Tag Archives: Lapensee Youth Hostel

Things are going well here in the Great White North. Except that it is all wet. We got about 6 feet of snow one day, then it rained all day the next day. The snow melt combined with the rain got our house wet. On the inside. In the basement. Via a crack in the foundation wall. Let me paint a picture for you. Me, standing out in zero degree temps, snowblowing what could only be described as slush away from the house and digging a big hole against the house to patch the foundation. To say that I was soaked would be an understatement. I would like however, to thank Jim at Hudson Trail Outfitters in Fairfax for selling me the Columbia snow suit before I left. It made a HUGE difference. Thanks. You should all go visit him and tell him I said hi, and buy stuff. It makes him happy.

Let’s see, what else is new. I hear that another female (maybe a second by the time you read this) has moved into the Hostel. Don’t give up the fight boys! Don’t let them out number you, or soon there will be pastel towels in the bathroom!

I hear that mutual friend Lapo, has gone gay. It was bound to happen sooner or later, actually, I always knew that he had it in him. Quite literally.

I continue to make plans with Lyn for our impending nuptuials. I never realized how much stuff one has to buy to get married. Aren’t you supposed to get free stuff? It’s kind of like paying for your own birthday party. On a similar note, although I would love to have every one of my old friends at the event, I fully realize that for geographic and economical reasons, some of you may not be able to attend. The wedding is August 27th of this year. I’ll leave it up to you guys. If you would like to come, you are welcome. Send me an email and I will get you an invite and details on how to get here, cost, places to stay, other things to do while you’re here and other stuff. This way, I won’t be spending about 1000 bucks on invites that may only yield 3 attendees. Not that you all aren’t worth it. Haha. If you can’t come, I understand, but we simply can’t be friends anymore. Just kidding. We can still be friends, maybe, if you send a big enough gift.

I mentioned in the sidebar that this installment would contain a discussion of curling. Well, it would except that I still haven’t figured it out. I can tell you a few things about it though, and they are as follows.

1. This sport makes little or no sense to the untrained observer.

2. In light of point #1, I will still try to make some sense.

3. The game is played by two teams on ice, who slide rocks and attempt to get them inside a designated area to score points. Imagine shuffleboard on ice. Sort of.

4. You must yell a lot to play this game. The four players on each team are always yelling at each other. Words such as ‘heavy’, ‘hard’, ‘hurry’, ‘good’, ‘whoa’, and ‘clean’ in addition to others are thrown about a lot. At first, I found myself aroused hearing these words shouted at me, as I was watching womens curling at the time. I thought I must have stumbled onto some combination wintersports/adult channel and was hoping that up next would be the lesbian naked pairs figure skating. Then I realized, quite to my dismay, that they were using these words with regards to the game. What each word means in relation to the game is still somewhat a mystery to me. I still enjoyed the yelling though, does that make me naughty?

5. A game consists of what I have determined to be 8 or 10 ‘ends’ or periods, which makes no sense either. If you play one ‘end’, how can you play 7 more? Isn’t the ‘end’ the END?

6. There is ALWAYS curling on tv in Canada.

7. Curling on TV is habit forming. It sucks you in. There is no action, no fast movement, no snappy music, but it’s like falling asleep to the air conditionerit sort of hypnotizes you. It sends messages to your brain that say “Come. Sit. Watch me for hours. Try to solve the riddle that is curling. Do or do not, there is no try. I am the walrus.”

8. I, and you, are not smart enough to play this game. The announcers discuss strategy and positioning in terms that would make MacArthur drool. I assumed they were just banging rocks around, but OH NO, every bump has a purpose, every play a whole hidden agenda. You cannot be privvy to this information unless you are a player, and to be a player, you have to be a master of motion, dynamics, physics and chemistry. At first glance it looks like a bunch of goofballs throwing rocks around on the ice and yelling like idiots, but don’t be fooled, it is the majesty and the mystery that is curling.

Now, if there is anyone out there that is a curler (is that even the right term?), don’t take offense to my little dissertation. I am only one of the lowly ones, the ‘unknowers’ that don’t partake in your sport. I play hockey. Which in your opinion may be just guys skating around beating each other with sticks, but to me it’s so much more. To me it’s guys beating each other with sticks, but also swearing a lot and drinking too much beer afterwards. That’s what takes it to the next level.

For all of you back in the States, my friends that are reading this and are unfamiliar with curling, let me just sum up by saying this:

You’ll know as soon as I do. Until then, stay tuned as I will continue to report on the strange customs of your neighbour to the north. (Such as spelling neighboor with a ‘u’.)

You know, John and I have spent some major fucking time on this thing. It’s pretty easy now but at first it was a bitch. You have to learn the program, then you gotta come up with some sort of plan of attack, maybe a running theme to carry through out the page, which I’m not even sure we’ve developed yet. You’ve gotta conceive and produce the graphics, type in the text, scan photos and all this other shit. Don’t get me wrong, it was and is alot of fun, but many beers went down, along with a lot of frustration.

