“What are you looking at?”

“That black fish!”

There is an aquarium behind me. A handful of colourful fish weave through the artificial world. They say fish are soothing.

“He keeps chasing the yellow fish around. He’s being a jerk.”

“Maybe they’re playing a game. How do you know it’s not fun?”

“See there he goes again. It’s not a game. Look at the yellow fish. He’s thinking, ‘Why won’t that guy leave me alone!’ ”

I feel obligated to point out that we are not characters in Finding Nemo. “I don’t think that fish is thinking anything.”

“He’s doing it again! What an asshole!”

I love that she thinks one fish is being mean to another fish, and is getting genuinely upset about it. I tell her so. Although let’s remember our priorities, it’s date night. So, I add, “Now quit worrying about the fucking fish and pay attention to me.”

“Did you just threaten to give me a karate chop to my wind pipe?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re going to argue with me that you’re a little butch.”

It took me a week, but I won that argument. Although any ground I gained, I lost when I told her my love increased for her twelve to thirteen percent.

Do you ever forget to put the sheets back on the bed until right before bed time? I hate that. You’re all geared up to climb in to a comfy bed and let the days troubles ease away, and the naked bed mocks you.

That’s what happened. We forgot to make the bed. The sheets were upstairs in a pile, and I was dreading that one last chore. I bitched about it as I trudged up the stairs to our room. But when I walked in and saw that she had made the bed without a word as a nice surprise, I looked at her and said, “My love for you just increased twelve to thirteen percent.” She wasn’t impressed.

I argued that she should be. Increasing our love, grown over our 9 year history, in one instant, 12 to 13 percent, is impressive. I mean, she didn’t give me a kidney, she just made the bed. I figured I had been pretty generous. She’s an accountant, she appreciates numbers, she saw my point. Still, I was getting in a habit of digging myself into holes. So when I brought up the blue cheese I was already in trouble.

We were hanging out, and I said I loved her, and she asked, “How much?” Yes, dorky, and sickly sweet, but we were by ourselves, and this is a game we like to play. Don’t judge. I try to stay away from the standards, I try stretch a bit, and this time I said, “I’d give up blue cheese for you.”

“Blue cheese! You’d give up mold for me! Nice.”

“But blue cheese is so awesome.”

She wasn’t buying it. The word “mold” was used repeatedly. It seemed to me she was concentrating on the wrong details. The point was that I loved blue cheese and I offered to give it up for her.

“But blue cheese! Moldy stinky cheese! Why not chocolate?! If you asked me, I’d say chocolate.”

Well now we were just arguing the relative merits of different foods. It’s the sincerity of the offer that makes a difference. And when I made it, my offer was genuine, hers was not. When pressed she admitted her giving up chocolate was unlikely.

“See, that’s the difference. I meant it.”

“So you’re going to give up blue cheese for me? To prove you love me?”

“Well not now. You’ve ruined it.”

“Seriously! Seriously? What the fuck’r you doing?”

“You looked so cute.” She finds my confused morning look and awry hair boyish and endearing. “It’s a good picture. It shows why I love you.” At least the camera was pointed at my face, that’s something.

I was a 35 year old Engineer and computer programmer, with no experience that would recommend me to the job of acrobat, but enthusiasm counters almost anything. I became a professional circus performer.

I just phoned up a circus company. I said, “A lady you know from Edmonton said I should call you when I moved to Vancouver. I liked her circus class. Um, she said I should call you?” I was nervous about this. They said, “See you Monday night.” So after work I went, and I trained with them for about about two years.

I tried many things. The first one I loved, was standing on the end of the Teeterboard when two people jumped off a tower on to the other end. The result was a rocket ride three or four storeys into the air.

The teeterboard pushes you up with an impressive force. When you first learn, you simply stand as stiff as the board you are on. As you progress you learn how to make a tiny jump, only a small bend of your knees, and then you straighten in time with the jumpers from the tower. The smallest of efforts, properly timed, are magnified by the springy board and give you extra height. However, if you are out of alignment, or your timing is off, the board will drive your feet upwards so hard that your knees buckle, and you will do what is refered to as a buck-a-roo. I only ever did one buck-a-roo, it was enough to end my career as a Teeterboard artist.

