m in the throes of a fever sweat brought on by the onset of mononucleosis, an illness of which I have only the vaguest understanding. I turn on the lights, and look it up on Wikipedia.

  9:00 A.M.

  There’s a knock at the door. I roll off the couch and answer it. It’s Ruby, Starlee’s fifteen-year-old intern.

  “Why in God’s name do you have an intern?” I ask when Ruby leaves the room to go sort Starlee’s bookshelf.

  “I have a lot to impart,” she says.

  Starlee is working on a self-help book called It Is Your Fault, and Ruby has been booking appointments all week with psychics, behaviourists, and self-professed shamans for Starlee’s research. Ruby carries around a dog-eared copy of The Bell Jar and a notebook she uses to write down the little bits of wisdom that Starlee imparts.

  Ruby re-enters the room and Starlee begins to impart.

  “Choose your college based on where the cutest boys are,” Starlee says, and Ruby takes furious notes.

  I find myself struggling to come up with a couple wise things, in the hope of making it into the notebook.

  “When buying cottage cheese,” I say, “always reach to the very back of the shelf.”

  Ruby nods politely, the notebook closed on her lap.

  We all sit around the kitchen table, surrounded by last night’s beer bottles, eating pretzels for breakfast while Starlee dispenses life lessons: “Read Joan Didion. Don’t let skinny girls depress you.”

  Eventually Starlee’s wisdoms will run dry and she will have Ruby walk her dog and defrost her freezer.

  When Ruby leaves the room, I reach for her notebook. Flipping it open, I write: “The line between an internship and a kidnapping can often be blurry.”

  SATURDAY.

  I decide to fly back to Montreal, and on the plane I’m seated beside a little girl reading Little House in the Big Woods. This is the first book I ever read, and seeing it again, in this little girl’s hands, makes me feel misty. This in spite of the fact I hated the book so much that it almost turned me off reading altogether.

  There’s just something about flying that always makes me a little emotional, makes me feel my own mortality in a very particular way. Perhaps it’s the way everything looks so small from up here. Or perhaps it’s the way that turbulence makes me feel, in the pit of my stomach, the tenuousness of life. More than likely though, it’s probably due to the double bourbon I always have when I fly. There should be a word for this feeling. Call it bourboulent.

  New Year’s

  (35 weeks)

  WEDNESDAY, 7:10 P.M.

  Tucker calls to see what I’m doing for New Year’s Eve.

  “Catching up on my reading,” I say. “I’m going to be forty soon and I’ve only read one Tolstoy novel. No, New Year’s is kid’s stuff.”

  “Come on. I’ll make you a sash and you can pretend to be the baby new year,” he says. “It’ll make you feel young.”

  After putting down the phone, I can’t bring myself to read Tolstoy. I instead reach for the Stephen King novel I keep on the TV for when the cable goes off. I begin with the dedication page and find myself wondering if, after so many dozens of books, Stephen King fears running out of family and friends to dedicate his work to. Perhaps he’ll soon have to start making dedications to casual acquaintances, like the guy who holds the door open for him at his local convenience store. When he has to start dedicating books to people he can’t even stand, he may realize it’s time to get out of the writing business.

  8:30 P.M.

  Marie-Claude phones to see if I want to come over and celebrate with her and the kids.

  “Celebrate what?” I ask. “The march to the grave?”

  “You know, you can afford to be a little more receptive to the world around you.”

  “Next time I’m in a restroom I’ll keep the stall do
or open to shake hands and pass out business cards.”

  “Baby steps,” she says. “Next time you’re in a restroom just try washing your hands.”

  9:45 P.M.

  My mother calls. When I tell her I’m not going out, she starts to worry.

  “You’re sick,” she says. “You sound nasal.”

  “I was born nasal. I’m just not in the mood. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Even your father’s having a party,” she says.

  She explains that, as we speak, he’s seated at the kitchen table, eating crackers and listening to the radio.

  “And not talk radio, but the music kind,” she says. “Let him have his fun. It’s New Year’s, after all.”

  10:30 P.M.

  Tony phones from his future in-laws.

  “I’m not doing anything,” I say, pre-emptively. “It’s going to be a new year tomorrow whether Jonathan Goldstein dances on a coffee table with a lampshade on his head or not.”

  “You remind me of a girl I once dated who always fastforwarded through the opening credits when we watched videos,” he says.

  “She sounds like a keeper.”

  “We broke up after two weeks,” he says. “It could have probably lasted at least a month or two, but she fastforwarded us. The point is, you can’t rush to the end. Life shouldn’t be about that.”

  We get off the phone. I hit the metaphorical pause button and stare out the window.

  11:15 P.M.

  Characters in books and on TV shows often learn about what really matters in life through the guidance of helpful supernatural beings who know more than we mortals ever will.Take Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, for instance, or the family from Alf.

  Staring out the window, I consider how in real life, all we’ve got are our hunches about what matters. And, of course, we also have our family and friends to steer us a little when we’ve a hunch our hunches are wrong.