When we first conceived this grand idea of a ‘Youth Hostel Website’, we thought it was a killer idea even for us. All our friends who were always over here and hanging out could find out what was going on when they weren’t around and keep up to date on all the latest happenings. Now, it wouldn’t be like us not to poke fun at people, we even poked fun at ourselves, you have to be able to laugh at yourself otherwise you’re fucked. I set out to report the events that occurred on a day to day basis with the utmost integrity and the only thing I interjected was my own twisted brand of humor. Everything that you read on this page IS TRUE, IT REALLY HAPPENED THAT WAY.

In doing my reporting I apparently pissed some people off, embarrassed some people, I guess. Well so what. If you’re embarrassed by something you’ve done that was made public here maybe you need to look at the deeper issue of why. Why are you embarrassed. If you’re so embarrassed, why don’t you cut it out? God knows there’s some embarrassing shit about me here. I made a concerted effort not to exclude myself from the carnage. Do you think I’m proud of the fact that I went into a violent rage and was so drunk I shredded a can of Pringles all over the living room? No. Some might say I have a problem. So be it. the fact of the matter is, I take responsibility for my actions. If I piss somebody off, I admit it, If I break something, I admit it, If I’m an asshole, well you get the picture.

Apparently some people want to go out and party and wear that floral lampshade on their head and dance naked on the coffetable and then forget about it at work the next day. No way. The great oriental philosopher, Hong Kong Phooey said once, “You are what you do, people will remember you for your actions. So if you can’t take the heat get the fuck out of the kitchen.” I may have misquoted him a little but I think you get where he was coming from.

For some reason, some of you think our house is like a theme park where you can come be a fucking idiot and then go home and no one will know. Well I’m here to tell you we’re fucking idiots all the time, that’s what our house is about. We are all insane here. Maybe it should be the Lapensee Sanitarium. We love nothing more that to have our fellow patients-er-um, I mean friends come over and play with us. The only problem is when you wake up the next morning and want us to be quiet, well don’t. If you don’t want to play with us, don’t. If your mom, or your boyfriend, or girlfriend, or your fucking grocery store clerk looks at you funny afterwards, don’t blame me, I just wrote down what I saw you do. YOU DID IT. By the way, I still can’t believe what you did with that beer bottle…

Alright, so here it is, our webpage. What does this mean? No one will ever probably visit it. If you’re reading this, you probably got here by accident and then your system locked up and won’t let you leave. (A software touch we programmed in, it’s working!)

So now you’re stuck here forever, dabbling in the the lives of what you think are a bunch of poor lost souls, and this is what we are, but we are lost together and that’s what makes us survive.

Everyone’s got em.

Your own circle of friends. The circle of wagons you can retreat to when the Indians of the world attack. The people that live here at this house have a bond that goes even deeper than being ‘friends’ we’ve spent ‘times’ with each other. we’ve all been through the shit and the shine and I know that just when I’m about to lose my grip one of these sorry motherfuckers will throw me a rope and bring me back in. I can say I would do the same for them.

When you live, eat, shit and shower with people, you get to know them pretty well. You get to see all their finer points. Although it’s hard to remember those finer points when they borrow your room one night and leave a big stain on the sheets. Most of the time though, you peacefully coexist, you start to expect certain people around, heck you even start to want them around when they’re not. They make you forget about all that other shit, your problems. They bring you from a mass of confusion back down to just being human.

We all have an inner need for human contact, an ache. Even the darkest loner will tell you this. At times the reason we feel so alone in a group of people is because they are at a distance, we have not let them inside who we are, and we have not gone inside and embraced who they are. There is static that exists.

I KNOW the guys I live with. I can read them, better than anyone else, maybe even their family. They know me too. Sometimes more than I’d like.

This ‘opening up’, this ‘knowing’ is not a weakness. It’s the people that hide themselves that cause themselves and those around them more greif. There are times when I want to know no one, but they are few and far between. I retreat into my world and come back to the surface, every one does. Call it downtime or whatever, it’s you – time.

The basic fact is you/we need other people, other emotions other ideas, if only as sounding boards or reminders of how much we have it together. In as much as I know how ‘nowhere’ I’m going and how messed up in the head I am, I am better off having known all the people here. I do not regret a time spent with any of them and I hope they feel the same about me, because it’s through interaction with them, and through them that my life is enriched and I am who I am today. Go out and LIVE with the people you know and love, don’t just interface. Take something you know from them and make it your own. Accept them, their imperfections and revel in your time together, for it is short and you will miss it when it’s gone. You need to have a place to call home, and souls to share it with.

The Youth Hostel is my home. These guys are my friends. These are my memories.

I would not trade any of it for the world.