Every Wednesday we did Teeterboard. I did it for, probably eight evenings. For the first six I wore a safety harness, in my mind, it was part of the ride. The seventh night the harness came off at the end of practice. I did a couple landings without thinking about that too much, the evening ended with success. On the eighth night, I lost it, a bit, and that was enough.

As the feet of the two tower jumpers began to descend, my concentration drifted, and when I found it again, that board was driving my feet straight into my ass. The next day it felt like I had done a couple hundred deep knee bends. I was thrown, ass over tea kettle, limbs flailing, in a small awkward arc that had me landing on my head. My spotters guided me to the ground safely, but it changed my perspective. This fabulous fun would never replace my income, and was an irretrievably stupid risk for a man who made his living using the contents of his skull.

So, I mostly praticed two person hand to hand acrobatics, which I was much better at anyway. My partner and I worked on tricks, or moves, tie enough of those together successfully, you end up with a performance.

In this trick. My partner and I face each other two strides apart. I’m crouching slightly, my elbows are locked and my hands are laced between my knees. She walks forward, places her hands on my shoulders, steps one foot into the cradle of my palms, and as she drives her body up I straighten, lifting her foot. On the way up, she pirouettes as I separate my hands, I catch her other foot as she completes the spin, she locks every muscle in her body, I catch her momentum, and we end with her standing in my hands at shoulder level. Simple.

We couldn’t get it. Night after night I thought, “I’ll never be strong enough, she’s too heavy, I’m old, my back hurts, this whole thing is ridiculous! But we are so close!” I didn’t think I’d be able to do it.

Unlocking the secrets of an acrobatics move was fun, and something entirely unique, or it was for me. You have to find a language to express a physical movement that alludes description. It becomes this nebulous thing. You know it’s wrong, but you can’t find the words to say why. Actually, I never knew, I was terrible at knowing what was wrong, but they did.

Two members of our group were helping us practice. They were also boy / girl hand to hand actobats. They were strong and talented performers who had mastered this trick, and went on to circus fame. On this day however, they were trying to help my partner and I figure out the problem.

The girl training us tried it with me a couple of times. The two of us couldn’t do it either, so there was no doubt the source of the problem, it was me. She stepped back and said, “I don’t know. I can’t push. He’s gooshy.”

My partner is French. Her English is excellent, but this lost her, so she wrinkled her forehead and asked, “What is gooshy?”

“I don’t know. I go to stand, and he’s not there, his hands aren’t solid. I can’t push. He’s gooshy.”

Now she got it. “Yes! You’re gooshy!” she said, and threw her hand at me in exasperation. They watch me now. As she steps into my hands I drop them a fraction. I was readying myself to lift an enormous weight, except she wasn’t, she was tiny, but I was trying to do all the work. When she began to push I fell out below her, so I had to catch her first, which worked against both of us, and felt impossible.

As I crouched down ready to try again I muttered my new mantra, “No gooshy, no gooshy, no gooshy.” And I moved against her foot as soon as I felt it. Fluid power, like an arc on graph paper, up over my head, spin, and she’s standing in my hands. Beautiful. Simple.

It’s the beginning of February. Usually I’m thinking uncharitable thoughts about the people crowding the exercise equipment. Just give up on your stupid New Year’s Resolution already. New leaf time.

Yoga, tennis, walking, rock climbing, swimming, rowing, boxing, biking, dancing, bowling, running, stretching, or maybe the flying trapeze. Find something you can enjoy. You’re body is a depreciating asset, but there is unfound power and grace in it yet. There is poetry in motion.

I was paid for one circus performance. It was the hardest won money of my life. I’m proud of it.

Thank you:

• Peter and Nino, founders of The Underground Circus, who trained me.
• Jeff and Kelsey, featured performers in their second Cirque du Soliel show, who discovered what made me gooshy.
• Marie-eve, actress, acrobat, stunt woman, and yoga teacher who trusted me to balance her in the air, when she probably shouldn’t have.
• The family I met at the Underground Circus.

My apologies:

To you, for that being so much like liner notes, from a teen heartbreak album.

I met really nice people right off the start. Two Frenchmen in my hostel room introduced themselves, and insisted I come to dinner with them. They had heard of a place just down the block. They pronounced my name with this lifting French accent that was inviting. “Come on Dirk. You must come Dirk. What else? Come on Dirk. We know of a place.” They were great.

So were the rest of the people I met hanging around with them. They were all great people, who spoke French. Tourists from France, or Eastern Canada. The Spanish employees at tourist hubs, like train stations, spoke French as their second language. I don’t have a second language, so I can certainly not fault them for failing to have a third, but it was isolating, and somehow exhausting to be on the edge of understanding for hours at a time.

I followed them to a couple of clubs. Lots of beautiful people and alcoves with strange lighting and modern lounging furniture. Huge haute sterile affairs, lonely places, or so they’ve always felt to me.

I tried to shake my funk with a walk up one of the main plaza streets, a tourist hot spot. Beautiful buildings along a wide tree lined pedestrian area. The space was lovely, the experience was not. Every thirty paces stood a guy blowing a whistle making this rhythmic rolling high pitched sound; a rave kid nightmare. I never did come to understand if they were selling the whistles themselves, or using that as an attraction to sell you something else, although I couldn’t imagine either approach being successful.

The sound chased me from all directions as I weaved through the crowded alley of trinket vendors and buskers. Street performers can be amazing, but these were all modified versions of the “The Statue”, which many of them did well, very imaginative costumes. Still, no magicians, jugglers, singers, musicians, dancers, or acrobats. Just crowds, commerce, “The Statue”, and the whistle sound track. At night this area is patrolled by surprisingly unattractive, yet very aggressive prostitutes. It was all bringing me down, man.

The culmination of the street was a huge square with a fountain at it’s centre, surrounded by stone figures. The sculptures were built to the scale of divinity, set on podiums, so you have to look up to see their beautiful looming feet. The buildings, everything, it all started to feel that way. Like it was built to impress the peasant or the invading army; magnificent and imposing.

I had to resort to an English pub. World Cup was on. I scribbled in my book, met a guy, his bachelor party, and a nice fellow from the Netherlands who worked on a ship that repaired local beaches by moving sand from the bottom of the ocean. The bartender spoke enough English that she qualified as the only resident of Spain I managed to have a conversation with. She was pretty, which was nice, although she recommended the pizza, which was horrible. Not a total loss, the evening was not very Spanish, but it got me back on the upswing.

Still, I had written Barcelona off. I just needed to kill the morning and then it was off to the airport to meet my girl. I undertook one of my aimless wanderings and it led me through this park; it was amazing. The massive fountain built into a sloping hill was beautiful and inviting. Kids splashed in it and small groups wandered the surrounding path which invited you to view it from different angles. And, all the interesting people in the city were here!

I joined those lounging in the sunny grass; couples and kids and families. A few guitars and frisbees, jugglers, some tight rope walkers practicing in the trees, yoga, a guy manipulating glass spheres, hula hoops, and two young men struggling with a hand to hand stunt. Hey! I know that one, but the language barrier kept me from telling them. Men threaded their way though the crowds quietly offering cold cheap beer they sold out of plastic grocery bags. It was my sort of place, the antithesis of the touristy plaza. So I lingered, and came around to think that maybe Barcelona and I had a future together after all.

When I arrived in the city, on my way in from the airport, every time I stepped off a train the next train was right there, it was a journey of green lights. It was the experience I used to time my trip back to pick up my girl, which was filled with red lights. I was late, but just a little.

Wait, what! Terminal 2, there’s a Terminal 2! Fuck. How do I get there!? Another train! Fuck. And so, I am running, sweaty, stressed out, and an hour late, when I see her, looking worried, exhausted, and so tiny with her backpack on.

She sees me, and bursts into tears. When we pull back from our embrace I say, “I love you. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” It’s nothing personal, it was just timing, and my heart was somewhere else. It wasn’t you Barcelona, it was me.

I filled the pot with water, turned it on low, and went for a shower. Afterward, wrapped in a towel, I found it bubbling, scraped at the bottom, and splashed a quantity of boiling black crusty water at my navel. She found me, naked and yelping, tracing a single piece of ice, pinched between my fingers, over my stomach.

Some lessons, you learn the hard way.

So, for obvious reasons, I haven’t written anything at all, except that lame mullet joke. I don’t even have time to get the last word in with my sisters. Well, it will have to do. I’ll try again when I figure out that damn wrap.

Amsterdam, as advertised

The first thing I saw exiting the train station was a square full of blowing newspapers. A lonely apocalyptic scene, except there were people everywhere, and none of them seemed zombie like, I’d know, I’m qualified. It took me a day and a half to realize something strange was going on. The first person I asked said, “You know about the garbage strike, right?” Which made more sense than what I had assumed, so I felt apologetic for my leap. “I’m sorry, I thought maybe it was always like this.”

Garbage will swallow a city in a surprisingly short time

I tried to see beyond the garbage, but it wasn’t a landscape that appealed to me, narrow streets, and two dimensional canyon like architecture. But, the thousands of bikes and pedestrians produced a rhythm I liked, a people centric heart beat.

Plenty of people pour into Amsterdam to party, and it’s definitely a good place to do that. In fact, if letting your hair down is out the question, then Amsterdam is not for you, because there are certainly prettier places. However, if you are a little adventurous there are gems in the city for any taste. I saw some great street dancers, talked to a DJ I liked, saw great acts at a blues bar , and I watched a beautiful couple in a smokey coffee shop pull back from a deep kiss with an enviable mix of adoration and sex in their eyes.

This is a playground for all of Europe and it shows. My random wanderings planted me at a bar with a rainbow of beautiful people. I thought maybe they were shooting a United Colors of Benetton Ad in the place. I finished my beer and got out before someone saw me and started to point and laugh. I went looking for locals, and those I found, I really liked. They confirmed what I had already observed, locals are treated differently, there is a strong sense of community in Amsterdam, the tourists get the tacky candy coating.

The Anne Frank museum was one of the few that held any pull for me. It’s well done. There are hundreds of exihibits weaving throughout the house. The one that captivated me was a small square of paper pinned to the wall. Anna’s father used this tiny map to track the bits of news he got from the radio about the Allied progress.

Anne’s father planned to hide from the Nazi’s. He hid his family and some friends, seven people, for two years, until someone betrayed them, and they were all taken to concentration camps. Nine year old Anne, died in a camp believing the rest of her family was already dead. Months later her father was saved by the Allied liberation. He was the only surviving member of his family of four.

As I stood there, I thought of what it would be like to carry that weight and to look at the pins in that map everyday and hope help had made it to the next town. I think now that it would be a good recolection the next time I feel put out by something in my privileged life.

A coworker of mine was preparing for a public meeting to discuss an environmental clean-up. Being the voice of Big Oil at a public meeting is a nightmare. A mob mentality can take hold, plus you have to deal with the personification of that character from the Simpsons, who shouts, “What about the children?! Won’t somebody please think of the children!?” I thought it would be funny for him to open his comments by asking, “By a show of hands, how many of you rode bicycles to the meeting tonight?” I still think that’s funny.

Oil is our way of life, yes yours too. We have a complex world wide network of infrastructure and technology to find, extract, refine, transport, and use petroleum products. It is the largest single industry in the world and it is woven into every aspect of our lives from how we get our food to why we don’t sit in the dark. I understand the urge to curse the oil industry, but the soapbox you are trying to get up on is plastic, it’s made of oil. This is not an industry problem, it’s a human one.

Do you know how people choose where to buy their gas? Location and price. People buy gas at a station that is on the way to or from work, or they drive a little further to save a few pennies per litre. No one pays more for gas based on the environmental performance of the company selling it.

The BP spill will be analyzed, problems will be identified, guilty parties will be named, new procedures will be put in place, but it’s all sort of irrelevant. We all understand that continuing to get oil out of the ground is not making grass greener and water cleaner, so where does all this indignant shock come from? You and I are the reason men are drilling for oil more than a mile under the ocean, so our hand wringing and finger pointing is disingenuous, because none of us rode bicycles to this meeting.